Champagne

Written by Anton Chekhov

Narrated by Peter Coates

Champagne is a short story by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, written in 1887.
The story is written in the first person. The young head of a remote railway stop lived with his wife and without children in solitude, amusing himself with vodka and watching passing trains.
Life was boring. One day before celebrating the New Year, he sat with his wife at the festive table, drank enough and thought about boredom. We waited for the clock to show the arrival of the New Year. At five minutes to twelve he uncorked the bottle, the cork flew out, and the bottle slipped out of his hands and fell to the floor. The wife greeted Happy New Year with frightened eyes. She knew that the falling bottle was a bad omen and meant that something bad would happen in the new year.
After arguing with his wife, the narrator left the house thinking that this had already happened to them, that the worst could not happen. He remembered his dead parents, how he was kicked out of the gymnasium, how he wandered around with nothing to do and friends. He did not love his wife; he married when he was still a boy.
Returning home, he saw his wife cheerful - "good aunt" Natalya Petrovna, the wife of the hero's wife's uncle, a woman of free behavior, came to them for three days. At dinner, "aunt" and "nephew" drank well, they became dizzy, and their romance began (a terrible, mad whirlwind). In this whirlwind, the hero loses his wife, mistress, and job. He asks "what else bad could happen to me?"

• Language: English
• Publisher: Strelbytskyy Multimedia Publishing
• Release date: Mar 11, 2024

Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov was born in 1860 in Southern Russia and moved to Moscow to study medicine. Whilst at university he sold short stories and sketches to magazines to raise money to support his family. His success and acclaim grew as both a writer of fiction and of plays whilst he continued to practice medicine. Ill health forced him to move from his country estate near Moscow to Yalta where he wrote some of his most famous work, and it was there that he married actress Olga Knipper. He died from tuberculosis in 1904.