person
Yevgeny Petrovich Bykovsky
Yevgeny Petrovich
also: Евгений Петрович, Быковский, Bykovsky, the prosecutor
A prosecutor at the district court who, told by the governess that his seven-year-old son has taken up smoking, sits down to deliver a fatherly lecture and finds himself unable to summon any conviction for it, drifting instead through memories of his own schooldays and misgivings about pedagogy, before improvising a fairy tale that finally, almost by accident, gets through to the boy.
Reading notes
- At Home §56 And this is the one you're to go flogging...
Bykovsky's private recoil from the very punishment casually described in section 39: holding his son, he cannot square the idea of flogging a child for smoking with the boy in his arms, a turn that marks the story's real argument -- that abstract disciplinary logic collapses in the presence of love.
- At Home §70 Falsification, deception... conjuring tricks...
Bykovsky's uneasy verdict on his own method: the fairy tale worked precisely because it was beautiful and indirect rather than logical, which he finds philosophically troubling even as he privately concedes, in section 72, that such 'purposeful deceptions' may simply be how moral truth reaches anyone, child or adult.
Mentioned in 1 work (17 mentions)
At Home
- §1 Yevgeny Petrovich
- §2 Yevgeny Petrovich Bykovsky
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- §25 Yevgeny Petrovich
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