At Home

Anton Chekhov's short story "At Home" is an exploration of the themes of happiness and the impossibility of land reform in late-19th-century Russia. Vera is initially excited about the prospect of living in the countryside with her aunt, but as time goes on, she becomes disillusioned with the monotony of rural life. Full of knowledge and idealism from her schooling, Vera longs for excitement and is disappointed by the narrow-mindedness of the locals. Her unhappiness is compounded by her awareness of the social and economic inequalities that surround her: She sees the poverty and deprivation of the peasants and feels helpless in the face of their suffering.

Though Vera considers various ways she might introduce reform to her estate and to the village, she is completely incapable of acting on her ideas. In a deeply ironic moment, Vera screams at the servant Alyona, emphasizing the ease with which she and others of her class can take advantage of those whom they employ; Vera has a bout of rage unrelated to Alyona’s actions, but because Vera has no other outlet for her anger, she uses Alyona as a scapegoat. Alyona has no means of retaliation and ends up suffering the fate of nearly all the other servants on the estate who have been fired and/or beaten for trivial reasons.

Even though Vera dreams of change, she can’t help but feel alienated from the people she wishes to help:

​​And how could she go to [the people]? They were strange and uninteresting to her; she could not endure the stuffy smell of the huts, the pot-house oaths, the unwashed children, the women's talk of illnesses. […]—no, she would rather die! (Part 2, Paragraph 17).

Though she believes in reform in theory, in practice, she is uncomfortable working or socializing outside of her own class. This conflict between wishing for reform and reaping the benefits of landownership is ultimately unsolvable for Vera, and she eventually falls into the same behaviors as her peers, who perform token services for the peasantry while relying on their labor and hardships to fund their aristocratic lifestyles. She vividly describes this hypocrisy: If they “really had believed that enlightenment was necessary, they would not have paid the schoolmasters fifteen roubles a month as they did now, and would not have let them go hungry” (Part 2, Paragraph 17). But she cannot escape her role in perpetuating this very system.

Another point of irony is that Vera takes pride in her own intelligence while considering Neshtchapov incapable of lofty thinking: “[I]t certainly never entered his head that the peasants were human beings like himself” (Part 2, Paragraph 17). These reforms do enter Vera’s head, but in the end, she is no better than Neshtchapov or any of her peers who remain silent about the subject of reform or argue about ideals that they will never put into practice.

The traveling laborer who arrives late in the story, a young man, provides a foil to Vera’s other romantic interest in the story, Neshtchapov. Vera observes the young laborer from afar before engaging him in conversation. Very briefly, the laborer plants in Vera’s mind the idea that one doesn’t have to be tied to their home permanently; he is free to come and go as he pleases but at the expense of having any real family. This makes Vera consider whether she might be able to move, think, and act as freely as he does.

However, as soon as Auntie Dasha sees the pair conversing, she fires the laborer, making any further communication between him and Vera impossible. It could be that Auntie Dasha does not want an “illegitimate” worker on the estate, or that could be a pretense for her real reasons: to make sure there are no rivals for Vera’s affections and no one to put strange ideas into her head. Vera’s lack of choice freezes her in place, and her initial hopes of finding peace and happiness in the steppe turn to thoughts of futility and depression.

When Vera sees Neshtchapov drive by from her spot in the ravine and decides to “take [her]self in hand, or there'll be no end to it" (Part 3, Paragraph 26), she is thinking about her responsibilities as a landowner and the futility of wishing that she had any options other than the ones already presented to her. She will marry a man she finds dull and unattractive because his income will help her family pay the interest on their mortgage. She consoles herself by promising to do the very things she scoffs at other society ladies for doing: ​“[S]he would look after the house, doctor the peasants, teach in the school” (Part 3, Paragraph 32).

The story suggests that the class divide in 19th-century Russia was so deeply ingrained that change was unlikely to occur without a fundamental shift in social and political attitudes. This observation proved true, as the Russian Revolution of 1905 took place not long after Chekhov wrote “At Home.” In 1897, the monarchy was using peasant taxes to fund its industrial expansion; Chekhov hints at this in Part 1 by mentioning the new factory (referred to as “the works”) where former agricultural laborers are now employed, aiding in the establishment of Russia’s first large-scale industrial working class. Aristocrats and capitalists, like Dr. Neshtchapov, own the factories and reap the profits while the workers collect low wages, much of which goes to taxes.

In the same section, Auntie Dasha mentions that no landowners live nearby, implying that they have sold their failing estates and have likely moved to the cities. This is representative of the diminishing aristocracy; by this point, the country had lost faith in Tsar Nicholas II (1894-1917), and 20 years later, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 would end the monarchy and usher in the communist era.

Vera’s observation that happiness does not exist in “real life” (Part 3, Paragraph 32) is the same conclusion that many of Chekhov’s characters come to when they realize that the gulf between dreams and reality is too vast for one person to overcome. Her ambivalence is bitterly rewarded when, after her marriage, she no longer lives on her beautiful estate but moves to the factory campus with her husband. Rather than offer a cautionary tale, however, Chekhov’s aim is to  present the existential paradox of struggling with one’s ideals and desires when one is forced to live in a world that is neither flexible nor fair.