This is an early story from 1883, a year that Chekhov wrote some 40-odd tales, most of them short, many of them presented as humor or social commentary.
The tale, in brief: A local police captain takes his daughter to the theater and she is so taken with the performance that she ends up running off with the lead actor. But he is a brute and she is miserable.
I think this is meant to be an amusing tale. Look at this silly simp, falling in love with an obvious rogue. She got what was coming to her!
If she were merely unhappy as an actor’s wife, I could imagine (maybe?) some kind of amusing portrait, but in this case the actor is beating his young wife… so, if this story was in fact intended to amuse, it doesn’t translate from its 1880s setting to the present day.
In any case, it’s short and unpleasant.
What’s interesting about it to me (the story itself being no great shakes) is the fact that, even as a very young man, Chekhov already seemed to be nursing a real hatred of actors. Across the whole breadth of his stories, I don’t think you’ll ever find an actor who was not a cad or a weasel or at the very least a sap. Around the time that he wrote this story, he had this to say about actors (in a letter to a playwright, Kanaev):
“Our actors have everything except good breeding, culture, or if I may so, gentility… I expressed my fears for the future of modern theater. The theater is not a garden and not a Tatar restaurant.
I don’t know where this distaste came from. I’m not sure how or where he would have come into regular contact with actors at that point in his life – he was finishing medical college while simultaneously writing massive numbers of short stories. He did manage to waste a fair amount of time in Moscow’s red light district, so maybe that was a world rife with theater folks. (But why would he deem them any less savory than himself, a regular visitor to the brothels and low establishments in the area?) Anyway, as early as 1883, at the age of 23, Chekhov was busy eviscerating actors every chance he got.
The big question is this: Why would he ever want to be a playwright if he felt this way about actors???
READ THIS? READ THAT!
“A Tragic Actor” is an interesting bookend to the novella, “A Dreary Story.” In both, a young woman runs away with an actor and suffers for her choices.
A Chekhov Circus 