Pyotr Boborykin

Reading notes

• The Alarm Clock's Calendar §79 Pyotr Boborykin

  Prolific Russian novelist and journalist, often credited with popularizing the Russian word for "intelligentsia"; the calendar drily notes his birthday among its other pseudo-events.

• To A. S. Lazarev, 20 October 1888. Moscow. §11 Boborykin

  Pyotr Boborykin, prolific novelist and journalist, cited here ("to some degree") as a secondary example of the writer who over-relies on quotation marks for supposed originality; see also in the same sentence.

• To A. S. Suvorin, 3 November 1888. Moscow. §4 to write a physiology of creation (Boborykin)

  Pyotr Boborykin, already established in this corpus, named only in passing as an example of someone who might attempt a "physiology of creation" -- no further detail given.

• To A. S. Suvorin, 20 February 1889. Moscow. §5 For chairman of the Society of Dramatic Writers they're going to elect Boborykin.

  Pyotr Dmitrievich Boborykin, prolific novelist and journalist, here discussed as the leading candidate for chairman of the Society of Russian Dramatic Writers and Opera Composers (institution:society-dramatic-writers. \S11's "Committee of the Dramatic Society"); Chekhov professes indifference to the outcome despite being consulted.

• To A. N. Pleshcheyev, 3 September 1889. Sumy. §10 a chicken that has fallen into the cabbage soup

  "курица, попавшая во щи" is a fixed Russian idiom for someone who has landed in an awkward, undignified predicament (roughly "like a chicken fallen into the soup-pot" -- caught out, done for). Chekhov's assessment of Boborykin here -- sympathy for the man alongside real skepticism about his "thin" troupe assembled from "chance elements" and doubt that they can do justice to his ambition for a classical repertoire -- is a genuine, mixed critical opinion and should be preserved as such, not smoothed into pure praise or pure mockery.

• To A. N. Pleshcheyev, 14 September 1889. Moscow. §8 as moth-eaten as Boborykin's head

  "Облезлые" (moth-eaten/mangy/threadbare, literally describing fur or fabric that has lost its nap) applied first to the untalented performers in Goreva's troupe, then transferred by comparison to Boborykin's head/mind -- a barbed, physically deprecating jab at a fellow novelist Chekhov had evidently come to think less of after a recent meeting.

• To A. N. Pleshcheyev, 14 September 1889. Moscow. §8 simply an eccentric whom his wet-nurse dropped in infancy

  "Чудак, которого в детстве мамка ушибла" -- a blunt Russian folk insult attributing someone's oddness or foolishness to a childhood head injury inflicted by a careless wet-nurse (мамка). Translated directly rather than softened into a milder "eccentric fellow," since the injury/damage implication is the point of the jab at Boborykin's diminished standing in Chekhov's eyes.

• To N. A. Leikin, 12 October 1891. Moscow. §5 Living in Moscow now is P. D. Boborykin, at the "America" rooms on Vozdvizhenka

  The "America" furnished rooms (\foreignlanguage{russian}{"номера \"Америка\""}) on Vozdvizhenka Street were a well-known Moscow lodging house of the period, the kind of address a prolific, itinerant man of letters like Boborykin -- who kept no single permanent home for long stretches -- might use; Chekhov gives it as a working mailing address rather than a description of a proper residence.

• To A. S. Suvorin, 30 November 1891. Moscow. §6 Boborykin was to see me. He too dreams.

  Pyotr Boborykin, prolific Russian novelist and journalist often credited with coining the Russian word for "intelligentsia." Chekhov's account of the visit is a set-piece anecdote: he casts Boborykin as a genial "literary maniac" (\textit{маньяк литературный}) consumed by a grand, half-formed theory of the Russian novel's "physiology" and natural line of descent, finds the encounter itself a rare pleasure (\textit{манна небесная}, "manna from heaven") precisely because real literary company is so scarce for him in Moscow, yet remains skeptical of the theory's scientific pretensions -- objecting in particular to Boborykin's move to set Gogol outside the novel's natural line of development, which Chekhov counters with a characteristically down-to-earth image (even a dog's bark, even his own sneeze, affects the surrounding natural order).

• Notebooks. Diaries §730 Boborykin said in earnest that he was the Russian Maupassant

  Pyotr Dmitrievich Boborykin (1836-1921), a prolific and self-important novelist of the naturalist school, mocked repeatedly in these notebooks for his self-comparison to Maupassant.