Dr. Mikhail Ivanovich

Reading notes

• The Princess §16 Dr. Mikhail Ivanovich

  Introduced here simply as a former estate doctor recognized by his baldness and hooked nose; only gradually, through the conversation that follows, does the reader learn the full history between him and the princess -- ten years of service to her father and then to her, ended by an unexplained dismissal.

• The Princess §20 I spend every Saturday night here, it is my duty

  Establishes that the doctor's presence at the monastery is entirely professional (he treats patients there on a fixed schedule), in pointed contrast to the princess's performance of a spontaneous, soul-stirred pilgrimage.

• The Princess §39 an aversion to people... to everything that makes up a human being

  The opening statement of the doctor's central charge: that the princess's entire domestic system -- muffling carpets, high-backed chairs to hide servants' heads, footmen posted to screen out 'indecent' visitors -- is organized around not having to perceive the humanity of the people who serve her, not merely around comfort or status.

• The Princess §43 All this two-legged livestock was raised up in lackeydom, grew fat, grew coarse, lost the image and likeness of a man

  "двуногое живье" (literally "two-legged livestock/living-stock") is the doctor's own dehumanizing phrase, and it is dehumanizing on purpose -- his point is that the princess's household has taken the strongest, healthiest people from her lands and degraded them into a servant class stripped of individuality ("lost the image and likeness of a man" echoes the Genesis language of humanity made in God's image). The phrase describes what the system has done to people, voiced in the harsh idiom of a man who is himself angry and inelegant; it is not the narrator's or Chekhov's own assessment, and Hermitsh Press translates it without softening, per the sensitivity practice noted in the headnote.

• The Princess §48 thirty-five thousand couriers come galloping

  A deliberate absurdist exaggeration on the doctor's part (echoing a stock comic-hyperbole register familiar from Gogol's Government Inspector, where a similar wild number of couriers is invoked for comic effect) -- he is mocking the disproportionate advance warning and ceremony that precede even a brief, twice-weekly inspection visit from the princess.

• The Princess §52 afterward they had to be whipped and paid money to make them come to you

  this is a brief, factual aside within the doctor's account of the failed peasant school -- the village boys fled the princess's amateur teaching so completely that adults resorted to corporal punishment and payment to force their attendance. The detail is presented to illustrate how coercive the princess's supposedly benevolent projects became once their voluntary appeal collapsed; it is not dwelt on further, and the translation preserves it plainly rather than expanding or softening it.

• The Princess §52 Whoever does not know how to tell people apart from lapdogs ought not to occupy himself with charity

  the doctor closes his indictment of the school and infant-feeding episodes with this second dehumanizing comparison -- likening the peasants the princess used as objects of her charitable amusement ("living dolls") to lapdogs (болонки, a small pampered pet breed).

• The Princess §55 I served your father ten years, then you... in one fine day I am informed that I am no longer in service

  The doctor's own case becomes his last and most personal piece of evidence: a decade of service ended with no explanation, and his wife's unanswered attempts to plead with the princess in person -- the emotional core beneath the rhetorical excess of the rest of his speech.