Selected Short Stories
The Russian literature that I have been reading are relatively monotonous in form – they’re really, really long novels, and so reading Chekhov’s stories was a welcome break. Chekhov’s style of writing is a mixture between realist impressionism and pessimism. He lived in the late 19th century, and I can’t help but associate some of his writing style with the artistic style of the French realist painters like Courbet, Millet, and Corot, the reason being Chekhov’s subjects included people of all different backgrounds (not just nobility or some idealized upper-class), and he sought to represent some truthful, un-romanticized reality. The stories I read were translated and arranged by Pevear and Volokhonsky, and this edition shows Chekhov’s progression as an author through different stages of his writing style. Although I’m not the biggest fan of the short story genre, these stories had in them this really attractive, plain expressiveness and I’m sure I’ll come back to reread a few of the best stories.
Unhappiness is a major theme among most of Chekhov’s stories. In Gooseberries, he writes how the masses of unhappy people do not voice their unhappiness, and that the happy ones are in a precarious and transient state before some inevitable fall into unhappiness. Chekhov’s self-defined goal in writing was to portray undistorted truth, and this recurring pessimism has troubled me all throughout reading – was Chekhov simply a more depressed, pessimistic person who saw reality as truly depressing and not neutral, or was he more getting at how easy it is for people to focus on the negatives of life so much that even neutral, uninteresting events become tinted with negativity? Reading these unhappy, blue stories is sobering, and unlike traditional tragedies, I didn’t experience a feel-good superiority over the poor characters, but rather I felt sad alongside them. I wouldn’t want to spend too much time reading those stories because they would make me depressed, but from an aesthetic viewpoint, the sadder stories did touch my heart.
% grep -i "selected short stories" quotes.txt8 matches
on knowledge
“A bird’s given two wings, not four, because it can fly with two; so a man’s not given to know everything, but only a half or a quarter. As much as he needs to know in order to live, so much he knows”
— (the old man), Anton Chekhov, In the Ravine
on unhappiness
“The happy man feels good only because the unhappy bear their burden silently. At the door of every contented, happy man somebody should stand with a little hammer, constantly tapping, to remind him that unhappy people exist, that however happy he may be, sooner or later life will show him its claws, some calamity will befall him – illness, poverty, loss – and nobody will hear or see, just as he doesn’t hear or see others now. But there is nobody with a little hammer, the happy man lives on, and the petty cares of life only stir him slightly, as wind stirs an aspen – and everything is fine”
— (Ivan Ivanovich), Anton Chekhov, Gooseberries
on imagination
“I [the phantasm] exist in your imagination, and your imagination is part of nature, which means that I, too, exist in nature”
— (The Black Monk), Anton Chekhov, The Black Monk
on fate
“That I am a doctor and you are a mental patient has no morality or logic in it – it’s a matter of pure chance”
— (Yefimych), Anton Chekhov, Ward No. 6
on fate
“It had to be that the strong hinder the life of the weak, such was the law of nature, but this thought could be clearly and easily formulated only in a newspaper article or a textbook, while in the mishmash that is everyday life, in the tangle of all the trifles of which human relations are woven, it was not a law but a logical incongruity, when strong and weak alike fell victim to their mutual relations, inadvertently obeying some controlling power, unknown, extraneous to life, alien to man”
— (Korolev), Anton Chekhov, A Medical Case
on genius
“How lucky Buddha and Mohammed and Shakespeare were that their kind relations and doctors did not treat them for ecstasy and inspiration! If Mohammed had taken potassium bromide for his nerves, worked only two hours a day, and drunk milk, there would have been as little left after this remarkable man as after his dog”
— (Kovrin), Anton Chekhov, The Black Monk
on illusion of progress
“Among scientists, writers, and artists, work is at the boil, the comforts of life increase every day thanks to them, bodily needs multiply, and man still remains the most predatory and slovenly of animals, and the tendency in the majority of mankind is toward degeneration and the permanent loss of all vitality”
— (the artist), Anton Chekhov, The House with the Mezzanine
on time
“The past, he thought, is connected with the present in an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of the other. He touched one end, and the other moved”
— Anton Chekhov, The Student