Extract

He felt strangely tired. As he undressed and got into bed, covering himself with the blanket, he could not help thinking that this romance had come to an end.

An awkward, unremarkable artillery officer wanders by mistake into a dark room during a party at a country estate and is kissed by a woman he never sees. That single accidental kiss becomes the center of Staff-Captain Ryabovich's inner life for an entire summer, swelling into fantasy, tenderness, and a future that exists only in his imagination. Chekhov published this story in 1887, when he was twenty-seven, and already his gift was fully formed: the ability to render the immense interior consequences of negligible events. When the brigade returns to the estate months later, Ryabovich walks to the river instead. Nothing has happened, and everything has. The kiss was never meant for him, and that is precisely the point.