Author’s note: “Weekend Short” is a recurring column profiling short stories. Analysis from the readership is encouraged in the comments section.

Welcome to the weekend!

Today’s short story is a dour Russian account from Anton Chekhov, the Russian doctor and author who lived during the latter half of the 19th century and who met with success early enough and frequently enough to support his family from his teenage years onward. In his time, Chekhov was chastised by critics and writers for the absence of obvious political intent in his writing, preferring to leave his subjects as he found them and eschewing the authorial tyranny many writers grant themselves for a circumspect reserve concerning his characters’ lives and intentions.

“A Dead Body” finds us on a roadside with two men and the remains of a third. The two living stand vigil against old night so that the deceased might enter glory on the third day. If one has never found himself in the woods with naught but a small fire and questionable company, you cannot know just how lively and grasping a place it can be.

Chekhov writes:

A still August night. A mist is rising slowly from the fields and casting an opaque veil over everything within eyesight. Lighted up by the moon, the mist gives the impression at one moment of a calm, boundless sea, at the next of an immense white wall. The air is damp and chilly. Morning is still far off. A step from the bye-road which runs along the edge of the forest a little fire is gleaming. A dead body, covered from head to foot with new white linen, is lying under a young oak-tree. A wooden ikon is lying on its breast. Beside the corpse almost on the road sits the “watch”—two peasants performing one of the most disagreeable and uninviting of peasants’ duties. One, a tall young fellow with a scarcely perceptible moustache and thick black eyebrows, in a tattered sheepskin and bark shoes, is sitting on........

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