person
Thomas Mayne Reid
Mayne Reid
Irish-born author (1818-1883) of popular adventure novels widely read in 19th-century Russia; invoked as light, undemanding reading a husband offers his wife.
Reading notes
- Idyll §6 Mayne Reid
Thomas Mayne Reid (1818-1883), Irish-born author of popular adventure novels widely read by Russian schoolboys; his fictional prairies and jungles supply the sketch's mock-exotic imagery.
- Boys §24 Have you read Mayne Reid?
Thomas Mayne Reid (1818-1883) was a real Irish-born, Britain-based author of immensely popular boys' adventure novels set on the American frontier, in Mexico, and elsewhere in the colonial world (e.g. The Boy Hunters, The Headless Horseman); translated and reprinted throughout Russia, his books were a staple of the 19th-century schoolboy imagination. Chechevitsyn's whole runaway scheme -- the invented Indian-chief persona, the talk of bison, mustangs, and the pampas -- is built directly out of Reid-style fiction, which the story treats as the recognizable source of a boy's daydream, not as a text it endorses.
- To V. V. Bilibin, 11 March 1886. Moscow. §4 Mayne Reid
Thomas Mayne Reid's adventure novels were standard reading for Russian schoolboys in this period, prized for stirring a taste for daring exploits; Chekhov's comparison is affectionately mocking -- Bilibin's censorship troubles worked on him the way a swashbuckling novel works on an impressionable student, prompting reckless imitation.