The Schoolmistress, and other stories

Tales of Chekhov #9

by Anton Chekhov

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The Schoolmistress and Other Stories (1920)

1. The Schoolmistress
2. A Nervous Breakdown
3. Misery
4. Champagne
5. After the Theatre
6. A Lady's Story
7. In Exile
8. The Cattle Dealers
9. Sorrow
10. On Official Duty
11. The First-Class Passenger
12. A Tragic Actor
13. A Transgression
14. Small Fry
15. The Requiem
16. In the Coach-House
17. Panic Fears
18. The Bet
19. The Head Gardener's Story
20. The Beauties
21. The Shoemaker and the Devil

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Classics, Russia, Literature, Classic Literature, Russian Literature

166 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 31, 1921

About the author

Antón Chéjov (Spanish)

Dramas, such as The Seagull (1896, revised 1898), and including "A Dreary Story" (1889) of Russian writer Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, also Chekov, concern the inability of humans to communicate.

Born ( Антон Павлович Чехов ) in the small southern seaport of Taganrog, the son of a grocer. His grandfather, a serf, bought his own freedom and that of his three sons in 1841. He also taught to read. A cloth merchant fathered Yevgenia Morozova, his mother.

"When I think back on my childhood," Chekhov recalled, "it all seems quite gloomy to me." Tyranny of his father, religious fanaticism, and long nights in the store, open from five in the morning till midnight, shadowed his early years. He attended a school for Greek boys in Taganrog from 1867 to 1868 and then Taganrog grammar school. Bankruptcy of his father compelled the family to move to Moscow. At the age of 16 years in 1876, independent Chekhov for some time alone in his native town supported through private tutoring.

In 1879, Chekhov left grammar school and entered the university medical school at Moscow. In the school, he began to publish hundreds of short comics to support his mother, sisters and brothers. Nicholas Leikin published him at this period and owned Oskolki (splinters), the journal of Saint Petersburg. His subjected silly social situations, marital problems, and farcical encounters among husbands, wives, mistresses, and lust; even after his marriage, Chekhov, the shy author, knew not much of whims of young women.

Nenunzhaya pobeda , first novel of Chekhov, set in 1882 in Hungary, parodied the novels of the popular Mór Jókai. People also mocked ideological optimism of Jókai as a politician.

Chekhov graduated in 1884 and practiced medicine. He worked from 1885 in Peterburskaia gazeta.

In 1886, Chekhov met H.S. Suvorin, who invited him, a regular contributor, to work for Novoe vremya, the daily paper of Saint Petersburg. He gained a wide fame before 1886. He authored The Shooting Party , his second full-length novel, later translated into English. Agatha Christie used its characters and atmosphere in later her mystery novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd . First book of Chekhov in 1886 succeeded, and he gradually committed full time. The refusal of the author to join the ranks of social critics arose the wrath of liberal and radical intelligentsia, who criticized him for dealing with serious social and moral questions but avoiding giving answers. Such leaders as Leo Tolstoy and Nikolai Leskov, however, defended him. "I'm not a liberal, or a conservative, or a gradualist, or a monk, or an indifferentist. I should like to be a free artist and that's all..." Chekhov said in 1888.

The failure of The Wood Demon , play in 1889, and problems with novel made Chekhov to withdraw from literature for a period. In 1890, he traveled across Siberia to Sakhalin, remote prison island. He conducted a detailed census of ten thousand convicts and settlers, condemned to live on that harsh island. Chekhov expected to use the results of his research for his doctoral dissertation. Hard conditions on the island probably also weakened his own physical condition. From this journey came his famous travel book.

Chekhov practiced medicine until 1892. During these years, Chechov developed his concept of the dispassionate, non-judgmental author. He outlined his program in a letter to his brother Aleksandr: "1. Absence of lengthy verbiage of political-social-economic nature; 2. total objectivity; 3. truthful descriptions of persons and objects; 4. extreme brevity; 5. audacity and originality; flee the stereotype; 6. compassion." Because he objected that the paper conducted against [a:Alfred Dreyfu

Reviews

[Illiterate · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of Chekhov’s shorter shorts. My favorites are Misery and Requiem.

[Paola Adelina · Rating 5 out of 5]

considered a russian literature master for a reason (in the cart)

[Realini Ionescu · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Schoolmistress and Other Stories by Anton Chekhov

10 out of 10





The short stories of Anton Chekhov are extraordinary in so many ways, but one aspect that is mesmerizing is the fact that they are so accessible – in that readers can at least get some of the messages, if not all the layers and hidden significations – and at the same time so sophisticated and take on so much of what we meet in real life – and they are representative of the age of Anton Chekhov, but as all magnum opera, they have echoes and seem so accurate for the present and surely the future eras – but there are questions of philosophy, morality, the meaning of life, such as we have in this miraculous tale, where the protagonist, The Schoolmistress aka Maria Vasilyevna, has to wonder about her role, the hard life she is living, paid only 21 rubles, although local folks consider her grossly overpaid: "5 rubles would be more than enough"…she has lost her family, when her parents had died, she has continued a correspondence with her brother, until the latter would abandon it…



Albeit much has changed, there are some traits that seem eternal, at least in Russia and places where it has had influence, she has invaded and brought on communism – like in our lands, alas – the mud is still present in many places, the roads have improved, but they still are a nightmare, as the car cameras keep showing and then there is the massive corruption problem – recently, they have had the scandal of the Putin palace, which Navalny has posted on the internet, attracting tens of millions of viewers – probably more than one hundred million in the meantime – the state being actually kidnapped by a brutal tyrant and his cabal of oligarchs, the latter allowed to keep immense wealth, accumulated through illegal, crooked deals, getting huge properties from the state for peanuts, if they share that benefit with the officials and they keep out of politics – unless of course they sponsor the party of Putin, as exposed in the book by Victor Pelevin, The Sacred Book of the Werewolf http://realini.blogspot.com/2021/02/t... where we see how modern day Russia functions…this short story has also been translated as In The Cart

‘For thirteen years she had been schoolmistress, and there was no reckoning how many times during all those years she had been to the town for her salary; and whether it were spring as now, or a rainy autumn evening, or winter, it was all the same to her, and she always — invariably — longed for one thing only, to get to the end of her journey as quickly as could be…She felt as though she had been living in that part of the country for ages and ages, for a hundred years, and it seemed to her that she knew every stone, every tree on the road from the town to her school…Her past was here, her present was here, and she could imagine no other future than the school, the road to the town and back again, and again the school and again the road’…the thought that comes to my mind s that I would prefer a Panglossian attitude any day now, as in ‘all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds’ as expressed in Candide by Voltaire http://realini.blogspot.com/2014/12/c...



Still, The Schoolmistress has all the reasons in the world to be depressed, at a loss and absolutely overwhelmed by the position she is in, with a ridiculous pay – and the conviction of the community that she is getting much more than she deserves and she gets money on the side – out of Moscow, where she had lived with her family, until her parents died, and thus on a down spiral, having had the opportunity to know a better life, which is worse than if she had been born in the country, in poverty, without knowing a better life – no prospects, aged before her time and therefore unable to envisage a different future – indeed, one of the happiness rules would invite us to Imagine the Best Possible Future and what would that be in the case of the heroine – when she meets with a neighboring landowner, Hanov, there is quite a lot that they would have in common, only she is in such a state of despair now…



True, they belong to two different classes now and as it is stated in the immensely popular Capital in the twenty first century by the celebrity economist Thomas Pickerty, if two people were in different classes, there was absolutely no chance for them to get together and thus Pride and Prejudice would have been impossible in real life…yet Hanov is different, he had been an examiner at her school ‘and was exceedingly courteous and delicate, giving nothing but the highest marks…Marya Vassilyevna was filled with dread and pity for this man going to his ruin for no visible cause or reason, and it came into her mind that if she had been his wife or sister she would have devoted her whole life to saving him from ruin…His wife…Life was so ordered that here he was living in his great house alone, and she was living in a God-forsaken village alone, and yet for some reason the mere thought that he and she might be close to one another and equals seemed impossible and absurd…In reality, life was arranged and human relations were complicated so utterly beyond all understanding that when one thought about it one felt uncanny and one’s heart sank…’

There are many problems that this Schoolmistress has, the poverty is so insidious and pervasive that she has to fight for the meager salary, for the wood they have to burn in the school, she has to answer to primitive, illiterate men that control the activity of the school, because the system is corrupt and instead of eliminating such vileness, it is promoting it – alas, this is the case today and we can think of the Navalny poisoning and then his arrest, and the Magnitsky case – which has brought about a law in the meantime to punish corrupt officials, but in the USA, not in Russia – wherein the lawyer Magnitsky had alerted the authorities about some serious corruption, only to be punished by the mafia state and eventually killed.



One other major issue that The Schoolmistress has is the fact that she ‘had become a schoolmistress from necessity, without feeling any vocation for it’ and we should all avoid that plight, by finding our calling and trying to make it our job – you do that by identifying what you like, what you are good at and what has meaning for you and then you intersect the three groups and what results from this operation is the group of activities, portfolios, jobs that you should look at, for if you do that, then you get paid to do what you love or like for nearly the rest of your life, as opposed to getting to work with reluctance and waiting for five o’clock to get home…

Ideally, there would be Flow in this activity as explained by one of the fathers of positive psychology, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in his masterpiece, Flow http://realini.blogspot.com/2016/10/f... and teaching would be one of the most Flow-prone activities, if the professor has a calling…at the other end, there are jobs that require a negative mindset – and it induces one, as in lawyering…in the US, this is the one activity with the highest rates of depression, suicide and divorce rates – and among them you have detectives, traffic controllers, financial analysts, because being positive gives one a better big picture, but it is those with a negative inclination that see the details better… https://www.thefreshreads.com/in-the-...

[Eirin · Rating 2 out of 5]

The start of the collection was a bit boring and slow. It was okay, but not really terribly exciting. Around the midpoint the stories started getting more interesting however, and I was enjoying my reading. I liked "In the Coach-House" and "The Head Gardener's Story". My favourite was "The Bet", about a man who as a bet agrees to be locked up in solitary confinement for fifteen years. Then came the penultimate story, and I was simply annoyed.

"The Beauties": Such an in-depth exercise in the male gaze I have rarely seen. The whole story is dedicated to scores of men, young and old, oogling at two girls. They literally gather about the girls (16 and 17 years of age, while the men are everything from 17 to 70...) and staring just because they are pretty. They regard them as if they were works of art or other inanimate objects, simply there to be admired, stared at, and desired.

I am disappointed because up to then Chekov has included several much more nuanced depictions of women. I hesitate to call them "good", because he is clearly writing in a time that does have a certain viewpoint of women and he is affected by that. Still, they are decidedly not one-sided or dismissive, as a lot of the literature throughout history has treated women. So I was hoping that the "The Beauties" would show some nuance, some action on part of the women, anything that breaks them away from being simple objects for the pleasure of the male gaze. Nope. They are oogled and desired, and then the men are forced to leave, and stop staring at them, and sulk because they can't have the pretty lady for themselves. Great story...

[Marie (UK) · Rating 1 out of 5]

it is hard to describe Checkhov as drivel but these stories are memorable only in their dreariness. Dismal tales of dismal lives all similarly lacking a beginning, middle or end. They tell no moral (except maybe the last) and do not draw the reader in. Out of the book 2 were Ok "Misery" which was miserable but at least understandably so and the first class passenger which must have been there to inject a lighter note.

People keep telling me that short stories are excellent but hell i wish i could see why. I have yet to read a short story collection that captures my imagination.

I expect Chekhov is turning in his grave reading this - well so he should - thank God it was free on Kindle

[Diane · Rating 2 out of 5]

Did the editors gather the most depressing stories and put them all together in this volume?

[Stevie · Rating 3 out of 5]

We had to choose a story to analyze for a class and my group choose the schoolmistress by anton chekhov. it was extremely well written, it showed the struggles of a woman who yearned for a life better than hers, she also struggled with teaching not being her calling, which happens to a lot of people. People get into a 9-5 job and feel trapped for many reasons, socioeconomic status, they feel they are running out of time with life and that it would be easier to just stay with the same job which leads to feelings of isolation and loneliness similar to the feeling the main character portrayed

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I haven't really read the whole book, just the first story so far. My thoughts are here: https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/06/13/t...

[Nikki Norell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Välskrivna noveller om mänskliga problem och situationer.

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tales of ordinary people in ordinary circumstances that explore their behavior. Some great stories, the rest are very good.

[Jon Mountjoy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Twenty-one lovely short stories that (incidentally) paint a vivid picture of life in Russia. While I enjoyed the book and the stories, they lacked that something that would tip me over into wildly enthusiastic must-read territory.

They really are vivid - I feel I have a much better picture of, say, the Russian winter now; the coldness, the bitterness, the isolation - but also of some of the characters, like the eponymous schoolmistress.

However, I found many of the stories didn't deliver anything to me except for a short segment of life. Some, like the The Head-Gardener's Story, obviously tried to say something - they had an obvious start and an obvious end. Others, like After the Theatre or A Nervous Breakdown require interpretation - the author's trying to tell me something, but really, I struggle to find it. The story doesn't really have an ending for ending sake, but rather the story appears to instead just be a vessel to contain an idea. At least, that's what my brain tells me at 3:10 in the morning while I write this review.

[Klissia]

Nunca me interessei em Chekhov mesmo sendo um dos principais escritores do panteão russo de 1800.. Por causa de Bunin que era um dos seus maiores admiradores,agora estou lendo seus contos e vejo a influência deste na sua escrita, gostei. Algo que ecoa de uma Rússia do passado,limiar de realismo melancólico e humano nas "alamedas escuras" da vida.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Now, THIS is a translation worth its salt--Constance Garnett reveals the kind of ragingly deep simplicity that I always admired Chekhov for--I may have to track down the entirety of this Ecco Press series.

[Kim · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good to very good mix of classic Russian short stories.

[Leah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some stories I liked and some I didn't. It was my first time going through Chekhov and I enjoyed more than I thought I would.

[Georgina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully evocative stories that take you to another world. Chekhov - what can one say? He is Chekhov. The Great.

[Maria Ettlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting view into lifes of russian people from the old days.

[Karen S · Rating 3 out of 5]

I felt like something was lost in the translation or in cultural differences for many of the stories. However, some were very moving, especially the title story.