person
Ivanov (Petersburg notary)
Ivanov
also: Иванов, notary Ivanov, нотариус Иванов
A Petersburg notary Chekhov calls "likeable" (симпатичный), engaged in late December 1891 to draw up a power of attorney in the name of A. I. Smagin so that Smagin could complete the purchase of a Poltava-province farm on Chekhov's behalf. Not otherwise identified; distinct from the many other Ivanovs in the corpus (a common Russian surname).
Reading notes
- To A. N. Pleshcheyev, 25 December 1891. Moscow. §7 у симпатичного нотариуса Иванова сочиню доверенность
A power of attorney (doverennost) drawn up before a notary was the standard Russian legal instrument authorizing one party to act on another's behalf in a property transaction; Chekhov needed one made out to A. I. Smagin, the Poltava-region acquaintance handling the search for a farm on Chekhov's behalf (his sister Maria had just gone south to look at properties -- see section 4), so that Smagin could conclude the purchase without Chekhov's own presence.
- To N. M. Lintvareva, 18 January 1892. Derevnya Belaya. §3 In Petersburg on the 5th of January I ordered a power of
attorney from a notary (also!) Ivanov
The second notary of the running joke, and the same Petersburg notary Chekhov calls "likeable" in (\S7, engaging him in principle) and names again in (\S3, where the power of attorney is actually ordered in A. I. Smagin's name, 4 January 1892, for this same Yatsenko farmstead). Chekhov's parenthetical "(also!)" -- \foreignlanguage{russian}{тоже} -- is the joke's hinge: he marks explicitly that this is a *second* notary of the identical surname, distinguishing him from the Sumy Ivanov of the previous sentence rather than conflating the two. The date given here (5 January) sits a day after the 4 January dateline of, consistent with Chekhov recounting the same episode slightly loosely to a different, more informal correspondent.