Bogimovo

Reading notes

• To Ye. M. Shavrova, 2 September 1891. Bogimovo. §1 Bogimovo

  The country estate south of Moscow, near Aleksin, where Chekhov spent the summer of 1891 -- the year of "The Duel" and, that autumn, the first work on the Sakhalin book.

• To A. S. Suvorin, 16 October 1891. Moscow. §7 as I did at Bogimovo

  The Kaluga-province estate where Chekhov spent the summer of 1891 and did sustained, all-day work on both "The Duel" and the beginning of his Sakhalin book; he invokes that stretch of concentrated writing as the pace he now wants to recover for the new novella idea.

• To A. S. Suvorin, 20 May 1891. Bogimovo. §3 I've moved to another dacha

  This is the move from the Aleksin dacha -- the upper floor of Bylim-Kolosovsky's house, described in -- to Bogimovo (Богимово), a Kaluga-province manor near Aleksin. The two houses are not the same: Chekhov signals the change of address in his very first line ("another dacha"). Bogimovo would be his base for the rest of summer 1891, the summer in which he wrote "The Duel" and began serious work on "Sakhalin Island."

• To A. S. Suvorin, 20 May 1891. Bogimovo. §3 the whole upper floor of a great manor house

  The manor house at Bogimovo, with its columned hall and musicians' gallery, was a far grander establishment than the Aleksin house; Chekhov's family took the entire upper floor for the season.

• To A. S. Suvorin, 20 May 1891. Bogimovo. §3 Bogimovka

  Bogimovka is Chekhov's informal, diminutive form of Bogimovo, used interchangeably with the full place-name in his letters of this period.

• To M. V. Kiseleva, 20 July 1891. Bogimovo. §4 a certain young squire

  The unnamed young landlord of the Bogimovo estate the Chekhovs are renting for summer 1891; Chekhov's description here (absent-minded, liberal, in shirt untucked) is genial mockery of a type rather than a pointed character sketch.