To N. M. Lintvareva, 18 January 1892. Derevnya Belaya.
Н. М. ЛИНТВАРЕВОЙ, 18 января 1892 г. Деревня Белая.
Headnote
Dated 18 January 1892, from Belaya village, Nizhny Novgorod province – a new location for this correspondence, Chekhov having gone there to take part in famine-relief work – to Natalya Mikhailovna Lintvaryova, the same correspondent as and.
The letter is light and bantering. Chekhov reports receiving contradictory letters from Ivanenko, one urging him to buy Kublitsky’s dacha and the other detailing all the disasters that would follow if he did; he recounts a running comedy of failed attempts to buy a farmstead at Yatsenki with two different notaries both named Ivanov, joking that he was created for the punishment of notaries named Ivanov because he wrote the play "Ivanov" – yet insists he must still flee Moscow. He describes a fierce blizzard the previous evening in which he and a companion nearly lost their way in open country. He closes with greetings and news that he has met the actress Mariya Zankovetskaya, whom he calls "the Ukrainian queen," who is likewise angling for him to buy a farmstead near her in Chernigov province.
A note on register: in, Chekhov briefly mimics a Ukrainian-accented pronunciation of Russian in his own sentence ("Можэтэ себэ представить... Украина нэ забудэ" – substituting э for е), a playful nod to Zankovetskaya’s Ukrainian stage fame. Russian orthography has no direct English equivalent for this eye-dialect device, so the translation renders the sense in plain English; the mimicry itself is lost in translation and is noted here for the record. This is affectionate mimicry of a specific person’s regional association, not an ethnic slur, and required no application of the no-softening policy.
Light, self-mocking tone throughout (the running joke on "Ivanov," the mock-fright at the blizzard, the exaggerated "thousand bows and two thousand good wishes").