Manya Khodakovskaya

Reading notes

• To the Chekhovs, 7 April 1887. Taganrog. §29 His fair-haired Manya is a fat, Polish, well-fried cut of meat, handsome in profile but unpleasant en face. Little pouches under the eyes and an over-active production of the sebaceous glands.

  Chekhov, writing as a trained physician, describes Khodakovsky's daughter Manya in coarsely reductive, semi-clinical physical terms, explicitly marking her ethnicity ("Polish") as part of the joke -- comparing her to a cut of meat and cataloguing her complexion in language drawn from his medical vocabulary (sebaceous-gland activity, under-eye pouches). The passage also carries an undertone of specifically Polish stereotype current in the period (a well-fed, physically overripe "Polish" femininity), on top of the casual objectification of a young woman's body that runs through much of this letter's social reportage. Translated faithfully and without softening; "Pan" (loc. 29, for her father Khodakovsky) is the ordinary Polish honorific "Mister/Sir," used respectfully, in contrast with the demeaning register of the description of Manya herself.

• To the Chekhovs, 19 April 1887. Taganrog. §15 Есть между ними даже циники, напр белобрысая Моня Х(одаковская). Эта особа трогает не только живых, но и мертвых. Когда я гулял с нею по кладбищу, она всё время смеялась над мертвецами и их эпитафиями, над попами, дьяконами и проч.

  In this passage Chekhov calls the young women of Taganrog generally "frivolous in their dealings with men" and names Manya Khodakovskaya specifically as a "cynic" ("циник") for having laughed, while walking with him through the cemetery, at the dead, their epitaphs, and the clergy. Read in context, Chekhov's tone is amused and gossipy rather than morally condemnatory -- the passage sits inside a longer catalogue of provincial social types (abrupt in their movements, quick to fall in love, prone to elope with actors) that he treats as one more piece of Taganrog's local color, in the same register as his complaints about the shuttered windows and the market bread-rings. It is nonetheless frank, reductive commentary on named young women's characters and behavior, translated in full rather than softened, consistent with this project's policy of faithful, non-sensationalizing rendering; it is presented for the historical record of Chekhov's social observations and attitudes, not endorsed. Manya Khodakovskaya is described in similarly blunt physical terms in (glossary, loc. 29), where the same "cynic" streak is implicitly in view.