person
Seryozha (Sergei Yevgenyich Bykovsky)
Seryozha
also: Сережа, Sergei Yevgenyich, Seryozha
Bykovsky's frail, dreamy seven-year-old son, caught smoking his father's tobacco; he listens to his father's lecture with a child's indifference to logic, chatters about the cook's cut finger and a barrel-organ player, but is finally moved -- and startled into a promise never to smoke again -- by his father's improvised fairy tale of a prince who dies of the same habit.
Reading notes
- At Home §17 Sergei Yevgenyich
A mock-formal address: Bykovsky uses his son's name plus patronymic ("son of Yevgeny") the way one would address an adult, signaling the exaggerated gravity he is about to affect for a lecture he does not really feel.
- At Home §52 he invariably painted the sound L yellow, M red, A black
A description of synesthesia -- the automatic cross-sensory association of sounds or letters with colors and shapes -- observed here in a child with unusual precision for 1887, decades before the condition had a settled clinical name; Chekhov, a practicing physician, renders it as an unremarkable childhood trait rather than a case study.