At sea
At sea , also at night ( Russian В море , W more ), is a short story by the Russian writer Anton Chekhov , written in 1883 and published on October 29 of the same year in No. 40 of the Moscow weekly Mirskoi tolk . The author mocks the common practice of miserable rewards for certain religious offices in Russia . During Anton Chekhov's lifetime, the story was translated into Bulgarian.
The first-person narrator - a young sailor - and his elderly father, a depraved drunkard, hit the jackpot on board. The remaining twenty crew members on the steamer received nothing. At night, father and son are allowed to secretly observe the couple in the newlyweds' cabin. The sailors handcrafted the two peepholes in the cabin wall in a week and sawed them out a little. When the first-person narrator wants to take his peep post, his path leads past the communal cabin. In it the new husband, a young pastor with a gospel in hand, negotiates lively and verbatim with a fat old Englishman. The young, slender, very pretty pastor's wife cannot take her eyes off of her handsome husband's blond head.
The sailor's father fights for the better peephole. The young pastor sits on the edge of the bed and shakes her head. Towards the end of the lengthy exchange of views, the content of which cannot be understood behind the cabin wall, the pastor falls on his knees in front of his beautiful wife. When the woman is still shaking her head, the narrator observes threatening gestures from the clergyman. It seems as if the young woman is now suffering, vacillating and fighting down her anger. After a few minutes of hesitation, she gets up from the bed and nods unequivocally to her pastor. The young husband kisses his wife's hand with relief and leaves the comfortable sleeping cabin. After a few minutes he comes back with the fat old Englishman. The latter asks the young pastor a question. The lady turns pale and nods. The pastor smacks a few banknotes and disappears again. The Englishman carefully locks the cabin door.
The father of the first-person narrator pulls the son away from the peephole and says: “You shouldn't see that! You are still a child."
German-language editions
Used edition
- Gerhard Dick (Hrsg.), Wolf Düwel (Hrsg.): Anton Chekhov: Collected works in individual volumes : Auf See. A sailor's story. P. 150–154 in: Gerhard Dick (Ed.): Anton Chekhov: From rain to 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)
Web links
- The text
- Chekhov Bibliography, Entry Stories No. 156 (Russian)
- Reference to first appearance in the Laboratory of Fantastics (Russian)