This is one of the occasional Chekhov stories that is explicitly about social tensions in Russia. It’s a compelling tale and an interesting peephole into the ways that the rich and poor lived–and their sometimes fraught relationships.
The story: A bridge is being built outside a small village. We’re never told why the bridge is being built, or what regions it links. We do learn, though, that the workers (“navvies”) sometimes come into the village and make trouble.
The bridge-building project is led by an engineer whose wife falls in love with the rural landscape and persuades her husband to buy “a small piece of ground” (60 acres!), where they build a cottage.
Their arrival is not universally welcomed. The land that they purchased had been used by the villagers to pasture cattle. The family’s sleek horses are envied; their parties, with fireworks, and their fallow land–they neither farm nor ranch, but simply want to “breath the fresh air”–are a provocation.
The newcomers are not universally disliked. But two villagers in particular speak out against them: Lytchkov, a drunkard, and Kozov, a bitter, idle old man who is essentially feigning disability (“he was prevented from working by a disease that he sometimes called a rupture and sometimes called worms.”)
Tensions rise. The villagers let their animals run wild over the engineer’s land and gather mushrooms in his wood.
At first, the engineer speaks with the locals pleasantly, asking to be treated with the same respect that has afforded them. But when the villagers continue to trespass on his property, the engineer deploys guards and locked gates to keep people out. He refuses to hire anyone from town.
Meanwhile, his wife makes tearful and showy attempts at charity. (These ham-handed, condescending visits are cringeworthy in the extreme.)
This tale of festering resentments seems likely to end violently, and it does. But not in the way that you might expect. The peasants don’t take up arms against the engineer; nor does he lash out violently at them. Instead, one of the “bad” villagers, Lytchkov, drunkenly approaches the engineer on a holiday evening, begging for help; his son abuses him, he complains. Then the son steps forward to lodge his own complaints. And the Lytchkovs, father and son, begin hitting each other on the head with sticks, while the engineer, his family, and in fact much of the town, look on in perplexed horror.
The newcomers leave town the next day. They sell the house and never return.
This is definitely not a simple or simplistic story. The depiction of the peasants is somewhat troubling: They are lazy, drunk, idle, scheming and stupid, afraid of modernity and unwilling to change. Even “the good ones” (Rodion, a blacksmith) are stupidly servile and groveling. It’s not as if Chekhov paints the rich as purely admirable: the engineer’s wife is condescending and foolish. But at bottom this is a diptych portrait: on the one hand, the hard-working engineer, who represents morality and education and, most of all, the future; on the other, the idle and stupid poor, who the future will essentially bypass, the way the trains bypass the town as they cross the engineer’s bridge.
Like I said, it’s a compelling story. It’s loaded with fascinating detail. It is among Chekhov’s best. But it’s ugly, too. It has a real bias against the peasantry that is hard to shrug off.
It’s a troublesome, provocative work.
READ THIS? READ THAT!
The characters in 19th century Russian novels seem to be always conversing about how to improve the lot of the country’s rural poor. Chekhov tends to not to lean on this little trick, instead writing incisively about the ways that rich and poor interact. A fascinating story about those fraught relations is “Choristers,” a lovely portrait of a village choirmaster preparing for a rare visit from the rich nobleman who essentially owns the village.
A Chekhov Circus 