Reviews for Stories of Anton Chekhov

The average rating for Stories of Anton Chekhov based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-10-16 00:00:00 Eric Locher There are thirty-four stories by the master in this volume and I might write about every single one in the book - they're all like pearls: some just a little bit bigger and some just a little bit smaller… Vanka Zhukov, a nine-year-old boy, sent three months earlier to be apprenticed to the shoemaker Aliakhin, did not go to bed on Christmas eve. He waited till master and apprentices went to church, then took a bottle of ink and a pen with a rusty nib from the master's cupboard, spread out a rumpled sheet of paper in front of him, and began to write. Before tracing the first letter, he looked fearfully several times at the doors and windows, cast a sidelong glance at the dark icon, surrounded on both sides by long shelves of shoe lasts, and heaved a choking sigh. The paper lay on a bench, and he himself knelt down by the bench. "Dear grandpa, Konstantin Makarych!" he wrote. "So I'm writing you a letter. I wish you a Merry Christmas and all good things from the Lord God. I have no father or mother, you are the only one I have left." The stories are sad and they are funny… They are full of laughter and they are full of tears… "And yesterday they gave me what-for. The master dragged me out to the yard by the hair and thrashed me with a belt, because I was rocking their baby in the cradle and accidentally fell asleep. And last week the mistress told me to clean a herring, and I started with the tail, so she took the herring and began shoving its head into my mug…" The tales are sweet and they are bitter. The tales are bittersweet. The compassion is blended with irony and misery is mixed with hilarity… In the evening, while we were having tea, the cook served a full plate of gooseberries. They weren't bought, they were his own gooseberries, the first picked since the bushes were planted. Nikolai Ivanych laughed and gazed silently at the gooseberries for a moment with tears in his eyes - he couldn't speak for excitement; then he put one berry in his mouth, glanced at me with the triumph of a child who has finally gotten his favorite toy… Humans are quite different - some wish for the stars in their pockets and for some a plateful of gooseberries is enough…

Review # 2 was written on 2017-03-28 00:00:00 Tyshaunai Felder If a writer who told the stories of ordinary people like you and me, using only few pages, in the 1800s can make us read him in this day and age, he is a true master. Whenever you feel like you are stuck in the world of fantasies, super natural stories and average romance novels, go to Chekhov. He will bring you back to reality.