This is a tale in the category of “two travelers meet on the road and trade their life stories.” Or at least one of them does.
The best part of the story, for me, is the first page or two, where Chekhov paints the scene: a rough room at a tavern that is reserved for “travelers,” that is, a place for them to sleep, although there are no beds. It’s a mean, simple room, but it still manages to feel warm and welcoming as a snowstorm howls outside.
The descriptions of the room and the inhabitants are really quite wonderful.
At this point, though, we meet Liharev, a man traveling with his eight-year-old daughter, Sasha. They are poor and suffering; before taking shelter from the storm, their carriage ride had been so rough that, Liharev claims, they did not sleep for two days. And their suitcase has been stolen.
Enter a young woman, Mlle. Ilovaisky, a daughter of the local gentry, traveling from one of her family’s estates to another.
Liharev, as it turns out, is also the son of wealth, but he has squandered it – and his wife’s wealth, too. Not only that, but he has been jailed multiple times, and professes to have ruined the lives of any number of women.
How any of this occurred – how he lost money, how he corrupted women (including a nun), how he ended up in jail… this we never learn. And there’s the rub with this story: We are meant to believe in a tale that has no specifics. There are no footholds for the reader, so Liharev’s life story is just sort of odd. He presents as a sort of naive, idealistic fellow, much younger than his 42 years. He’s an attentive father, slightly cowed by his daughter. It’s really not clear how he could have been such a miscreant as to land in jail even once, let alone the five times, or how he could have been a sort of Svengali to woman upon woman. I don’t know, I just didn’t buy it.
The ending is good though: He explains that he is traveling to a distant mine in the steppe, where he will work as a supervisor of some sort. Mlle Ilovaisky is appalled on his behalf, certain that the relentless emptiness of the steppe will break him.
And then, because this is a tale in the category of “two travelers meet on the road and trade their life stories,” they go their separate ways.
READ THIS? READ THAT!
There are so, so, so many Chekhov stories of this type: “Overdoing It,” “The Petchenyeg,” “On Official Duty,” to name just a few. But the one this really reminds me of is “Uprooted,” which shares the theme of the lost soul who imagines that his next stop must surely be his last, that he will finally find a place in the world. Both of these stories are far from perfect, but the melancholy of the searcher in each is affecting.
A Chekhov Circus 