This is a mostly tiresome, heavy-handed sketch about an annoying young woman playing sick and enjoying the attentions of her husband and others.
Lizaveta “falls ill,” apparently after munching on a turnip, and languishes in bed, imagining the moaning and wailing that will attend her funeral. Her husband does his best to care for her; he even stays up all night watching over her.
In the morning, she pops out of bed, ready to attend a rehearsal for an amateur theatrical, and her husband has no choice but to drag his sleep-deprived body to the office. Once there, his boss urges him to go home–he clearly is not feeling well.
Haha?
“Martyrs” is unique for including what I think must be the most jaw-dropping moment of anti-semitism in all of the collected work of Anton Chekhov.
Bored and unable to sleep, Lizaveta begs her husband to do something to entertain her–tell her a story, say.
What shall he tell her, he asks.
“Something about love,” Lizaveta says languidly. “Or some anecdote about Jews…”
Good grief.
READ THIS? READ THAT!
This isn’t much of a story. What I rather like best about it is that Lizaveta seems to blame her illness on eating a turnip. This is not the only time that someone falls ill in a Chekhov story and the cause is chalked up to something absurd. In “Ladies,” a character loses his voice after drinking a beer.
It’s not really clear whether Dr. Chekhov is making fun of these diagnoses, or if people actually believed that everyday items like beer or turnips could somehow make you sick.
A Chekhov Circus 