#196 On Official Duty

Find today’s 6647 word story here:  http://www.chekhovshorts.com/stories/196.html Travis review: I found today’s story about officials traveling to investigate a suicide and the distractions that follow interesting from the standpoint of naming schemes. There are 3 L prominent names: Loshadin (the village constable), Lesnitsky (the dead insurance agent) and Lyzhin (the examining magistrate who the reader …

#165 Nieghbors

Find the 7618 word story here: http://www.chekhovshorts.com/stories/165.html Travis review: Chekhov starts this story with an immediate dilemma: aristocrat Pyotr Mihalitch’s younger sister, Zina, has run away to live with their neighbor Vlassitch, a married man. Pytor feels obligated to do something as his mother is bed-stricken with shame, yet conflict is not in his nature. …

#162 The Grasshopper

Find today’s 9,960 word here: http://www.chekhovshorts.com/stories/162.html Travis review: I wonder if Chekhov wrote this story thinking about contradiction or at least a conflict within himself by being both a doctor/man of scientist and a writer/artist. The married couple are named Osip and Olga, both four letter names that start with the letter O. Osip is “a …

#129 In the Coach-House

Find today’s 2349 word story here: http://www.chekhovshorts.com/stories/129.html. Travis review: Chekhov has a great methods of telling stories. In this case, a wealthy man is dying via a self inflicted gunshot to the head. We could have seen the story from the grieving wife or the hopeless doctors trying to save him or even the man …

#120 Volodya

Find today’s 5141 word story here: http://www.chekhovshorts.com/stories/120.html Travis review:  This may be one of Chekhov’s darkest stories. It drips with gloomy teenage male angst and ends with a bang. Volodya, “a plain, shy, sickly-looking lad of seventeen,” is uncomfortable in this world. He lives with his vain and superficial mother. The family’s fortune has been squandered by her …

#118 The Examining Magistrate

Find today’s story here: http://www.chekhovshorts.com/stories/118.html An examining magistrate tells a true story about a woman, who in the prime of her health successfully predicts her own death. The structure unfolds like a mystery, as the majority of the story details the woman’s life starting from the point that she made her prediction: “Directly after my confinement. …

#090 Excellent People

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 …

#052 A Story Without An End

Find today’s 3373 word story here: http://www.chekhovshorts.com/stories/052.html Travis Review Today’s story, like yesterday’s, starts off very Poesque with macabre atmosphere, dark rooms with flickering candle light, images of death and melancholy, and in this case, a suicide attempt. The story is also told in first person, which Chekhov doesn’t write in much (but Poe does.) After …

#033 A Dead Body

Find today’s 1887 word story here: http://www.chekhovshorts.com/stories/033.html Travis Review: Today’s story, has two men “performing one of the most disagreeable and uninviting of peasants’ duties.” They are in the woods freezing and watching over a corpse. One is young and other is an old simpleton with a “goat beard.” The young man humiliates his companion’s intelligence, which seem to …