In Paradise Lost, Book One, Milton
mentions Leviathan, a sea monster of the Old Testament (Job, XL, 20):
"that sea-beast / Leviathan, which God of all his works / Created hugest that
sweam the ocean-stream" (200-202). MILTON + LEVIATHAN = HAMILTON + LEVITAN.
Levitan is Chekhov's Jewish friend Isaak Levitan (1860-1900),
the celebrated landscape painter. In a letter of May 10, 1885, Chekhov
tells his younger brother that Levitan, who calls every fish "a
crocodile," has made friends with Begichev (the patron of Moscow
Imperial Theaters) who calls him "Leviathan." In another letter
Chekhov mentions a peasant, who hired out to Levitan a bath cabin
on his land and who calls his lodger "Tesak Il'ych" (instead
of "Isaak Il'ych," Isaak being an unusual name for a peasant's ear;
tesak is Russian for "broadsword," "cutlass" and "chopper," "hatchet").
TESAK = SEKTA (sect) = ASKET (ascetic). I don't know if they belonged
to a sect, but both St. Anthony (c. 251-356), Anton Chekhov's namesake, the
hero of Flaubert's novel and Bosh's painting, and Isaac Newton, Levitan's
namesake, a scholar of genius, were famous ascetics.
Three details are perhaps worth
mentioning:
Milton and Hamilton are also cities in
Ontario, in SE Canada;
Leviathan is also a philosophical work
(1651) by Thomas Hobbes dealing with the political organization of
society;
Levitan had an elder brother Adolf, a genre-painter
(1859-1933), who was the namesake of Chekhov's publisher, Adolf Marx (a curious
name); having sold off the publishing rights to his works to Marx, Chekhov wrote
in a letter that he was now a Marxist.
Alexey
Sklyarenko