“To whom should I tell my grief,” Iona, a desolate father mourning the unexpected death of his only son, asks the universe. The question reveals the father’s need to find comfort in sharing his tragedy and finding a sympathetic ear to make his sorrow bearable.

That sounds understandable. The story, however, undercuts that plea for sympathy and exposes it as a sentimental gesture that Chekhov cannot, in the end, abide by. A doctor by profession, Chekhov knew well the impact of grief and the desperate coping strategies of the bereaved. In moving with quiet desperation from one stranger to another to find someone to care about his tragedy, Iona reveals his own unsettling egotism and his curious logic that the universe somehow owes him compassion and an explanation. “[My son] went and died for no reason.”

That he ultimately finds comfort in opening up to a dumb animal reveals the story’s irony. Sharing his tragedy with his horse feels like a punchline. The reader is uneasy about whether to laugh or cry over the pathos of Iona finding comfort in the tenderness of a horse. To whom should he tell his grief? No one, the story argues. Your misery belongs only to you.

Iona, then, is as stoic as sentimental, heroic as comic, and tragic as pathetic. Drawing on two familiar Biblical archetypes—the Old Testament prophet Jonah (“Iona” is the Russian name for “Jonah”) and the Good Samaritan parable in Luke’s gospel—Chekhov suspends the character of this grieving father between conflicting readings. Iona deserves sympathy for the heartbreaking story of his life’s shattering but also ridicule for his preposterous expectation that the universe must care about his little world falling apart.

The complexity of Chekhov’s argument is grounded in his use of those two Biblical allusions. Jonah is hardly a conventional Old Testament prophet. Familiar to contemporary audiences for being swallowed by a great fish, the Jonah story is more involved.

Jonah’s is a story of a futile search for goodness. Sent by God to the sinful city of Nineveh to coax its people to repent, Jonah essentially refuses the mission. He is lonely, bitter, and angry. He whines about the impossibility of finding any good people in the streets of Nineveh. He is judgmental, motivated by his growing dislike of people who refuse to understand the gravity of his mission. Only the three days in the belly of the leviathan convinces him to try mercy.

Chekhov, in addition, plays a variation on Luke’s familiar parable. Rather than a man physically wounded and left to die alone, Iona is emotionally battered and searches the St. Petersburg streets for some comfort, someone to stop and care about him.

As in the parable, Iona confronts and is abandoned twice by the military officer and the wealthy partygoers. Luke’s story asks the question central to Chekhov’s story: who is my neighbor? As in Luke’s parable, the strangers ignore the wounded stranger, like the priest and the Levite in the gospel story.  In Luke’s gospel, the battered stranger finds comfort in the generosity of the Samaritan, then in Jewish society, a culture stereotyped as barbaric and dangerous. Iona finds his comfort not in the generosity of a stranger but in an unlikely animal.

Like Jonah, Iona feels lost, displaced, a stranger in a strange and sinful land. Like Jonah, Iona is angry and bitter that death took his young son instead of taking him. Chekhov, through the deadpan voiceover of the narrator, sees the irony that Iona does not in his hyperbolic grief. “If Iona’s heart were to burst and his misery flow out,...