place
Bogoyavlenskoye Station
also: Станция Богоявленное, Bogoyavlenskoye
A nonexistent railway station in Nizhny Novgorod province -- the mailing address Chekhov gave for his friend Yevgraf Petrovich Yegorov, land captain and partner in the horse-buying famine-relief scheme described in (also the return address on Chekhov's own direct letter to Yegorov the same day). Chekhov himself discovers the error a month later, in (3 January 1892): no station named "Bogoyavlenskoye" exists in the province; the real station, close enough in name to explain the slip, is "Bogoyavlenye". This entity records the erroneous name as Chekhov actually wrote and mailed it -- it should not be silently merged with or renamed to the correct station, since the whole point of is that the two names are not the same place.
Reading notes
- To A. I. Smagin, 11 December 1891. Moscow. §5 Bogoyavlenskoye Station, Nizhny Novgorod province, to Yevgraf Petrovich Yegorov, land captain
The mailing address Chekhov gives for donations to the horse-buying fund: Bogoyavlenskoye Station in Nizhny Novgorod province, care of his partner in the scheme, Yevgraf Petrovich Yegorov, addressed by his official title as land captain (zemsky nachalnik).
- To F. O. Shekhtel, 14 December 1891. Moscow. §5 or straight to the spot: Bogoyavlenskoye Station, Nizhny Novgorod province, to the zemstvo chief Yevgraf Petrovich Yegorov
The field address for the relief fund: Bogoyavlenskoye Station in Nizhny Novgorod province, care of Yegorov in his official capacity as zemstvo/land captain.
- To Ye. P. Yegorov, 3 January 1892. Petersburg. §3 я посылал Вам свою корреспонденцию по такому адресу: "Станция Богоявленное, Нижегор уезда". Между тем, оказывается по справкам, что ст. Богоявленное в Нижег губ нет, а есть ст. Богоявленье.
The resolution of a real postal error, not a variant spelling for its own sake. Chekhov himself supplied the address \"Bogoyavlenskoye Station, Nizhny Novgorod uyezd\" as the mailing address for Yegorov's famine-relief donations back in \S5 (repeated as the return address on his own direct letter to Yegorov the same day) -- and every letter he addressed there since has apparently gone astray. Making inquiries after weeks of Yegorov's silence, he now learns that no station by that name exists in Nizhny Novgorod province at all: the real station is \"Bogoyavlenye\", a name close enough to the one he had been using that the mistake went undetected for nearly a month. This apparatus keeps as the record of the erroneous address Chekhov actually wrote and mailed to (it is what the earlier letters say, and cannot be silently corrected out of the record), and introduces as the distinct, correct station his own inquiry turns up here -- the two ids track the error and its correction as Chekhov himself narrates them, rather than merging them into one 'really meant' place.