Populist/Slavophile idealization of the peasant (narodnichestvo)

Reading notes

• The Whistlers §1 Master of Arts

  The Russian 'magistr' denotes a specific academic degree (roughly between a candidate's and a doctorate) held by university-affiliated scholars; the brother's learned credentials set up the story's contrast between educated 'Westernizing' skepticism and Vosmyorkin's populist enthusiasm for the unlettered peasantry.

• The Whistlers §2 Only a Russian could have invented the bathhouse!

  The banya (steam bathhouse) was a genuine staple of rural Russian life, but Vosmyorkin's boast here is the story's first note of drunken national self-congratulation, priming the reader for the far more troubling 'this is the real Russia' declarations to come.

• The Whistlers §6 all the rest are pigs, vermin

  Vosmyorkin's toast to 'the real Russia' collapses immediately into contempt for everyone else -- Germans, French -- cast as swine and vermin. Chekhov is not endorsing this language: the whole scene is staged so that Vosmyorkin's professed reverence for 'the people' is inseparable from, and exposed by, his readiness to dehumanize whoever stands outside his sentimental circle. The irony deepens a few lines later, at loc 27, when he uses the same word 'swine' to address the servants he has just been praising.

• The Whistlers §8 Westernizer

  'Zapadnik' (Westernizer) names the opposing camp to the Slavophiles in the 19th-century Russian debate over the country's cultural direction -- Westernizers favored European institutions and rationalism, Slavophiles (and later narodniks) prized a distinct, peasant-rooted Russian path. Vosmyorkin brands his brother a Westernizer as an insult, though his own position is less a coherent Slavophilism than maudlin, alcohol-fueled sentimentality.

• The Whistlers §8 the intelligentsia has gone rotten

  A stock complaint of the era's populist rhetoric -- that educated society (the intelligentsia) was corrupt, alienated from its own people, and morally inferior to the 'unspoiled' peasant. Chekhov lets Vosmyorkin voice the cliche at length precisely so its hollowness can be measured against how he actually treats the peasants he claims to venerate.

• The Whistlers §27 Come on now, you swine!

  Vosmyorkin orders the same servants he has just called 'the real Russia' to sing by calling them swine -- the story's clearest single collision of populist rhapsody and reflexive contempt, delivered almost in the same breath.