One of them was Nikolai Leykin: of that Viktor Bilibin informed the author in a 7 December 1887 letter (Chekhov apparently left the claim uncommented).

Kashtanka, a young foxey-looking mongrel belonging to a carpenter drunkard named Luka Alexandrovich, gets lost through her own 'improper behaviour', frightened by a military band on the street.

Upon inspection, she finds the place poor and ugly (nothing "besides the easy-chairs, the sofa, the lamps, and the rugs") next to her masters' apartments, rich with all manner of rubbish.

Finally, she goes to sleep, dreaming nostalgically of how Luka's son Fedyushka used to lovingly 'play' with her by way of using her "as a bell, that is, shake her violently by the tail so that she squealed and barked", as well as giving her a piece of meat to swallow and then "with a loud laugh, pulling it back again from her stomach," by a thread he'd fixed it with.

In the morning, Kashtanka meets (and, after a bout of initial hostility, befriends) her neighbours: a gander named Ivan Ivanovich, who talks much nonsense, and the old white tomcat Fyodor Timofeyitch, a lazy creature with a highly skeptical mindset.

The trio, completed by the pig Khavronya Ivanovna, and supervised by their trainer, starts to perform the most wonderful tricks, like bell-ringing, pistol-shooting, and, most importantly, climbing atop one another to form what's known in their master's parlance as the Egyptian Pyramid.

A month passes, and Tyotka gets used to her new life, full of good dinners and exhausting but joyful training sessions during which she walks on hind legs, catches sugar, dances and 'sings' (by way of accompanying music by howling).

Still, every evening brings her a whiff of sadness, as she continues to dream wistfully of her wonderful past with the rude and silly carpenter and his sadistically-minded little boy.

The team leaves the house for a performance in which Kashtanka is, for the first time, substituting the late Ivan Ivanovich at the base of the Egyptian Pyramid.

Half an hour later she's on the street with them, happy to return to her good old life of hunger, full of abuse and drunken Luka's eloquence, mostly in the form of one, oft-repeated observation: "You, Kashtanka, are an insect of a creature, and nothing else.

In an 8 January 1888 letter Yakov Polonsky wrote to Chekhov: "For a New Year Day you treated us with two fine stories, "Kashtanka" and "The Easter Tale"[note 2] and I am happy to inform you that everybody here are delighted with them....