This is a sad, beautiful snapshot of a poor man who, though broken, impoverished and in ill health, still clings to dreams of a simple life in nature.
The dreams of the story title are those of a nameless tramp who is being escorted to a town center by two “peasant constables.” The tramp, like the constables, also is a peasant, but he doesn’t look or sound like one.
As the three men trudge through the forest, the constables press for details of the tramp’s life: Their prisoner seems to fit no standard mold. He is neither peasant nor gentleman. And, oddly, the tramp claims not to remember his own name.
Walking along with difficulty, coughing relentlessly, the tramp tells his story. His mother was a nurse for “the gentry,” and his father was likely the master of the house, the very man who enslaved his mother. His mother’s favored position in the home made his childhood somewhat sweeter: He ate well, dressed well, and learned to read and write. But his mother (accidentally) poisoned the master of the house, and he himself was an unwitting accomplice, so he went to prison. Now he is an escapee.
His dream is heartbreakingly modest: Rather than being sent back to prison, he only hopes to be sent to Siberia, where he imagines himself living in nature, fishing for his dinner. He spins out a vision of a simple, beautiful life, and for a moment, he manages to capture the imagination of his escorts: “The peasant called up a picture of a free life such as they had never lived.”
But it’s only for a moment. The tale ends with the guards jeering at the poor little man. He’s far too weak to survive in Siberia. In fact, he’s too weak even to survive the trip.
And the tale ends with the three of them resuming their walk in the woods, the tramp’s head bowed low, the constables silent.
This is just a tremendously beautiful and sad story. It also is interesting for its echoes of Chekhov’s own life. Like the tramp, Chekhov was a descendent of serfs: His grandfather was a serf who purchased his freedom. And like the tramp, Chekhov did not have a fixed, natural place in society: Not a gentleman, not a peasant, not a son of wealth but not a beggar, either. And the tramp is a lover of literature: “When I have time I sit in a corner and read a book,” he tells the guards.
Crucially, the tramp appears to have tuberculosis, a disease that, along with the rough life of prison, has robbed him of his strength and his youth. Even in his early 20s, Chekhov was beginning to be weakened by TB, although he hid it from others and even from himself.
Finally, like Chekhov, the tramp has a love of the outdoors and, especially, fishing. Chekhov’s letters sometimes seem like the notebook of an angler, not a writer. He catalogs the many fish he has caught and even draws pictures of the types of hooks he needed to catch certain fish.
This is not to say that the story is in any way autobiographical, but it draws deeply from Chekhov’s life for inspiration, and the dreams of the peasant might be the dreams of the writer as well.
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“Dreams” shares a small but telling plot point with another of Chekhov’s painful portraits of peasant life: In “Peasant Wives,” a young woman is accused of poisoning her husband so as to escape her marriage, just as the tramp’s mother was accused of murdering her “master,” or enslaver, if that is the better word. Poor Russian women of that day and age had little or no legal protections, and when they were brought to court, I imagine they rarely if ever escaped conviction. (Not to say that poor men had much, if any, more hope of a fair trial.)
A Chekhov Circus 