“No mere relation of harmonized incidents, no recurrent crises, can
make a short story. There must be an inner voice. To explain my
meaning: I do not count Chekhov’s ‘The Darling’ a short story. It is a
fine character sketch. It has a beginning, a very fine working out, but
it gets nowhere. Three-fourths of the Russian short stories, so-called,
are not stories at all. They are sketches, narrations of incidents.
They are like a song, finely wrought, but with no dominant chord to
resolve them into a real end.”--_George Gilbert._