person
George Kennan
Kennan
also: Кеннан
George Kennan (1845-1924), American journalist and explorer whose travels in Siberia and investigative reporting on the tsarist exile and prison system (compiled the following year as "Siberia and the Exile System," 1891) had made his name, in Chekhov's usage, shorthand for a lavishly resourced, rigorously reported piece of foreign correspondence. Already invoked adjectivally the year before this letter ("Kennanesque" plans, \S3, disclaiming that scale of ambition for the Sakhalin trip); here named directly as the standard of well-funded reporting the London Times could in principle station in every famine-district volost, against which Chekhov measures the poverty of the Russian press.
Reading notes
- To Ye. P. Yegorov, 11 December 1891. Moscow. §6 "Times" на свой счет устроил бы в голодающих губерниях перепись, посадил бы в каждой волости Кеннана, платя ему по 40 руб. суточных
George Kennan (1845-1924), the American journalist and explorer whose travels in Siberia and exposes of the tsarist exile and prison system (compiled the following year as "Siberia and the Exile System," 1891) had already made his name a byword, in Chekhov's usage, for a lavishly resourced, rigorously reported piece of foreign correspondence -- see also "Kennanesque" (\S3, written the year before, disclaiming any ambition of that kind for the Sakhalin trip). Here Chekhov imagines the London Times funding a Kennan-caliber correspondent in every famine-district volost at 40 rubles a day as the (unattainable) standard against which Russia's own underfunded press has to be judged.