Tretyakov

Reading notes

• To Al. P. Chekhov, 13 May 1883. Moscow. §5 Tretyakov

  A figure Alexander had accused Anton of maligning in a satirical piece; Anton insists here that his target was a general social type or 'system,' not the dying Tretyakov personally, and that raising his illness was beside the point.

• To Al. P. Chekhov, 7 September 1891. Moscow. §5 Leonid Tretyakov is dying of consumption.

  A single flat sentence of grim news, appended with no further comment after the letter's business is concluded and the signature already given -- characteristic of Chekhov's habitual restraint in delivering hard facts to Alexander without editorializing or offering consolation. A Tretyakov (surname only, no first name, initialed elsewhere in the corpus as "L. V.") already appears in the corpus's earliest known letter to Alexander (May 1883) as a dying consumptive whom Alexander had accused Anton of maligning in a satirical piece; this letter is the first to give a full first name, Leonid, for that same recurring, otherwise-unidentified figure, and confirms -- eight years after the earlier letter's account of him as already ill -- that the illness proved fatal in the end. No other comment follows; the sentence sits alone as its own section, set off from both the business paragraph above and the address panel below.