This is merely a trifle. Upon the death of a local nobleman, a young writer named Zapoikin, admired for his smooth speech-making, is asked to come to the funeral and give a eulogy.
The dead man, Babilonov, was a drunken rascal. He’s hardly the sort of man to be remembered fondly, but Zapoikin agrees to give a eulogy: He’ll get food and drink and cab fare for his trouble.
And so Zapoikin arrives at the funeral and launches into a stirring speech, full of lies about the dead man. (We don’t know much about Babilonov but we have to assume that most of what Zapoikin says is actually the opposite of the truth. So when Zapoikin says dead man always worked late into the night, we can be fairly sure he rarely set foot in the office; similarly, Zapoikin says the deceased never took a bribe, leaving us no doubt that he was as crooked as an old hawthorn branch.)
The joke of it is that Zapoikin has misunderstood who has died: He has assumed that the dead man is someone else – someone who is, in fact, in attendance at the funeral. And soon enough, he sees the dead man, fully alive, there in the cemetery. Fin.
Like so many of Chekhov’s earlier stories, this was presumably written mainly for cash, with an eye toward entertaining a growing reading public in Moscow and St. Petersburg. It presumably served that purpose well; though for a modern reader it’s not a terribly worthwhile tale.
READ THIS? READ THAT!
This tale is a sort of variation on a regular Chekhov theme–people drinking too much and acting asinine. There are a good half-dozen in this vein, none of them particularly noteworthy, but most or all well executed pieces of entertainment. Like decent sitcom episodes, they had a certain value in their time; less so now. “A Happy Man” is just such a story.
A Chekhov Circus 