person
"Prosecutor Kostya"
Prosecutor Kostya
also: Костя, прокурору Косте, Kostya
A member of the Suvorin household or intimate circle, addressed only by first name and profession in Chekhov's joking closing lines ("to poor prosecutor Kostya I will preach seditious ideas") -- grouped with Suvorin's wife Anna Ivanovna and children Nastya and Borya as household intimates awaiting Chekhov's mock-terrifying homecoming visit. No prosecutor named Konstantin has been confidently matched to Suvorin's circle in the surrounding correspondence; recorded here as unidentified rather than guessed. Distinct from (a fictional schoolboy in "Summer Cottagers") and from the many unrelated Konstantins in the corpus.
Reading notes
- To A. S. Suvorin, 9 December 1890. Moscow. §12 а бедному прокурору Косте буду проповедовать возмутительные идеи
"To poor prosecutor Kostya I will preach seditious ideas" -- the third of Chekhov's mock threats to the Suvorin household, extending the comic register of the passage: having just spent months documenting the abuses of the tsarist penal system on Sakhalin, he jokes about radicalizing a prosecutor (an officer of that same state apparatus) with "возмутительные идеи" (literally "outrageous/seditious ideas"). "Kostya" is a diminutive of Konstantin; no prosecutor of that name has been confidently identified in the surrounding Suvorin correspondence or household records available to this corpus, and the entity is recorded as unidentified rather than guessed, per the translator's flag. The joke's shape -- a returning Sakhalin investigator threatening to convert a prosecutor to sedition -- gains its edge from \S4's and \S11's material on the penal system's failures.