"Chekhov: 11 Stories" Anton Chekhov

I just finished listening to this book. Due to technical difficulties, it took two years to finish, having started it while walking last time I was in Alaska last. I bought 5 books from Audible.com during a $5 sale, and these 5 books have caused me endless trouble. Usually the books they have in the sales are not that popular, but since I like more obscure literature I can sometimes find something. Two of the books were this one by Chekhov and “Mrs. Dalloway” by Wolfe. Unfortunately, something happened to the recordings of these books, and I was unable to download them again on to my MP3 player. Although I got quick response from Audible, the help was not satisfactory. I did everything they said and nothing worked. While in Alaska this time, I ran into some other download difficulties---names were not showing up so it was like potluck when you chose a recording. Then, the download manager stopped recognizing my device. I downloaded new software, reset my MP3 player, and nothing seemed to work. So, I just decided to hell with the software, I'll just copy the files to the device, and if it screwed it up, then I'll just buy a new one. But now, everything works, Audible will speak to my device again and I can listen to the 5 pesky books! So, I've finished Chekhov after a two year hiatus.

This is why I am hesitant to get a Kindle or some such device. When you open a book, it always works. Even though I am reluctant to venture into reading hardware, I don’t know how I ever lived without my MP3 player. I'm sure that I could not have completed the marathon last year without the training, and the training was much more enjoyable because I could listen to books at the same time. (Of course, my walking partner is due a lot of credit for getting me out there for hours on the weekends.) Speaking of downloads, you can download many of Anton Chekhov’s short stories from Project Gutenberg, a great place to visit if you are interested in inexpensive reading material and like the classic authors. I don’t particularly like to read off of the computer, but they have a lot of formats and I think it is possible to get books for devices like Kindle there, too.

The stories in “11 Stories” are

1. The Black Monk
2. The Kiss
3. Mire
4. Misfortune
5. An Artist’s Story
6. Not Wanted
7. Expensive Lessons
8. The Head of the Family
9. Anyuta
10. The Help Mate
11. The Trousseau

Again, one great thing about posting about short stories is that I can spoil one, but there are others to read. I liked many of the stories, but “The Kiss” keeps coming to mind. A young officer is with others at a gentleman’s home for tea. He is inexperienced in love and doesn’t particularly enjoy social events. He is wandering in the house, and walks into a dark room. A woman embraces him and kisses him before she realizes he was not her assignation. It is his first kiss, and it changes his life completely.

Chekhov lived from 1860-1904 in many different parts of Russia. He was a short story writer, playwright and physician. His characters are often physicians or students of medicine, and he also writes about artists. As a physician, he often gave help to the poor without charging them, and he had great concern for the treatment of the poor and the criminal. In one story, I can’t remember which, a young man is arguing against building clinics for the poor, which at first glance seems counter to Chekhov’s interests, but the man goes on to say that instead of treating illnesses, we should eliminate the causes. I read that Chekhov was one of the greatest short story writers and that his methods were innovative, but the stories in this collection seem to be straightforward enough. Recently I have read Proulx, Faulkner and Kawabata, and many of those stories are innovative. On the other hand, these three writers are from the 20th century and Chekov lived mostly in the 19th Century, so maybe to my untrained eye they are innovative.

The recording was good enough, but there was one irritating feature. There was no gap whatsoever between one story and the next. Sometimes I like to stop the playback at a convenient break, but the stories stopped abruptly, the reader announced the next title, and continued on. In one case, the reader put longer breaks between the sentences of the story than there was between the last sentence and the beginning of the next story. I'm sure it was an editting issue, but I don't remember having that problem in Proulx's short stories that I listed to.