Chekhov’s father was a petty tyrant who immiserated his wife and children, but only rarely did Chekhov portray cruel, overbearing fathers in his fiction. “Difficult People,” like “The Head of the Family,” is one of those rare cases.
The title, “Difficult People,” would probably better be, “A Difficult Person.” It is a portrait of a hot-tempered father who treats his family badly. The father is Ivanovitch, a stingy man who sighs at the sight of money, so precious is it to him.
Ivanovitch is not gentry, but he isn’t poor, either. He owns 300 acres of land; he has a laborer who is building a barn for him. I’m not sure how to characterize him within Russian society of the time, but he strikes me as small-town wealthy. His son is a college student and needs money–for train fare, for clothing, for new boots. Ivanovitch’s wife must pester her husband for money for their son.
“Difficult People” brings to mind modern day America, and particularly small town America, where education is viewed skeptically. I could imagine Ivanovitch wearing a red MAGA cap while tooling around in a powerboat on a Saturday afternoon, bitterly unhappy that his son prefers to spend time away at college, learning things that have little practical or financial purpose.
In the end, Ivanovitch gives his son the money he needs–but the money isn’t really the issue. The heart of the problem is the father’s pride and his antipathy to the education his son is pursuing. When father and son part at the end of the story, it’s the beginning of what is likely to be a lifelong estrangement.
This is a good story. But grim.
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To read Chekhov’s letters, you would imagine that he would have created dozens of stories featuring selfish, narcissistic fathers, so difficult was his father in his childhood. But in fact that type of dad is relatively rare in his fiction. There were plenty of other types of bad fathers, though, like the useless drunkard who is the title character of “A Father.” That said, Chekhov did occasionally sketch a caring father figure, like the semi-comical, ineffectual dad of “Shrove Tuesday.” It’s not a wonderful story by any means, but a fond portrait of a decent man, making an interesting contrast to the father in “Difficult People.”
A Chekhov Circus 