Other editions of book The Schoolmistress, and other stories

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Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860-1904) was a Russian short story writer and a playwright. His playwriting career produced four classics, while his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. Chekhov practiced as a doctor throughout most of his literary career: "Medicine is my lawful wife, " he once said, "and literature is my mistress". Chekhov renounced the theatre after the disastrous reception of The Seagull in 1896; but the play was revived to acclaim by Constantin Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theatre, which subsequently also produced Uncle Vanya and premiered Chekhov's last two plays, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. These four works present a special challenge to the acting ensemble as well as to audiences, because in place of conventional action Chekhov offers a "theatre of mood" and a "submerged life in the text". His originality consists in an early use of the stream-of-consciousness technique combined with a disavowal of the moral finality of traditional story structure.

Marya Vassilyevna had been schoolmistress for thirteen years, but she felt as though she had been living in that part of the country for ages and ages, for a hundred years, and it seemed to her that she knew every stone, every tree on the road from the town to her school. Her past was here, her present was here, and she could imagine no other future than the school, the road to the town and back again, and again the school and again the road....

Among the stories is one of Chekhov's classics, "The Bet," in which a greedy banker makes an ill-considered bet regarding capital punishment with a young and impressionable guest. Fifteen years later -- the surprise ending provides one of Chekhov's most thought-provoking tales. The title story is a careful reminder of the soul-deadening life of a teacher in the Russian countryside -- for in Russia of Chekhov's day, education was less-valued than it is today, and teachers greatly underpaid and undervalued. Chekhov was of a different social background than more aristocratic Russian authors such as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Turgenev -- this offered him an insight into character that differed from theirs. A physician as well, Chekhov's observational skills are clear in this, as with all of his collections of short fiction. These stories will remind the reader of other 19th Century masters of short fiction, such as Maupassant. But their nature, and poetic irony, is exclusively that of Anton Chekhov.Included in this volume are "Enemies," "The Schoolmaster," "The Examining Magistrate," "Betrothed," "From the Diary of a Violent-Tempered Man," "In the Dark," "A Play," "A Mystery," "Strong Impressions," "Drunk," "The Marshal's Widow," "A Bad Business," "In the Court," "Boots," "Joy," "Ladies," "A Peculiar Man," "At the Barber's," "An Inadvertence," "The Album," "Oh! the Public," "A Tripping Tongue," "Overdoing It," "The Orator," "Malingerers," "In the Graveyard," "Hush!," "In an Hotel," and "In a Strange Land."

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"The Schoolmistress, and Other Stories" by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.