Poltava

Reading notes

• To Ya. P. Polonsky, 25 March 1888. Moscow. §5 Poltava

  A historic Ukrainian city Chekhov names among the celebrated places near his summer dacha at Sumy.

• To A. N. Pleshcheyev, 31 March 1888. Moscow. §4 Poltava

  Provincial capital near the dacha Chekhov had leased, evoked here as the heart of "Gogolian" small-town Ukraine.

• To I. L. Leontyev, 15 April 1888. Moscow. §8 an excursion to Poltava for the fair

  Poltava, a provincial capital in Ukraine; Chekhov dangles a visit to its fair as one of the summer's promised attractions.

• To A. S. Suvorin, 29 August 1888. Sumy. §5 Poltava province

  Chekhov had gone there specifically to look at a farmstead for possible purchase, arriving in time to watch the threshing; the trip and the farmstead are the subject of this section and the next.

• To A. S. Suvorin, 10 October 1888. Moscow. §4 the farmstead

  Continues the Poltava-province farmstead-purchase plan discussed at length in; the prize money is now earmarked toward the same prospective purchase (\S6).

• To A. S. Suvorin, 8 April 1889. Moscow. §5 Poltava

  The Ukrainian provincial city, proposed alongside the Volga as a destination for a prospective visit with Suvorin; no further itinerary detail is given.

• To A. S. Suvorin, 22 November 1891. Moscow. §4 Poltava province

  The Ukrainian province, associated in the popular imagination chiefly with Gogol and Peter the Great's 1709 victory, where the small estate Chekhov describes here has turned up for sale; this is the same Poltava-province estate-hunt he is separately pursuing through his acquaintance A. I. Smagin in letters written the same week.

• To F. O. Shekhtel, 14 December 1891. Moscow. §6 I've decided to submit to necessity: to buy a farmstead in Poltava province and move there for good

  At this point, mid-December 1891, Chekhov's plan to leave Moscow for good still pointed toward Poltava province, where he had spent much of the autumn discussing a specific khutor (farmstead) purchase with his friend Alexander Ivanovich Smagin -- see the extensive companion thread of Smagin letters from these same weeks, e.g., and, which track the property inspection, sketches, financing, and travel logistics in detail. The Poltava purchase ultimately fell through; the farmstead Chekhov actually bought, in March 1892, was Melikhovo -- in Moscow province, not Poltava. This letter therefore captures the plan in its still-unsettled, pre-Melikhovo state; the discrepancy is historical fact, not an error in the letter.

• Spring's Arrival (A Discourse) §9 Poltavas

  Poltava, a provincial capital in Ukraine famous chiefly for Peter the Great's 1709 victory there, named here purely as a byword for a sleepy, mud-choked provincial town.