person
the pharmacist
also: фармацевт, аптекарь
The small, dark-haired, curly-headed night pharmacist Strizhin turns to after failing to rouse either doctor; grave and unhurried to the point of comedy, he lectures Strizhin on pharmacists' dignity and sends him away with nothing but a scolding, described by the narrator's antisemitic aside about the tone of 'pharmacists of the Jewish faith.'
Reading notes
- An Act of Carelessness §24 pharmacists of the Jewish faith
This line is a period antisemitic caricature, preserved here per editorial policy of presenting historical material factually rather than sanitizing it. The narrator singles out the pharmacist's manner as one that 'only very clever and solid pharmacists of the Jewish faith know how to use' -- invoking a common 19th-century Russian stereotype that cast Jewish pharmacists (a profession Jews were disproportionately represented in in the Russian Empire, given the restrictions the Pale of Settlement and quota laws placed on other trades and professions open to them) as pedantically self-important or officious. It reflects the casual antisemitism widespread in late Imperial Russian popular writing -- Chekhov's own letters and journalism contain both patronizing and, at times, sympathetic treatments of Jewish characters and the discrimination they faced, and this passing narratorial aside sits at the harsher end of that range rather than at its most reflective. The line is not corrected, cut, or softened in translation: Hermitsh Press's editorial policy is to render the source text as written and flag such material here rather than erase the historical record of the prejudice it carries.
- An Act of Carelessness §26 I ask you not to excite yourself
The pharmacist's clinical, faintly officious register -- treating a man who believes he is dying to a lecture on comportment before he will even answer a question -- is the story's comic engine in its second half, deflating Strizhin's melodrama with bureaucratic delay rather than help.
- An Act of Carelessness §31 our nerves must be made of rope
The pharmacist turns the encounter around, casting himself as the aggrieved party -- roused at four in the morning by an inconsiderate customer -- and folds his complaint into a broader claim that people in general do not regard pharmacists as fully human, layering petty professional grievance on top of a dying man's plea for help.