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by Anton Chekhov (Author), Stephen Pimenoff (Translator)
It is New Year's Eve, and Nellie, the pretty daughter of a landowning general, is sitting in her room looking in the mirror. Although she is tired and her eyes are half closed, she is spellbound as the reflection in the looking glass dissolves into a sea of grey mist, in which she starts to discern the beloved features of her fiancé. As in a diorama, the scene keeps changing, and to the early snapshots of joyful marital life succeed other, more sinister images of care, sickness and bereavement, casting a long shadow onto the girl's future.
With 'The Looking Glass' Chekhov captured the very essence of the Russian soul. This short story, along with the others included in this collection, demonstrates why he is considered the absolute master of the genre.Author Biography
Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) is one of the giants of modern literature, exerting a strong influence on many present-day novelists and dramatists. As a playwright, he ranks in popularity second only to Shakespeare in the English-speaking world. As a prose writer, he was one of the first to use the stream-of-consciousness technique, and his anti-heroic realism, full of ambiguity and allusion, provides no easy moral conclusions and results in a new kind of narrative approaching real life in a way no writer had achieved before him.
