ABSTRACT
At the turn of the nineteenth century, the pretensions, vulgarities and blinkered views of life that Anton Chekhov examined so probingly found their exact correspondence in the upwardly mobile Russian Jews among whom Dovid Bergelson had grown up. Chekhov's style offered Bergelson elements of an allusive, ironic narrative mode perfectly suited to depicting a crumbling social order. For all his melancholy, Chekhov's fiction tends to exemplify his conviction that 'no choice in life is positively final and no situation absolutely fixed'. Bergelson's view is considerably less positive, yet both writers employ kindred strategies to frame their respective conceptions. Movement in Bergelson, as so often in Chekhov, is a series of repeating patterns that change marginally to introduce a variety of characters through a few incisive details. Typical of Bergelson's stylistic and thematic concerns, but with clear structural affinities with Chekhov's practice, is the short story 'Yordim' ('The Declasse'), first published in book form in 1929.
