Find today’s 2263 word story, the first from 1887. http://www.chekhovshorts.com/stories/097.html Travis Review: Today’s story has both a title and a subtitle which Chekhov rarely has done. The story, told in first person, delves into an area of superstition I had never heard of before: dropping a bottle of champagne on New Year’s eve brings bad luck …
Find the last story from 1886 that we’ll read here: http://www.chekhovshorts.com/stories/096.html It comes in at 6669 words (including a poem.) Travis Review Today’s story felt like a Dostoyevsky tale. It features Liharev, a passionate, unhappy man whose unanchored soul craves to travel, learn, and experience as much as possible even though he knows it will put …
Find today’s 1654 word story here: http://www.chekhovshorts.com/stories/095.html Travis Review: Today’s story is a heartbreaking tale of an orphaned nine year old boy that is worthy of Dickens. Vanka writes a letter to his grandfather. The story vacillates between the boy writing about his awful experiences a shoemaker’s apprentice and memories of his grandfather and the …
Find today’s 1419 word story here: http://www.chekhovshorts.com/stories/094.html Travis Review: I believe that today’s story is more an indictment against Latin instructors than tale of animal cruelty. Since Steve has taken Latin, I’ll let him confirm or deny whether all Latin instructors are as merciless as Pyotr Demyanitch. I also don’t remember if in any other stories, …
You can find today’s 1585 word story here: http://www.chekhovshorts.com/stories/093.html Travis Review: Today’s comic tale is similar to the journey of an American fruitcake. Specifically, it’s a gift to give that nobody wants and so it passed for another to another. In every situation, it is funny how the work of art is forced upon the recipient and …
Find today’s 1269 word story here: http://www.chekhovshorts.com/stories/092.html Travis Review: Because Grigory Petrovitch Zapoikin “possesses a rare talent for impromptu speechifying“, he is called upon to give a speech at funeral. Chekhov sets the comic tone for the story when he mentions that the deceased “had died of the two afflictions so widely spread in our country, a bad …
Find today’s 1910 word story here: http://www.chekhovshorts.com/stories/091.html Travis review: We have another story with children protagonists, and like most of the other tales, the kids learn a lesson about the adult world. In this case the lesson is about death and the callousness of adults. The brother and sister wake up to discover that the …
Find today’s 4049 word story here: http://www.chekhovshorts.com/stories/090.html Travis Review I didn’t care for this story. It was long and uninteresting, following the lives of a reclusive literary critic and his sister as they go through their routines and then their fight about non-resistance to evil and the worthless of reviewing old literature. (I guess we’re …
Find today’s 7,198 word story here: http://www.chekhovshorts.com/stories/087.html Travis Review: It feels like Chekhov took a temptress out of a fairy tale and added a pair of cousins who go up to visit her mansion separately. While there are elements that feel the a little fantastical, the rest of the story is grounded in the psychological way …
Find today’s 3148 word story here http://www.chekhovshorts.com/stories/084.html Travis Review: (Note: this is a quick review as I’ve fallen behind on many things this weekend.) A father and son who bear the same temperaments, collide in today’s story. The entire family seems terrified of the father, Shiryaev. When the oldest son, Pytor, at the prompting of …