The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Sunday, July 5, 2026

Storytime: A couple of things often happen when someone gives alms to a person in need: the giver will lecture the poorer person with a bit of sanctimony: spend this wisely, do some work for me in exchange, don’t be lazy. The giver will also feel very good about himself. And if the person in need somehow gets back on their feet, the giver takes the credit besmogged in smugness. In a nutshell, that’s the ideology behind welfare-to-work campaigns, which go on the patronizing assumption that, unlike others, the poor need a carrot and sometimes a stick to get back in shape, and on the equally retrograde assumption that they’re beyond help anyway. “The Beggar” is an 1887 story by Chekhov. Skvortsov is a lawyer. Louchkov is a drunken beggar. Louchkov approaches  Skvortsov, claiming he’d been railroaded from his job as a teacher and begging for alms. Skvortsov recognizes him as the same beggar who’d given him a different story two days before, but he invites him to his estate to split wood for some money. Louchkov hesitates, giving Skvortsov a chance to lecture him about the virtues of work and what losers beggars are, of their own doing. Louchkov relents. At the estate, the lawyer’s housekeeper throws an axe at Louchkov and cusses him out, as the lawyer watches from his study’s window before going back to work. Between the cold and his hangover, Louchkov is incapable of splitting the wood, but somehow the job is done, the housekeeper informs Skvortsov, who provides a ruble for the beggar, telling her to summon him back regularly to split wood. Louchkov returns several times, and several times goes away with a ruble in his pocket, until the lawyer, proud of himself, refers Louchkov to an office job as a copyist, which Louchkov takes. The two lose sight of each other. A couple of years later, they meet again in the theater. Louchkov is well to do, earning 35 rubles a month. Skvortsov is delighted and takes all the credit, again lecturing Louchkov about the virtues of work and sternness to straighten out the poor. But Louchkov has a surprise for the lawyer, telling him the sanctimony and the wood-splitting had nothing to do with it, because he never split a single log of wood. It was Olga, the housekeeper, who saved him. “It was like this,” Louchkov tells the lawyer: “When I came to break wood she would start: ‘Ah there you are, drunkard! Cursed! So you won’t die!’ Then she sat down in front of me, suddenly saddened, looked me in the face and said desolately: ‘Unfortunate you are! You have no joy in this world or in the next, drunkard that you are, you will burn in hell! Drag yourself to misery!’ And other stories along the same lines, you see. What bad blood she did to herself and shed tears about me, I cannot tell you. But the main thing is that she broke my wood! The fact is that, sir, at your house, I never broke a log, it was always her! Why she saved me, why I changed by looking at her, and why I stopped drinking, I can’t explain to you. I only know that her words and her noble conduct brought about a transformation in my soul, that she corrected me and that I will never forget her. But it’s time, we’re ringing.”

God dammit, I want the people working for me to be worse off than I am, not better. That’s the reason I pay you so well. I want to see you right on the verge. I want it right out in the open. I want to be able to hear it in a stuttering, flustered, tongue-tied voice…. Don’t trust me. I don’t trust flattery, loyalty, and sociability. I don’t trust deference, respect, and cooperation. I trust fear.

–From Joseph Heller’s Something Happened (1974).

The Cartoon and Live Briefing Archive.