The Devil (A Case from Practice)

Reading notes

• A Case from Practice §45 the monster itself with the crimson eyes, by the devil himself

  Korolyov's own figure for the impersonal power that runs the mill: the two furnace-lit windows glimpsed across the yard become a monster's crimson eyes, and the monster becomes the devil -- a figure he does not literally believe in but returns to all night as the truest name for what he sees.

• A Case from Practice §51 that unknown force

  Chekhov shifts register here from the concrete "devil" to an abstract "unknown force" (неведомая сила) and then "unknown, mysterious force" -- Korolyov reaching for a more respectable, secular name for the same thing his mind keeps calling the devil; the translation preserves the shift rather than flattening it back to one word.