2. The Student, By Anton Chekhov (1894)

2. The Student, By Anton Chekhov (1894)

Rating: 7.5/10

I read this story over and over because I couldn't understand it right away. As a Christian already knowing about the story of Peter and Jesus, I always just accommodated it and didn’t try to interpret it in another way. So, this story was quite interesting to me.
Ivan feels negative and isolated at the beginning of the story but changes his view afterward through meeting with two widows. In this process, we should talk about an epiphany. I first learned this concept through ‘Araby’ in the British Literature class. To apply it to Ivan, passing on the cold wind, he thought that ignorance, misery, desolation, and feeling of oppression will always exist and it would be no better. However, after talking with the two widows, he realized that the “past is linked with the present by an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of another”. This was his epiphany. His negative feeling changed into enlightenment and positive thoughts. If we put Ivan’s life into a hero’s journey, he would be in the stage of crossing the threshold. His negative feelings and isolation would be the threshold, and since now he had overcome it, we could guess that he would soon enter the ‘special world’. (202)