Paris

Reading notes

• Ladies and Gentlemen, Townsfolk (Господа обыватели) §58 Paris

  The capital of France, invoked by the fire chief as the imagined gold standard of civic order and generous pay -- a stock marker of provincial Russian envy of the West.

• This and That (Letters and Telegrams) §3 Parisians

  Invoked here as the sophisticated foreign standard the provincial telegram-writer measures his own excitement against.

• The Liberal §52 Paris

  The French capital, tossed into the mock-will's catalogue of the whole earth's contents as a stock marker of cosmopolitan glamour.

• He and She §1 Paris

  The capital of France; here the one city the touring diva favors with months at a time, treating the rest of Europe as provincial by comparison.

• He and She §47 Paris

  The city where the wife, then a young conservatory graduate, first met her future husband during an evening of carousing.

• To the Chekhovs, 1891. Paris. §3 the hearth of civilization

  \textit{очаг цивилизации}, a grand, half-ironic epithet for Paris -- "hearth" in the sense of a source or center, the same word used of a hearth-fire -- typical of Chekhov's habit of deflating his own high style within a sentence or two (here, immediately, into the deadpan bureaucratic detail of the train timetable).

• To the Chekhovs, 1891. Paris. §5 Paris, though, is beyond describing

  A characteristic Chekhov move: gesturing at the impossibility of summing up a place in a letter and promising a fuller account in person, deferring real description until he is home (cf. similar deferrals elsewhere in the 1891 travel correspondence).

• To I. P. Chekhov, 1891. Paris. §1 Paris

  The final stop of the 1891 European trip before the return to Russia; this is the last surviving letter of the travel series, written the same day Chekhov sets out for home.

• The Guard Under Guard §37 Paris

  The ultimate destination implied by the couple's trip abroad, and Balbinsky's parting fantasy of finally shaking off his wife and meeting his friend there alone.