person
Andrey
also: Андрей, Andrey, his son
The six-year-old, only and last child of Doctor and Mrs. Kirilov, who dies of diphtheria in the story's opening lines; his small body, laid out with open eyes, is described in the story's central image of grief before his father is called away to a false errand.
Reading notes
- Enemies §1 died of diphtheria
In the pre-antiserum era -- diphtheria antitoxin was not developed until 1894 and did not reach wide clinical use in Russia until the turn of the century -- diphtheria was a leading killer of young children, spreading through crowded households and claiming a large share of its victims within days as a thick membrane closed the throat and toxins reached the heart and nerves. Chekhov, himself a practicing zemstvo doctor, gives Andrey's death no medical scene at all: the story opens after it has already happened, with the household's frantic effort (the servants sent away that morning, Kirilov's hands "still burning from carbolic" in loc 2) visible only in its aftermath. The translation preserves this abruptness rather than softening or explaining it, in keeping with the story's clinical, unsentimental opening.
- Enemies §15 lay a boy with open eyes
This paragraph is the story's central, unflinching image: the dead child's open, darkening eyes and the mother kneeling motionless over him, her stillness described as containing enormous suppressed "living movement." Chekhov -- a doctor as well as a writer -- draws the scene with clinical precision (the sickroom's basins, rags, and lime-water still scattered where they were used) rather than sentiment, and the translation follows that precision closely, neither softening the physical detail of the boy's body nor adding consolatory language the Russian does not supply.