Note-Book of Anton Chekhov

Excerpt: ...and dies with a touching expression of love on her lips. Evidently she loved, not her husband, but some one else, superior, beautiful, non-existent, and she lavished that love upon her husband. And after her death footsteps could be heard in her house. They are members of a temperance society and now and again take a glass of wine. They say: "In the long run truth will triumph;" but it is untrue. A clever man says: "This is a lie, but since the people can not do without the lie, since it has the sanction of history, it is dangerous to root it out all at once; let it go on for the time being but with certain corrections." But the genius says: "This is a lie, therefore it must not exist." Marie Ivanovna Kladovaya. A schoolboy with mustaches, in order to show off, limps with one leg. A writer of no talent, who has been writing for a long time, with his air of importance reminds one of a high priest. Mr. N. and Miss Z. in the city of X. Both clever, educated, of radical views, and both working for the good of their fellow men, but both hardly know each other and in conversation always rail at each other in order to please the stupid and coarse crowd. He flourished his hand as if he were going to seize him by the hair and said: "You won't escape by that there trick." N. has never been in the country and thinks that in the winter country people use skis. "How I would enjoy ski-ing now!" Madam N., who sells herself, says to each man who has her: "I love you because you are not like the rest." An intellectual woman, or rather a woman who belongs to an intellectual circle, excels in deceit. N. struggled all his life investigating a disease and studying its bacilli; he devoted his whole life to the struggle, expended on it all his powers, and suddenly just before his death it turned out that the disease is not in the least infectious or dangerous. A theatrical manager, lying in bed, read a new...