This tale appears as part of Volume 12 of the Constance Garnett translations of Chekhov, a book devoted entirely to stories about children, with a few animal stories mixed in.
As I read deeper and deeper in the volume, the less enthusiastic I became, because I knew that Chekhov would spare his characters no indignity or pain, if that’s what the story called for. Throughout the preceding 11 volumes there were numerous, pitiless portraits of children ill-treated by their parents or other adults, and I assumed (correctly) that a good many of the stories in the 12th volume would follow suit – and indeed, they do.
The classical student of the title is the son of an ambitious mother who has arranged for him to have a traditional, “upper class” education despite the family’s modest means. But the teenager, Vanya, is no great student. He repeatedly gets poor grades, to the great disappointment of his mother.
The mother in this story is one of the more monstrous parents ever set on paper by Chekhov. In her rage over his latest failure on a Greek test, she tells him that she has prayed for death. “I prayed to God to take me,” she tells Vanya, “but He won’t take me, a sinful woman.”
Ugh.
Their neighbor, Vanya’s aunt, chides Vanya’s mother, pointing out that rather than sending her own son to a fancy school, she set him to a life of business, and now he’s earning a good living. But the mother isn’t persuaded. What Vanya needs, she says, is a good beating. And so she enlists the lodger, who lectures the poor kid and then gives him a hiding with his belt.
Unpleasant as all this is, the story ends with – well, not with a twist, but with a turn: It’s decided later that night that Vanya shall go into business, like his cousin. This fact is presented lightly, a humorous reveal. Hahaha, he was bullied and beaten with a belt, but now everything is fine!
This tale was written 1883, still at the dawn of Chekhov’s meteoric rise as an artist and public figure. At this point in his career, pretty much every story he wrote ended with a snappy little twist. His audience–specifically the editors to whom he sold his stories–was clamoring for more, and specifically more of the same.
In stories from every stage of his career, Chekhov showed empathy for children in his work. It’s worth noting that his father was a temperamental bully with an atrocious temper, so he knew what it was for a child to be harangued and beaten, and he would not want to make light of suffering such as Vanya’s in this story. But he didn’t really know yet how to end a story except with a light touch. These tricksy surprise endings are fine for comic entertainments but they feel ugly and out of place in this otherwise harsh tale.
READ THIS? READ THAT!
As we have seen in a lot of other stories, Chekhov did very little revision and, at least in the first six or seven years of his writing career, experienced little editing. So there are quite a few tales with odd, offputting shifts in tone, like this one’s abrupt change from ugly and sad to jokey.
Most often, the lack of revisions shows up in longer stories and novellas, which start off one way, lurch another and finally return to somewhere else–sometimes consonant with their beginnings, sometimes not. He knew this about himself. In October 1888, he admitted that as a writer, he thought about beginnings and ends, but not middles. “Because I am so used to short stories that consist of little more than a beginning and an end,” he wrote in a letter, “I lose interest as soon as I feel that I am writing a middle, and tend to make too much of a meal of it.”
And in 1886, he admitted that he rarely spent more than a few hours on an individual story.
There’s nothing wrong with that (especially when you consider the outcome–certainly he was the greatest short story writer of his age and possibly of all time) but any number of stories, whenever in his career they were written, have odd structural and tonal flaws, almost certainly because they were dashed off rapidly and not revised. Of the many tales with such flaws, “Ward No. 6” comes to mind first, with its early pages devoted to reportage and its middle a dull, Socratic dialog about sanity. Another long work that unfolds like a broken accordion is “The Wife.” And then there is “A Doctor’s Visit,” in which, amazingly enough, the doctor of the title does not actually pay a visit – no, it is his assistant who visits. (What?!?!)
Those examples, however, are all major works, or at least ambitious ones, and many readers consider them to be significant accomplishments. (I don’t agree but ok.)
For a look at another, minor work that, like “A Classical Student,” veers in odd tonal directions, you could read “An Incident,” which has its own ugly little surprise ending in a story that has not aged well at all.
A Chekhov Circus 