Oysters (Chekhov)

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Illustration on oysters
by Alexander Apsit from 1903

Oysters , also the oysters ( Russian Устрицы , Ustrizy ), is a short story by the Russian writer Anton Chekhov , which appeared on December 6, 1884 in the satirical weekly Budilnik . Wiktor Golzew and Iwan Bunin praised this social criticism. During the author's lifetime, the little story was translated into Bulgarian, Hungarian, German, Polish, Romanian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, Finnish, Czech and Swedish.

The narrator remembers his childhood - the day when his father first begged in front of a restaurant in Moscow . The narrator, then eight years old, had an illness: hunger.

He spelled the advertisement: oysters . When asked, the father explains the unknown food. Hungry, the boy rises to the exclamation: "Give me oysters!" Two men in top hats laugh in disbelief. When the boy insists on his wish, the two passers-by take the boy and his father into the restaurant and buy the little one a plate of oysters for ten rubles.

The father, who did not eat anything that day, later regrets at home that he did not ask the two gentlemen for a little money. His son cannot fall asleep for a long time because of thirst and cannot get rid of the oyster taste in his burning mouth.

literature

Output used:

  • Gerhard Dick (ed.), Wolf Düwel (ed.): Anton Chekhov: Collected works in individual volumes : oysters. P. 247–252 in: Gerhard Dick (Ed.): Anton Chekhov: From rain to eaves. Short stories. Translated from Russian by Ada Knipper and Gerhard Dick. With a foreword by Wolf Düwel. 630 pages. Rütten & Loening, Berlin 1964 (1st edition)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Illustration on oysters
  2. ↑ Russian Viktor Alexandrowitsch Golzew
  3. ↑ Reference to the first publication in the Labor der Fantastik (Russian) and comments on the text at Lib.ru
  4. ↑ Entry in WorldCat