The Death of a Government Clerk

The initial setting of the story is the Arcadia opera house in St. Petersburg, where Chervyakov watches The Bells of Corneville. Written by the French composer Jean Robert Planquette, this opera was popular with audiences in the late 1800s. It features a miserly steward who attempts to secure an aristocrat’s family fortune for himself. The fact that the opera is French signifies an elevated cultural event, as Russian citizens often looked to the European continent—and France in particular—as a model for culture and sophistication. Chervyakov’s attendance is therefore a symbol of his anticipated upward social mobility.

More subtly, the storyline with the steward also works in parallel with Chervyakov’s ambitions. Like the steward in the opera, the clerk in Chekhov’s story is a member of the lower class who works with records, inventories, and other administrative concerns. Chervyakov, like his fictional counterpart on stage at the Arcadia, imagines himself in a higher station in life. He thinks this within the first few sentences, when he watches the opera and feels “on top of the world” (Paragraph 1). The sneeze that follows is the defining event that drags him downward from this lofty position.