Pyotr Isayevich Weinberg

Reading notes

• To M. V. Kiseleva, 21 March 1887. Moscow. §4 in the manner of Weinberg's flea

  An allusion to Pyotr Weinberg's well-known Russian verse translation of Goethe's "Flea Song" (from \emph{Faust}, Mephistopheles' song of the flea raised to courtly favor) -- or, in a variant period reading, to Weinberg's own comic public recitations, which were something of a standing joke in literary circles for going on long past their welcome. Chekhov invokes "Weinberg's flea" as a stock image for something that lingers on stubbornly without ever quite dying outright, applied here to the slow, unglamorous tail end of a book's sales.

• To A. N. Pleshcheyev, 3 February 1888. Moscow. §8 Weinberg's anecdote

  A comic anecdote associated with the writer and translator Pyotr Weinberg, evidently well known in Chekhov's circle, used here as shorthand for impatient suffering -- "withering away like the flea" in the story.

• To A. P. Lensky, 8 December 1888. Petersburg. §6 Weinberg's reader, so they assure me here in Petersburg, is poor

  Refers to Pyotr Isayevich Weinberg (1831-1908), poet, translator, and literary historian known for compiling literary anthologies/readers -- matching the existing corpus entity, first established under his own name in letter/text literaturnaya-tabel-o-rangah. This is a possessive/adjectival reference ("Вейнберговская хрестоматия", "Weinberg's reader") to a reader he compiled, not a direct address.