Venice

Reading notes

• The Lion and the Sun §15 The City of Venice

  A generic decorative picture of Venice hanging on a provincial hotel-room wall -- the kind of stock print sold cheaply across Russia -- which Kutsyn absurdly presses into service as a prop for pantomiming "I am the mayor," since it has nothing to do with either man's actual city.

• To I. P. Chekhov, 13 March 1891. Petersburg. §3 Venice

  Second stop on the itinerary, and the city from which Chekhov promises to write again (\S6).

• To I. P. Chekhov, 1891. Venice. §3 Venice

  Chekhov's second stop, after Vienna, on his first trip abroad; he writes this letter two days after arriving, fulfilling the promise made at the close of ("I'll write to you from Venice").

• To I. P. Chekhov, 1891. Venice. §3 the palace of the doges

  The Palazzo Ducale, seat of the Doge of Venice and the Venetian government for centuries, seen from the gondola along with the Piazza San Marco and the cathedral (\S4, \S8).

• To I. P. Chekhov, 1891. Venice. §4 Piazza San Marco

  The central square of Venice, which Chekhov walks daily; also the site of the Sunday concert he anticipates at \S9.

• To I. P. Chekhov, 1891. Venice. §4 the cathedral of San Marco

  St Mark's Basilica, the Venetian cathedral on the piazza of the same name, which Chekhov finds indescribable.

• To the Chekhovs, 1891. Venice. §4 Piazza San Marco

  \textit{площадь св. Марка} -- St. Mark's Square, Venice's central piazza, named along with its \emph{собор того же имени} ("cathedral of the same name," St. Mark's Basilica) and the adjoining Doge's Palace; treated here as part of Venice itself rather than split into separate landmark entities, matching the convention set in the companion letters from the same days.

• To M. Ye. Chekhov, 1891. Venice. §3 St. Mark's Church

  St Mark's Basilica, on the Piazza San Marco -- the same cathedral Chekhov describes to his brother Ivan the previous day as "something that cannot be described." Here, writing to his uncle rather than his brother, he gives it a longer, more itemized description (the three bronze flagstaffs, the four bronze horses, the sculptural ornament) suited to a reader who has not seen it.

• To the Chekhovs, 1891. Venice. §3 Venezia bella

  Chekhov switches into Italian for the pun -- "lovely Venice" (Venezia bella) has, thanks to the rain, stopped being bella -- playing off the giddy Italophile enthusiasm of his letters from earlier in the week.

• To I. L. Leontyev, 1891. Florence. §3 Bella Venezia, with her feminine, bird-like gondolas

  Venice, personified as "Bella Venezia" (Italian: "Beautiful Venice"), the first stop on the itinerary Chekhov and his publisher Suvorin followed through Western Europe in spring 1891; her gondolas are figured as feminine and bird-like, continuing the playful, ornamental personification that runs through the whole sentence.

• To I. P. Chekhov, April 1891. Rome. §4 St. Mark's in Venice

  St Mark's Basilica, which Chekhov had called "something that cannot be described" only days earlier in the Venice letter; here he uses it, with backhanded praise, as the standard St. Peter's fails to surpass.

• To I. P. Chekhov, 1891. Paris. §3 letter from Venice

  Refers back to, the letter Chekhov sent Ivan from Venice on 24 March (5 April) 1891, asking whether it had arrived.

• A Failure of Compensation §37 Venice

  Another stop on the letter-writer's aimless circuit of Italian cities, named alongside Rome as a place he had once hoped to walk with Vera unobserved.