Alexei Sergeyevich Kiselev

Reading notes

• To N. A. Leikin, 28 April 1885. Moscow. §7 on the estate of Kiselev

  Alexei Sergeyevich Kiselev, owner of the Babkino estate near Voskresensk where the Chekhov family rented a summer house for the 1885 season -- their first summer there, the start of what became several productive rural retreats.

• To F. O. Shekhtel, 8–9 February 1886. Moscow. §9 the Kiselevs

  Alexei Sergeyevich Kiselev and his wife Maria Vladimirovna Kiseleva, landowners at Babkino near Voskresensk from whom the Chekhov family rented their summer house; their presence at a Tuesday gathering in Moscow shows the friendship continuing into the city season, outside the rural context of the earlier Babkino letters.

• To M. V. Kiseleva, 13 September 1887. Moscow. §10 Alexei Sergeich

  Alexei Sergeyevich Kiselev, Maria Kiseleva's husband and the Babkino landowner, to whom Chekhov owes a rouble that Kiseleva is asked to deliver on his behalf.

• To M. V. Kiseleva, 28 September 1887. Moscow. §8 Alexei Sergeyevich, Vasilisa and Elizaveta Alexandrovna

  Chekhov's customary round of greetings to the Kiselev household: Maria Vladimirovna's husband, their daughter, and Elizaveta Alexandrovna, a member of the Babkino/Voskresensk circle otherwise unidentified in the corpus.

• To M. V. Kiseleva, 28 September 1887. Moscow. §12 owner of Babkino... (Kisselhoff...)

  A jokey Germanized/mock-foreign rendering of Kiselev's surname ("Kisselhoff"), continuing the letter's playful tone into its final line as Chekhov plans a separate note to Maria Vladimirovna's husband.

• To M. V. Kiseleva, 7 November 1887. Moscow. §17 ask her to show Alexei Sergeyevich

  Nikolai directs his following errand list (sections 18-20) specifically to Alexei Sergeyevich, Kiseleva's husband, treating him as its intended reader rather than Kiseleva herself.

• To A. S. Kiselev, 10 November 1887. Moscow. §3 Your High Nobility!

  "Ваше Высокородие" is a formal Table-of-Ranks style of address (roughly the honorific due a civil or military rank of the 5th-3rd class), absurdly overblown for a private letter to a friend and neighbor; it sets the letter's running mock-official register, sustained through the pseudo-legal list of "valid reasons for non-attendance" that follows.

• To A. S. Kiselev, 24 November 1887. Moscow. §6 of all my enemies the angriest is -- you!!!

  Mock-ferocious teasing typical of Chekhov's letters to close friends: naming Kiselev, one of his warmest correspondents, as his own worst "enemy" for comic effect, in the same vein as the exaggerated threats and mock-official language of his other letters to the Kiselev family.

• To Al. P. Chekhov, 24 November 1887. Moscow. §3 Kiselyov, for no reason at all, clutched his head

  Alexei Sergeyevich Kiselev, the Chekhovs' landowner friend near Voskresensk -- a family friend, distinct from the actor Ivan Platonovich Kiselevsky named later in this same letter (loc 11), who played in \textit{Ivanov} itself.

• To M. V. Kiseleva, 3 February 1888. Moscow. §10 He presented me with a little glass

  The gift-giver and the subject of "very often" teasing about Chekhov's mental faculties is Kiseleva's husband, Alexei Sergeyevich Kiselev -- distinct from Kiseleva herself, who is the letter's "you" throughout and is credited only with underscoring the word "prudence" in her own letter.

• To M. V. Kiseleva, 3 February 1888. Moscow. §11 the two of us behaved ourselves well -- I mean he and I: it was I who kept him from getting up to no good

  Referent-tracking note: the Russian is 'Я его останавливал от нехороших поступков' -- 'I kept HIM from bad behavior.' The person restrained is Kiselev (Alexei Sergeyevich), Kiseleva's husband, during his stay in Moscow; Chekhov is the one doing the restraining. The English deliberately spells out 'I mean he and I' and 'it was I who kept him' to prevent the ambiguous pronouns from being misread as Kiseleva restraining Chekhov, or Chekhov restraining himself -- the actions of misbehaving-and-being-checked belong to Kiselev, not to Chekhov or to Kiseleva.

• To M. V. Kiseleva, 3 February 1888. Moscow. §12 Alexei Sergeyevich, to Vasilisa, to Koklyush, to Elizaveta Alexandrovna, and to Babkino

  The closing roll-call of greetings names Kiseleva's husband first by his own name and patronymic, distinct from the immediately preceding referent-sensitive anecdote in section 11 about restraining his behavior in Moscow.

• To M. V. Kiseleva, 2 November 1888. Moscow. §4 from you and from Alexei Sergeyevich

  Alexei Sergeyevich is Kiseleva's husband, Alexei Sergeyevich Kiselev, the same "Squire" (Барин) greeted by name at the letter's close (loc 10) and addressed directly as recipient of the fuller report on Seryozha's health in letter.

• To M. V. Kiseleva, 2 November 1888. Moscow. §10 Bow to the Squire and to Vasilisa

  "The Squire" (Барин) renders Alexei Sergeyevich Kiselev, per the established rendering used in letters, and.

• To M. V. Kiseleva, 13 December 1888. Petersburg. §11 A low bow to the Squire, to Vasilisa, and to Elizaveta Alexandrovna.

  "The Squire" (Барин) renders Alexei Sergeyevich Kiselev, Kiseleva's husband, per the established rendering used in letters 377, 442, 3-508, and 3-516.

• To M. V. Kiseleva, 17 February 1889. Moscow. §6 the blini-eating Squire

  "The Squire" (Барин) renders Alexei Sergeyevich Kiselev, Kiseleva's husband, per the established rendering used in letters 377, 442, 3-508, and 3-516; "blini-eating" plays on the Maslenitsa/Butter Week season during which the letter is written.

• To M. V. Kiseleva, 3 December 1889. Moscow. §10 Alexei Sergeyevich

  Alexei Sergeyevich Kiselev, Maria Vladimirovna's husband and co-owner of the Babkino estate.

• To A. S. Kiselev, 8 December 1891. Moscow. §3 Your Honor!

  \foreignlanguage{russian}{"Ваше Высокородие"} ("Your Honor"/"Your High-Wellborn") was the formal address due a civil or military official of the 5th class in the imperial Table of Ranks (roughly a state councillor or brigadier-equivalent) -- a rank Kiselev, a private landowner, did not actually hold. Chekhov opens the letter with this deliberately overblown honorific, and returns to the same register at the close ("Your will is sacred to me!!!"), continuing a running joke with Kiselev about rank and ceremony that recurs across their correspondence (cf. the headnote); it sets the letter's mock-official tone before the plain-spoken literary verdict that follows.

• To A. S. Suvorin, 5 March 1891. Moscow. §9 at the Kiselyovs'

  A visit to the household of Alexei Sergeyevich and Maria Vladimirovna Kiselev at their Babkino estate near Voskresensk, longtime friends with whom the Chekhov family had summered in the mid-1880s.

• To M. V. Kiseleva, 28 January 1890. Petersburg. §3 Valentin Yakovlevich

  The source names Kiseleva's husband here as "Valentin Yakovlevich," a different first name/patronymic pairing than the name-patronymic already established for him elsewhere in this corpus as Alexei Sergeyevich Kiselev ("the Squire"/\Барин, see and its siblings). The mentions file links this surface form to as the closest attested identity match -- husband of the addressee, greeted in the same breath as "the Squire" two sections later -- but the discrepant name is NOT silently resolved: it may be a joking alias, a lapse of memory or transcription on Chekhov's part, or (less likely) a genuinely different person. Flagged here for review rather than forced.

• To A. M. Kondratyev, 22 February 1891. Moscow. §4 Today I got a letter from Kiselev, he's asking me to bring caviar.

  Alexei Sergeyevich Kiselev, owner of Babkino, writing ahead of the planned visit with the small domestic request that Chekhov bring caviar.

• To M. V. Kiseleva, 11 March 1891. Moscow. §4 the rural superintendent's

  "Земского начальника" (zemsky nachalnik), conventionally rendered "land captain" elsewhere in this corpus and here "rural superintendent" -- a district administrative-judicial office created by the 1889 reform, staffed from the local hereditary gentry and vested with sweeping authority over the peasant population of the district, including the power to order corporal punishment (flogging) of peasants under summary judicial process. Alexei Sergeyevich Kiselev, Maria Vladimirovna's husband and Vasilisa's father, held this actual office (cf., where Chekhov addresses him directly as "Mr. District Superintendent"), which is the entire point of the joke here: the flogging bed supposedly kept in "his chamber" is a real feature of the zemsky nachalnik's punitive authority, deployed as a running tease against Kiselev's own household rather than a hypothetical or fictional office.

• To M. V. Kiseleva, 1891. Venice. §4 the rural superintendent

  "Земскому начальнику" (zemsky nachalnik), again rendered "rural superintendent" as elsewhere in this corpus -- the real district administrative-judicial office held by Alexei Sergeyevich Kiselev, Maria Vladimirovna's husband. Continues the running joke begun in the preceding letter to Kiseleva of 11 March 1891, where the office's flogging authority supplied the punchline; here Chekhov instead has "the shade of the fair Desdemona" pay it a mock-gallant compliment, transplanting the household tease onto the Venetian, Othello-haunted setting.

• To M. V. Kiseleva, April 1891. Rome. §6 his high-born self

  "Его высокородию" ("his high-born-ness"), a formal honorific title of address matching Alexei Sergeyevich Kiselev's civil rank as zemsky nachalnik (rural superintendent), used here as a mock-formal flourish for Maria Vladimirovna's husband -- the same running joke about Kiselev's real office found throughout this correspondence.

• To M. V. Kiseleva, 20 July 1891. Bogimovo. §3 written in French

  Alexei Sergeyevich Kiselev, Maria Vladimirovna's husband, writing to Chekhov in French is a small running joke of affected gentry manners between the two men; it is noted here, not glossed further, as characteristic banter rather than a substantive detail.