The Lament – Class 11 English Chapter 1 Notes & NCERT PDF

Before the Story: What Is a Short Story?

Woven Words opens its Short Stories section with a short introduction that is worth knowing before you read any story in the unit.

About the Author

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904; the textbook misprints his birth year as 1810) was born into a middle-class Russian family and studied medicine at Moscow University. His first story appeared in 1880, and in the next seven years he wrote more than six hundred stories. He also wrote famous plays such as The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. His central theme, the book says, is life's pathos caused by the inability of human beings to respond to, or even communicate with, one another — and The Lament illustrates it "beautifully".

Summary

The opening scene

It is twilight in St Petersburg. Wet snow twirls round the street lamps and settles on roofs, horses and people. The cab-driver Iona Potapov sits motionless on his sledge, "quite white" and bent double, looking "like a phantom". His little horse is equally white and still, like "a gingerbread horse worth a kopek". They have not had a single fare since before dinner.

The officer

An officer hires him for Viborg Way. Iona drives clumsily and is sworn at from all sides. He turns to his passenger and manages to say:

'My son, Barin, died this week.'

The officer asks briefly what the son died of, but soon closes his eyes and is "not disposed to listen".

The three young men

After waiting an hour and more in the snow, Iona takes three noisy young men — two tall and lanky, one short and humpbacked — to the Police Bridge for just "two griveniks", an unfair price he accepts because "to him it is all the same now, so long as they are fares". They abuse him, quarrel about drinking and hit him on the neck. Iona laughs along ("He-he… gay young gentlemen!"), glad of any company, and twice tries to tell them his son has died. The humpback only replies, "We must all die," and they get off before he can tell his story.

Alone again

Iona's grief returns "with greater force". The narrator describes it as "such an immense, illimitable, grief" that, if his heart broke, "it would flow over the whole earth… and yet no one sees it". A hall porter only tells him to move on.

At the stables

Iona drives back early. In the crowded, stuffy lodging a young cab-driver wakes for a drink, but falls asleep again as soon as Iona starts to speak. Iona longs to tell the story properly: how his son Kuzma Ionitch fell ill, suffered, died, the funeral, fetching the dead son's clothes from the hospital, and his daughter Anissia in the village.

The ending

Finally he goes to the stable to feed his horse. Talking to it, he says his son "was a first-rate cabdriver", and compares his loss to a mare losing its foal. "The little horse munches, listens and breathes over its master's hand… Iona's feelings are too much for him and he tells the little horse the whole story."

Characters

Themes

Literary Devices & Style

Word Power

Exam Focus

Questions come from Understanding the Text, Talking about the Text, Appreciation and Language Work.

Outline: the officer closes his eyes; the young men mock and hit him ("We must all die"); the porter says "Move on"; the young driver falls asleep → every class of society is indifferent → theme of human alienation.

Outline: Iona can bear to talk only to it; it "munches, listens and breathes over its master's hand"; he compares his loss to a mare losing a foal → irony that an animal gives the sympathy humans deny.

Outline: snow, twilight and motionlessness reflect grief, coldness and isolation; Iona "white" like a phantom → prepares the mood of pathos.

Other likely questions: the impression you get of Iona; the significance of the story beginning and ending with the horse; the associations of the colour white; words like snuffle, snort, sniffle, snore (all begin with sn- and relate to sounds made through the nose).

Common Mistakes