A brief, minor work.
Sasha Uskov, a ne’er-do-well scion of a respectable family, is at risk of jail for, in essence, passing a bad check, and his uncles and other family members must decide whether to bail him out, thus saving the family name, or to let him pay the consequences, thus teaching him a harsh lesson.
The older family members debate the young man’s future in rather forced, stagey speeches; Sasha, meanwhile, considers himself rather melodramatically. It’s all too much.
A story like this, short, talkative and simple, seems more like something from Chekhov’s crazy productive years back in the 1880s, when his mind seemed to be boiling with ideas, and every story popped at the end (sometimes surprisingly, sometimes eyerollingly, but still, they all popped) and generally there was a sparkle in the writing–a sense of delight in the ironies of life.
“A Problem,” however, was written somewhat later, or at least was published somewhat later, in 1891, and it has a darker tone. The twist at the end is not so much a twist as an affirmation of the reader’s expectations, and it’s a sinister affirmation, at that.
READ THIS? READ THAT!
There’s no shortage of Chekhov portraits of dissipated, drunken youths, but this one reminded me particularly of “Late Blooming Flowers,” which is one of the writer’s earliest attempts at a longer narrative. (“Late Blooming Flowers” wasn’t translated by Constance Garnett and is not readily available in English; a 1964 collection of translations by I.C. Chertok and Jean Gardner, “Late Blooming Flowers and Other Stories” can be found used.)
“Late Blooming Flowers” is not a good story but it does feature a somewhat absurdly comical portrait of a god-like doctor. The story was written when young Chekhov was still just a medical student, and he seemed to be fantasizing about the day when he, as a successful and esteemed professional, would have boatloads of money and would lord it over the wastrel rich.
A Chekhov Circus 