person
Konstantin Yukhantsev
Yukhantsev
also: Юханцев
A cashier at the Moscow Commercial Loan Bank whose embezzlement of over two million rubles was exposed in 1878, producing one of the era's most notorious fraud trials; his real notebook is cited here as if it were a practical manual for crooked cashiers.
Reading notes
- Bibliography §4 Mr. Yukhantsev
Konstantin Yukhantsev, a Moscow bank cashier whose embezzlement of over two million rubles was exposed in 1878, becoming one of the era's most notorious fraud scandals; his real notebook is cited here as if it were a practical travel manual.
- To the Chekhovs, 28 May 1890. Krasnoyarsk. §13 the pardoned Yukhantsev here, and Rykov too
Two real, notorious figures from the great Russian bank-fraud scandals of the 1870s, both by 1890 living out sentences of Siberian exile in or near Krasnoyarsk -- which is precisely Chekhov's point in \S13: he cannot understand why a town he finds so agreeable should also be "a favorite place for exile." Konstantin Yukhantsev was a cashier at the Moscow Commercial Loan Bank whose embezzlement of more than two million rubles came to light in 1878, producing one of the era's most sensational fraud trials; Chekhov calls him "the pardoned [прощенный] Yukhantsev," registering that his sentence had by this point been commuted or reduced. Ivan Gavrilovich Rykov was chairman of the Skopin Mutual Credit Society, whose years of falsified accounts caused the bank's 1875 collapse and his own subsequent conviction. Both names would have been instantly recognizable to Chekhov's Russian readers as bywords for large-scale financial crime, on the order of a reader today recognizing a headline-era Ponzi-scheme name; Chekhov drops them with no further explanation because none was needed. The pairing turns the observation from a passing remark about penal geography into a wry comment on what kind of criminal ends up exiled to a genuinely pleasant town: not violent offenders, but disgraced men of business.
- Advertisements and Notices §11 Yukhantsev
Konstantin Yukhantsev, a cashier at the Moscow Commercial Loan Bank whose embezzlement of over two million rubles was exposed in 1878 and produced one of the era's most notorious fraud trials -- his real "memorandum book" is invoked here as if it were a practical manual for crooked cashiers.