Resumo de The House With The Mansard

When you are tired of all ?this rubbish?, with a vague feeling of the ?meaninglessness of all this?, Anton Chekhov?s this sweet short story will go a long way in calming your mind. It is like a lullaby. You feel like having taken a nice weekend outing and returning to the work with renewed vigour. Now to the story.

As told earlier, it is a story with a wistful mood, interspersed with episodes of love, intelligence, art, innocence, affectations and stupidity. He is a talented landscape painter, but a lover of idleness. He feels it would be a good thing to tear out his heart which weighs so heavily on him. He is now on a visit to a friend and landowner in Russian countryside. He happens to visit that ?house of the mansard?, where he meets a rich family with a mother and two unmarried daughters. The elder daughter, Leda, is busy with social service and the younger, one hardly seventeen, is a voracious reader. Needlessly to say, the sisters are beautiful, particularly the younger one. The company of a city bred and a relatively well known artist is welcome to the family. But the problem comes when the artist shows his reservation about the elder one?s social service activities. Probably the artist is the last of the nihilists, who criticize the existing order of things, and criticize rightly, but does not know the answers to life?s vexing questions. The mother and the younger one are under the despotic rule of the elder daughter, who, on coming to know of the affair between the artist and the younger daughter, sends them (the mother and daughter) off abroad, thereby putting an end to a romantic chapter in the artist?s life.

The story is interspersed with reflection on questions of life, death, soul, suffering, science and religion, without trying to impose any set beliefs on the reader. There is humour too, for without a sense of humour life will be really dreadful. When the landowner friend of the artist gives a lecture of pessimism as the mood of the times, the hero tells that it was not a question of pessimism or optimism but ninety percent of the people are without brains. The gentleman is of course offended.

The story ends with a wistful sentence, ?Missie?where are you??

SATHYA

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