Semyon Yakovlevich Nadson

Reading notes

• To N. A. Leikin, 26 January 1887. Moscow. §11 a memorial service for Nadson

  Semyon Yakovlevich Nadson, an immensely popular young poet whose death (on 19 January 1887, in Yalta, of tuberculosis, at age twenty-four) had occurred only a week before this letter; Chekhov is indignant that Petersburg's literary community had not marked the occasion with a memorial service (panikhida).

• To N. A. Leikin, 8 February 1887. Moscow. §5 Nadson

  Semyon Nadson (1862-1887), the immensely popular lyric poet, had died on 19 January 1887, three weeks before this letter; his death set off a wave of eulogy that Leikin evidently thought excessive, prompting Chekhov's defense here.

• To Al. P. Chekhov, 19–20 February 1887. Moscow. §5 the murder of Nadson

  Semyon Yakovlevich Nadson, the celebrated young poet who had died of tuberculosis on 19 January 1887; Chekhov's word "murder" (убийство) is rhetorical -- it reflects a contemporary controversy in which Suvorin's Novoye Vremya was blamed by many in the literary public for having published harsh attacks on Nadson that were widely felt to have hastened his decline, a charge Suvorin's critics repeated as one of his "misdeeds" alongside the theft mentioned in this same sentence.

• To Al. P. Chekhov, 7–8 September 1887. Moscow. §6 Burenin to hammer away at Nadson

  Semyon Nadson, the immensely popular lyric poet who had died just months before this letter (in January 1887); Burenin's polemics against Nadson's poetry and its admirers were a running feature of his Novoye Vremya column.

• To Al. P. Chekhov, 6–7 October 1887. Moscow. §4 the dead Nadson

  Semyon Nadson, a popular young poet who had died the previous January (1887); Burenin's review apparently took a swipe at him even while praising Chekhov, a juxtaposition Chekhov gently rebukes as needless.