The Schoolmistress, and Other Stories
1921
Chekhov's genius lies in what he doesn't say. In these twenty-one stories, he captures the precise moment when ordinary life cracks open to reveal something raw and true: a teacher's weariness on a long road home, a man shouting his sorrow to a horse, the impossible distance between what we desire and what we possess. His characters occupy the margins of society, yet their inner lives contain universes. A schoolmistress meets a landowner and feels the absurdity of her existence; a prisoner waits for execution that may never come; a lady returns from the theatre and cannot speak. Chekhov finds devastation in monotony, comedy in despair, and beauty where no one thought to look. These are stories that teach you how to read silence. They linger like the memory of someone you loved but never told.
Editions
X-Ray
“And no one thought her attractive, and life was passing drearily, without affection, without friendly sympathy, without interesting acquaintances. How awful it would have been in her position if she had fallen in love!””
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
“He had lived hitherto in unruffled calm, as though in drunken half-consciousness, knowing neither grief nor joy, and now he was suddenly aware of a dreadful pain in his heart. The careless idler and drunkard found himself quite suddenly in the position of a busy man, weighed down by anxieties and haste, and even struggling with nature.””
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
“He prattled on mechanically to get a little relief from his depressing feelings.””
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
“There is no wall that cannot be broken through, but the heroes of the modern romance, so far as I know them, are too timid, spiritless, lazy, and oversensitive, and are too ready to resign themselves to the thought that they are doomed to failure, that personal life has disappointed them; instead of struggling they merely criticize, calling the world vulgar and forgetting that their criticism passes little by little into vulgarity.””
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
“but he had a peculiar talent”
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
“There is vice," he thought, "but neither consciousness of sin nor hope of salvation.””
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
“He went out of the restaurant laughing. He liked his friends”
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
“In reality, life was arranged and human relations were complicated so utterly beyond all understanding that when one thought about it one felt uncanny and one's heart sank.””
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
