This must have seemed quite unusual back in the day – a real experiment in form. An unnamed narrator relates three separate instance of deep unease, or panic, induced by:
- an unexplainable light shining from the belfry of a village church;
- a breakaway carriage rolling down a hill past him;
- a dog that trails after him through the woods.
There’s really nothing more to this story than that.
It’s not terrible. It’s okay. It’s fine. It reminds me of a Pessoa fragment, or three Pessoa fragments, if you will.
What’s interesting about this tale, if that’s the right word for it, is how un-tale-like it is. It presents itself more as a hybrid, part fiction, part personal essay. The narrator is never identified so while he isn’t explicitly Chekhov, there’s no reason to think he isn’t.
“Panic Fears” was published in June 1886, when Chekhov had just begun to attract the attention of serious writers and editors such as Dmitri Grigorovich and Alexey Suvorin. Simultaneously, he had begun to publish under his own name, and on the pages of the better, more respectable publications. So it seems reasonable to imagine that he was flexing his muscles a little – trying out something a little different.
But only a little different. The third vignette, the tale of the dog in the woods, ends with an explanation: The dog, it happens, belonged to an acquaintance who had lost him that morning. The ending is presented as a sort of twist, a tidy bow to tie it all off. It doesn’t, of course. It feels like a bit of a cop-out for what otherwise would have been a truly abstract work.
But Chekhov wasn’t quite ready for that in 1886. He was making decent money from his writing (and earning money from doctoring) but he wasn’t above whining about money worries to his editors: “You ask what I do with all my money,” he wrote to an editor in April of that year. “The devil alone knows where it all goes!”
READ THIS? READ THAT!
There is really only one story to compare this one to: “The Beauties,” a very similarly structured piece of writing that falls somewhere outside of fiction but not, apparently, within non-fiction, either.
A Chekhov Circus 