person
Pyotr Petrovich Strizhin
Strizhin
also: Петр Петрович Стрижин, Стрижин, Pyotr Petrovich, Strizhin
A self-righteously sober widower who, sneaking a nightcap of vodka in the dark after a christening, drinks kerosene by mistake and spends the night convinced he is dying, only to recover by morning and credit his 'regular life' for the miraculous escape.
Reading notes
- An Act of Carelessness §1 the very one whose new galoshes were stolen last year
A stray aside typical of Chekhov's early comic sketches: the narrator introduces Strizhin by a minor, unrelated misfortune from an earlier year, as though the reader is expected to already half-know him -- a joke at the expense of small-town gossip and reputation rather than a reference to any other story.
- An Act of Carelessness §2 spiritually improving kind
"Духовно-нравственные" (spiritually-moral) books were a recognized genre of pious, improving literature circulated in the period, often through church-affiliated presses; that this is *all* Strizhin reads is the story's opening proof of his performed rectitude, which the kerosene mishap and his own hidden appetite for a nightcap will promptly undercut.
- An Act of Carelessness §35 Prosche v moey smerti nikogo ne vinit'
Strizhin's melodramatic death note -- "I ask that no one be blamed for my death" -- and his vision of birds singing over his own grave are stock gestures of sentimental deathbed fiction that the story is gently parodying; a man dying (he believes) of a kerosene mishap borrows the exact imagery of a tragic hero, which is the joke.