Here we have a tale about a man who finds himself snowed in at a woman’s cottage miles from home.
(In Chekhov’s stories, travelers are constantly stumbling into other people’s homes, or empty stables, railway stations, and mean little inns, generally in the snow or rain. I can’t tell if this is just a literary trope or if Russia really was like this back in the 19th century – travelers regularly getting lost and throwing themselves on the mercy of whoever happened to be living behind the door that they are pounding on.)
In any case, our hero, Yergunov, finds himself in the company of some sketchy scoundrels – indeed, one of them, Kalashnikov, is described by Chekhov as “an arrant scoundrel and horse stealer.” After telling us frankly that Kalashnikov is a horse stealer, we then learn that he comes from Bogalyovka, where the peasants have “the reputation of being good gardeners and horse-stealers.”
Giving Chekhov the benefit of the doubt as I read the tale, I figured the menacing Kalashnikov and his shady sidekicks would act against type; Yergunov’s prejudices would be confounded by a kind act of a stranger on a cold night.
But no, it turns out that a peasant from Bogalyovka can’t be trusted. Kalashnikov and his accessories steal Yergunov’s horse. And that’s the story!
The whole thing could be summed up this way: A man meets some horse stealers. He worries that they will steal his horse. Then they steal his horse.
The only thing that gives this tale any narrative tension is the tacit assumption by the reader that Chekhov may turn the tables somehow–that horse thieves won’t be horse thieves. If you were coming to this story without any knowledge of Chekhov’s reputation for subtlety and nuance, for his fondness for tricky endings, you would read the story as summarized above and, when the horse thieves engage in horse thievery, you would scratch your head and say, “Hmm, seems odd to structure a story like this, explaining how everything is going to happen and then, it happens, just like you said it would.”
In other words, if you came to this story having never read a Chekhov tale, you would find this story insipid.
I, on the other hand, had read more than 100 stories by Chekhov by the time I read this one, and that led me, irony of ironies, to enjoy the story–at least during the time that I was actually reading it. It wasn’t until I came to the end that I felt let down. In the act of reading, I thought it was a decent piece of work, if not a masterpiece.
In short, I gave Chekhov the benefit of the doubt and, in this case, he squandered my good will.
A side note: Not to make too much of Chekhov’s antisemitism (about which I have railed in numerous other posts) but this story is of a piece with his engrained, deterministic view of people as extensions of ethnicity or origin. Tatars behave a certain way, Jews another… Turks, Greeks, Muslims, you name it, they generally can’t escape their essential natures. Hence those horse-thievin’, Bogalyovkan peasants just have to do the horse-thievin’. It’s in their blood.
Russia, just by dint of its size (and imperial pretensions), had a diverse population, and it’s hard to fault someone in the 19th century for having certain benighted attitudes about one group or another, I can’t help but wish someone as apparently wise as Chekhov couldn’t manage to elevate himself above the commonplace prejudices of his day. But on the whole, the occasional antisemitism that crops up in his stories (like his hatred of those darned Bogalyovkan peasants!) is an irritant but not a huge impediment to reading him.
READ THIS? READ THAT!
For another, very different kind of story featuring an unexpected visit in a snowstorm, try “The Witch.” Unlike “The Horse-Stealers,” the tale unfolds in ways that are impossible to predict, even to the point of defying the reader’s understanding. These two tales make interesting bookends.
A Chekhov Circus 