This is a profound story, brief as a flicker of fire.
A group of workmen are playing a game of cards in the stable of a manor house. The master of the house has shot himself in the head. The men gossip.
The men are playing a game of “kings,” and periodically one of them is kinged and makes pronouncements such as, “Now if I like I can chop off anyone’s head.” Meanwhile, the king of their castle lies dying not 100 feet away.
Among the men is a boy, Alyoshka, grandson to one of the workmen. He plays his own hand of cards with them, but mainly he keeps silent and listens as they converse.
When the master of the house dies of his wounds, the conversation turns dark. As a suicide, the master has committed a mortal sin; he is destined for hell. He can have no funeral and no requiem. The men recall stories of other suicides; the spirits of the dead haunting the lives of the living.
That night, lying in the sledge in the coach house, the boy Alyoshka can’t sleep. The sound of mourners wailing in the courtyard gives him frights. His grandfather comforts him and at last he falls asleep. When the sun rises, nothing has changed, but somehow Alyoshka is no longer so afraid.
This strikes me as the prototypical Chekhov story. The “action” such as it is, takes place just offstage; we are left to wonder what, exactly, led the man to take his life. The men have theories but we as readers (and especially as modern readers) know that their talk is mostly ignorant conjecture and rumor. We’ll never know why the man took his life, or what the impact of that death will be on his family and even his staff, including these men playing cards. All we know is that the game will go on in one form or another, and after an initial shock and fright, the sun rises, and the sad fact of death recedes into memory.
READ THIS? READ THAT
In Constance Garrett’s 13-volume Chekhov translation, most of the 201 stories seem to be arranged by pure chance. Occasionally, though, the stories are organized by theme. (Volume 12, for instance, is almost entirely stories about children and animals.) “In the Coach-House” appears in Volume 9, immediately following the story “The Requiem,” and these two stories are a perfect match for each other. In each, someone has died, but we don’t know what caused the death (or led to the suicide, in the case of this story). The survivors speculate about the deceased’s state of grace in the afterlife, and while they are saddened, they have a fatalistic, harsh attitude. Both are wonderful. Something about “In the Coach-House” is even better than wonderful. It’s sublime.
A Chekhov Circus 