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 forty years of writing he has never used. His uncertainty spirals into a bizarre and paranoid fantasy, as everyday objects transform themselves into malevolent exclamation marks... Written between 1885 and 1886, when Anton Chekhov was on the verge of becoming a literary celebrity, this endearing collection of early stories reveals the comic talents of Russia's most celebrated dramatist and short-story writer. .