Short Fiction by Anton Chekhov (libby ebook reader .txt) π
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Anton Chekhov is widely considered to be one of the greatest short story writers in history. A physician by day, heβs famously quoted as saying, βMedicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress.β Chekhov wrote nearly 300 short stories in his long writing career; while at first he wrote mainly to make a profit, as his interest in writingβand his skillβgrew, he wrote stories that heavily influenced the modern development of the form.
His stories are famous for, among other things, their ambiguous morality and their often inconclusive nature. Chekhov was a firm believer that the role of the artist was to correctly pose a question, but not necessarily to answer it.
This collection contains all of his short stories and two novellas, all translated by Constance Garnett, and arranged by the date they were originally published.
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- Author: Anton Chekhov
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Sitting on a low stool she told us of her life in Petersburg, and mimicked some celebrated singers, imitating their voice and manner of singing. She made a sketch of the doctor in her album, then of me; she did not draw well, but both the portraits were like us. She laughed, and was full of mischief and charming grimaces, and this suited her better than talking about the mammon of unrighteousness, and it seemed to me that she had been talking just before about wealth and luxury, not in earnest, but in imitation of someone. She was a superb comic actress. I mentally compared her with our young ladies, and even the handsome, dignified Anyuta Blagovo could not stand comparison with her; the difference was immense, like the difference between a beautiful, cultivated rose and a wild briar.
We had supper together, the three of us. The doctor and Mariya Viktorovna drank red wine, champagne, and coffee with brandy in it; they clinked glasses and drank to friendship, to enlightenment, to progress, to liberty, and they did not get drunk but only flushed, and were continually, for no reason, laughing till they cried. So as not to be tiresome I drank claret too.
βTalented, richly endowed natures,β said Miss Dolzhikov, βknow how to live, and go their own way; mediocre people, like myself for instance, know nothing and can do nothing of themselves; there is nothing left for them but to discern some deep social movement, and to float where they are carried by it.β
βHow can one discern what doesnβt exist?β asked the doctor.
βWe think so because we donβt see it.β
βIs that so? The social movements are the invention of the new literature. There are none among us.β
An argument began.
βThere are no deep social movements among us and never have been,β the doctor declared loudly. βThere is no end to what the new literature has invented! It has invented intellectual workers in the country, and you may search through all our villages and find at the most some lout in a reefer jacket or a black frock-coat who will make four mistakes in spelling a word of three letters. Cultured life has not yet begun among us. Thereβs the same savagery, the same uniform boorishness, the same triviality, as five hundred years ago. Movements, currents there have been, but it has all been petty, paltry, bent upon vulgar and mercenary interestsβ βand one cannot see anything important in them. If you think you have discerned a deep social movement, and in following it you devote yourself to tasks in the modern taste, such as the emancipation of insects from slavery or abstinence from beef rissoles, I congratulate you, Madam. We must study, and study, and study and we must wait a bit with our deep social movements; we are not mature enough for them yet; and to tell the truth, we donβt know anything about them.β
βYou donβt know anything about them, but I do,β said Mariya Viktorovna. βGoodness, how tiresome you are today!β
βOur duty is to study and to study, to try to accumulate as much knowledge as possible, for genuine social movements arise where there is knowledge; and the happiness of mankind in the future lies only in knowledge. I drink to science!β
βThere is no doubt about one thing: one must organize oneβs life somehow differently,β said Mariya Viktorovna, after a momentβs silence and thought. βLife, such as it has been hitherto, is not worth having. Donβt let us talk about it.β
As we came away from her the cathedral clock struck two.
βDid you like her?β asked the doctor; βsheβs nice, isnβt she?β
On Christmas day we dined with Mariya Viktorovna, and all through the holidays we went to see her almost every day. There was never anyone there but ourselves, and she was right when she said that she had no friends in the town but the doctor and me. We spent our time for the most part in conversation; sometimes the doctor brought some book or magazine and read aloud to us. In reality he was the first well-educated man I had met in my life: I cannot judge whether he knew a great deal, but he always displayed his knowledge as though he wanted other people to share it. When he talked about anything relating to medicine he was not like any one of the doctors in our town, but made a fresh, peculiar impression upon me, and I fancied that if he liked he might have become a real man of science. And he was perhaps the only person who had a real influence upon me at that time. Seeing him, and reading the books he gave me, I began little by little to feel a thirst for the knowledge which would have given significance to my cheerless labour. It seemed strange to me, for instance, that I had not known till then that the whole world was made up of sixty elements, I had not known what oil was, what paints were, and that I could have got on without knowing these things. My acquaintance with the doctor elevated me morally too. I was continually arguing with him and, though I usually remained of my own opinion, yet, thanks to him, I began to perceive that everything was not clear to me, and I began trying to work out as far as I could definite convictions in myself, that the dictates of conscience might be definite, and that there might be nothing vague in my mind. Yet, though he was the most cultivated and best man in the town, he was nevertheless far from perfection. In his manners, in his habit of turning every conversation into an argument, in his pleasant tenor, even in his friendliness, there was something coarse, like a divinity student, and when he took off his coat and sat in his silk shirt, or flung a tip to a waiter in the restaurant, I always fancied that culture might be all very
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