"Chuigou!"

“Forward!” is the characteristic call of Alexander Petrovitch’s educational ideal: not a command to obey rules mechanically, but an appeal to recover from failure, cultivate intelligence, and face difficult work with strength of mind. Its meaning becomes especially poignant in Tientietnikov’s story, where the teacher’s death deprives a promising pupil of the voice that might have helped him persevere.

The teacher’s defining appeal

Alexander Petrovitch’s pupils understood his encouragement as permission to rise again after a mistake. A boy who had played a prank could confess it freely; the master might assume a stern expression, yet the pupil left heartened rather than humiliated. The principle behind that response was an insistence on intelligence: Alexander believed that a boy who devoted himself to becoming clever would cease to behave foolishly. He retained less capable pupils for a single term and gave the clever ones an additional course, while allowing boyish playfulness as a way of discovering what lay within them.

The word condensed this approach into an impulse toward renewed effort. Alexander’s senior pupils were expected to bear ridicule without mockery, disregard fools, restrain anger, avoid revenge, and preserve their tranquillity. His lessons prepared them for the hardships and temptations of adult life, including difficult official positions in which others might lose their heads or surrender to bribery. The call to move ahead thus joined intellectual development to self-command and resistance to wrongdoing.

Tientietnikov’s loss

Tientietnikov had long hoped to reach Alexander’s advanced class. He attained that position only for the master to die suddenly, just as the coveted instruction began. The school changed under the successor, Thedor Ivanovitch, whose insistence on external rules and adult standards replaced the distinctive education Tientietnikov had anticipated. In this narrative, the loss is not merely the death of a respected teacher: it is the disappearance of the person whose encouragement had given discipline its humane purpose.

Years later, newspapers and reviews could make that absence newly present. When Tientietnikov saw a former schoolmate’s name attached to success in public service or a contribution to science, he felt grief at how little he himself had done. His school days and the vivid figure of Alexander returned to him, and he wept. The recalled call to go forward stands against his stagnation: it makes visible the distance between his early aspirations and the life he has failed to order.

From personal encouragement to national question

The narrator interprets Tientietnikov’s regret as evidence of a deeper spiritual injury. His promising instincts, in this account, were never given their final tempering; experience did not strengthen him to overcome obstacles, and no later guide restored the moral force and will weakened by hesitation. The missing voice is imagined as one that could call his soul forward and direct Russian ideals toward a higher life.

The expression consequently expands beyond a schoolmaster’s influence on one pupil. The narrator asks who can speak this compelling word in the language closest to the Russian soul, understanding the country’s capacities and inner depths well enough to redirect its ideals. He imagines the gratitude such a person would inspire, then answers with a diagnosis of continued sloth and wasted striving: no such caller has yet appeared. The intimate memory of a dead teacher therefore becomes a national lament, and “Forward!” names both the needed summons and the absence that the narrative cannot resolve.