concept
Nero
also: Неро, Нера
Uncle Petrusha's big black Great Dane, taciturn and dignified, whom the children -- lacking a father for the kittens -- appoint in place of the toy horse; he eats the kittens while no one is watching, and the adults' amused indifference afterward is the story's real shock.
Reading notes
- An Event §44 a big black Great Dane
Датская порода ("Danish breed") is the period Russian term for the Great Dane; Chekhov's description of Nero's silence, gloom, and self-possessed dignity sets him up, tonally, as a household grandee well before he does anything -- the story's central shock arrives through an animal already coded as impressive rather than threatening.