Anton Chekhov

"One should not go to sick people and old women for miracles. Is not health a miracle? And life itself? A miracle is something incomprehensible."

Fortunately for men, women in love are always blinded by their feelings and never know anything of life

what is the explanation of the love itself,

It is not a question of medicine and woods, my dear, he is a man of genius. Do you know what that means? It means he is brave, profound, and of clear insight. He plants a tree and his mind travels a thousand years into the future, and he sees visions of the happiness of the human race. People like him are rare and should be loved.

Unwilling to these sad shores

A mysterious force is drawing me’

sang the medical student in a pleasant tenor.

‘See the windmill now in ruins’

the art student joined in.

‘See the windmill now in ruins’

repeated the medical student, raising his eyebrows and sadly shaking his head.

He stopped singing for a moment, rubbed his forehead as he tried to recall the words, then he sang so loudly, so well that passers-by looked round at him.

‘Here once I did meet light-hearted love, as free as myself.’

His expression appeared strange to the medical student.

‘Why are you staring like that?’ he asked. ‘Please, don’t start philosophizing! Vodka’s for drinking, sturgeon’s for eating, women for visiting and snow for walking over. Please try and behave like a normal human being, at least for one evening!’

‘Don’t worry, I’m not chickening out!’ Vasilyev laughed.

The vodka warmed his chest. He looked at his friends affectionately, and admired and envied them. How well-balanced these healthy, strong, cheerful men were, how well-rounded and smooth their minds and hearts! They sang, loved the theatre passionately, sketched, talked a great deal, drank without having hangovers the next day. They were romantic, dissolute, gentle and audacious. They could work, be deeply indignant, laugh at nothing and talk rubbish. They were warm, decent, selfless and as human beings were in no way inferior to Vasilyev himself, who was so careful with his every word and step, so mistrustful, so cautious, so prone to make an issue out of the least trifle. And so he had felt the urge to spend just one evening in the same way as his friends, to unwind, let himself go a little. Would he have to drink vodka? Then drink it he would, even if he had a splitting headache the next morning. Would they take him to visit some girls? Then he would go. He would laugh, play the fool, cheerfully respond to passers-by.

He was laughing as he left the restaurant. He liked his friends – the one with pretensions to artistic eccentricity in that crumpled, broad-brimmed hat, the other in his sealskin cap – he had money, but he liked to play the academic Bohemian.

He liked the snow, the pale street-lamps, the sharp black prints left on the snow by the feet of passers-by. He liked the air and particularly that crystal-clear, gentle, innocent, almost virginal mood that one sees in nature only twice a year – when all is covered with snow, and on bright days or those moonlit nights in spring, when the ice breaks up on the river.

‘Unwilling to these sad shores

A mysterious force is drawing me …’

he sang under his breath.

For some reason he and his friends could not get that tune out of their minds and the three of them sang it mechanically, out of time with each other.

The medical student and the artist stopped in this doorway, craned their necks and looked into the room together.

‘Buona sera, signori!’ the artist began, making a theatrical bow. ‘Rigoletto, Huguenotti, Traviata!’

‘Havana, Cucaracha, Pistoletto!’ the medical student said, pressing his cap to his chest and bowing low.

Vasilyev stood behind them. He too wanted to perform a theatrical bow, to say something ridiculous, but he could only smile, and the embarrassment he felt was almost a feeling of shame. Impatiently, he waited to see what would happen next.