The fool

Book writer: Antoine Chekhov

“The Fool” is a story by the Russian writer Antoine Chekhov. The summary of the story is that Yulia Vasilievna is a nanny who works for a bourgeois family. When the “head of the family” invites her to pay her and hold her accountable for the two-month period in which she worked for him to take care of the children, he provokes her and treats her roughly and harshly. From her share of the money, and while holding her accountable, he deliberately deducted part of her pension from her, until he finished the deductions with a large decrease in her pension, to which Yulia only responded with the word “thank you”! Which provoked him and made him very angry. Thank you for what?! For what I plundered you. For what I robbed you! I stole from you! Why do you say thank you?! Why don't you defend your right? To answer, “No one else gave me anything.” After the suspense in the story, Chekhov surprises us that the head of the family did not eat up her right to the money. The most he does is keep the reader in a state of nervous tension, and playing on the psychological state of the heroes of the stories makes one fully realize what sensitivity the writer possesses to be able to show the characters with this degree of deep psychological anatomy.