Victor Fet
 

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