Чехов на шее

ОМСК It was.It was a grey and windy day.It was a grey and windy day in mid-April.The clouds, the yet mainly colorless grass, the bridge, and the houses were muted shades of gray, as if winter had extracted all life and left it like a fish lying lifeless on the side of the river.The brisk wind brought the chill of an ice flow. Cold and rather cheerless walkers hurried on in the morning to their universities and workplaces in our city of Omsk, a provincial city by character and charm.A coffee shop on the first floor of the Hotel Rossiya in the heart of the old city provides a fresh and new place to camp out until the museum opens at 10am.Scanning the row of books, my eyes light on the Sorceress Something Something and a sci-fi fantasy book. …"Books, Chekhov—yes, Chekhov is a great writer with the touch of melancholy realism that is somehow comforting, maybe because it mirrors our own lives in some way, in contrast to, say, Ivanhoe knights riding and battling against impossible odds and winning the fair Rowena at the end.One movie adaptation I watched recently was Anna on the neck. «Анна на шее». An elderly and rich man marries the young penniless Anna and then uses her to get a higher rank in society, the order of St. Anna. And here at the local museum, which I call the &Shop,&they had a room full of Tsarist Era medals. Being in the army for four years, of course, rank was everything, literally. The sergeants, many, did very little hands-on labor work, which was left to the...