by Dorian Passer and Anton Chekhov. 56th place, IFComp 2022.

This definitely got me thinking, but I’m not sure I like it. That is, I like it a bit, but maybe not enough.

I think I would have bounced off this much harder if I hadn’t read Saunders’ A Swim In A Pond In The Rain this year and gotten a little crash-course on Chekhov short stories therein. I was able to enjoy the Chekhov story embedded in this work much more. But then, I’m less sure that the contemporary (and interactive) part of this work lands nearly as well against the Chekhov story.

Chekhov’s story is about false hope, and hopes dashed. On one level, Ivan’s condition is that he goes from having a losing lottery ticket to having a losing lottery ticket; nothing changes. But his experience of the possibility of winning changes him - it sets him on these grand dreams about what it would be like to have money. And it changes the way he sees the world around him. It changes his relationship to his wife. Then not winning changes him again, and he’s become a bitter man. His character changes.

Toria’s story doesn’t seem to have quite the same character motion. She is reading Chekhov along with us, and she is also playing the lottery. Waiting for the results, she also dreams about having money and this changes her thoughts on her friend’s/roommate’s cooking. She also loses. But in the end she smiles, and decides to play again - even to play more in the role of Ivan, by using his lucky lottery numbers. Why?

It seems to me Ivan has ended in a strictly worse place than he started. Perhaps this story is a moral tale about the risk of misplaced hope. So why has Toria rejected this warning? Maybe that says more about Toria as a character than about consequence in the story - she is the sort of person who joyfully continues to hope, against all odds. She stands in contrast to Ivan; they are almost the same, but in the end he despairs and she persists.

In that, I’ve nearly talked myself into liking this story. So why don’t I like it? Personal taste maybe. I struggle to enjoy text messages as a literary form, perhaps more than I struggle with Russian literature. I find myself feeling like I know Ivan, or at least I know his type; Toria not so much. She doesn’t get a short bio like Chekov often uses to introduce his characters.

The mad-lib interaction also didn’t do anything for me. Injecting a sentiment into Toria’s story a few times didn’t really engage me; it seems like the game is sort of selling that it’s doing some kind of sentiment analysis, but really it felt like a placebo as much as anything. This wasn’t helped by the very first prompt, which I struggled quite a bit to fill:

“I wonder if Jas is _ to eat that sauce again herself?“

What expressive word do I put here? “Going” to eat that sauce? “Planning” to eat that sauce? “Happy” to eat that sauce? I froze on this for a bit. In retrospect it seems like “eager” might be a good fit, but I wanted to give a negative sentiment here. “Loathe?” “Disgusted?” They’re kind of awkward. I went back and tested this first one and the language that follows changes ever-so-slightly to re-rail the sentiment; that is, I’m not even sure it counted much as expression to fill in this word. A later phrase sounds like sarcasm to me, but could maybe be taken literally depending on the word filled in, seeming like another non-expression moment. I didn’t feel like I was making interesting choices, or significantly shifting Toria’s attitude.

Anyway, thought-provoking as a piece of literature, but not something I’m likely to recommend.