The Schoolmistress
by Anton Chekhov
"The Schoolwife and Other Stories" contains twenty-one stories of the Russian drama master and the short story of Anton Chekhov. Among the stories, "The Pond", one of Chekhov's classics, is where a greedy banker makes a malicious bet on the death penalty with a young and impressionable guest. Fifteen years later, an unexpected ending gives one of Chekhov's most thought-provoking tales. The title story is a cautionary reminder of the spirit of the dead life of a teacher in the Russian countryside - because in the Russia of Chekhov times, education was valued less than it is today, and teachers were greatly underpaid and underestimated. Chekhov had a different social background than more aristocratic Russian writers such as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Turgenev - this gave him the idea of a character different from theirs. The doctor also notes that Chekhov's observational skills in this matter are understandable, as in all short collections of fiction. These stories will remind the reader of other masters of 19th-century short fiction, such as Maupassant. But their nature and poetic irony belong only to Anton Chekhov.
