The Schoolmistress

📖 The Scoop

The Schoolmistress and Other Stories contains twenty-one tales by Russian master of drama and the short story, Anton Chekhov. Among the stories is one of Chekhov's classics, The Bet, in which a greedy banker makes an ill-considered bet regarding capital punishment with a young and impressionable guest. Fifteen years later - the surprise ending provides one of Chekhov's most thought-provoking tales. The title story is a careful reminder of the soul-deadening life of a teacher in the Russian countryside - for in Russia of Chekhov's day, education was less-valued than it is today, and teachers greatly underpaid and undervalued. Chekhov was of a different social background than more aristocratic Russian authors such as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Turgenev - this offered him an insight into character that differed from theirs. A physician as well, Chekhov's observational skills are clear in this, as with all of his collections of short fiction. These stories will remind the reader of other 19th Century masters of short fiction, such as Maupassant. But their nature, and poetic irony, is exclusively that of Anton Chekhov. Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian physician, dramaturge and author who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short stories in history. His career as a dramatist produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. Chekhov had at first written stories only for financial gain, but as his artistic ambition grew, he made formal innovations which have influenced the evolution of the modern short story. His originality consists in an early use of the stream-of-consciousness technique, later adopted by James Joyce and other modernists, combined with a disavowal of the moral finality of traditional story structure. He made no apologies for the difficulties this posed to readers, insisting that the role of an artist was to ask questions, not to answer them.

Genre: Fiction / Short Stories (single author) (fancy, right?)