This is a kind of nothing story, but it starts so wonderfully. The narrator recalls his father, a poor man hunting for work in Moscow. It’s a loving portrait of a good man in desperate circumstances. He’s poor and ashamed to be wearing galoshes with no shoes underneath; to hide the fact of his shoelessness, he draws “the tops of some old boots up round the calves of his legs.”
Wonderful, touching, such an unusual detail! (Chekhovs’s own father faced struggles as well but I don’t think he came to quite this level of desperation. Besides, he had Anton’s earnings as a writer to buoy him up.)
After this promising start, though, the story turns into a sort of cruel comedy: the child sees a sign for oysters for sale. His father explains what they are and that they are eaten alive, horrifying the child. The child seems to pass out from hunger, and when he comes to, he asks for oysters for some reason, but doesn’t realize that he isn’t supposed to eat them whole. Someone gives him one to eat and he crunches on the shell.
Eh…
Overall, this is a compelling and sad sketch of poverty, recalled through a child’s eyes. It feels like it ought to be the beginning of a novella or even a novel. But it ends basically where it begins, with the father hunting fruitlessly for work, the child hungry and confused.
This feels like a hint of what Chekhov would be up to in a few years – taking on serious and sometimes painful and sad topics. But in 1884, when “Oysters” appeared, he was still trying to make a name for himself and, more importantly, looking to get paid by the literary journals that wanted him to supply amusements, and so this comes out as a kind of mish-mosh – a possibly tragic sketch that is played for laughs.
That’s sad, really, considering that Chekhov’s own father had come to Moscow not so long before this story was written. And like the father in the story, Pavel Chekhov struggled to find work and his family was in great need.
Meanwhile, here’s a weird Chekhov factoid: After his death in Germany (he was at a spa, hoping to recover from a tubercular attack), his body was transported back to Moscow on a refrigerated rail car designed to ship oysters.
READ THIS? READ THAT!
This tale is an oddball for Chekhov. It’s a memory piece, a recollection of some time long gone. I don’t think there is another story like that in all his hundreds of works. The closest I can come to it is “Beauties,” in which an unnamed narrator recalls two women who briefly captured his attention when he was young.
A Chekhov Circus 