On the evening I read this short story, I was also reading May Sarton’s 1938 novel Single Hound (more about that tomorrow), in which one character affectionately calls another a “gooseberry”. Even though there’s no such moment in Chekov’s short story and, indeed, the gooseberries themselves are a disappointment—I
“Like any self-respecting Russian artisan, Ivan Yakovlevich was a terrible drunkard,” Gogol tells us. But he waits to share this—until after we have seen the nose that Ivan discovers inside a freshly baked loaf of bread—so that we don’t mistake the nose for a drunken hallunication. Whenever Ivan barbers
Aiyiyi, I have no good reason for this, because all that I’ve done is flip through the next story, to see if it would be as long as Tolstoy’s “Master and Man”—whether I should expect to read fifty pages for this month’s “short” story. It’s not—it’s half the length—but
In reading this fifty-page-long story, I followed the instructions that Saunders set out for us in the first story, curious to see whether the process would prove valuable. Saunders, himself, took a unique approach with the first of the seven stories he considers herein; he offered commentary after each
If I were to witness a murder, I figure I’d be like that woman in the Swedish drama “The Breakthrough” who sees the perpetrator straight on but, later, cannot recall a single facial feature. So Saunders’ point about the previous story, about Turgenev’s physical descriptions in “The Singers”, didn’t
