One terrible night (Chekhov)
A terrible night ( Russian Страшная ночь , Straschnaja notsch ) is a short story by the Russian writer Anton Chekhov , which appeared on December 27, 1884 in the magazine Rasvletschenije . During the author's lifetime, the text was translated into German, English, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak and Czech.
action
When the little civil servant Ivan Petrovich Panichidin entered his rented room in the Arbat district of Moscow on Christmas night in 1883 , he found a high-quality women's coffin in it. Panichidin, who spent Christmas Eve at a spiritualistic session , wants to see whether the coffin is "inhabited", but flees back into the heavy rain in Moscow. He wants to spend the night with his friend Nepokoyev in the nearby Mjortwy-Gasse. The comrade is absent and there is another coffin in the room; this time almost twice as big, brown, carefully crafted and unadorned. Panichidin remembers his friend Pogostov's apartment. The newly minted doctor Pogostov, in whose room there is also a coffin, is present and, unlike Panichidin, is a daredevil. Pogostov opens the lid and finds a piece of paper with the solution to the riddle in the empty coffin. The mutual friend Iwan Tscheljustin, the son-in-law of a coffin maker, wants to save his father-in-law from financial ruin by removing a few of the most valuable coffins from the bankruptcy estate and hiding them with friends.
Panichidin then labored for three months from a medically treated nerve breakdown. Everything will be fine. But Ivan Tscheljustin's business, who has meanwhile taken over the company from his father-in-law, is going badly. That's why Panichidin always looks around his room wildly to see if Ivan has not deposited a white marble monument or a catafalque with him.
reception
Schklowski writes that Anton Chekhov piles up horror motifs. So the final, banal, materially justified explanation comes as a surprise.
literature
Used edition
- Gerhard Dick (ed.), Wolf Düwel (ed.): Anton Chekhov: Collected works in individual volumes : A terrible night. P. 252–260 in: Gerhard Dick (Ed.): Anton Chekhov: From the rain to the eaves. Short stories. Translated from Russian by Ada Knipper and Gerhard Dick. With a foreword by Wolf Düwel. 630 pages. Rütten & Loening, Berlin 1964 (1st edition)
Secondary literature
- Wiktor Schklowski : Theory of prose. Edited and translated from Russian by Gisela Drohla . 192 pages. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1966 (translation of the Russian original edition О теории прозы (O teorii prosy), Moscow 1925)
Web links
- The text
- online in the Gutenberg-DE project , translator: Alexander Eliasberg
- Wikisource Страшная ночь (Чехов) (Russian)
- online in Lib.ru (Russian)
- online in FEB (Russian)
- Chekhov Bibliography, Entry Stories No. 232 (Russian)
- Reference to first appearance in the Laboratory of Fantastics (Russian)
annotation
- ↑ Panichidin sounds like Panichida (Панихида) - the mass for the dead. Panichidin lives with the officer Trupov as a sublet. Trup (труп) is the corpse. The Church of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary stands on the graves next to Trupov's house . The friend Pogostov - like the village cemetery (Погост) - lives with the State Councilor Kladbistschensky like the cemetery (кладбище). Another friend lives on Totengasse (в Мертвом переулке).