Yevgraf Petrovich Yegorov

Reading notes

• To A. I. Smagin, 11 December 1891. Moscow. §5 my business in Nizhny Novgorod province is already boiling, boiling away!

  The horse-buying famine-relief scheme Chekhov describes here in full for the first time: together with Yevgraf Petrovich Yegorov, a land captain in a remote district of Nizhny Novgorod province whom he had arranged to meet a few weeks earlier, Chekhov is buying up peasants' horses -- which famine-stricken owners were selling off cheaply -- feeding them over the winter, and returning them in spring, so the coming year's spring plowing will not be lost and the famine cycle repeated. He frames the venture half-jokingly as a commercial speculation ("we expect to clear something like a hundred thousand") while its actual purpose is straightforward famine relief.

• To Ye. P. Yegorov, 14 December 1891. Moscow. §4 в январе я приеду к Вам непременно

  Chekhov firms up, as a definite plan, the visit to Yegorov's district that had described as having already failed once (due to his influenza) -- he now commits to January and to composing the newspaper piece together in person.

• To Ye. P. Yegorov, 14 December 1891. Moscow. §5 Я Ваш агент, так Вы и смотрите на меня и почаще пишите руководства ради

  Chekhov casts himself explicitly as Yegorov's Moscow-based fundraising agent, awaiting instructions rather than acting independently -- consistent with the division of labor proposed in (Yegorov supplies on-the-ground facts and requests; Chekhov handles the press and the Moscow donor network).

• To N. M. Lintvareva, 14 December 1891. Moscow. §6 A very good man is working on the spot, and nothing hinders him, since he is a district superintendent.

  Yevgraf Petrovich Yegorov, the land captain (zemsky nachalnik) in Nizhny Novgorod province whom Chekhov had first written to arrange a meeting in October and with whom he was by late November coordinating a joint fundraising subscription appeal for his district; this letter reports the practical relief work now underway on the ground under Yegorov's supervision -- horse-buying to save peasants' livestock over the winter -- and gives Lintvaryova his field address directly, in case Ivanenko's benefit concert (\S6) should raise money to send there.

• To N. M. Lintvareva, 14 December 1891. Moscow. §6 The address of the field of battle is as follows: Station Bogoyavlenskoye, Nizhny Novgorod province, to the district superintendent Yevgraf Petrovich Yegorov.

  Chekhov's running joke of the "field of battle" (\foreignlanguage{russian}{"поле битвы"} / \foreignlanguage{russian}{"поле сражения"}) for the famine-relief effort, used twice in this section, treats the relief work in martial terms consistent with the letter's brisk, businesslike tone toward the famine even as it moves, two sections later, into genuine grief over the deaths of Kharitonenko and Zinaida Mikhailovna.

• To F. O. Shekhtel, 14 December 1891. Moscow. §4 a good friend of mine, a highly decent and lively man, has organized famine relief

  The unnamed friend is Yevgraf Petrovich Yegorov, a land captain (zemsky nachalnik) in a remote district of Nizhny Novgorod province, named explicitly two sections later (\S5). The winter of 1891-92 saw a severe famine across the Volga and central Black Earth provinces, and Chekhov spent this period organizing relief and fundraising from Moscow -- self-mockingly "playing the part of a lady bountiful" -- while Yegorov did the on-the-ground work; see also the fuller account of the same partnership in (\S5, to Smagin, three days earlier), which describes the horse-buying relief scheme in detail.

• To Ye. P. Yegorov, 25 February 1892. Moscow. §3 I am sending you, Yevgraf Petrovich, 12 rubles

  The fourth and last surviving letter in Chekhov's famine-relief correspondence with Yevgraf Petrovich Yegorov, following (26 January 1892) (29 January 1892), and (6 February 1892). A hurried note written while packing, opening with a sum that Chekhov immediately revises in section 6.