person
The Finn
the Finn
also: чухонец, the Finn or Swede
An elderly, well-to-do fellow passenger in Klimov's train compartment, apparently a Finn or Swede, who talks incessantly about his sailor brother while smoking a pipe; the feverish Klimov comes to hate him, and his figure -- along with the pipe smoke -- recurs obsessively through the delirium. Chekhov frames Klimov's contempt for him (and, in the same breath, for "Greeks") explicitly as a symptom of the fever, not as an endorsed viewpoint; see the glossary note at loc 8.
Reading notes
- Typhus §1 a well-to-do Finn or Swede
"Чухонец" (chukhonets) was a period colloquial and mildly disparaging Russian term for Baltic-Finnic peoples (Finns, Estonians, Izhorians) living around Petersburg; it appears elsewhere in Chekhov's journalism in the same casual register. It is rendered here as "Finn" -- the term itself, and the narrator's application of it to a specific, individualized fellow passenger, are period-typical rather than remarkable; the story's more pointed material comes later, at loc 8, when the term recurs inside Klimov's feverish interior monologue.
- Typhus §8 "Loathsome people, these Finns, and... Greeks too"
This passage is presented by Chekhov as a symptom of Klimov's oncoming typhus delirium, not as an authorial or narratorial judgment. The chapter is explicit about the mechanism: section 9 states outright that "the thought of the Finns and the Greeks produced in his whole body something like nausea" -- a somatic, feverish reaction, paired a moment later with a second, equally irrational lurch toward images of "organ-grinders, naked women, and foreign oleographs" when Klimov tries to think of the French and Italians instead. Chekhov is tracing the onset of infectious fever through the derangement of ordinary thought, not endorsing Klimov's xenophobic irritability; the passage is followed, within a page, by the objectively delirious hallucinations of section 10 onward (shadows, voices outside the skull, menacing flickering images) that unambiguously mark this as clinical delirium rather than characterization of a settled worldview. No other figure in the story echoes or validates the sentiment, and the fellow passenger himself is drawn with nothing worse than a talkative, pipe-smoking tedium once the fever lifts its grip on the narration. The translation preserves the ethnic slur and the ugliness of Klimov's language in character, consistent with editorial practice elsewhere in this edition of not softening period text, while this note supplies the context a modern reader needs: the line describes a sick man's mind turning on a stranger, not a claim the story asks its reader to share.