A celebrated architect, Uzelkov, returns after twenty years to his hometown, where, though he has been retained to oversee a restoration of the local church, he has been generally forgotten. Oh–and not only did Uzelkov grow up in the town, he married and later ditched his wife before moving away to the big city.
Uzelkov seeks out Shapkin, the attorney who managed his divorce, and who as it turns out is an unmitigated bastard. Between the two of them, Uzelkov and Shapkin, Uzelkov’s wife was destroyed: First she was abandoned, then she was fleeced. Of the two men, only one has the grace to at least feel pangs of guilt.
As a portrait of selfishness and sheer human greed, it would be hard to beat this story. Shapkin in particular is such an ogre, you want to strangle him. Uzelkov is a bit of a more complex character, if only for feeling remorse and shedding a tear of regret over his abandoned wife’s grave.
This tale was published in 1885, really still the very beginning of Chekhov’s blossoming as a short story writer, and I would certainly consider it one of the better works from his early years. It’s an example of what I think of as “cruel Chekhov,” a writer who did not blink when it came to portraying selfishness, greed, and, yes, simple cruelty. These stories appear to have been valued by Chekhov’s low-end publishers–that is, his publishers appear to have believed that readers wanted stories like this. They were commercial works, in other words, not self-consciously composed works of art.
Chekhov’s cruel works from this period–1885 and early 1886–attracted the attention of important writers and won Chekhov the admiration of one of his most trusted and valued readers at that point–his older brother, Aleksandr.
Three “cruel” stories in particular helped catalyze Chekhov from journeyman magazine writer to short story artist, at least in the eyes of key readers and thus in Chekhov’s own eyes as well. One was “The Huntsman,” a desperately mean-spirited portrayal of a man who has abandoned his wife to poverty. This story, published in July 1885, was particularly admired by Dmitry Grigorovitch, a significant figure in Russia’s literary world at the time (although he is largely forgotten today, at least in the US.)
Another is the utterly cold-blooded story “Sorrow,” the tale of a mingy man who waits too long to take his wife to a hospital. She dies, and then he himself suffers a dreadful physical calamity. This was particularly admired by the poet Liodor Palmin. (Another name unfamiliar to us today but important to Chekhov at the time and a man whose work appeared widely in the press.)
Finally, there was the almost unreadably sad tale “Misery,” about a cab driver whose son has died and who can find no one–no human–who will listen to his sad story. Chekhov’s brother was the admiring reader this time; this is the story that persuaded him of Anton’s genius. (Both “Sorrow” and “Misery” have been translated under a variety of similar-sounding titles–“Grief,” “Woe,” etc.–making it sometimes confusing which is which.)
The feedback that Chekhov received on these cold, sad tales must surely have changed his view about what he was capable of writing, and even what could be done within the confines of a short story, even if it were to be published in a relatively low-class magazine of the day. He didn’t suddenly produce works of genius after mainly pumping out entertainments–even from the earliest days some of his stories were rich and thoughtful–but the early works were mainly light: sketches of buffoons, charlatans, hypocrites, sycophants… he enjoyed skewering these easy targets, and readers seemed to like it when he did.
By late 1886 and into 1887, he was writing more complex, much richer stories, tales that leaned into humor without becoming broad, like “The Privy Councillor,” or that leaned into sorrow without collapsing under the weight of sadness, like “Easter Eve.”
READ THIS? READ THAT!
Chekhov wrote a handful of stories about characters returning to their hometowns. “Old Age” is unique in that the character is making the trip by choice; it’s his desire (and because he has a job to do) that he goes back to his roots. By contrast, the young woman in “At Home” seems to have nowhere else to go. This “forced” returns strike me as more in line with Chekhov’s attitude about going back to one’s roots. Chekhov seemed to enjoy growing up in Taganrog, but once he moved to Moscow as a young man, his hometown struck him as stultifying and claustrophobic. “Home” was, for him, a place you struck out from, not a place to return to.
A Chekhov Circus 