Olga Ivanovna

Reading notes

• The Doctor §45 you were depraved, vulgar

  "Порочны, пошлы" (depraved, vulgar/coarse) is Tsvetkov's own period judgment of Olga's earlier sexual conduct as an unmarried woman with multiple partners, not the narrator's assessment. The story is frank, without euphemism, that Olga bore a child out of wedlock and that several men -- Tsvetkov, Petrov, and the lawyer Kurovsky (section 47) -- have all continued paying money toward the boy's upbringing, implying each believed, or was led to believe, he might be the father. Chekhov presents Tsvetkov's moralizing language as the period double standard of a man who both condemns Olga's past and has spent years paying to sustain it; the translation preserves the doctor's harsh words in character rather than softening them, consistent with the story's unsparing view of Tsvetkov's own self-interest and cruelty toward a grieving mother.