This very short morality tale begins in the manner of Boccacio or Chaucer: a group of people gather in the evening and decide to tell tales.
In this case, the gathering is a group of jurors sequestered overnight during a trial. Having listened to one of the witnesses struggle to recall a disturbing incident, the jurors (or jurymen, as Constance Garnett has it in this translation) decide to tell their own tales of experiences that left equally strong impressions.
At this point, the Boccaccion (Boccaccian? Boccaccio-esque?) structure is abandoned; the tales of the first three or jurors are elided, and we get to the actual heart of the story, related by the fourth juror. Many years ago, when he was young, he fell in love with a woman and asked her to marry him. Not much later, a friend, a wily young lawyer, boasted that he could persuade anyone of anything. In fact, if he so chose, he swore, he could persuade the man to abandon his fiance.
Prideful and sure of his love, the young man says he’d like to see the lawyer try such a thing; surely nothing can endanger his relationship with his betrothed. But the lawyer introduces doubt into the young man’s mind and soon has persuaded him to throw over his girlfriend. The young man dashes off a letter to the girlfriend ending the engagement, and the lawyer seals the deal by addressing it and mailing it off.
Of course, the young man soon realizes his error and curses himself for being turned by the wily lawyer. The lawyer, in turn, tells him not to worry: He made sure to garble the address on the envelope. The letter will never reach its intended destination.
At that point, the clock strikes twelve, and the jurors realize they must go to sleep. Their minds turn to the fact that they are jurors judging another man’s life. They think of the accused murderer in his cell, whose fate is in their hands. And then, Chekhov says, the jurors all forgot the story of the fiance and the wily lawyer, and go to bed. In other words, they learned nothing from the story. In the morning, they may well vote to condemn an innocent man.
This is the rare Chekhov story that is better schematically than in the actual writing, and the reason for this is, mainly, its brevity: It’s not even seven pages long. The rhetorical trickery of the lawyer is sketched so quickly, and with so few details, that it has no weight. It’s not that it is unbelievable that a lawyer might persuade a companion that his affection is misplaced; rather, the telling of it is so short that it is scarcely any more compelling than simply saying, “the lawyer then persuaded the young man to break off his engagement.”
So that’s a weakness; it’s a critical one. The tale is not much. It certainly has the potential to be much more compelling.
It’s interesting, though, that Chekhov ends the story with the jurors rather mechanically going to sleep. The moral of the story is lost on them, while it is glaringly obvious to the reader.
I can’t decide if this is an example of Chekhov venting his misanthropy, which bubbles up regularly in his work, or if perhaps he thought the story might seem saccharine if he closed it with the jurors pondering the ways in which words can be used to confuse and mislead, an important point when acting as a jury in a murder trial. Honestly, I have to wonder if, having written the story, Chekhov himself felt unconvinced by the tale of the wavering suitor, giving him no choice but to leave the jurors in unenlightened sleep.
READ THIS? READ THAT!
It’s rather amazing that an authoritarian society like Tsarist Russia had a jury system. (It was established only in the 1860s, and lasted just a few decades before being abolished under communism.)
That a jury system existed at all seems even more amazing when considering how little the rural poor–an enormous segment of the population–seemed to understand that legal system. In Chekhov’s “Darkness,” a family trying to free a man from jail is utterly ignorant of the judicial system. Courts and the law are completely alien to them.
A Chekhov Circus 