Then he suddenly changed his mind and in a 6 June letter asked Viktor Goltsev to send it back, saying it was not fit for Russkaya Mysl.

He starts visiting the Turkin family, considered to be the pride of the town, where the husband runs a small amateur theatre, the wife writes novels and their beautiful daughter Ekaterina (known informally as Kotik, which means Kittie) plays the piano, preparing herself for the conservatory.

Unlike the majority of the townsfolk, Startsev does not take this acme of the local cultural life seriously, yet Kotik, full of charm, naivety and youthful spirits, easily conquers his heart.

Before making the proposal, he even takes a midnight trip to the town's old graveyard[note 1] where she'd jovially made a mock appointment with him, and even finds this silly adventure delightful.

For three days Startsev suffers greatly, then learns that she indeed had departed from the town to enroll into the conservatory, settles down into normalcy and soon all but forgets her, remembering his momentary madness with mild amusement.

And the Turkins are the same as they were years before: the husband runs a little theatre, entertaining his guests with well-rehearsed humour, the wife reads aloud her novels, and Ekaterina still likes to play her piano very loud.

Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky, who, writing for Zhurnal Dlya Vsekh,[2] hailed Chekhov as "an independent force blazing in literature the trail of its own".