Fish Love

"Of course, there can be no talk of mutual feelings. Can she, such a marvelous woman, fall for me—the carp?" A.P. Chekhov.

The purpose of the genre was to make Chekhov’s audience laugh, and behind the comic situations in which Chekhov’s characters ended up were vivid personalities and a person’s fate together with their surroundings—the real face of reality.

With Chekhov, the humorous novella entered “big” literature as a full-blooded genre with its own distinctive features. The variety of forms (which small genres of Russian classics had not known before) makes it impossible to give any complete classification of his stories, though attempts have been made.