place
Tomsk
also: Томском
A Siberian city, site of the calendar's mock "learned dispute" that ends in a police intervention.
Reading notes
- The Alarm Clock's Calendar §53 Tomsk
A Siberian city; the invented site of a mock scholarly dispute over which sea is largest and which town smallest, ending -- absurdly -- in a police intervention.
- List of Exhibitors Awarded Cast-Iron Medals in the Russian Section at the Amsterdam Exhibition §3 the Tomsk public
A Siberian provincial city, invoked here as a byword for a remote, unsophisticated readership.
- The Bridegroom and Papa §38 Томская губерния
Tomsk province, a vast administrative division of western Siberia and a common destination for penal exile and settlement; Kondrashkin's blithe insistence that it is "fertile" and that people "live better" there than in European Russia is the joke's climax -- he would rather reason away a Siberian exile sentence than lose a son-in-law.