person
Skvortsov
also: Скворцов, the barrister
A barrister (присяжный поверенный) who catches a beggar in a fabricated hard-luck story and, instead of turning him away, forces him to chop firewood; convinced he has reformed the man through his own moral lecturing, he takes credit at the story's end for a change of heart that -- as Lushkov reveals -- was actually wrought by his cook Olga.
Reading notes
- The Beggar §9 This is vile, my dear sir! ... I'll have you sent to the police
Skvortsov's outrage here, and his class-inflected tirades later in the story ("all parasites reason that way," "you're lazy, spoiled, drunk"), voice a real and common current of educated-class opinion in 1880s Russia: that professional beggars were work-shy frauds exploiting the charitable instincts of respectable people, rather than victims of genuine destitution, alcoholism, or a labor market with few unskilled openings for a man who could not present himself for physical work (as Lushkov himself explains at loc 18). Chekhov gives Skvortsov's prejudice full voice without authorial comment; the story's irony is that Skvortsov is proven wrong about the mechanism of Lushkov's reform (his own lecturing accomplishes nothing; it is the cook Olga's unglamorous, silent kindness -- quietly chopping the firewood herself -- that actually saves him), while never abandoning his self-satisfied belief that he was the one who set Lushkov "on the right path." The translation preserves Skvortsov's harsh period language ("parasites," "lazy, spoiled, drunk," "fit for nothing but begging and lying") in character rather than softening it, consistent with Chekhov's unsparing, unresolved picture of philanthropic self-regard.