A very brief sketch of a wealthy 16-year-old girl, Nadya, whose mind ricochets from thought to thought and infatuation to infatuation.
She is passionate, hopeful, distracted, unfocused – a teenager. There’s not much more to the story than that. But it does end on an interesting note: After mooning about the theater and her admirers and her poodle, Nadya’s eyes come to rest on a “holy image” over her bed, and she falls into a sort of ecstasy – not really any different from her ecstatic response to the play she has seen, and her ecstatic response to attention of young men…
Her energy is appealing. The story is slight. I wonder if I’m not ranking it a bit too high!
READ THIS? READ THAT!
For a completely different rendering of a teenager’s consciousness, you could read the painful and ultimately tragic “Volodya.” Or for a look at the life of a poor young servant girl, there is the equally painful “Sleepy.” But those two stories are just tremendously sad. So why not compare Nadya’s ecstatic response to a holy image to the glowing ecstasy of Ivan Velikopolsky, the clerical student in the wonderful tale, “The Student.”
A Chekhov Circus 