Might as well just say it outright: This is a pretty bad novella. It’s a tale with some strengths and typical Chekhov touches, but it’s unfocused and disjointed.
The story is absurd. It involves the family of Grigory Petrovich Tsybukin, a wealthy merchant in a dismal little manufacturing town. He marries off his older son, a detective, to a pretty but poor local woman. They appear to have no relationship whatsoever but she manages to get pregnant and have a child. The detective-son, then, is convicted of passing counterfeit money, and sent away to jail. In his absence, the father decides to leave a portion of his estate to his new, infant grandson, and his other daughter-in-law, who has been essentially a partner in managing the family businesses, becomes so enraged that she murders her infant nephew.
There’s more, but that’s the gist of it. It’s absurd.
If there is a center to this fractured novella, it is the murderous daughter-in-law, Aksinya.
She doesn’t start off as a villain. In the early chapters, she is merely a hard-working partner to her father-in-law, Grigory Petrovitch. But at the wedding of Grigory’s older son, Chekhov suddenly makes her out to be evil: “She looked with a smile on her face as a viper looks out of the young rye in the spring at the passers-by.” (Chekhov re-uses that awkward viper metaphor once more, as if the once wasn’t bad enough.)
The only positive thing I can say about this work is that it opens with an absolutely great anecdote about the village where the story unfolds: Ukleevo is known as “the village where the deacon ate all the caviar at the funeral.” And indeed that is the story – there was a funeral, caviar was provided, and the clergyman ate it all. And so that was how people referred to the village ever after.
Life really is like that! We do recall places for the silliest and slightest reasons.
As for the novella otherwise, there is a wealth of character and activity; there is crime, punishment, love, marriage, and murder, and yet it all just seems like so many words strung together on the page.
There are some typical Chekhov touches. First and foremost, he portrays the factory town as a bleak, hellish and disease-ridden (see “A Doctor’s Visit,” among others.) Another is the figure of the second son who is physically damaged. In this case, he is sickly and deaf. In “Peasant Wives,” he is drunken and deformed.
All in all, though, it’s not the strongest effort by Mr. Chekhov.
READ THIS? READ THAT!
I suppose you could make a case that “In the Ravine” should be read alongside “Mire.” These are the two Chekhov works that center on scheming, villainous women. Unfortunately, “In the Ravine” is marred by sloppy construction and melodrama, and “Mire” is basically ruined by its antisemitic cant… but the two works are unusual for the inclusion of a basically evil woman at their centers. Evildoers in Chekhov’s world are most often men, reflecting their relative power in society.
A Chekhov Circus 