Volodya

Reading notes

• Volodya §78 he himself suddenly felt revulsion at what had happened

  Volodya's own reaction -- revulsion arriving within half a minute of what he had imagined, moments before, as the peak happiness of his life -- registers the psychological damage of the encounter more directly than anything the narration states outright; his self-loathing afterward (sections 80-81, and again 85-86, both ending on 'ugly duckling') traces a straight line to the story's final scene.

• Volodya §115 he picked up a revolver from the table

  The revolver belongs to Augustin Mikhailych, whose room Volodya has wandered into essentially at random while avoiding his mother and his own shame; Chekhov gives no indication the weapon was sought out in advance or that suicide was already a formed plan at this point -- Volodya himself notes a few lines later that he has never handled a gun before, and experiments with its mechanism almost idly (section 118) before the fatal action in section 120.

• Volodya §118 Section 118

  Beginning here, the story depicts Volodya's suicide directly and without narrative euphemism: he places the muzzle of an unfamiliar revolver in his mouth twice, first only testing its mechanism, then, moments later in section 120, pulling the trigger while a stranger laughs in the next room. Section 121 ends the story mid-sentence, on the blur of his dying consciousness, without any authorial commentary on the act or its causes. This edition preserves the scene in full, per editorial policy of presenting difficult source material factually rather than sanitizing or suppressing it. The immediate context -- his mother's exposure of his humiliation to the Shumikhins the day before, Nyuta's sexual use and cold rejection of him hours before that, his own outburst of contempt for his mother, and a full day with no adult attending to his visible distress -- is left by Chekhov to speak for itself; no character in the story registers what has driven him to this, which is itself part of the story's bleak design.