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Hush by Anton Chekhov

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Anton Chekhov’s Hush encapsulates the struggles of everyday family life of a man with an unsuccessful career. Chekhov’s intention is to bring out the hidden problems families have and shed light on them. His objective is like that of Tolstoy’s in his novel Anna Karenina1 – bringing out the importance of family life. Disaffection is studied through insight into Ivan Krasnyhin’s relationship with his work and with his family. He is being portrayed as a dominating dictator at home, whereas he fails to be one at work. Chekhov introduces us to the hardship of maintaining a pleasant family life. “Nadya, I am sitting down to write Please don’t let anyone interrupt me. I can’t write with children crying of cooks snoring.”.2 When Ivan Krasnyhin says this, we automatically begin to dislike him for his impolite behavior towards his wife. He is so inconsiderate that he has the audacity to ask his wife to tell the children to stay quiet. He is full of vengeance and despair and takes it out on the people around him. Chekhov has made use of ellipsis to bring forward the idea of an unfinished thought, as if Krasnyhin is refraining to say something or the fact that he wants to quickly go do his work. Chekhov has written this story in the third person narrative. He has done this so that we are given a free opinion as to who we should sympathize with. We are given a sense of belonging, as if we are present in the story, witnessing the incident with our own eyes, and deciding who is correct in their actions. If the story was written in Krasnyhin’s point of view, we would have felt sorry for him and we would not have a fair perspective of the situation, we would have been biased to agree with Ivan in his undesirable manner of treating his wife. We would have been forced to see his struggles through his eyes. This narra1tive point of view brings out the mundane struggles and internal drama in a family. Moreover, Chekhov writes in

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