AMOSOZ
...The local police inspector had been ill for two years now and
was wasting away. Yakov had impatiently waited for him to die, but the
inspector moved to the main town in the district for treatment, and
he darned well gave up the ghost there. This meant a loss of at least
ten roubles, since the coffin
would
have been an expensive one lined
with brocade. It was at night that Yakov was particularly plagued by
thoughts of these losses. He would put his fiddle by his side on the
bed and whenever he was haunted by any unpalatable thoughts, he
would touch the strings, the fiddle would twang in the dark and he
would feel better.
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The tender sadness and the warm, forgiving humor might have left a
stamp of sentimentality on "Rothschild's Fiddle" were they not balanced
by an ice-cold selection of details, by a surgical conception of human
nature and by a carefully measured dis tance between the characters and the
truth. The characters are often unaware of this truth, or else they do not
acknowledge it, but the reader is invited to recognize it between the lines.
Here and in other stories, Chekhov establishes a precise equilibrium, as on
a chemist's scale, between the ridiculous and the heartbreaking. The con–
tract includes verbal understandings, as it were, between the narrator and
the reader, a sort of non-paper consent, or secret appendix. Frequently the
reader has to understand something by means of its opposite. Such, for
instance, are the first sentences: a lamentation about the dearth of deaths in
the village, about the old people who die "so seldom it was very annoy–
ing." This comes from the narrator, not from the protagonist, but the
reader understands, after a moment of bewilderment, that the complaint is
the grumbling of the coffin-maker, whose "business was bad."
Bronze and Marfa are an old, childless couple. The inventory of
their humble hovel is counted by the narrator: "Marfa, a stove, a double
bed, coffins, work-bench"-the woman, Marfa, is included in the list of
furnishings-but the reader already knows that this narrator mixes his
own voice with the voice of heartless Bronze.
Bronze accepts, most reluctantly, orders for children's coffins, and calls
the business of preparing such coffins "wasting my time on such nonsense."
This detail, which appears near the beginning of the story, attests to petty
avarice (small coffins make for small profits). Yet, halfway into the story,
the reader will learn that Bronze has erased from his memory the life and
death of his only child, a fair-haired baby girl born to Marfa and him fifty
years before. Only after Marfa's death, when Bronze suddenly remembers
his disaster, will it become clear to the reader that Bronze has hardened
his heart all these years in order to protect himself from the pain. His
