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If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. Most people will know Chekhov through such quotations as this, ascribed to Chekhov and quoted and quoted ever since: ‘Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. ‘The Kiss’ by Anton Chekhov (1887) – Turning the love story on its head, or turning it inside out, or… If “utility” is an odd word to use around literature, one might well wonder at it especially when used about such a story as this: getting us roped into this protagonist’s thinking and feeling so that we are utterly trussed up by the end, caught, pinned down, exposed… one might as well ‘gaze at the lamp for a long, long time’, then shake your head and start packing. If one were ever to ask, what is literature for, you might be well advised to refer the questioner to this story, and simply say: “This.”
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Could you ask: how might it be improved? In which ways, exactly, does it fall short? What does it do, after all, for the reader? There must be, of course, stories by Chekhov which don’t amount to much, which don’t achieve what Chekhov sets out to achieve (which is what exactly?) however, ‘Verochka’ is not one of these stories. To take an early story such as ‘Verochka’ when, supposedly, Chekhov was still some way from ‘mastering his art’, and to wonder at how good it is, does seem to miss the point. …if this piece of fiction doesn’t have ‘utility’ in buckets then how can fiction be said to have a use at all?