The Lottery Ticket
IVAN DMITRITCH,
a middle-class man who lived with his family on an income of twelve hundred a
year and was very well satisfied with his lot, sat down on the sofa after
supper and began reading the newspaper.
Showing posts with label Chekhov. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chekhov. Show all posts
Monday, March 2, 2026
Sunday, December 7, 2025
Chekhov / From Russia, with love
From Russia, with love
On the centenary of Anton Chekhov's death, Rosamund Bartlett, author of Chekhov: Scenes From a Life, explains why the work of a Russian writer who died a century ago continues to resonate so strongly with us today
Chekhov, photographed in Melikhovo in 1897
Wednesday, December 3, 2025
Anton Chekhov / My Life
“Perhaps I was not living as I ought.”
Renowned as the greatest short story writer ever, Anton Chekhov was also a master of the novella, and perhaps his most overlooked is this gem, My Life—the tale of a rebellious young man so disgusted with bourgeois society that he drops out to live amongst the working classes, only to find himself confronted by the morally and mentally deadening effects of provincialism.
Chekhov / The Requiem
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The Requiem
IN the village church of Verhny Zaprudy mass was
just over. The people had begun moving and were trooping out of church. The
only one who did not move was Andrey Andreyitch, a shopkeeper and old
inhabitant of Verhny Zaprudy. He stood waiting, with his elbows on the railing
of the right choir. His fat and shaven face, covered with indentations left by
pimples, expressed on this occasion two contradictory feelings: resignation in
the face of inevitable destiny, and stupid, unbounded disdain for the smocks and
striped kerchiefs passing by him. As it was Sunday, he was dressed like a
dandy. He wore a long cloth overcoat with yellow bone buttons, blue trousers
not thrust into his boots, and sturdy goloshes — the huge clumsy goloshes only
seen on the feet of practical and prudent persons of firm religious
convictions.
Friday, September 8, 2023
Secrets, lies and a child: William Boyd on the truth behind Chekhov’s marriage
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| Anton Chekhov with his wife Olga Knipper. |
Secrets, lies and a child: William Boyd on the truth behind Chekhov’s marriage
In 1902, as he pondered The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekhov had another question on his mind: who was the father of his wife’s unborn child?
William Boyd
Monday 20 August 2018
O
n 25 May 1901, Anton Chekhov, aged 41, married the actor Olga Knipper, eight years his junior. The marriage provoked great surprise and consternation among his friends and family. In Russia at the time, Chekhov was as famous a writer as Tolstoy and, in addition, a passionate and amorous man who had enjoyed more than 30 love affairs. He was also a regular visitor to brothels. And, even more significantly, he was the ultimate commitment-phobe. Many women had fallen in love with him and wanted to marry him but he always quickly backed away. Then suddenly, clandestinely, he married.
William Boyd on Writers Who Inspired Him
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| William Boyd |
William Boyd on Writers Who Inspired Him
The novelist William Boyd tells us about the authors, from Chekhov to Heller, who most influenced his own development as a writer – and reveals the secret to a well-crafted sex scene
After writing 17 novels, do you feel as inspired now as you did 20 or 30 years ago?
Yes, I do actually. Funnily enough, I feel in the last three of four years a new surge of energy. I don’t know whether it’s because I’m getting older, but I actually feel I’m working harder than I’ve worked ever before in my life. I seem to have so many things on. It’s not by any great intent, it’s just the way things have panned out. I can’t write for as long as I used to. I used to write for five hours a day and now I’m down to about three. But I do feel very creatively energised as I approach my 60th birthday, which is reassuring. It’s strange how these things happen. It’s not just new novels, I’m also writing short stories and for film and television. I feel very busy and I enjoy that. I don’t feel under any pressure so obviously the brain is still working well.
Anton Chekhov / A lifetime of lovers
Anton Chekhov: a lifetime of lovers
Chekhov's love life was complicated and very busy – he had no wish to settle down. William Boyd believes one short story reveals much about the Russian's sexual liaisons, so he wrote a play based on it
In his full, unfettered pomp ... Chekhov, photographed by his brother in 1891. Photograph: akg-images
I keep a photograph of Anton Chekhov on my mantelpiece. It's such an informal shot that it looks surprisingly modern. Chekhov appears to be sitting at a cluttered desk or a table, resting his head on his left hand. His thick hair is tousled and uncombed and his eyes look a little tired. You feel he might be about to say to the photographer, "Get a bloody move on, will you?" And indeed it's quite possible that he could have uttered such words, as we know that the photographer was his older brother, Alexander, a fact that probably explains the easy, unposed nature of the snapshot.
Wednesday, November 2, 2022
Kashtanka by Anton Chekhov
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| Ilustration by Ofra Amit |
Kashtanka
by Anton Chekhov
IMisbehaviour
A YOUNG dog, a reddish mongrel, between a dachshund and a "yard-dog," very like a fox in face, was running up and down the pavement looking uneasily from side to side. From time to time she stopped and, whining and lifting first one chilled paw and then another, tried to make up her mind how it could have happened that she was lost.
Top 10 dogs' stories
Top 10 dogs' stories
Heartbreaking tales of love, devotion, innocence – and philosophy. From Homer to Kafka, these works show humanity intimately observed by its best friend
Jill Ciment
Wednesday 26 August 2015
Man created dog, or dog created man, about 30,000 years ago somewhere in east Asia. Dogs witnessed us when we were still part very much part of the animal kingdom, marginal creatures foraging for a living, before we had stone tools, before we mastered agriculture, invented money, built cities, and polluted the earth. Dogs are like a first lover who knew us when: they know where we really come from, and who we really are.
They have shared our hearths and meals and affections for longer than any other animal. A 12,000-year-old grave in Israel contains the skeleton of a woman holding the skeleton of a puppy. We have even shared death with them. How could they not make their way into our imaginations?
While dogs have been bearing witness to our behaviour for 30,000 years, we have also been closely observing them. We are their first loves, too. We knew them when they were still wolves, before they tasted kibble, had their nails trimmed and their teeth brushed.
In my novel, Heroic Measures, one of the points of view belongs to Dorothy, a 12-year-old dachshund who stands 12 inches tall and weighs 10lb 2oz. Entering her consciousness seemed no different to me as a writer than visiting the minds of the older couple, Ruth and Alex, who have been Dorothy’s family since she was eight weeks old. Dorothy’s character is as idiosyncratic and individual as any human I have created.
Here are 10 favourite narratives told from a dog’s point of view.
1. The Odyssey by Homer
Argos, Odysseus’s loyal hound, is one of the first dogs in western literature. After waiting 20 years for his master’s return, Argos must make a most painful decision. He realises that Odysseus is in disguise. If he greets his master, or if his master acknowledges him, Odysseus will be in mortal danger. Argos has to accept that after two decades of longing for this moment, he will only be rewarded with a glimpse of the man he loves.
2. The Call of the Wild by Jack London
All of London’s dog novels hark back to the courting stage of man and wolf, when we were still both beasts. London’s plots are really love stories - two wary beings learn to trust each other and fall in love. Buck, a huge St Bernard/shepherd mix, is kidnapped from his comfortable middle-class home, sold into bondage, and escapes. In the Alaskan wilderness, he discovers the bestial instinct within himself. Only late in life does Buck fall in love with a man, John Thornton, who saves his life. When he loses John to an Indian’s arrow, he returns to the wild and joins a wolf pack. London intends for Buck’s howl, “the song of the pack”, to be a dirge.
3.
3.The Diary of a Madman by Nikolai Gogol
Poprishchin, a lowly clerk infatuated with his supervisor’s beautiful daughter, keeps a diary as he sinks into madness. He begins to suspect that his dog, Fidel, is having an affair with her dog, Meggy, and exchanging love letters. The first epistolary dog’s tale.
4.
4. Kashtanka by Anton Chekhov
Narrated from the point of view of a dachshund mix, and presented as a children’s tale, this is a horrifying story of a beaten dog who joins the circus only to return to her original cruel master because she feels more comfortable being kicked than loved. Janet Malcolm, in her book, Reading Chekhov, writes that Kashtanka might be the great man’s most autobiographical story.
Sharik, a stray, finds himself adopted by a successful surgeon and thinks he has entered earthly paradise, only to discover that the doctor’s real intentions are to perform medical experiments on him. During one procedure, the doctor attaches a pair of human testicles to Sharik. To the doctor’s delight and the dog’s astonishment, Sharik transmogrifies into a primitive man. But though he looks like a man …
The erudite dog who narrates this meditation on the origins of nourishment believes himself to be not “different from any other dog”, and yet he asks if it is possible for a creature to be “more unfortunate still” than he is. Kafka, like Plato, believed that the dog is the most philosophical beast in the world.
At the end of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, the insect-being that had been the man Gregor dies, much to the relief of his family who never reconciled with his horridness. Our narrator in Investigations of a Dog summits on the point of isolation and silence and never really descends. Kafka seems to be saying that knowledge unshared distances us from one another as much as it enlightens.
His biographer Elias Canetti writes:
"The uniqueness of his work, in which emotions hardly appear, though literature otherwise swarms with them, volubly and chaotically. If one thinks about it with a little courage, our world has indeed become one in which fear and indifference predominate. Expressing his own reality without indulgence, Kafka was the first to present the image of this world."
7. So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell
10. Unleashed: Poems by Writers’ Dogs. Edited by Amy Hempel and Jim Shepard
A shot rings out on a farm in rural Illinois – one neighbour has murdered another. Late in the novel, Maxwell allows the murderer’s dog a point of view. The dog has witnessed her human in his most heinous state, but of course she never passes judgment on him.
8.
8. Her Dog by Tobias Wolff
A grieving man, Joe, is walking Victor, his dead wife’s dog, when they are approached by an aggressive dog twice Victor’s size. The man scares off the mongrel and Victor thinks: “What devotion! Almost canine.” But safe once again, Victor remembers that Joe never wanted him. If not for the wife, Victor would still be in the pound. In a moment of doggy insight, Victor tells Joe that he loved his dead mistress more than Joe loved his dead wife.
King, the dog and guardian of a homeless couple, narrates this story dramatising 24 hours of precarious survival on a scrap heap somewhere near a motorway in France. The term “dog-eat-dog society” has never been more cleanly defined.
The title says it all. A wonderful collection of doggerel. Disclaimer: Sadie, the dachshund whom my character, Dorothy, was based on, has a poem in it.
THE GUARDIAN
Wednesday, March 23, 2022
Books and writers / Chekhov
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| Anton Chekhov |
Anton Chekhov
(1860 - 1904)
Russian playwright and one of the great masters of modern short story. In his work Chekhov combined the dispassionate attitude of a scientist and doctor with the sensitivity and psychological understanding of an artist. Chekhov portrayed often life in the Russian small towns, where tragic events occur in a minor key, as a part of everyday texture of life. His characters are passive by-standers in regard to their lives, filled with the feeling of hopelessness and the fruitlessness of all efforts. "What difference does it make?" says Chebutykin in Three Sisters.
Saturday, February 5, 2022
The joy of small things / Chekhov and Georgia O'Keeffe loved autumn leaves, and so do I
 Autumn Leaves, Lake George, 1924 |
| Georgia O'Keeffe |
The joy of small things
Chekhov and Georgia O'Keeffe loved autumn leaves, and so do I
Their colour provides solace as we struggle to adjust from summer to darker nights and rain
Friday 15 November 2019
T
he colours of autumn are abundant: the cool blue of the sky, the silver frost on the grass, the fuchsia of an early sunset. But the true riches are the leaves. The deep reds; the fierce oranges. The ochre of those curled at the edges. The shrivelled ones; the pale yellow of fading bruises. The combination of these colours against those crisp skies is majestic.
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