person
Putokhin
also: Путохин
A sober, religious copying clerk earning thirty-five roubles a month, who supports his mother, wife, and four children until his wife's death and his dismissal from the notary's office (replaced by a young lady) trigger a rapid collapse into drinking, violence toward his children and mother, and the pawning of his son's coat and mother's shawl; he vanishes for good after the second binge.
Reading notes
- The Old House (A Landlord's Story) §2 a copying clerk for a notary
A "перепищик"/copying clerk transcribed legal documents, reports, and formal papers by hand for a notary's office -- low-status, poorly paid clerical work (Putokhin earns thirty-five roubles a month) typical of the impoverished lower-middle-class "chinovnik" milieu Chekhov returns to throughout his early fiction.
- The Old House (A Landlord's Story) §7 the notary unexpectedly dismisses Putokhin and puts some young lady in his place
By the mid-1880s Russian offices had begun hiring women as copyists and clerks, work considered respectable for educated but unmarried or widowed women and cheaper for employers than a male clerk's wage. Putokhin's outrage is class- and gender-inflected wounded pride, not economic logic: he reacts to being replaced by a woman as a specific humiliation, distinct from the ordinary blow of losing a post at all, and the story marks this insult -- not the wife's death alone -- as the true trigger of his collapse.
- The Old House (A Landlord's Story) §19 with a hangover he fights terribly
This passage and those surrounding it (locs 19-20, 27) depict Putokhin's escalating alcoholism turning into physical violence against his mother and, by clear implication, his children -- Vasya suppresses his crying specifically because his father's hangover rages end in beating the grandmother and a physical brawl with Yegorych. Chekhov does not moralize or intervene as narrator; the violence is rendered through its effect on the household's survival behavior (a child learning to cry silently to avoid provoking it) rather than depicted directly on the page. This is presented factually, as an accurate rendering of the source, consistent with the story's unsparing account of how quickly a stable working-class family disintegrates under one man's drinking -- not for shock effect, and not softened or omitted in translation.
- The Old House (A Landlord's Story) §26 I'll make a gentleman of you
"Я тебя в дворяне выведу" literally promises to "bring you out into the nobility" -- an impossible boast, since hereditary noble status (dvoryanstvo) was not something a gymnasium education could confer on a copying clerk's son. The line marks the full detachment of Putokhin's drunken remorse from reality, immediately before the story shows him drinking away the promise that same evening.