character
Varka
also: Варька, Варьке, Варьки, Варькой, Варьку
A thirteen-year-old nurse-girl in service to a bootmaker's household, worked day and night minding the family's infant on top of a full round of chores and denied sleep; the story's protagonist, whose accumulating sleep deprivation drives her into a delirious, hallucinatory state in which she comes to see the crying baby as the "enemy" keeping her from rest, and, in the story's final scene, strangles it.
Reading notes
- Sleepy §1 girl of about thirteen
"Спать хочется" depicts the sustained neglect and physical abuse of a thirteen-year-old child laborer -- Varka is struck, has her ear painfully twisted, and is denied sleep to the point of derangement over the course of the story -- and ends with her, in a state of sleep-deprived psychosis, strangling the infant in her care. Nothing has been softened or omitted from the source; the abuse and the infanticide are rendered as directly and unsensationally as Chekhov's own flat, non-editorializing narration presents them. This edition translates the material for the historical and literary record, not for shock; readers sensitive to depictions of child abuse or the death of an infant should be aware before continuing.
- Sleepy §33 gives her ear a painful twist
This is the story's one directly depicted moment of physical violence against Varka in the waking present (as opposed to her exhausted visions); it is rendered in the same flat, unelaborated register as everything else in the household's treatment of her, with no narratorial comment -- consistent with Chekhov's overall method in this story of letting cumulative, unremarked cruelty do the work rather than any single dramatized outburst.
- Sleepy §62 Having strangled it
The story's final act is narrated in the same unbroken, unemphatic sentence rhythm as the household chores that precede it -- no pause, no horror registered by the narrating voice -- so that the killing reads as the same order of event as putting on a samovar. This flatness is the story's most-discussed formal choice: Chekhov offers no moral framing, leaving the horror to arise entirely from the cumulative logic of neglect and sleep deprivation the story has built across all sixty-two sections. Translated directly and without softening, per this edition's editorial policy of rendering Chekhov's sources unsanitized.