This is a decently wrought piece of melodramatic clap-trap. There’s really no plot, so to speak. A boy is dying. His mother is at the point of collapse. The doctor caring for the boy is terse, respectful, and uncompromising: There’s no hope for the patient. The boy will die.
There are hints of an interesting story here. The mother, for instance: When the boy was born, she nearly gave him up for adoption. Why? Is her wild grief merely an act, born of guilt that she has never loved her son?
Similarly, the doctor, too, seems like more of a friend or confidant than a mere doctor. Why? Is he about to confess his love to the mother?
Chekhov, to his credit, manages to insert these micromysteries into the narrative with a subtle hand: After the mother asks the doctor if there really is no hope for the boy, he responds, “Such questions lead to nothing. I am ready to answer as many as you like, but it will make it no easier for us.”
The inclusion of the word “us” in that little speech is quite well done, no? Why “us,” the reader wonders. What is going on here?
The problem is, the whole story is so damn overwrought: the grieving, the sighing, the crying… the cherubic child, suffering stoically, and speaking almost in riddles. Asked if his head hurts, the boy says, “Yes. I keep dreaming.”
Eeesh. I personally get no pleasure from reading this. It’s a soap opera, however well crafted.
And then Chekhov ties off the story with a little bow, or a pair of bows, as there is a double surprise ending, and the reader is left thinking, uh… okay. Credit given for answering the little mysteries planted in the beginning of the story.
But I could live without the whole story, to be honest.
READ THIS? READ THAT!
What makes this a particularly unsuccessful work is the portrayal of the saintly child on his deathbed. Chekhov never had children of his own but when he wrote about children, he did not simplify them.
For a much more interesting and rounded portrait of a child interacting with doctors, read “The Runaway.”
A Chekhov Circus 