person
Luka Bedny
Luka
also: Лука Бедный, Лука, Luka, Luka the Poor, the old shepherd, пастух
An old, toothless-looking shepherd tending the Artamonov herd, playing a homemade pipe as he watches the flock; a lifelong observer of "God's doings" in the countryside, he delivers the story's long elegiac monologue on the vanishing of game, fish, rivers, forests, and the weakening of both peasants and gentry, reading it all as a sign of the world's approaching ruin, and gives his name -- Luka the Poor -- only as Meliton takes his leave.
Reading notes
- The Shepherd's Pipe §3 a ragged homespun coat
"Сермяга" was coarse, undyed homespun wool cloth worn by the poorest peasants; pairing it with bare feet and no hat marks Luka as destitute even by peasant standards, consistent with the surname he gives at the story's close, "Bedny" (Poor).
- The Shepherd's Pipe §23 the time has come for God's world to perish
Luka's monologue draws on a folk-eschatological register -- reading the decline of game, fish, and rivers as literal portents of the end of the world -- rather than a naturalist's or scientist's account of ecological change; the story lets this reading stand as the old shepherd's sincere and internally consistent cosmology, not as authorial commentary on actual environmental cause.
- The Shepherd's Pipe §37 twenty kopecks
A двугривенный (twenty-kopeck piece) was a small silver coin; Luka's wage for an additional night-watch shift on top of his day's herding gives a concrete measure of a shepherd's meager cash income in the late 1880s countryside.
- The Shepherd's Pipe §39 nothing but rabbit-skins
This is Luka's own bitter, in-character social commentary, not the narrator's or author's assessment: an old peasant shepherd, having just described the gentry of two generations back as "half of them generals," dismisses the present-day landowning class as "мездрюшка" -- worthless scraped rabbit pelt, i.e. flimsy, of no substance -- likening a contemporary gentleman unfavorably to "some Hungarian or Frenchman" (loc 39) for his physical slightness and lack of purpose. Chekhov frames this as period folk grievance against a class in visible economic and physical decline after emancipation, delivered by a speaker who elsewhere applies the identical charge of weakness to the peasantry, including himself; it is not held up as reliable social diagnosis but as one more thread in Luka's larger vision of universal falling-off.
- The Shepherd's Pipe §61 Luka the Poor
The shepherd gives his name only as Meliton is leaving -- "Лука Бедный," a surname (Bedny, "Poor") that reads as much like a plain description of his circumstances as a family name, a common pattern for the poorest peasants' bynames in the period.