In the Coach-House
A fancy house.
A gentleman has shot himself.
The hired help play cards and talk about the suicide.
Talk about how people who kill themselves can't get proper funerals.
Discuss why the gentleman might have killed himself. Women troubles?
Recount a story of another rich man who killed himself but the mother paid off the police and he got buried inside the cemetery until the workers told the mother her dead son was howling every night.
Alyoshka, the eight year old grandson of the coachman is frightened.
He wants to go home.
The grandfather soothes him to go to sleep but he has bad dreams throughout the night.
Whenever you read a story of suicide by Chekhov -- you harken to The Seagull. How common was this act of shooting yourself with a revolver? Also, it's mentioned that too much thinking may have led to this action. Was that a commonly held idea?
What were Chekhov's personal experiences with suicide?
Since there are about one million suicides every year in the world and we still grapple as to why people kill themselves -- the topic is one which still elicits great interest.
This story puzzled me. What was Chekhov getting at here? Is it about suicide, as you suggest?
ReplyDeleteSome years ago, an elderly family friend died. At the funeral, an Indian friend said he didn't understand why people were crying. He was taught that death is simply a passage into another state of being. Nothing to get upset about.
Recalling this, I think the young boy is the focus of this story. Being 8-years old, Alyoshka doesn't understand most of what's going on, but he's learning and imitating the emotional responses towards death from the adults. Makes me wonder what else we're unconsciously picking up when we're young.