figure
Laertes
also: Лаэрт
The son of Polonius and brother of Ophelia in Shakespeare's Hamlet, who vows fierce revenge for his sister's death and drowning; Chekhov's narrator likens Krasnukhin's grave, fist-shaking pose at the story's opening to "the tone of a Laertes about to avenge his sister" -- a mock-heroic comparison that inflates a mediocre journalist's nightly performance of anguish into tragic stature, only for the joke to collapse a line later into a plea for tea and a beefsteak.
Reading notes
- Sh-h-h! §1 a Laertes about to avenge his sister
See the entity note on Laertes: the narrator's mock-heroic comparison inflates Krasnukhin's stagey, fist-shaking pose into Shakespearean tragedy, a comic mismatch of scale the story will keep exploiting.