person
The unnamed ten-year-old boy of Upper Armudan
A ten-year-old settler child Chekhov interviewed during his 1890 household census at Upper Armudan, Sakhalin, transcribed verbatim in his letter to Koni of 26 January 1891: fair-haired, stooped, barefoot, sitting alone in an empty hut. In the exchange he reports, without affect, that his mother's "husband" is not his real father but her live-in cohabitant; that his mother, a widow, "came to her husband" by killing him; and that he himself was born illegitimate at the Kara hard-labor prison. Not otherwise identified from the surviving text.
Reading notes
- To A. F. Koni, 26 January 1891. Petersburg. §7 a boy is sitting on the bench
The unnamed ten-year-old settler boy whose interview Chekhov transcribes verbatim through \S19; not otherwise identified from the surviving text.
- To A. F. Koni, 26 January 1891. Petersburg. §13 He's my mother's live-in man.
Renders "сожитель," a period term for an unmarried male cohabitant, here translated plainly as "live-in man" rather than a more clinical or a more judgmental register, consistent with the flat, reportorial tone of the boy's own answers and Chekhov's transcription of them.
- To A. F. Koni, 26 January 1891. Petersburg. §17 SENSITIVITY FLAG -- domestic violence disclosed by a child
the boy's flat one-word answer "Убила" ("She killed him") -- confirming, without further prompting or affect, that his widowed mother killed her first husband before taking up with her current cohabitant -- is translated at the same plain, unembellished register as the source. Chekhov neither comments on nor softens the disclosure in the surrounding text, and the translation follows suit; reader-facing apparatus should flag this exchange (\S14--\S19) as containing a child's matter-of-fact disclosure of a parent's violent act, per the corpus's practice of noting difficult content for readers without editorializing on the page itself.