Ben Sharafski's Reviews > The Story of a Nobody

The narrator of The Story of a Nobody is a revolutionary who goes to work under cover as a servant at the house of the son of a senior government official, hoping to gather information which would assist him in his activities.

The protagonist's story is somewhat patchy and lacks credibility, but the doomed love story that he witnesses as a silent - if not disinterested - observer is told with Chekhov's genius for describing the hopelessness and futility of life in Russia in the late nineteenth century. Like the great jazz divas Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, he's got the knack for taking pain, despair and sadness and turning them into something beautiful, multi-layered, nuanced and deeply moving.