Another day, another skewering of hypocrites.
This story is a fairly heavy-handed portrait of a hateful fellow, Lyashkevsky, a retired military man now living somewhere in the humid southern provinces. In other words, he is the Russian version of an American snowbird.
Lyashkevsky spends his days at his window, muttering caustically about all the idlers in the town. His similarly grouchy friend, Finks, stops by for a sit and a chat. They sit around doing nothing, complaining vociferously about people who sit around doing nothing. Once Finks is gone, Lyashkevsky has bitter words for him, as well.
The day ends with the bitter old man cursing out his furniture (yes, his furniture), and then it’s off to sleep, to dream of revenge on one and all.
This is a bit of a one-note performance, more like the brief entertainments Chekhov wrote in 1883 and 1884, when he was practically selling his stories by the pound.
READ THIS? READ THAT!
“Aborigines” is yet another chance for Chekhov to unload on southern Russia. His roots are in the region and he rhapsodized about the climate, but he came to dislike, detest even, what he saw as a torpid, incurious, and unaccomplished culture, where he complained that there weren’t even any good bakeries, let alone writers or artists. He seemed to have equal disdain for southerners who never left the south (see, for instance, “Lights”) and for northerners who wanted to bask in the sun (like this story.)
“The Duel” takes place in one of those hot, indolent towns, and the character of Laevsky embodies what Chekhov sees as the laziness of the south, even as he pines for the bracing weather and culture of the north.
A Chekhov Circus 