Texts

A Moscow member of the intellectual circles there considers himself a modern Hamlet and thereby is dissatisfied with everything and is bored by everything. He does lead an active social life, and although he’s uncultivated and lacks social graces he makes up for it by impressive declarations about authors he’s never read and about the true meaning of works of art and theatre. Although utterly bored with everything he in fact gets along quite fine.
First published in the influential Saint (…)

TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. A CONFESSION, OR OLYA, ZHENYA, ZOYA (Исповедь, или Оля, Женя, Зоя) (1882) A thirty-nine year-old man writes to a lady friend who had asked him why he had never yet married, and explains with three examples of cases (there were many other occasions, these were just examples) when he had been on the verge of proposing to a woman he was in love with when something unexpected happened to ruin the event and the whole project. (2,300 words)
2. HOW I CAME TO BE LAWFULLY (…)

Volodya is a frail seventeen-year-old student thinking about the critical exam the following day that could result in his expulsion from school, about his inferior social position at the house of the Shumihins where he and his mother are guests, and about the attractiveness of the Shumihins’ thirty-year-old married cousin. This is the account of the quite catastrophic results (for Volodya) of that encounter.
Volodya) (Russian title: Володя) was first published in the daily newspaper (…)

An examining magistrate tells a doctor while they are driving to an inquest that “there is a great deal that is enigmatic and obscure in nature; and even in everyday life one must often come upon phenomena which are absolutely incapable of explanation.” When the skeptical doctor declares that there’s no effect without a cause and that if there’s a death there must be a reason for it, the magistrate proceeds to tell him of a woman who had for months predicted the exact date upon which she (…)

A cab-driver tells a passenger the story of how his father had fallen victim to robbers after bragging in a café that he was taking five hundred roubles of rent-money to town. He’d been accosted by thieves afterwards, but not before confiding the money to his little daughter, who’d fled through the surrounding woods. She lost her way though, and finally came to a cabin where a woman gave her shelter; but unfortunately it was the home of the chief of the robbers and the woman gave them the (…)

Brykovich rushes out of his flat late at night fed up with the bossiness of his wife, the owner of the lodging house where they live. He encounters the musician Khalyavkin, who’s behind with his rent and is unsuccessfully trying to get his key into his lock after a night out with fellow artists, and starts berating him for being in arrears. An argument begins that evolves into a very Russian discussion involving life’s troubles, sausages, tea and vodka that lasts until dawn and is the start (…)

The magistrate Popikov is woken up early by Ivan, an unkempt peasant who’d been summoned to appear before him at 11 a.m. to testify in an affair of assault. The judge decides to hear him anyway, and the man in his confused and semi-illiterate manner recounts the affair that had started when he’d pulled a boy’s ears for throwing stones at ducks in a pond, much to the violent disapproval of the accused man, a certain (inebriated) Drykhunov who was passing by and who’d ended up by inviting Ivan (…)

Nilov is a big, very powerful man who was attacked by a probably-rabid wolf when out for a walk at night while staying with a friend during a hunting expedition.
Nilov manages to survive, but his subsequent anguish at the thought of having contacted rabies and his desperate efforts to find a cure for the dreaded disease constitute the meat of this short but rather powerful story of a mortal conflict between man and beast and its consequences.
Initially published in the daily newspaper (…)

An opera singer unsuccessfully confronts her parasitical husband who has been profiting from her fame and wealth ever since she defied him to take up her artistic career.
A resounding declaration in favour of feminine emancipation, only marred somewhat by the basic vileness of the male partner in this fruitless and endless confrontation.
The title “Mari d’elle” is a direct tranposition of the original Russian title in the Latin alphabet, signifying “Her Husband”.
It was first published (…)

TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. A TRIVIAL INCIDENT (Пустой случай) (1886) The narrator recounts how he and his companion, a Prince, had been prevented from hunting in the forest of Madame Kandurin, with whom the prince had formerly been connected. The two go to the lady’s mansion, where the narrator realises the extent of the prince’s sad situation and how close he had previously been to an entirely different fate. (4,000 words)
2. ON THE ROAD (На пути) (1887) We follow the unfolding of the intense (…)