Anton Chekhov
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Checkhov says truth and falsehood both play an important role in personal happiness of men. Could this also be the cause of both passionate romance and failed relationship between an impoverished Russian prince and a rich landowner? This story examines the very essence of human psychology providing valuable insight into complexities of such concepts as happiness, deception, romance and depression.
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A collection of Short Stories by Anton Chekhov featuring A Tragic Actor, In A Strange Land, Oh The Public, The Looking Glass, Her Husband and Overdoing It. These stories are small masterpieces. The scene is set quickly and within a few sentences the story line is underway. But all seem to contain an element of the unexpected.
63) The Chorus Girl
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One day when she was younger and better-looking, and when her voice was stronger, Nikolay Petrovitch Kolpakov, her adorer, was sitting in the outer room in her summer villa. It was intolerably hot and stifling. Kolpakov, who had just dined and drunk a whole bottle of inferior port, felt ill-humoured and out of sorts. Both were bored and waiting for the heat of the day to be over in order to go for a walk.
64) Gooseberry
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Nikolai Ivanich has never reconciled himself to life in the city and makes plans to acquire enough money to buy a small estate where he can grow gooseberries, a symbol in his mind of happy life in the countryside. He saves every penny and spends his days dreaming of the future estate: where the main building will be located, ducks swimming in a pond, and where the gooseberry bushes will be planted. His brother sees it as an escape from reality and...
65) Misery
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The cabman Iona's son recently died. He desperately and unsuccessfully tries to have a talk with the people he meets and tell them of how shattered he is. He ends up talking to his horse.
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A collection of Chekhov's short stories featuring: Talent, Anyuta, The Helpmate, Ivan Matveyitch, Polinka. These stories are rich in characterisation and represent brilliantly observed slices of life. They don't come to an end, they just peter out inconclusively leaving you to draw your own conclusions.
67) In An Hotel
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Madame Nashatyrin is fed up with violent behaviour and foul language emanating from abusive male guest next door. She has two grown up daughters and is concerned about their well being when complaining to the hotel-keeper. 'Either give me other apartments, or I shall leave your confounded hotel altogether! It's a sink of iniquity! Why don't you get rid of the scoundrel?' But as soon as the marital status of the scoundrel revealed she meditates and...
68) A Malefactor
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A local investigating magistrate unsuccessfully tries to explain that it is wrong to take nuts off the railroad track to a peasant, Grigoryev, who simply cannot see why he's to be deprived of his right to use an iron nut as a weight for his fishing line.
69) Ivan Matveyitch
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Between five and six in the evening. A fairly well-known man of learning is sitting in his study nervously biting his nails. 'It's positively revolting,' he says, continually looking at his watch. 'It shows the utmost disrespect for another man's time and work. In England such a person would not earn a farthing, he would die of hunger. You wait a minute, when you do come . . . .'
70) Grisha
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A boy of two years and eight months makes his first foray into the outside world in a company of his somewhat wayward nanny and is quite overwhelmed, having got even his first taste of alcohol. In the evening he cannot get to sleep. The soldiers with the brooms, the big cats, the horses, the bit of glass, the tray of oranges, the bright buttons, all gathered together, weigh on his brain. He tosses from side to side, babbles, and, at last, unable to...
71) Overdoing It
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Smirnov is scared of being robbed. To compensate and deter the cabman from attacking him, he blusters on in a comical way about his fighting abilities, the three revolvers he doesn't have, and how a party of armed friends will join him soon.
72) Happiness
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A flock of sheep was spending the night on the broad steppe road that is called the great highway. Two shepherds were guarding it. One, a toothless old man of eighty, with a tremulous face, was lying on his stomach at the very edge of the road, leaning his elbows on the dusty leaves of a plantain; the other, a young fellow with thick black eyebrows and no moustache, dressed in the coarse canvas of which cheap sacks are made, was lying on his back,...
73) Her Husband
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Natalya Bronin is lying in her bedroom, her whole being abandoned to repose. She lies, deliciously drowsy, thinking of her little daughter who lives somewhere far away with her grandmother or aunt. The child is more precious to her than the public, bouquets, notices in the papers, adorers and she would be glad to think about her till morning. She is happy, at peace, and all she longs for is not to be prevented from lying undisturbed, dozing and dreaming...
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Nellie, a young and pretty girl, dreaming day and night of being married, gazes into a looking-glass. In the mirror her future husband emerges and they live together through days and months in fast forward, yet she sees her future distinctly in all its details.
76) Anyuta
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In the cheapest room of a big block of furnished apartments Stepan Klotchkov, a medical student in his third year, was walking to and fro, zealously conning his anatomy. In the window, covered by patterns of frost, sat Anyuta, a thin little brunette of five-and-twenty, very pale with mild grey eyes. Sitting with bent back she was busy embroidering with red thread the collar of a man's shirt. She was working against time...
77) The Grasshopper
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Olga Ivanovna Dymova enjoys the company of extraordinary people, all painters, writers and musicians, who look to her bright and original. All members of the small artistic circle which she is a hostess of, they all tell her she herself is a promising artist and pianist, the reputation she tries to uphold by practicing regularly and producing countless and, apparently, not very original 'etudes'.
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Eaten away by illness, an elderly coffin maker named Yakov reflects on his life-in particular his indifferent relationship with his now-deceased wife, Marfa, and his antipathy towards Rothschild, the flutist in the Jewish klezmer orchestra in which Yakov occasionally plays.
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The theme of romance continues in this volume and begins with iconic 'The Lady with the Dog' by Anton Chekhov. Set in Yalta, Crimea, appears at first as a holiday romance. Gurov is a married man but he holidays on his own and has a history of holiday affairs. He meets the lady of the story's title with her Pomeranian dog. But Chekhov's love stories are not romantic accounts of unrequited love or of love at first sight. Or, even of tortured love that...