A Malefactor


"A Malefactor" is an 1885 short story by Anton Chekhov.

Publication

"A Malefactor" was first published in the 7 August 1885 issue of Peterburgskaya Gazeta, in its Fleeting Notes section, subtitled "A Little Scene" and signed A. Chekhonte. The story was included into the 1886 collection Motley Stories, to be reproduced unchanged in all of its 14 editions, and later into Volume 3 of the original edition of the Collected Works by A.P. Chekhov, published by Adolf Marks in 1899–1901.

Background

maintained that the prototype for the character of Denis Grigoryev was a peasant named Nikita Pantyukhin, from the village Kraskovo in Moscow Governorate. "Anton Pavlovich was trying to put it to him that one was not supposed to unscrew nuts off railroad tracks, which could cause train crash, but Nikita seemed to be unable to understand him... 'Sure I know what's allowed, what's not. Sure, it's not everywhere that I unscrew them: one here, another there,' he was repeating," Gilyarovsky wrote. According to him, Chekhov had written down some words and expressions used by the real life 'malefactor' and then reproduced then in his story.
Lev Tolstoy included "A Malefactor" into his personal list of Chekhov' best stories. In Chekhov's lifetime the story was translated into Bulgarian, Hungarian, German, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak and Czech languages.

Synopsis

A local investigating magistrate unsuccessfully tries to explain that it is wrong to take nuts off the railroad track to a peasant, Grigoryev, who simply cannot see why he's to be deprived of his right to use an iron nut as a weight for his fishing line.