A scintillating series of mouth-watering descriptions of a great many savoury dishes. A particularly gloomy forecast of the future of the natural world. He finally makes a decision. He admires the scenery and the difficulties of the terrain as they flash along; they almost have an accident; and he is unable to strike up a conversation with the surly driver who resents his presence. A nicely-described drive in the starlit Russian night, nothing more.
When Pashka was finally examined the doctor berates the mother for not having brought him sooner as his arm was so badly infected — she had let him rot for six months — that he had to be operated on and Pashka, who had never before been separated from his mother, had to stay there overnight.
Wandering around the different wards he sees terrible things and runs out of the hospital in the evening in terror. A sensitive account of a poor peasant boy learning about death and disease the hard way, seen through his own eyes.
Sasha waits patiently outside for the verdict, not really caring which way it will go. When the kindliest of the uncles manages to get agreement on paying the debt, Sasha asks him for a hundred roubles so that he can go and celebrate with friends. A delicate portrait of the eternal conflict and contrast of goodness, badness, innocence, guilt, moral values and nihilism all in a few pages.
Infuriating and fascinating at the same time. But the image he sees of himself in the mirror is not very impressive and as he leaves for the meeting he meditates bitterly on how one and all are intriguing against him. This doctor is a sick man! But his interior monologue is a juicy one indeed. None of the stories are very gay, all have a melancholy tint of decline and decay. This longish word story is certainly rife with realistic anecdotes about the trials and travails of transporting cattle by rail in the Russia of the times.
But the evocative tale remains essentially anecdotal. Amusing but somewhat inconclusive, and excessively simplistic about young ladies in general and no doubt about young French ones in particular.
He does manage to achieve his aim, but then he starts dreaming of a Serbian order. A somewhat heavy-handed satire on officialdom and the magic of official honours. A satire of commercial mores with a distinctly juvenile touch.
All nineteen officers duly join in the outing and are regaled by tea, drinks, delicacies, wine, elegant conversation and dancing with the numerous ladies of the household that is full of guests.
We follow one officer, short and rubicund and almost middle-aged, practically an outcast among his fellow officers, as he wanders around the huge mansion and is actually kissed in the neck in the dark by one of the ladies of the house, who seems to have mistaken him for another. He spends the rest of the story wondering who that delicious person might have been.
A delicate evocation of the manners of the time in polite society - and of the unhappy destiny of an unhappy man. Pyotr declared on the spot that he loved her and she reciprocated in like — but there was an insurmountable social barrier between them, as he was only a plebeian and she was a noblewoman.
A touching tale touchingly told. He also trained Kashtanka to do tricks too. One day the gander was fatally stepped on by a horse, and Kashtanka was taken to replace it at the circus act — but right away there was a cry of recognition and she was reunited with the carpenter and his little boy.
A nice little story perhaps somewhat too uneventful to be very impressive. A powerful but perhaps too cynical parable about the attractiveness of sin. She tries to stay awake all night while rocking the baby and in the early morning, still dead tired, she carries out an extensive series of household duties and is again charged with rocking the screaming child to sleep.
A powerful tragedy most convincingly narrated. On the way they meet a wagon-train driven by peasants with whom the young boy travels most of the way to his final destination, while the uncle goes off in search of a buyer for his wares We see the sights and sounds of the steppe in the day and at night — the birds, the animals, the winds and the storms and the rivers and the fish — and we listen with Yegory to the talk of the peasants and their quarrels and their tales, especially of bandits and robberies and murders, and we are plunged intensely into the atmosphere of that vast and populous land.
A simple and straightforward tale, narrated in subtly poetical terms by a writer who loved that land and its people. A quiet masterpiece. This sort of thing continues in an expansive, enthusiastic, almost emotional, rather Russian way for some good time, and to illustrate how as a younger man he himself had harboured similar nihilistic thoughts, the engineer recounts his heartless seduction of a despairing woman he had met by chance in a resort town many years previously.
A long, intense, complex work of considerable force. The consequences of this act on the life of the hospital and on the career of the doctor and the assistant, and the play of forces at work in the hospital organisation and in the regional judicial system — for there are judicial consequences — are the marrow of this story.
An interesting and intricate psychological analysis of the forces at work in the medical system of the time. Remarkably effective evocations of memorable moments. As the day progresses through dinner, tea, and supper and the guests finally leave after midnight, her stress and dissatisfaction evolve into a crisis of epic moral and physical dimensions.
A fascinating account of a particularly unhappy day in the life of a sensitive, educated and wealthy young woman. But all good things must come to an end. A simple and basically simplistic fable impregnated with sympathy for the poor and with animosity for the arrogant rich.
He goes along in a spirit of friendship but is severely depressed by what he sees and the sordidness of the people and the places they have visited.
He meditates at length on the stupidity of the common people and the essential baseness of his friends who participate in the exploitation of the fallen women he saw that night, and returns home to ponder further on the state of humanity. He goes back to the district the next night though to try to understand what he has seen and heard there, and the following day his friends find him in such a state of nervousness that they take him to a psychiatrist for medical treatment.
Life carries on nevertheless. The bet had been made, the student had spent fifteen years — that were drawing to a close the next morning — in solitary confinement with all the food, wine and books that he desired, without once having left the small room in which he had been confined. But now the banker feels differently about the prospect of losing such a sum A nicely-told fable that somehow seems excessively intellectual and contrived today in spite of its lofty intentions.
She likens herself to a graceful bird bringing joy and grace into the solemn institution. On her walk she sees the doctor Mihail Ivanovitch, to whom she expresses her regrets for the loss of his wife the previous year. Straight talk that rings ever so resoundingly down to us so many years later. In a second even shorter scene the lover flees and the count rewards the driver with a hundred roubles that the driver refuses out of respect for the nobility!!
Complete nonsense! A quite extraordinarily intense, moving reflection on science and art and learning and values and on what makes life really worth living. He finally comes upon an inn that he recognizes as being frequented by horse-thieves but has no alternative but to take shelter there, where there are in fact two known horse-thieves as well as the attractive daughter of the house.
She brings in food and wine and vodka, Yergunov exchanges stories with the fellows who drink much less than he does and who leave early on.
When he tries to prevent them from taking his horse, that the doctor had lent him for his errand, the girl blocks the door and Yergunov loses his head, and soon after his job. The story ends rather badly for all concerned except the horse-thieves. An interesting excursion into the mindset of a poor soul lost in a cruel world. He carries on a desultory conversation with his neighbour, a certain Pavel Ivanitch, who rallies incessantly against the system and the inevitable fate of the men in the sick bay, most of whom are dying.
We follow Gusev and Ivanitch to the bitter end. A poignant portrayal of a simple man facing death uncomprehendingly far from home. A dark vision full of drama of life in the countryside, where all of the people portrayed, apart from the little boy, are pretty nasty human beings. So he asks — endlessly — for advice from his generous and warm-hearted friend the doctor Samoylenko, and debates — endlessly, in a very Russian way — with himself and with his entourage on the moral consequences of his various options and on the meaning of life, etc.
His tireless self-indulgence and self-centredness provoke the enmity of an officer who has his eye on Nadyezhda, and in a frenzy of agitation about borrowing enough money to be able to flee to Moscow, Laevsky insults the officer who is only too happy to demand a duel. That event changes everything for everyone in the story. A work of practically novel length in English, but not in Russian, where it has 32, words , but clearly more a long story that has been stretched out by the numerous lengthy scenes of soul-searching and introspection, the tensions and mental anguish described so well that they almost succeed in interesting the reader in the fate of the fatuous central character.
Pyotr hesitates at first about what to do but finally sets off on horseback in a storm and in a stormy mood for a confrontation with the illicit couple, whose financial and social situation is very bleak.
After much soul-searching discussion with the two of them there is a reconciliation of sorts and Pyotr returns home, a wiser and a sadder man. A moving tale of an intense moral confrontation that is a revelation of character and values for all parties concerned. He even tolerates unflinchingly her vacation fling with a well-known artist who flaunts their relationship in front of him and his friends and who treats her more and more casually.
She learns too late that the most celebrated person she had ever met was the man she had married. A fluid tale of flightiness with a subtle undertone of bitterness about the chasm between the artistic and the scientific worlds. He promptly summons his best friend and his wife, with whom he has been separated for two years and who is living an independent existence on the ground floor of his estate, to organise a relief committee. But he meets with unexpected resistance from his wife who accuses him of always wanting to control everything around him, and as the story progresses he learns more about her, about what his friends and neighbours think of him, and about himself.
A powerful story artfully told with a very strong social content. She has a lot of fun doing so and is very happy to be sixteen, pretty and loved by handsome fellows. A nicely-recounted moment of joyful youth, an impressionist sketch of a passing moment, with no story line whatsoever though. Can this really be considered a short story? Then a girl came in to buy stamps and he added postage and stamps, and so on — after a while he was selling a large variety of goods, and when the grocer next door was arrested for fraud he extended his shop and his trade to groceries too.
Now when his friends ask him what he has read lately he replies that he now does more positive things. A short 2-page spoof of the commercial trade. The older man has been in Siberia for a long time and is quite happy with his simple, carefree existence manning a ferry-boat, and he expounds on the positive side of the Siberian experience, while the young Tatar, who barely speaks Russian and is oppressed and shunned by one and all because of his ethnic origins, is desperately miserable and dreams at length about his young wife from whom he had been taken away.
An interesting peek into life in that vast land, sketchy and limited but nevertheless touching. He bit on her hook while she was fishing but survived the ordeal and went mad, and when a young poet came bathing in the pond our carp mistook him for the lovely young lady and kissed him on the back.
This infected the poet with pessimism, an infection that he spread in the offices of his publisher. That is why all Russian poets thereafter were pessimists.
A short two-page tongue-in-cheek fable that might have seemed charming in its day. That evening, unforgettable, things came to a head. A beautifully-narrated account of passion and conflicting loyalties. The narrator, who sympathises with her frustration at the lack of warmth and understanding she receives, is so taken up with her that he intervenes when the inevitable crisis comes, and we follow them as they flee to Italy and the south of France fruitlessly seeking health and happiness.
A strong story of conflicting ideas, ideals and emotions, beautifully recounted. After a visit to her sister Olga, now a nun, she realises that she has been shallow and dishonest with herself and that she hates her husband and would like to have good relations again with the other Volodya. A well-told tale of shallowness, self-deception and frustration.
She finally faces up to the reality of her loveless life and the social impossibility of a serious relationship with the foreman. A sensitive portrait of a somewhat empty-headed and very privileged young woman. In this story there is the following interesting reference to Maupassant: " Of all contemporary writers, however, I prefer Maupassant.
A terrible, prodigious, supernatural artist! Every line is a new horizon. What a fury of transitions, of motives, of melodies! You rest peacefully on the lilies and the roses, and suddenly a thought —a terrible, splendid, irresistible thought—swoops down upon you like a locomotive, and bathes you in hot steam and deafens you with its whistle.
Read Maupassant, dear girl; I insist on it. The site is splendid and the welcome whole-hearted, but Andrey still spends too much time working and very little sleeping and has strange encounters with a supernatural figure, a black monk who descends from the skies to discuss values and ideals with him.
A final encounter with the black monk puts an end to everything. A strange but moving and convincing portrait of psychic anguish and decline. Which he disliked doing because of the piercing, plaintive way the flute player Rothschild played everything right beside him, so he developed a virulent hatred for Rothschild in particular and of Jews in general. But one day, as his wife Martha was taken ill and seemed to be rejoicing at the thought of escaping from her life of misery with him by dying, he started wondering about the way he had spent his life with her, and when after her death he too was taken ill and Rothschild came to ask him to play again in the orchestra, he called him brother, played one last time for him and bequeathed his precious violin to him on his dying bed.
A simple but moving story of reconciliation and redemption, masterfully recounted. As dawn breaks he reflects on the impact of the story on the widows and is struck with a sense of the continuity of history down through the ages.
A brief meditation on religion and nature. The guest tries to leave after a while but Pavel insists that he stay for supper with his daughters, when he continues with his monologue. An admirable little fable about the need for faith in the essential goodness of human nature? She admits that she is in love with the fellow and wants to go to live with him, but when he offers her a divorce on her terms her attitude is surprising to say the least.
A stark account of a stark situation, smoothly recounted. Completely taken aback by this unexpected offer from someone so old, so ugly, and so unknown to her she initially refuses, but changes her mind the next day for material reasons. They discuss a lot, she eventually has a baby, the baby gets sick and dies, they become reconciled and Laptev continues to wonder about life and love and what use it is having so much money.
Anne drama Anna is a young eighteen-year-old who has married Modest Alexeitch, a wealthy government official of fifty-two. She is dismayed on realising during their honeymoon trip to a monastery! The tremendous success she has at the ball leads her to a whirlwind social life, her husband finally acquires the coveted Order of Saint Anne, and she has learned how to put her husband in his place.
A fable with a certain charm and a certain bite. He discovers at the end of a tree-lined avenue nearby a large house where two young women live with their mother, and starts visiting them every day, arguing about values and art and science and society with the socially very active elder daughter and walking along the beautiful country paths with the younger sister.
When he makes a declaration of love to the latter, she rushes off to talk things over with her family — and has left for good the following day with her mother, as ordered by the elder sister. The narrator never sees any of them again. He lives in poverty and is happy to be applying his ideals of universal equality and the elimination of privilege to his own life, as he ceaselessly explains to one and all, notably to his sister, to his fellow workers, to his employers and to Misha, the woman in his life.
He eventually marries her although that ends badly, and his sister has an affair with a married doctor that ends even worse. A long, too-long account of a life spent searching for meaning in the lower level of society, in spite of the material and social difficulties involved in that quest, a direction that no doubt touched a chord in many a reader in the Russia of the times, although probably less so in more recent days.
Unemployed and penniless, he returns to his home village with his wife and little daughter, but life there is far from the snug memories he had retained from his childhood. They live with the rest of his large family in a small hut at the edge of a very poor village, where dirt, poverty, grossness, violence and alcoholism are everywhere. There is very little food, what there is is awful, foul language is the rule and the children, regularly beaten, are quite deprived of any proper education.
At the end their lot is so bad that the survivors — Nikolay is not one of them — leave to look for work as servants in Moscow.
A grim vision — some at the time, like Tolstoy, thought it was too grim — of the social situation in the countryside in pre-revolutionary Russia, realistically conveyed with talent and understanding. After a long evening discussing life and values with Ivan and seeing the lifestyle of his family, he learns why they had been called Petchenyegs — savages — by a land surveyor who had also spent a night there several years previously.
A fascinating account of the lifestyle in a Cossack farm in the Don valley. It is as beautiful as she remembers, her aunt and her elderly grandfather greet her kindly and there are many neighbours and visitors, but the way of life is very different from the elegant big-city life she had been brought up in, the family finances are not brilliant, she does not fit in with the people she has to frequent, notably a close-mouthed manager of a nearby factory who seems very interested in her, and existential ennui sets in.
She finds a way out of her unhappiness and dissatisfaction, though. But the lot of a country schoolmistress is a difficult one, the material conditions are very poor, the roads are very bad, the peasants are reluctant to pay the costs, there is corruption everywhere, she is frustrated in her vocation at every turn, she does not get the recognition she knows she merits, and although the encounter with Hanov sets off a long train of thought about her condition, life must carry on as usual, somehow.
A quite moving tale of repressed feelings that has a most authentic ring to it. He feels obliged to go, knowing that the husband is a wastrel and a profligate and that they probably have financial problems.
Which certainly is the case as they are bankrupt, the estate is about to be sold, and Ta, Va and Na are desperate at the prospect of being deprived of the ancient family home. They ask him for legal help, the husband asks him for a loan and the young sister would clearly like to bring him into their family. A sad story, even though the women in the story are impractical and the husband is a weakling and a loser, a story possibly symbolic of decline and loss of things in general and of past attachments in particular, recounted in a straightforward and realistic manner.
He was unmarried, of course, and his colleagues and especially their wives decided one day to make a match for him with the gay, attractive sister of a new teacher in the town. Everyone participated in the effort, arranging outings and parties, and all was going well until the day when the young woman came riding by on a bicycle with her brother.
That was too much modernity for the teacher of classical languages and believer in old-time ways, and the clash that followed with the brother put a definitive and quite tragic end to the story. A portrait of the life of teachers in a provincial community cleverly integrated into a fable about the pitfalls of conservatism. His new life suited him admirably, but when Ivan went to visit him he found him to be a completely self-centred egotist putting on airs and perfectly adapted to the shallow, uncharitable life of a country notable.
When he finally got around to visiting them he had a rather boring time listening to the father of the household telling jokes, to the mother reading her own novels, and to the daughter playing interminably and very loudly on the piano.
The latter was attractive though, and he ended up becoming more and more fascinated with her although the feeling was not really mutual, and one night he actually proposed to her — to no avail as she had her heart set on getting away from the town and her parents and studying music in Moscow.
A sophisticated critique of small-town society and the people in it that no longer has quite the impact it might have had originally. Korolyov finds that the young woman, who lives alone with her mother and a governess, is healthy but neurasthenic, and stays the night at the factory at the pressing request of the anxious mother. He is struck by the eerie atmosphere of the gigantic garment factory, and has an intense dialogue with the young woman about the inherent fruitlessness of her mercantile and oppressive role in society.
The visit ends inconclusively. He strikes up a conversation with her and proceeds to apply his practiced charm on her while accompanying her on excursions on the seafront and in the region. She succumbs, as expected, and they separate after a while when she is summoned back to her home by her husband. But when Gurov returns to his beloved big-city life in Moscow he starts to find things unexpectedly tiresome, and he realises that he misses the lady with the lapdog — to the extent that he seeks her out in her home town and renews their relationship, unexpectedly profound for both of them.
A moving account of a relationship of surprising intensity, masterfully recounted. The magistrate, a young man who had graduated only two years previously, decides after a moment of hesitation and a long conversation with the elderly local constable not to stay the night in the sinister council building where the suicide had taken place, and goes with the doctor to the house of a colleague nearby where they arrive in time for supper and card-playing, dancing and flirting with the numerous young women in the household.
The storm becomes even more severe and it is only two days later that the magistrate and the doctor finally leave the haven of comfort — where the constable is treated with contempt by their hosts — to continue with the formality of the inquest.
An intense and vivid meditation on the contrast between the sophisticated life in the metropolis and the simpler way of life, even for well-off and well-educated people, in remote districts. She falls in love with her lodger, a theatre manager, and enthusiastically takes up the life of the theatre, soon talking constantly like him about his problems with the theatre business, with the inclement weather, with the actors, and so on.
But there was a void in her life when he died, that was rapidly consoled by a neighbour, a portly timber merchant, whom she married and with whom she similarly took up all his cares about the timber business to the exclusion of everything else.
When he died in turn she got in the habit of conversing at length with a veterinary surgeon, with whom a relationship sprung up in spite of the fact that he was still married and had a son. She took up all his comments about animal diseases and was happy with him until he went back to his wife and son. Then when the surgeon came back with the boy she took in the young fellow, now a high-school student, incessantly repeating all his comments about the school and the teachers.
A slightly amusing fable about the feminine condition that has not well passed the test of time. But although his wife tries to help the peasants in the neighbourhood, there are constant conflicts with them over encroachment of their cattle in his gardens and over petty thefts, and he and his family are considered to be unwanted strangers by the unruly, uneducated and poverty-stricken locals.
When the bridge is finished he moves away and sells the villa to a local official, who is accepted by the peasants as a neighbour although he ignores them completely. A striking tale of class friction with a strong streak of realism not to say cynicism about the noble nature of the peasantry so dear to the hearts of the big-city intelligentsia of the time. A possibly caricatural excursion into the mindset of very uneducated poor folk of the time, no doubt of sociological interest but necessarily limited otherwise.
An in-depth account of life in a remote village, of considerable interest. After the service he returns to the monastery where he is staying and finds that in fact his mother, who had really been in the audience, had come to see him with one of his many nieces his mother has had nine children and about forty grandchildren!
He is not feeling at all well, and he thinks about his mother and her strange, excessively respectful attitude towards him because of his elevated function, about his childhood and about his religious life.
He soon dies from the consumption he had long been suffering from, and is soon forgotten by everyone except his old mother. A delicate, sensitive account of the last few days of a delicate, sensitive person.
She finally flees from the mediocre life that was waiting for her there to study at the university in Saint Petersburg, and at the end of the story she sees Sasha again, who is dying of consumption, and her mother and grandmother one last time.
A very simple, basic little skit. Not funny, not interesting, not worth the trouble. An Idyll - But Alas! A simple tale of greed and deception that somehow seems less amusing today than it might have seemed at the time. As his mother-in-law suffers from the same ailments, when the two of them spend twenty-three hours out of twenty-four shouting at the top of their lungs, he himself shows signs of mental derangement, combined with suicidal tendencies.
The recommended solution to the problem is … amputation of the tongue! Not at all funny, not even then probably, or rather hopefully. But things went rapidly downhill and she was soon found kissing cadets, although the editor had forbade her any general distribution.
To no avail, so he let her go back to her parents. When he was grown up they got all their relatives and friends and acquaintances to form a chain to all pull together on the turnip, and it became a great state councillor.
This might imply that all great state councillors are turnip-heads, but that seems a bit excessive. The next day the signature sheet is empty, so the supervisor forges all the signatures himself to save face. This might have been meant to be a cruel satire of a pretentious ceremony, but it was a paltry effort nonetheless. Twenty-Six [ 3 ] humour In a few brief diary entries the supervisor of an office describes his conflicts with his wife who has a clear preference for one of his clerks, if not all of them.
Of no interest. My Nana [ 3 ] humour The narrator writes a love-struck letter to a courtisane who has trouble fitting him into her busy schedule.
But her maid, an acquaintance of the narrator, arranges things and he does manage to have a satisfying interview with the lady. A very short skit obviously written in a very short period of time. Needless to say, the stories cynically do not at all illustrate their theme in the sense intended. A set of silly stories that might amuse some. Maria is certain that he wants to propose to her, just as several of his colleagues had done recently, and is not at all interested as he has too many defects.
However, when he finally does make his request there is an awful come-down for Maria. Quite amusing in any case. The young German meets up with the Count in Moscow, where he is given roubles to travel to the estate and write a report on the coalfields there, which he does, reporting three months later that the coalfields are worthless and asking for money to enable him to go back to Germany. The Count sets off for Italy however without replying, and the German has to walk a long way and sleep in the fields before finding someone to lend him the money to go back home.
A flimsy story with little or no meat. A Problem 2 [ 3 ] humour At two in the morning the narrator leaves a party in a tipsy state with his wife and his mother-in-law, and as his wife is expecting he orders a cab in spite of the objections of the penny-pinching mother-in-law. Was that supposed to be funny??
Man and Dog Converse [ 3 ] humour Alexei is under the influence and starts off a monologue about man being first ashes and dust and then the crown of creation. When he hears a dog growling in front of his own doorway he takes that as a contradiction and breaks down, confessing tearfully to his many defaults and wrong-doings.
The conversation with the dog becomes physical and Alexei is in very poor shape when he wakes up the following morning. Somewhat clever although definitely not funny. When he finally just has to leave she helps him, most embarrassed until she looks around and realises that everyone else is as inebriated as he is. Perhaps this was more funny at the time, at least in Russia, than it seems to be here and now. He finally goes over to him to comfort him in his distress, but the fellow shows him that everyone else in the restaurant is eating just as much, and the Frenchman leaves in a daze at the miraculous bellies of the Russian people.
A gastronomically impressive comedy. The Proposal [ 3 ] humour The young landowner Valentin Petrovich puts on his best clothes to pay a visit to the estate of his neighbour, the very beautiful Princess Vera Zapiskina. He mumbles and hems and haws, and finally blurts out that he has a proposal to make. Contrary to what the Princess is expecting, he proposes to set up a jointly-owned factory on their estates to process lard.
A short but amusing tale. Man [ 3 ] love story A one-page story about a young man at a ball who is feeling depressed by the endless rounds of ladies and flowers and champagne in his life, is asking himself why he exists and is telling himself that the lot of man is indeed an unhappy one.
But just as he begins to think that he will be happy when he ceases to be, a young woman of remarkable beauty comes over and asks him for a glass of water, and he hurries off to fetch one. Short, very very short, but effective. Words, Words, Words [ 3 ] the feminine condition Gruzdev, a young telephone operator, is lounging on a sofa in a hotel room asking a young women how she had become a fallen woman. She tells him all about it and he is so moved by her story that she begins to think of a novel she had once read about a fallen woman being saved by someone like Gruzdev.
But then she undid three of her top dress-buttons and the story fades away. A not very original treatment of an ancient theme. The French Ball [ 3 ] humour Pyotr Semyonich receives a telegram from his editor instructing him to go straight away to the fancy French Ball.
When he wakes up it is too late to go to the ball, but that is no problem for this resourceful journalist. Quite a lot of fun! The end. Possibly supposed to be funny. Not a story: no characters, no plot, no dialogue. Which of my legs was bitten, the right or the left? What time is it? A brunette? A starlet? Or a red-head?
A one-page joke. Before making the incision, spasms of the peripheral vessels induce pallor. Pupils dilate. Our general deduction is that the sight of the approaching specialists agitates the vascular motor center and the nervus oculomotorius.
A chill ensues. During the incision, we note a rise in body temperature and hyperestesia of the skin. After the incision has been performed there is a fever. Sweat breaks out. The Philadelphia Conference [ 6 ] mock scientific debate A three-page mock account of an academic conference debating Darwinism and the inherited characteristics of the main European nations.
A Brief Anatomy of Man [ 6 ] humorous mock-medical essay A brief overview of various parts of the human anatomy, with flippant remarks about each of them: A face — the mirror of the soul except in the case of lawyers. The tongue — an enemy of man and a friend of the devil and women.
Dirty Tragedians and Leprous Playwrights [ 6 ] nonsensical theatre play Featuring a theatre impresario, a playwright who is on nodding terms with devils, witches, whales and crocodiles, the King of Sweden, a Baroness, a General and many others, we follow the dilemma of the impresario as he tries to think of a plot, then the arrival of the playwright accompanied by the witches and all the others who come to help him and so on ad absurdum. Are ancient languages profitable or unprofitable?
Letter to a Reporter [ 6 ] humorous letter A one-page letter to a reporter telling him that the author of the letter already knew all the faits divers crimes, accidents, fires and so on that had appeared in the paper that day, ending with a very mild insult.
Possibly intended as a satire on officialdom. On the Characteristics of Nations [ 6 ] humorous essay A text that purports to outline the national characteristics of various nationalities — the French frivolous , Swedes live in remote areas , Greeks traders , Spaniards strum guitars and fight duels , Circassians drink and brawl , Persians wage war on Russian bedbugs and the British value time and have no time for dinner.
Has not dated well. Feast-Day Gratuities [ 6 ] From the Notebook of a Provincial Scrounger humorous essay A list of comments by a house porter on the tenants of several buildings who do or do not give him adequate tips on the occasion of a feast-day. Letters to the Editor [ 6 ] humorous essay Three comical letters to editors of various journals. Nadia N. Archived essays Reviews Archived stories German Studies. Trifon Semyonovitch is a landowner who discovers a boy and a girl eating apples in his orchard.
A retired nobleman writes to his neighbour, a famous scientist, to declare how much he would like to meet him now that he has been living next door to him for the past year, and insists at length on his own interest in science. His earliest plays were short farces; however, he soon developed his signature style, which was a unique mix of comedy and tragedy.
Plays such as Ivanov and The Wood Demon told stories about educated men of the upper classes coping with debt, disease and inevitable disappointment in life. Chekhov wrote many of his greatest works from the s through the last few years of his life. In his plays of these years, Chekhov concentrated primarily on mood and characters, showing that they could be more important than the plots.
Not much seems to happen to his lonely, often desperate characters, but their inner conflicts take on great significance.
Their stories are very specific, painting a picture of pre-revolutionary Russian society, yet timeless. However, by this point his health was in decline due to the tuberculosis that had affected him since his youth. While staying at a health resort in Badenweiler, Germany, he died in the early hours of July 15, , at the age of Chekhov is considered one of the major literary figures of his time. His plays are still staged worldwide, and his overall body of work influenced important writers of an array of genres, including James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams and Henry Miller.
We strive for accuracy and fairness. The bewildering irrationality of their treatment is brought home with gently comic poignancy by the story's ending, where the couple flee, selling their villa to a pompous government clerk who disdains the peasants, and is treated in return with paradoxical civility. Comedy is of course another key element in Chekhov's imaginative armoury, and a further destabilising factor in the handling of his own "views".
However tragic or despicable or exasperating the moralist in him found the world, the writer in him was constantly drawn to its comic variousness and oddity. No other writer has evoked boredom, dreariness, ennui with such richly entertaining specificity. Who but Chekhov could have conceived a story such as "A Hard Case", built around a living embodiment of stifling conventionality in the person of Belikov, who reduces a whole town to his own state of cowering joylessness before the inhabitants finally turn against him?
The exorcising of such baleful spirits seems to have been one of the primal drives underlying the production of the odd stories Chekhov left behind: happiness, in his work, almost always occurs against an encroaching darkness that requires constant warding off.
In life he was known as an aficionado of jokes, pranks, festivities, the burlesque spirit in general. The aim was to create a high stakes drama in a short space and above all to bring off a surprise ending; the twist in the tail that reverses one's understanding of what has gone before. While Chekhov never totally abandoned this approach, he discovered early on how to create compelling stories that mirrored — or seemed to mirror — the casual movement of reality itself.
In "The Steppe", the first of his stories to be published in a serious literary journal, the artless artistry of his later masterpieces is already substantially evolved. Here, instead of neat twists or morally pointed drama, we have simply the flow of life registering itself on the senses and emotions of a nine-year-old boy as he journeys with his uncle across the Ukrainian steppe. There are fluctuations of mood, ranging from lyrical delight at the natural beauty of the steppe, to brooding menace as the bully Dymov begins picking on the boy.
But rather than pressing these fluctuations into service as steps towards some definitive conflict or revelation, Chekhov traces them purely for their own sake, as events in his protagonist's consciousness. Most writers, having sketched a character like Dymov in such deftly illuminating detail, and built up the hostility between him and the boy with such psychologically precise touches, would have found the temptation to stage a showdown between them irresistible, but Chekhov merely lets the pent energies of the situation disperse into an inconsequentiality that even today — after so many imitators have made the gesture commonplace — feels shockingly true to life.
Time and again moments of potential solemnity are deflated by some mundane detail, the effect of which is a kind of constant assertion of the lifelike over the "literary". Gurov, in "A Lady with a Dog", famously responds to Anne's sudden onset of remorse after they consummate their affair, not by attempting to rise to her anguished, high-flown rhetoric, but by cutting himself a slice of watermelon and eating it in silence. In death, sewn into a canvas bag, he is described as resembling — of all things — "a carrot or radish — broad at the head and narrow at the base".
And in a stunning, unexpected coda that at once makes light of his death and confers on it a curiously sublime apotheosis, the story follows his corpse after it is thrown overboard, noting the reactions of the "delighted" little pilot fish as it sinks past them, observing the shark that "nonchalantly" rips open the bag, and then veering into a passage in which the casual and the cosmic mingle with transcendent strangeness: "Overhead.
Again and again, as emotional pressures mount in his characters, the crisis expresses itself in this state of bewildered disjuncture.
Olga, the compulsively loving woman in "Angel", enters it as soon as she finds herself without a mate, describing it in her homely way: "You see an upright bottle, say — or rain, or a peasant in a cart.
But what are they for: that bottle, that rain, that peasant? What sense do they make?
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