As the title would suggest, this is a bleak sketch of a poor, uneducated peasant seeking to free his brother from jail. But the man he is importuning is merely a doctor employed by the local government, not someone with any judicial responsibilities.
The peasant (and his father) beg pathetically for their relative’s freedom, without any apparent understanding of how their society works – that is, as peasants, they are totally unfamiliar with the local bureaucracy, the law, and the different categories of power, whether political, legal, financial.
Like “The New Villa” and many other Chehov tales, this story explores the vast gap between the classes in 19th Century Russia.
For a modern reader, it’s somewhat difficult to get a sense of what Chekhov is up to in his portrayal of peasants, at least in this story. Kirila, seeking to free his brother, is not only ignorant of the legal system (approaching a doctor to free his brother from jail) but stupid, to boot (even after the doctor explains that he has nothing to do with jailing or freeing anyone, Kirila returns to beg some more.) Kirila seems (to me, an American reader in the 21st century) a parody of obtuseness and ignorance.
If it were only Kirila, I might say, well, this is a portrait of a pathetically ignorant young man; but Kirila’s father is every bit as ignorant and obtuse as the son. So it may be that:
- Chekhov is creating a fairly accurate portrait of the peasantry of the day – uneducated and utterly separate from the structures and machinations of middle class life of the day. The author is not looking to make us laugh at poor Kirila nor to pity him. It’s just a piece of reportage.
- Chekov is caricaturing peasants and their general ignorance, not to make the reader laugh, exactly, but more to elicit a kind of facepalm response: “Oh, these backward peasants!”
- Chekhov is a man of his day and harbors certain prejudices toward peasants, and that colors this story.
Likely “Darkness” is a bit of all three. As a modern reader, my first thought was that the title refers to the terrible suffering of the peasants and the grief that they feel for their incarcerated family member. But it is just as possible (maybe more so) that the darkness of the title is actually a comment about their ignorance.
READ THIS? READ THAT!
I pointed to this story from “A Malefactor,” which offers a very similar look at a poor, ignorant man struggling to understand the ways of the legal system. Rather than point back to that story in an endless loop, here’s a different sort of companion piece: Try “An Inquiry,” a very early and rather broad sketch of the lengths that a citizen must go to win the attention of a government clerk. If nothing else, these two stories show the very different ways that Russian bureaucracy was understood by peasants vs. members of the middle class.
A Chekhov Circus 