In the Library
Ionitch
Anton Chekhov, 1898
- Form
- Form Short Story
- Reading time
- Reading time 30 minutes
- Translated by
- Translated by Constance Garnett
- Chapters
- Chapters 1
- Length
- Length 7k words
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About the book
The trap Chekhov sets in "Ionitch" is not romantic suffering but its opposite: a man who stops suffering and is finished by it. Dr. Startsev falls for Ekaterina Ivanovna in a provincial town, is rejected, and recovers, which turns out to be the catastrophe. The years thicken him, the money accumulates, the Turkin family performs its same parlor charades season after season, and his incapacity to feel them as dull or charming or anything at all is the only register of what he has lost. Chekhov is the one writer who understood that indifference is not peace but dissolution. By the story's close, "Ionitch" is no longer a name but a verdict, and it fits because nothing is left inside to resist it.