109, Seven Short Stories

Seven Short Stories
by Anton Chekhov

I like short stories. They get in, tell a snippet of a life, and get out. They don't have time for lengthy descriptions or digressions or too many characters and sub plots. I've never read Chekhov before, but he was, apparently, a prolific short story writer. The stories in this collection were varied and poignant. The only thing that connected them was a sad, modernist metaphorical narrative of alienation. The characters in these stories do not know themselves, nor others--indeed, they are incapable of knowing or being known. Chekhov tells us that man is essentially and whole alienated from other people and even himself, an existential vacuum. He exists, as Francis Schaeffer put it, "beneath the line of despair," disconnected and lost; though he yearns, as the bereft cabbie in "Misery" does, to connect to others, ultimately, to Chekhov, such yearning is a hopeless endeavor.