The setting is a filthy barbershop rural village. It is tended by a filthy barber, Makar Kuzmitch.
Into the shop comes Erast Ivanitch. As it happens, Erast is Makar’s godfather. He is also the father of a daughter. Makar is in love with the daughter, and she with him. For all these reasons, Makar is happy to provide Erast Ivanitch with a free haircut.
But on this particular day, Makar learns that Erast has made a match for his daughter with a wealthier man. Stunned, Makar sets down his scissors and weeps. Erast treats him cruelly, noting the barber’s limited means, and ends up leaving with only half his hair cut.
The next day, hoping Makar has calmed down, he returns to get the cut finished, but Makar refuses – he wants payment in advance.
Erast storms out and dances at his daughter’s wedding with a long hank of hair hanging down one side of his head.
I imagine this story was meant at some level to be funny. The descriptions of the shop are almost cartoonish. Here are the adjectives found in the first two paragraphs: unwashed, greasy, small, narrow, unclean, faded, dingy, perspiring, thin, creaking, rickety, sickly… well, there’s more, but you get the point. So maybe this tale started out as a kind of satiric portrait of the filthy underclass. Chekhov was not above making fun of the poor (not that he did not also portray peasants sympathetically in other stories).
But poor Makar, when he learns of his girlfriend’s fate, wins our sympathy. The fact that he openly weeps in front of another man suggests a truly deep sorrow (especially so amidst the macho culture of Russia in that era).
You can’t help but be glad that Erast is left with a grotesquely imbalanced hair cut in repayment for what he has done to Makar.
“At the Barber’s” is early Chekhov, but it has a lot of the marks of his better-known, later works: subtlety, complexity, humanity. It ends with a jokey little bang, but the interplay between Erast and Makar is anything but simple. In particular, Erast is quite a character: A mix of pragmatism, selfishness, and spite, he’s not all bad. He wants what’s best (financially, anyway) for his daughter, and as Chekhov shows in the first paragraph, Makar’s shop is a mean little place with no great promise.
The story features Chekhov’s typical respect for a worker plying his trade, but it’s also tinged with his apparent disdain for the filth and deprivation of the poor.
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“At the Barber’s” isn’t one that is often mentioned as among Chekhov’s best, but it’s short, sharp, memorable, and strong, almost certainly his richest work from his early years, 1882-1883. Another early story that shows Chekhov’s burgeoning skills is “Fat and Thin,” which like “At the Barber’s” is a bit of a set piece, but it’s much more than that.
A Chekhov Circus 