person
Klimov
also: Климов, поручик Климов, Lieutenant Klimov
A young army lieutenant who falls ill with typhus on a train from Petersburg to Moscow; the story follows his feverish delirium, his convalescence and animal joy at recovering, and his devastation on learning that his sister Katya caught the disease from him and died while he was unconscious.
Reading notes
- Typhus §59 the animal joy that filled the convalescing lieutenant
The story's central and most unsettling observation: Klimov's body, still flooded with the physiological relief and appetite of recovery, cannot yet be made to feel the grief his mind has just registered -- "terrible and powerful as it was, it could not overcome the animal joy." Chekhov does not treat this as callousness but as a physiological fact about convalescence, one the story lets resolve naturally: only a week later, alone at the window, does Klimov's grief finally break through (section 60), once his body has caught up with what he already knew.