The story you are about to read had the title “Beasts” and was sent to “Oskolki” magazine but banned by The Peterburg’s censorship committee.
N. A. Leikin said to Chekhov the next day it happened: “An absolute mayhem. The censor took everything: your Beasts, Trefolev’s poems, Gilyarovsky’s poems, 1/2 of Bilibin’s reviews, my feuilleton story <…> I asked to give ‘Beasts’ a go and claimed it was an innocent story, but the committee told me: ‘Don’t we understand that it’s not about beasts!’ So I’m sending this to the Beasts editor. You will not lose the story. Rewrite it (make sure you do), and send it to The Petersburg Gazette. They will print it. The story is innocent.”
According to the censor, “one can hear a particular pessimistic tendency in the story, one can feel tendentious hints and laughter at the vicissitudes of fate of not only small, but also powerful people, at innocent misfortunes and suffering, at the hopelessness of the vanquished and enslaved…”. The censor banned the story, “bearing in mind the vagueness of the trend and the possibility of understanding it in a bad way.”