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Crocodile Tears
also: Крокодиловы слезы
A five-act play by the playwright Karpov, seen by Chekhov at Korsh's theater and dismissed at length as talentless, wooden, and a continuous lie and slander on life; Chekhov gives a detailed contemptuous plot summary in this letter (a village elder who has embezzled funds ensnares a young permanent member of the district board, wanting to marry him to his daughter, who loves a verse-writing clerk; an honest land surveyor exposes the truth before the wedding) and reports running into Karpov afterward, who unapologetically boasted of having needled "callow liberals."
Reading notes
- To A. S. Suvorin, 11 November 1888. Moscow. §7 A village elder who has been caught embezzling gets his hooks into a young permanent member of the district board {a landowner and nobleman}
TRANSLATION NOTE: renders "непременный член" (nepremenny chlen) as "permanent member of the district board," a specific Imperial Russian civil-service office -- a permanent, salaried (non-elected) member of a district peasant-affairs or zemstvo board, a post typically filled by a local landowner, which is exactly why Chekhov's own bracketed gloss immediately identifies the character as "a landowner and nobleman." This is a civil-service office and MUST NOT be rendered or confused as "Marshal of the Nobility" (предводитель дворянства, predvoditel dvoryanstva), which is a distinct, separately-elected honorific office of the nobility; an earlier draft mistranslated "непременный член" as "Marshal of Nobility" and this has been corrected per the translator's report. The land surveyor, the village elder ("старшина"), the clerk, and the daughter in this plot summary are unnamed fictional characters within Karpov's play as summarized by Chekhov, not real persons, and are catalogued only as elements of Chekhov's review rather than as corpus entities.
- To A. S. Suvorin, 11 November 1888. Moscow. §7 Before the wedding an honest young land surveyor opens the eyes of the permanent member; the latter exposes the abuses, the crocodile -- that is, the elder -- weeps, and one of the heroines exclaims: "And so: vice is punished, virtue triumphs!"
Continuation of Chekhov's plot summary of "Crocodile Tears"; the closing quoted line is the play's own moralizing tag-line, which Chekhov reproduces to underline what he considers its wooden naivety.