The Woman's Kingdom (1894) - Anton Chekhov
Why do I like this story? I like it for the realness and that it is not talked about, what is described there.
The main character, Anna Akimovna, now becomes an owner of a large factory and has to run it. She is 26 years old, does not have family or partner. She, against her any will, is thrown into a great responsibility of managing something she does not care about, does not have competency to do and crashes her slowly with its weight. She is rich, tries random acts of 'kindness' trying to give away people to the workers only to realise they all use and manipulate her. She realised the reality of their nature and 'help' does not seem reasonable to her anymore.
She is basically made to throw her life away for the sake of something that is miles away from her real core. Not to mention, she does not even now exactly what that is. She wants what is simple, she cannot have it.
It is how the arrangements make people slaves or camels wandering alone across the dessert thirsty for a drop of life.
[Some sentences that I write below are from my imagination, it is not exactly part of the story]
She is 26 year old and is already like an old, terribly and disgustingly reasonable and responsible person in a mens suit that is too large for her. She is at the desk, pretending she can read, she can barely hold a pen and makes signatures with simple crosses. She wears too high hills and too large shoes and almost falls. She is deprived of possibility to have normal life. She does not know how to escape it. She is alone and cannot even openly admit it as she needs to keep the face. She is now 26 years old, but it is pretty easy to imagine her in 10, 20, 30 years, how gradually she becomes more and more bitter and resentful. When her initial blindness will be fading away revealing other layers of her unlived life. How she lives not her life. How the trajectory has somehow shifted. It has never been her choice. Life made her. The fate took over, caught her in a snare. She takes it on her shoulders, and we watch her and her potential go to waste.
Being a women I resonate with this story. I feel lots of empathy towards Anna Akimovna. How women are placed in chairs not made for them. How expectations ruin them. How the weight is so enormous that they barely can carry it.
