"'You bring suffocation, oppression,'" she says, "'something insulting and humiliating to the utmost degree. Law and morality are such that a self-respecting healthy young woman has to spend her life in idleness, in depression, and in continual apprehension, and to receive board and lodging from a man she does not love.'"
Difficult People shows us, as Tchehov is fond of doing, a family in the process of bickering and squabbling from day to day.
The Grasshopper is the picture of a married girl who jumps from one lover to another, only realising the purity and greatness of her husband when he dies heroically.
A Dreary Story is the notebook of an old man who is about to die, having achieved fame but not found happiness. In this story there is a magnificent description of the fascination of lecturing.
"'No kind of sport,'" he concludes, "'no kind of game or diversion, has ever given me such enjoyment as lecturing. Only at lectures have I been able to abandon myself entirely to passion, and have understood that inspiration is not an invention of the poets, but exists in real life, and I imagine Hercules after the most piquant of his exploits felt just such voluptuous exhaustion as I experience after every lecture.'"
We feel again that some autobiographical thread of the author's is creeping in when he makes his old man say: '"I am interested in nothing but science. I still believe that science is the most important, the most splendid, the most essential thing in the life of man: that it always has been and will be the highest manifestation of love, and that only by means of it will man conquer himself and nature.'"
The remaining stories in the volume, which are peculiar in that they are linked by having characters in common, dwell on the evils of Tchehov's days, the listlessness of the educated public, the refusal to break out of the case or the groove, the general hypnotism and blindness to suffering of the so-called happy.
"'There ought to be,'" says the hero in Gooseberries, "'behind the door of every happy, contented man someone standing with a hammer continually reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people.'"
We learn in About Love that Tchehov's apprenticeship to medicine "taught me one invaluable lesson as an artist, to individualise each case."
In the sixth and last volume we have The Witch, which gives its name to the volume, which is parallel with The Chemist's Wife in that it again shows a wife dissatisfied with her husband endeavouring to secure a moment's romance with a postman who has lost his way.