Find today’s 2453 word story here: http://www.chekhovshorts.com/stories/130.html

Travis review:

A woman’s wrath is eternal. At least that is the moral of today’s story as told by a sportsman reflecting on his actions when he was a bratty, petulant kid. It is funny that the tales starts with sportmen spending the night in peasant’s hut, exhausting topics “…about dogs, about women, about first love, and about snipe.” The narrator of the tale still has a bit of his youthful cockiness in him as he starts out his story like a challenge or a brag “It is nothing much to be loved; the ladies are created for the purpose of loving us men. But, tell me, has any one of you fellows been hated — passionately, furiously hated? Has any one of you watched the ecstasies of hatred? Eh?” (A real ladies’ man, right?) Through the rest of story, we watch a lovely young tutor squirm under to torturing thumb of an adolescent bully empowered by a secret. It helps that the man tells the story in retrospect with bits of reflective guilt. Without that it would be easy to just hate the kid and vice-like grip the wealthy have over the poor. Overall things worked out for Zinotchka as she wed her love, the narrator’s brother, but the humiliation she bore from her former pupil is a scar that will never fully heal.

Rating: 5