A brief, satirical sketch of a pompous, fat dilettante who hires a young woman to teach him French and then falls in love with her –a love that is categorically not returned.
I imagine there may be cultural shadings to this tale that I don’t understand: That the man does not speak French is, I assume, a marker of sorts — it presumably means he is of a certain class, so high and no higher. The fact that he considers himself a cultivated man, and yet he cannot speak a word of French (or German) would be hilarious to readers of the day. (I think?)
Speaking of which, Chekhov was considered quite a funny writer in his time – not droll, as we might call him today, but rip-roaringly funny. Side-splitting. Gut-busting. Leo Tolstoy thought Chekhov’s humor was his genius, and he liked to read Chekhov stories out loud, sometimes laughing too hard to continue.
Humor doesn’t age well, as a rule, and I think it especially doesn’t translate well. So Chekhov’s humor has to cross two huge barriers to reach the modern American reader. I don’t laugh out loud too often when I read him; more usually my reaction to something funny in Chekhov is to think to myself, “Ha, that’s funny, sort of.”
“Expensive Lessons” is mainly meant to poke fun and make us laugh. It’s fine for what it is, but I didn’t laugh out loud.
READ THIS? READ THAT!
“Expensive Lessons” was written in 1886, toward the end of Chekhov’s early period, when he was placing literally hundreds of snarky little sketches in the pages of Russia’s popular magazine. That year, he was still knocking off satire and humor pieces, but within a year or two he was focused almost entirely on his plays and more serious, longer works of fiction. Another humor story from 1886 that takes aim at a pretentious writer is “Hush!”
A Chekhov Circus 