'I'm surrounded by smug, complacent mediocrities, dreary nonentities, pots of sour cream, jugs of milk, cockroaches, stupid women.'
Nikitin, a schoolteacher in a provincial town, visits his neighbours, where there is always laughter, music, dancing. He falls in love with Masha, a daughter of the house, and marrying her, feels that he takes in his hands a happiness which only seemed possible in novels. But as his sensible, practical Masha weaves her nest, the point of Nikitin's snug domestic bliss begins to seem 'oddly blurred, somehow'.
The loss of ideals and the poverty of actual experience are the themes in the stories collected here. Chekhov's Russians, at the close of the nineteenth century, are trapped in a prison of frustration; he never depicted with greater laconic power their spiritual desperation and search for ways of escape.
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