work
Cain: A Mystery
Cain
also: Каин, Cain
Lord Byron's 1821 closet drama dramatizing the biblical Cain's murder of his brother Abel and his rebellion against divine justice; the assistant prosecutor in "In the Court" reads it, absorbed, during the trial of a peasant accused of murdering his wife -- an irony Chekhov leaves unremarked.
Reading notes
- The Duel §149 Cain
Byron's 1821 verse drama on the biblical Cain; named among the literary touchstones Laevsky drops to dignify his own conduct.
- Unpublished. Unfinished [draft of] "The Beauties" §29 Byron's Cain
Bashtanov cites his own selective, beauty-drunk misreading of Byron's closet drama as an example of how aesthetic pleasure can 'bribe, deceive, and lead astray' -- he found both Cain and the devil sympathetic, missing the poem's moral argument.