It’s my first time reading anything by Chekhov, and it might also be my last. I’m clearly not smart enough for this.
Both “The Lady with the Little Dog” and “The House with the Mezzanine” are stories of unfulfilled or wrongly-fulfilled love, and so is the titular story, and you just want to take the characters and punch them one by one: a man seduces a much younger woman and they’re both miserable; a man falls in love with the sister of a girl he’s constantly quarreling with, but the elder sister convinces the younger to go away and forget about it, and they’re noth miserable; a man falls in love with the wife while visiting a couple of friends and, guess what? Yeah, they’re both miserable.
“Gooseberries” is fine enough, but you’re left wondering what the point was.
“Man in a Case” flows much more easily, though there’s again this urge to punch the characters.
My favourite has to be “The Black Monk,” for the touch of supernatural and Gothic drama: a man starts seeing the hallucination of a monk dressed in black, who convinces him he’s a genius handpicked by God to do something special. And while the man succumbs to his hallucination, the mania might just be what he needs to be happy in life. Except, guess what? Yeah, he’s miserable and makes his wife miserable. The header is an illustration to this story, by G.K. Savitsky.
Again, not a collection of stories I’d recommend if you’re depressed.
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