A civil servant stands accused of not understanding the rules of punctuation. He begins to go through the correct use of commas and semicolons before arriving at the exclamation mark, which, he realizes, in 40 years of writing, he has never used. From here he develops a bizarre and paranoid fantasy in which everyday objects transform into malevolent exclamation marks. Written when Chekhov was on the verge of becoming a literary celebrity, this is an enlightening new selection that reveals the author's often neglected comic talents

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