As a young man, Chekhov did some reporting along with his fiction writing. A few of the works included in his short story collections are, in essence, bits of reportage. This is one of those stories.
“The Bird Market” is a brief bit of reportage about the goings on at Trubnoy Square, where vendors sold live birds and other animals. There’s no story, no plot, no lesson to be learned. It’s simply a report from a market in Moscow.
With a quick hunt on Google Maps, you can virtually visit the square (Trubnaya Ploschad’) right now. It’s a sliver of a park running between rows of simple, low-slung apartment buildings, a paved walkway maybe 15 feet wide, bordered by two strips of grass. It’s easy to imagine the place 150 years ago, crowded with animal buyers and sellers and gawkers and strollers, all of them pressed together in what is barely more than a lane in the middle of a giant city.
(An aside: Boy, do I regret never visiting Moscow. Putin’s ugly and evil war means I may not get to go there in my lifetime – never to see the domes of the Kremlin, never to drink an apricot soda on a bench in Patriarch’s Ponds, where the poet Ivan Nikolayevich, pen-name “Homeless,” encountered the mysterious Professor Woland in the first pages of “The Master and Margarita.” Alas!)
But to return to the bird market of the 1880s: The way Chekhov ends the sketch is telling, describing the square as “a little bit of Moscow where animals are so tenderly loved, and where they are so tortured…” This was written in 1883. Even before he tried his hand at getting inside an animal’s consciousness, in stories like “Kashtanka” and “Whitebrow,” Chekhov empathized with animals.
READ THIS? READ THAT!
Another Chekhov work that was largely reportage (and focused on animals, for that matter) was “The Cattle Dealers.” I didn’t love that story–it was just too much information–but it made a decent splash when it came out, winning praise from the Petersburg Society for the Protection of Animals. (So that was a thing as long ago as 1887!)
A Chekhov Circus 