Sergei Vasilyevich Maximov

Reading notes

• To M. P. Chekhova, 16 January 1891. Petersburg. §6 old Maximov

  Probably Sergei Vasilyevich Maximov (1831-1901), ethnographer and writer on Russian folk life and Siberian exile -- fitting both the epithet "old" (he was about sixty in 1891) and the company of real Petersburg literary and artistic men named alongside him here (Mikeshin, Mikhnevich); the identification is probable rather than certain, as the surname alone does not distinguish him with certainty from any other Maximov of the period.

• The Meeting §5 Maximov

  The story's epigraph, four fragmentary lines describing an animal's eyes, ear, and skull, is attributed to the ethnographer and folklife writer Sergei Maximov, whose studies of Russian wanderers, vagrants, and exiles ("Бродячая Русь," "Сибирь и каторга") gave Chekhov's contemporaries a documentary vocabulary for figures like Kuzma; the epigraph's zoological language previews the story's later, unflattering description of Kuzma's flattened, animal-like skull at loc 12.