Pyotr Alekseyevich Sergeenko

Reading notes

• To P. A. Sergeyenko, 17 December 1884. Moscow. §4 Pyotr Alekseyevich

  Pyotr Alekseyevich Sergeenko, addressed by name and patronymic; a Taganrog gymnasium schoolmate of Chekhov's, then an aspiring writer living in the south of Russia.

• To P. A. Sergeyenko, 4 May 1888. Moscow. §4 dearest Yorick

  Pyotr Alekseyevich Sergeenko, a schoolmate of Chekhov's from the Taganrog gymnasium, addressed here by his own pen name, "Poor Yorick" (after the jester in Shakespeare's "Hamlet").

• To A. N. Pleshcheyev, 7 March 1889. Moscow. §11 A certain P. A. Sergeyenko studied with me at the gymnasium

  Pyotr Alekseyevich Sergeenko, a schoolmate of Chekhov's from the Taganrog gymnasium and, by this point, an aspiring writer, later a Tolstoy biographer; already established in this corpus (first appearance) -- reused here rather than creating a duplicate. He is also the addressee of the sibling letter in this same batch; see the crossrefs entry for this letter.

• To P. A. Sergeyenko, 25 June 1889. Sumy. §5 Sergeenko

  The addressee's surname as it appears on the telegram form itself, closing the routing block.

• To A. S. Suvorin, 16 June 1891. Bogimovo. §8 I haven't read Sergeyenko's story

  Pyotr Alekseyevich Sergeenko, Chekhov's schoolmate from the Taganrog gymnasium and by this period an aspiring writer and lifelong correspondent (later Tolstoy's biographer); already established elsewhere in this corpus. This passage does not add new biographical fact beyond Chekhov's curiosity about a story of his in the press.

• To A. S. Suvorin, 16 June 1891. Bogimovo. §8 has some sort of Ukrainian peg stuck in his head

  Renders "хохлацкий гвоздик" (literally "a little khokhol peg/nail"), a colloquial, faintly diminishing idiom using the folk term "khokhol" (Ukrainian) to describe a fixed, stubborn quirk of temperament -- roughly "a Ukrainian streak" or "a bee in his bonnet" -- rather than a considered ethnic slur; comparable in register to the corpus's other informal uses of "khokhol" for Ukrainian people or things (cf., where a pupil jokingly calls his own village's Ukrainian inhabitants "khokhol"). Chekhov applies it here to a personal foible in a man he otherwise calls talented and not stupid, not as a hostile characterization; translated at the actual colloquial register per the corpus's no-softening policy, without escalating the English past what the Russian idiom itself carries.