place
Tsar Bell
the Tsar Bell
also: Царь-колокол, Tsar-kolokol
An enormous 18th-century bronze bell, cracked and never rung, displayed as a monument on the grounds of the Moscow Kremlin; Chekhov jokingly reports it "alive and well" in the same breath as the poet Liodor Palmin.
Reading notes
- To V. V. Bilibin, 4 April 1886. Moscow. §24 Пальмин и царь-колокол здравствуют
A comic pairing: the poet Liodor Palmin, a fixture of Chekhov's Moscow literary circle, is jokingly declared to be "alive and well" in the same breath as the Tsar Bell, the enormous, long-cracked and never-rung 17th/18th-century bell displayed as a monument on the grounds of the Moscow Kremlin -- the joke turning on the incongruity of applying the same phrase of good health to a living acquaintance and to a famously broken, immobile object.