Status Updates From The Complete Short Novels

For “The Story of an Unknown Man” Chekhov does away with all the grand expansiveness of the first to stories in this collection and makes it all mostly set in just a couple apartments. This lets the grandness of the narrator rest with the narrators internal feelings, which are repressed and hidden until suddenly exploding out in a scene when he finally leaves the apartments and the snow mirrors his turmoil

I cannot stop reading this. All of these stories are nothing more than normal people making incredible drama over absolutely nothing... I am so interested and relate so hard.

Just like the steppe, in the duel the location feeds so much into the story. The hot waterside town beset on all side by crumbling cliffs feeds into this claustrophobic paranoia of the characters. The Duel refers to an actual duel but also the constant verbal sparring between all characters and their moral beliefs, everyone constantly wanting to impose them on each other.

“The Steppe” was so good, felt like an other worldly journey in a way. The constantly rotating characters combined with the never changing seemingly dead steppe landscape reminded me of something mythical, like the odyssey or the divine comedy, as it seems to Egorushka through his child mind.

The Duel (second story) is unbelievably good!!