Thomas Bernhard's novel Old Masters, first published in 1985, consists—true to style—of a single paragraph. The plot is very minimal, as with most of Bernhard's works: the tutor Atzbacher (who is also, apparently, a philosopher, even though he has never published anything) has been summoned for a meeting by his elderly friend Reger at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. For thirty years, Reger has visited the so-called Bordone room, which houses Tintoretto's painting White-Bearded Man, every other day. Precisely every other day.
Toward the end of Jane Austen's novel Persuasion, protagonist Anne Elliot has a short conversation with Captain Harville, an acquaintance. The conversation is about the constancy of love, and is rather playful, all the more so because the man whom Anne loves—Captain Wentworth—is within earshot. Anne does not know whether Captain Wentworth can hear her, but the possibility that he might lends the conversation special significance. The gist of the conversation is the following: Anne laments what she understands to be a peculiar (and often unfortunate) power of women: that they will keep loving even when "existence or when hope is gone."
I have two different translations of Chekhov's July 1883 story The Death of a Clerk: one in the collection Stories,by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky [P&V], and the other in the collection Forty Stories, by Robert Payne. I prefer the former, but I'll be sharing excerpts from each. Preference aside, as I always tell people, I try to read as many translations of my favorite works as possible—especially when it comes to Russian literature. That's the only way to gain as complete an understanding of the text in question as possible, if you cannot read it in the original language.
