Teleology of A. P. Chekhov’s Story “My Life” (Theme and Thematical Motifs)

Purpose. The study is devoted to main thematical motifs of Chekhov’s story “My Life”. The correspondence between them reveals thematical integrity of the story. Teleology, the philosofical and conceptual aim of literary creative work, gets its manifestation by means of thematic unity. Results. The hero of the story, Misail Poloznev, breaks off relations with his narrow-minded father, an untalented civil architect. Gentry son, Misail would not choose some respectable job and prefers to work as a house-painter. He declares the importance of manual labor, so he feels like a social outcast in the town. The first leading motif of the story is a labor necessity. Another house-painter, Redka, shares its opinion. His credo is no lie, no deceive, technical skills. True and untrue way of living is the next important motif in the plot and thematical structure of the story. It realizes in two subjects: Masha Dolzhikova’s slogan “Everything is being past through” and Doctor Blagovo’s theory of progress indifferent to ethic goals of self-perfection. Misail Polosnev, on contrary, is sure that “nothing gets past through without a trace”, that a man is responsible on his deeds. The motif of life as a play is a derivate of the responsibility motif. Masha plays in life like an actress. She and Dr. Dolzhikov are completely egoistic, so Misail’s father is. Misail, his sister and Redka live for others’ good. Finally, this way is the only right way to live. Conclusion. The general theme of Chekov’s story “Me Life” is free will of the person tied with his or hers sense of responsibility. Motifs of free labor, true living and common duty units the thematical wholeness of the story. Its teleology is a need of ethic existence for everyone.

Slavery versus Labor

Slavery has been a long-lasting and often endemic problem across time and space, and has commonly coexisted with a free-labor market. To understand (and possibly eradicate) slavery, one needs to unpack its relationship with free labor. Under what conditions would a principal choose to buy a slave rather than to hire a free worker? First, slaves cannot leave at will, which reduces turnover costs; second, slaves can be subjected to physical punishments, which reduces enforcement costs. In complex tasks, relation-specific investments are responsible for high turnover costs, which makes principals prefer slaves over workers. At the other end of the spectrum, in simple tasks, the threat of physical punishment is a relatively cheap way to produce incentives as compared to rewards, because effort is easy to monitor, which again makes slaves the cheaper alternative. The resulting equilibrium price in the market for slaves affects demand in the labor market and induces principals to hire workers for tasks of intermediate complexity. The available historical evidence is consistent with this pattern. Our analysis sheds light on cross-society differences in the use of slaves, on diachronic trends, and on the effects of current anti-slavery policies.

Campaign for Charleston

The Union campaign against Charleston and its environs lasted from November 1861 to February 1865. It included a naval blockade, classic siege operations on Morris Island against Confederate fortifications, and the 545-day bombardment of the city. Confederate defenses relied on engineering expertise and technological innovations in the form of torpedoes and submarines. Because Union forces confronted Confederate defenses for such an extended period of time along a lengthy coastline connected to South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, the campaign for Charleston had far-reaching effects. It created a refugee crisis, caused the breakdown of law and order, disrupted farming in interior counties, unleashed slave uprisings, and changed women’s relationship to the state. Because the Union occupation of the coastal Sea Islands was stable from the opening months of the war, this campaign featured prominent experiments with military emancipation, free labor, and the recruiting and use of African American soldiers in combat, such as the 1st South Carolina and the 54th Massachusetts, that profoundly shaped the national conversation about emancipation and civil rights.

Broken Games and the Perpetual Update Culture: Revising Failure With Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Unity

This article explores tensions between producers and audiences over the growing trend of broken games as developers rush error-ridden titles to market and update them after their release. Through the lens of software studies, it examines development norms among major game companies, noting important connections with contingent commodities and perpetual beta development. Focusing on the discourse surrounding Ubisoft’s notoriously broken Assassin’s Creed Unity (2014), it highlights how digital producers and audiences negotiate failure in a digital environment that increasingly relies on updates, revisions, and patches. It argues that digital industry producers foster an indefinite beta atmosphere within the context of a purchase and recontextualizes audience outrage as free labor by encouraging customers to report on faulty code. Ultimately, industry producers then engender a perpetual update culture in which digital commodities mediate failure through the rhetoric of constant improvement, and producers leverage the instability of digital distribution against its audience.

Pure-Chance Jobs versus a Labor Market: The Impact on Careers of a Random Serial Dictatorship for First Job Seekers

Do workers' first jobs affect their careers? Do such first-job effects (FJEs) vary across worker types? If so, can policy improve upon a “free” labor market by altering initial worker-employer matches? We study these questions using Norway's pre-2013 system of assigning doctors to their first job–residencies–through a random serial dictatorship. This generated individual-level variation in workers' choice sets over employers, which we use as instrumental variables to estimate FJEs. We then decompose workers' preferences over first employers into FJEs-on-earnings and employer “amenity value” components, showing how matches and worker welfare changed in the post-2013 decentralized labor market.