person
Fyodor Fyodorovich Sigayev
Sigayev
also: Федор Федорович Сигаев, Сигаев
The protagonist of "The Avenger," a husband who, shortly after catching his wife with her lover, goes to a gun shop to buy a revolver while mentally rehearsing an escalating series of murder-suicide plans, none of which he carries out; he leaves the shop with a net for catching quail instead.
Reading notes
- The Avenger §2 First I'll kill her and her lover, and then myself
The story is a satire built entirely on Sigayev's private fantasizing: he has just discovered his wife's infidelity and is shopping for a revolver while mentally rehearsing killing her, her lover, and then himself, before repeatedly revising and downgrading the plan across the story. Nothing in the text is acted on -- by the final section he buys a quail net instead of any weapon -- and Chekhov's satire targets the operatic self-dramatization of wounded male vanity, not the violence itself. This note is preserved factually, without softening the content, per translator guidance: the murder-suicide fantasy, the graphic imagined details (shattered skulls, blood on the carpet, an unfaithful wife's death throes), and the story's climaxing anecdote about a real shooting (section 25) are all deliberate and should not be minimized in apparatus commentary.
- The Avenger §28 Going to Sakhalin over some swine or other isn't sensible either
Sigayev's private recalculation immediately deflates the clerk's rhetorical flourish about Sakhalin into a purely practical objection -- he does not want to be exiled because it would let his wife remarry -- which is the story's characteristic move: grand moral or tragic language collapses instantly into petty, self-interested arithmetic.