This is an amazing story, certainly among Chekhov’s best.
The plot: An aged principal attends his school’s annual dinner despite his ill health and general weakness. The schoolmaster, Sysoev, is not, it seems, a terribly nice man: Tetchy and volatile, he rejects any suggestion that he may not be strong enough to attend the festivities.
At the dinner, Sysoev bickers with several guests over imagined or minor slights. He lashes out at the local schools inspector who, the schoolmaster says, conducted testing unfairly.
By the time the story is mostly done, the reader has taken a healthy dislike to Sysoev, who is so obviously arrogant and prickly, and more than that, blind to the fact that he is so clearly weak and in ill health.
And then, toasts are made, and the school’s financial director, Bruni, expresses a heartfelt appreciation for Sysoev’s many years of excellent leadership, and the guests set aside their irritation with the vainglorious old man. Bruni completes his toast by noting that the school has set aside money to provide for Sysoev’s family, and Sysoev, at first confused, suddenly realizes his mortality. He is old! He has not long to live! Embarrassingly, he breaks down in tears.
Such a rich story, describing a world that is both familiar and strange. There are tiny details suggestive of broader social trends: The school is a “factory school,” that is, it is part of a factory town, run by the company that owns the factory and likely everything in town. Bruni, the director, is a German. Perhaps Germans were recruited into Russia to help develop the country’s manufacturing base? Or, as is hinted at in one line of the story, the factory is actually a German operation on Russian soil? (The heads of the firm “lived abroad and scarcely knew of its existence,” which could either mean foreign ownership or, less likely, maybe the owners are negligent and lazy elites living it up on the Riviera.) In any case, the tale is full of these pulsing and rich details.
Certainly this should be included in any single-volume Chekhov collection.
READ THIS? READ THAT!
I don’t know how Chekhov had the ability to write this story. I really don’t. He was 26 at the time; he had only the experience of a student, not a teacher or a school administrator. He did not grow up in a factory town attending a factory school. It boggles the mind. (His younger brother, Ivan, was a schoolmaster, but he would have been very early in his career at this point.)
Even without any apparent first-hand knowledge of the teaching profession, he wrote three or four masterpieces featuring educators: This tale, “The Man in the Case,” and “The Schoolmistress” are certainly among his very best stories, and “The Teacher of Literature,” though flawed, has a lot strengths.
Of these, “The Man in the Case” has perhaps the most resonances: Both stories are about old, uncompromising teachers at the ends of their lives, and both manage to make fools of themselves, despite their pretensions of gravitas.
A Chekhov Circus 