Feodosia

Reading notes

• The Lady with the Little Dog §53 Feodosia

  A port town on the Crimean coast; the morning steamer arriving from it, watched by Gurov and Anna Sergeyevna at dawn, becomes one of the fixed images of his memory of her.

• To A. S. Suvorin, 3 April 1888. Moscow. §9 Feodosia

  The Crimean port town, near where Suvorin had a residence; Chekhov promises to visit that summer.

• To I. L. Leontyev, 14 September 1888. Moscow. §11 Feodosia

  The Crimean port town where Suvorin was building a house; a recurring setting elsewhere in Chekhov's letters and fiction of the period.

• To A. S. Suvorin, 24–25 November 1888. Moscow. §5 You have Feodosia

  Feodosia, the Crimean port town where Suvorin owned property, already established in this corpus (see's headnote).

• To A. S. Suvorin, 30 August 1891. Bogimovo. §9 That I didn't manage to visit you in Feodosia is a great loss to my health. I'm losing weight.

  Suvorin kept a house at Feodosia on the Crimean coast, where he was evidently summering with his family in August 1891 (see \S12-13's regards to Alexei Alexeyevich, Anna Ivanovna, and Yevgenia Konstantinovna, and \S16's postscript request for Feodosia peppers); Chekhov, occupied at Bogimovo with "The Duel" and "Sakhalin Island," had evidently once planned or hoped to join him there (compare, \S3, where he mentions an earlier, since-abandoned plan to visit Suvorin at Feodosia in early August) and here mock-diagnoses the missed trip as a health setback, continuing the letter's running joke (\S3) about his own hypochondriac "psychosis."

• To F. A. Chervinsky, 14 September 1891. Moscow. §3 I have to write to Feodosia. A letter there and an answer back from there takes 10 days.

  Chervinsky, a poet and playwright in Vladimir Tikhonov's Moscow theatrical circle (first attested at, where Chekhov calls him a talented fellow), was at this time in Feodosia, the Crimean port town also associated in the corpus with Suvorin's seaside household; Chekhov opens with a practical warning about the ten-day round trip for mail rather than any comment on Chervinsky's reason for being there.

• To A. S. Suvorin, 5 January 1891. Moscow. §8 to come visit you in Feodosia

  Feodosia, the Crimean port town where Suvorin kept a house; Chekhov looks ahead here to a summer visit.

• To A. S. Suvorin, 16 June 1891. Bogimovo. §9 on your way to Feodosia

  Suvorin's periodic travel to Feodosia, in Crimea, where he had property; Chekhov proposes to meet him partway, at Tula.

• To A. S. Suvorin, 13 July 1891. Bogimovo. §4 Feodosiya

  AMBIGUITY FLAG: "Вашу любимицу Феодосию" ("your favorite Feodosiya") is grammatically a feminine accusative parallel to the other named figures in the same sentence (Aivazyants, Nikitishna, Paparuba, Bulgakov), which invites reading it as a personal name rather than the Crimean town of Feodosia -- easy to conflate given the joke that immediately follows about the painter Aivazovsky, a lifelong Feodosia resident. No corroborating source elsewhere in the corpus resolves which reading is correct; both are plausible, and the entity is provisionally linked to the place rather than invented as a person.

• To A. S. Suvorin, 6 August 1891. Bogimovo. §11 your Palestines

  A jocular periphrasis (\textit{Ваши Палестины}, literally "your Palestines") for Suvorin's Crimean summer residence at Feodosia -- an idiomatic Russian phrase using "Palestines" loosely for any faraway or exotic place one dreams of visiting, not a literal reference to the Holy Land.

• Notebooks. Diaries §4031 Feodosia

  A Crimean port town where Suvorin kept a residence and where Chekhov stayed with him in September 1896, meeting the painter Aivazovsky there.

• Live Merchandise §126 Feodosia

  A port town on the Crimean coast, the nearest station and social hub for the dacha settlements where most of the story's second half takes place.