Here we have a light entertainment about a Latin teacher with a mouse problem.
What is a man to do if his house is invaded by mice? The answer, of course, is to get a cat, or in this case a kitten. But the kitten, as it turns out, is afraid of mice. Not only that, once it grows up into a full-size tomcat, afraid of mice it remains.
The tale is narrated by the Latin teacher’s nephew, who concludes the story by admitting to his own lingering fear – not of mice but of the Latin language, which he learned from his harsh, demanding uncle.
This tale, like so many others written in the earlier part of Chekhov’s career, was fundamentally intended to amuse and entertain. If a little moral or life lesson could be snuck in, so much the better. But mainly it was meant as a way for the reader to pleasantly pass the time. That’s what entertainment is.
Of course, this kind of entertainment is no longer of interest to almost anyone, and why not? There was no TV in Chekhov’s day, no radio, no movies, and of course no internet – no Instagram, no TikTok. We have those things now and, to be honest, most of Chekhov’s entertainments are not nearly as entertaining as, oh, reruns of Friends, SNL clips on YouTube, or basketball podcasts, to name just a few modern options.
Reading Chekhov’s many, many piffling tales sometimes feels tedious, or a waste of time, because truly they are meant to entertain and they can’t, for the most part, fulfill that function any longer.
But “Who Was to Blame,” almost unique among all the entertainments, really did entertain me. For one thing, the writing is much more piquant than Chekhov’s usual plain-spoken style. The first sentence is possibly the only one in all of the stories that begins essentially in mid-action: “As my uncle Pyotr Demyanitch was getting ready to go to the high school, he noticed that the corner of his grammar was nibbled by mice.” (I’ve elided some descriptive language to make the point clearly.) As far as I can tell, there is not a single sentence in all the collected stories, let alone one that is the first sentence of a story, that begins with the word “as.” (I searched my kindle version of the stories for this factoid!)
Compare that to some random openings of nearby stories: “A hungry she-wolf got up to go hunting.” “A young dog… was running up and down the pavement.” “The police superintendent… is walking across the market square…” “Mihail Petrovitch Zotov… was awakened by the cold…”
These aren’t bad sentences. But they’re flat and declarative. Unlike modern entertainers, Chekhov didn’t need to start with rocket bursts, or even a sharp push down a slide – so he generally didn’t bother with hyped-up openings.
There’s a lot of lively writing in this story. Consider this description of Pyotr Demyanitch: “a lean, bilious collegiate councillor, exceedingly like a stale smoked fish with a stick through it.” Spicy!
This story may not entertain quite as much as a new dance on TikTok or a basketball highlight reel, but it still entertains, 150 years after it was published.
READ THIS? READ THAT!
Another entertainment with a bit of spice in its telling is “From the Diary of a Violent-Tempered Man.”
A Chekhov Circus 