Sleepy

In Chekhov’s “Sleepy”, a 13-year-old “little nurse” named Varka strangles to death the infant in her charge. The brutal and rather unexpected ending exemplifies Chekhov’s approach to story writing—that is, as he once admitted in a letter, he “conduct[s] the entire action peacefully and quietly,” then “bash[es] the [reader] in the snout.” But what is most remarkable about this story is the suspension of conventional morality Chekhov demands and receives from his reader. In the space of five short pages, the reader is lulled along, much like the main character, by recurrent dream imagery. What results is a reader who finds himself defending the act of murder.