LOVE by Anton Chekhov

Rating: an unopened letter

Highlight of note: The opening is excellent, although possibly a bit dated.

The first story I picked for my short story a week challenge was Love by Anton Chekhov, from the collection Love and Other Stories. It's on Project Gutenburg if you want to read it.

The story open with the narrator discussing the feeling of putting a letter to ones beloved in the mail, calling to mind all the anticipation and nervous excitement that involves. I found this section very well done, for I am not young enough to have never done this. I wonder how well someone of my son's generation would understand though. Was there enough description of these feelings for someone who doesn't remember them to respond? The closest my son knows is the feeling of pressing "send" on an instant message, which is a similar sensation but not the same at all.

When the narrator's beloved responds, I found myself laughing out loud. She replied to his thoughtful missive (he wrote five drafts before finally sending one) with one sentence. Granted, it would have been several sentences had she a basic understanding of grammar, but she didn't. The narrator is appalled at the lack of punctuation and the fact that there's a misspelled word, but agrees to meet with this woman anyway. (One assumes because the bits of her he's interested in aren't the bits guiding the pen anyway.)

Other than that, I found the story disappointing though. Supposedly it is a discourse on romantic love, but I was never sold on the idea that the narrator loved this woman. Maybe my problem was with the rampant misogyny behind the narrator's treatment of his love interest. Or maybe it was just that he seemed neither happy nor sad to be in love, merely resigned to it. An author who so accurately recreated the sensations of sending a love letter should have been able to do better, so I was left wondering about Chekhov's own experiences with romance. Perhaps I'll add a biography of him to my reading list.