About this audiobook
An ageing professor looks back on a distinguished career while illness and sleeplessness disturb his familiar routines. Public recognition has not given him a coherent answer to the private questions now confronting him. His relationships with family, colleagues and a younger woman close to him reveal how uncertain an apparently accomplished life can feel from within.
Anton Chekhov develops the narrative through the professor's own observations. His intelligence remains sharp, but the ability to describe a difficulty does not necessarily provide a way through it. Irritation, tenderness and self-questioning coexist in an account that makes the limits of understanding part of its form.
The novella explores age, meaning and the distance between a reputation and a lived experience. Its quiet drama comes from the effort to identify what holds a life together, asking how someone accustomed to authority can respond when personal need cannot be answered by the knowledge that once sustained him.
