person
Doctor Kirilov
Kirilov
also: Кирилов, Kirilov, земский доктор Кирилов
A zemstvo (district) physician, forty-four, whose only and last child Andrey has just died of diphtheria; within minutes of the boy's death he is pressed by a stranger, Abogin, to leave his grieving wife and ride out to treat Abogin's supposedly dying wife, only to discover on arrival that she has run off with another man and the whole errand was a sham.
Reading notes
- Enemies §16 His face expressed indifference
Kirilov's flat, seemingly unmoved expression -- undercut only by the drops of recent tears in his beard -- is the story's first portrait of grief as numbness rather than visible sorrow; this same numbed, mechanical affect (the unsteady gait and groping hands of loc 14, the compulsive movement through the house of loc 18) recurs through the story and is what allows Abogin, in loc 30-31, to badly misread him as merely reluctant rather than devastated.
- Enemies §17 their right to have children was passing forever into eternity
Andrey was the Kirilovs' only child, and with the doctor at forty-four and his wife thirty-five and already described as sickly, the narrator states plainly that Andrey's death also ends any realistic prospect of another child -- doubling the loss from the death of a particular son to the foreclosure of parenthood itself. This is offered as the narrator's own bleak arithmetic, not a claim either character voices aloud in the scene.
- Enemies §49 thick, negroid lips
The Russian "толстые, как у негра, губы" (literally "thick lips, like a Negro's") is a period racial comparison used here purely as a physical descriptor within a longer, unflattering catalogue of Kirilov's careworn features (sunken temples, premature gray, sallow skin), set against the following description of Abogin as leonine and elegant. The phrase reflects nineteenth-century Russian usage rather than any characterization of Kirilov's actual ancestry, and the translation renders it directly rather than substituting a euphemism, consistent with this edition's practice of translating language of its period faithfully rather than modernizing it.
- Enemies §91 will remain in the doctor's mind until the grave
The story's closing sentence is the narrator's final, unsparing judgment on its own protagonist: Kirilov's grief for Andrey will fade with time, as the narrator flatly states, but the unjust, sweepingly contemptuous conviction about people like Abogin that crystallized on the ride home will not -- an outcome the narrator explicitly calls unworthy of a human heart. Chekhov offers no reconciliation or redemption for either man; the story ends on the durability of the wrong conclusion rather than the fading of the right grief.