place
Plyos
also: Плес, Плёс
A small town on the Volga in Kostroma province, a stop on Chekhov's 1890 river journey toward Sakhalin; he notes it as the former residence of the painter Isaac Levitan, whose Volga landscapes were largely painted there in the late 1880s.
Reading notes
- To S. P. Kuvshinnikova, 23 April 1890. Volga, parokhod "Aleksandr Nevsky". §3 I saw Plyos. I recognized the cemetery church, saw the house with the red roof
Chekhov had already passed Plyos two days earlier and described it at length in, \S7 ("Kostroma is a good town. I saw Plyos, where the languid Levitan used to live...") -- this second, much briefer mention on the return of the same stretch of river is a private act of recognition rather than a fresh description: he singles out the cemetery church and a red-roofed house because he remembers them specifically from an earlier visit, not from the trip narrated in itself. The mournful accordion heard from the bank supplies the same understated, withheld-emotion texture noted throughout this corpus's Chekhov apparatus -- the feeling of passing a remembered place is carried entirely by the concrete details (church, roof, accordion, cold, leftover snow) and never named as nostalgia or melancholy.