A Russian Affair by Anton Chehov

one of the most deepest needs human have is to be beloved by another human being and ironically most people wouldn’t admit to have that need, and as a social beings we define ourselves by the relationships we have with another human beings ,but in all human feelings Love is the most beautiful feeling to have and also the most scariest feeling also as it can make you lose you wit and do the most stupidest thing to retain it.

I think that no one has ever truly described love – and how could anyone describe that tender, joyful, agonizing feeling! Anyone who has but once experienced it would never even think of putting it into words! But what’s the point of preambles and descriptions? Why this superfluous eloquence?

WHY

in my short life experiences i am always amazed and also baffled on how love happens to me it’s not something i can rationalize to another human being why it happened to me or why it did happen now and not before, why sometimes love is reciprocated and sometimes not, why is sometimes love is not felt equally by the two people, why sometimes i fell out of love suddenly and inexplicably, why love between same-sex people is still taboo in my part of the world

IF

I sometimes wonder how my life would changed if i fell in love with that, what would happen and what would have changed? what if i did reciprocated back the love some women had for me would things have changed and how so? .

although this is short book which consists of  five stories which give a glimpse to beautiful prose Anton Chekhov have and what i loved about these stories is that they show humans in their complexity and not in fairy tale where every love  ends happily for both people who is i believe what great book should show

in the fourth story Ionych it tells the story of local medical officer who fell in love with a local girl and how being in love and leaving it somehow changed him for the worse.

what struck me in this story is although two people may fall in love but if their goals nd ambitions in life didn’t align with each other that kind of love would ruin the lives of both people and even make it more complex and hard to leave each other or stay with each other

and here is some witty quotes from the book

after you being rejected

And he regretted having felt as he did, he regretted having loved – so much so that he came close to sobbing out loud

mediocre authors

‘A mediocrity is not someone who’s no good at writing stories,’ he thought. ‘It’s someone who writes them but can’t keep quiet about it.’

love in Affairs

and wondered how they could free themselves from the need to hide, to deceive, to live in different towns, to see each other only after long intervals. How could they break free from these intolerable chains?

Mystery of love

It’s a mystery, and you can interpret it which way you like. Only one indisputable truth has been said about love up to now, that it’s a “tremendous mystery”, and everything else that’s been written or said about it has never provided an answer

A Russian affair

by Anton Chekhov

you can buy it from here

 

 

 

 

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Seven Hanged by Leonid Andreyev

Death the fate of every living being,being gifted with life you must also accept the negative side of the bargain that one day sooner or later that gift will be taken from you and you will become inanimate thing, something indistinguishable from stone or sand, a sad but true fact of life which is hard to deny but also hard to accept also, person like me who think play dream and laugh will one day will become dead and i will stop thinking playing laughing or dreaming, i will become no more distinguishable from rock or wall.

No matter how many times you tell me i cant believe it and no matter how many time i lie to myself it still haunts me

this is a story of Capital Punishment in which seven inmates wait their execution, and how everyone react and contemplate their incoming doom.

in the first part of the novel we get to know the government official who barely escaped death as secret police told him there was an attempt on his life and that terrorist group was planning to assassinate him in one o’clock tomorrow

and he couldn’t stop thinking about the cruel fate that some people had had in store for him.

although being warned and foretold about the incoming attempt on his life and as the police prepared the plan to capture the terrorist group before they kill him he still couldn’t believe in his salvation

he still couldn’t quite believe in his salvation. He wasn’t sure that life wouldn’t slip away from him, suddenly, any minute now. The death that those people had planned for him, which existed only in thought and intention, seemed to be still there, and it was going to stay there, it wouldn’t go away until they were caught

eventually he was transferred to other house and that night he couldn’t sleep and what irritated him the most

because it’s me thinking. And it’s not death that is terrifying, only my knowing about it. And it would be totally impossible to live if a man were to know with complete certainty the date and time when he was sure to die

and being told the date of your death can be one of the horrible things any humans hear it makes attached to that date and you become oblivious to everything else

eventually the seven inmates are transferred to individual solitary cell and each person contemplates that tomorrow he will leave this world and he will be hanged.

you cease to be human,alive and individual when you are hanged.

one last quote from one of the narrator who contemplate the mechanical aspect of the law and capital punishment

it also became a mechanical process and only for that reason something to be dreaded. Fetch and grab, take away, hang, pull down on the legs. Cut rope, haul down, cart away and bury.

A man has gone from the world.

one of the best novels i ever read which deals with the subject of death and capital punishment and its rumored that this novel inspired the Serbian assassins who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria.

the Author Leonid Andreyev