Chickens

Chickens appear in two sharply different registers: as part of the everyday economy of Boris Ansky’s family and as the unsettling center of a fable in his novel Twilight. The shift from eggs and a sacrificed hen to intelligent animals supposedly consenting to slaughter makes the creature both a material presence and a challenge to the assumption that human beings alone understand what is happening in the world.

Domestic Life and the Sacrificed Hen

In Kostekino, Boris’s parents support themselves through small, practical trades. His father sells shirts bought wholesale in Dnepropetrovsk and sometimes Odessa; his mother keeps chickens and sells their eggs. The household also has a well-tended garden, so its chickens belong to a larger pattern of self-sufficiency rather than appearing as decorative or exotic animals. Their eggs are a modest source of income, tied directly to the labor that sustains the family.

The hen enters family lore through Abraham Ansky’s joke about his only son. Boris was born when his parents were already approaching old age, and they delighted in him; Abraham would tease his friends that the boy was so spoiled he sometimes thought he ought to have been sacrificed as a child. The joke borrows the shape of the biblical story of Abraham and Sarah, but replaces the child with a hen: instead of sacrificing his firstborn, he sacrificed a hen, the one that lays golden eggs. The repetition makes the punch line affectionate as well as irreverent. The animal is not simply a stand-in for Boris: it is also an egg-producing creature whose value in the family’s life supplies the joke with its concrete, domestic logic.

Chickens in Twilight

The chickens return in the plot of Twilight, the novel by Boris Ansky that wins wide acclaim. Its protagonist is a fourteen-year-old boy who leaves his family to join the revolution, is wounded in battle, and is taken from the battlefield by a spaceship along with other mortally wounded soldiers. After their wounds heal in orbit, the boy eventually wakes in a shabby room and looks out at New York. The science-fiction journey gives way to misfortune in the city, where he meets a jazz musician who tells him that chickens talk and probably think.

That claim overturns the familiar division between the human observer and the animal being observed. The musician says that planetary governments know the chickens can talk, and that this is why so many people raise them. The boy answers that chickens are raised to be eaten. The musician responds that eating is what the chickens want, then describes them as masochistic and says they have the leaders under their control. The comedy depends on a reversal: the apparently powerless animal may possess knowledge and agency, while the human institutions that breed and consume it may be acting under an influence they do not recognize.

Repetition, Irony, and Uneasy Agency

The family anecdote and the fictional chickens are connected by more than the repeated animal. In Abraham’s joke, the hen is an actual part of household subsistence and a deliberately absurd substitute for the beloved son. In Twilight, chickens become the subject of a speculative conspiracy involving governments, leaders, and human appetites. The domestic joke makes sacrifice comic by shrinking its biblical scale; the novel’s joke makes consumption uncanny by suggesting that the creatures being eaten might choose their fate—or might somehow be directing the people who eat them.

Neither passage resolves the status of the chickens’ supposed intelligence. The claim comes from a musician speaking to the novel’s boy, within a story-within-a-story, and the boy’s practical objection does not verify it. That uncertainty is part of the effect: chickens move from the background of ordinary work to the center of an implausible explanation, without becoming fully knowable on human terms. Their recurrence gives a small, familiar animal disproportionate imaginative force, exposing how easily human beings can treat the lives they depend on as food, joke, or instrument—and how fragile that confidence becomes once the animal is imagined as a thinking subject.