A colleague of her husband informs her that her own husband was far more a genius than all of her artist friends put together.
The story of Olga is the story of class conflict between people who go quietly about their business, serving others, seeking the truth in their own quiet ways, and people who live ostentatiously (whether in wealth or in eccentricity) and selfishly, caring nothing about anybody but their own hermetic existences. Olga learns too late the lie of such class snobbery, the snobbery of the artist toward the man who simply wants to live a good life with a wife and work which serves and benefits others:
Olga Ivanovna went back in memory over her whole life with him, from beginning to end, in the utmost detail, and suddenly realized that he really had been a remarkable man, an unusual man, a great man, in comparison to all the others she had known (Chekhov Short Stories 89).
Class in "The Grasshopper" has less to do with divisions over money or property than about perception and self-perception. Olga's husband knew himself and his place in life as a man committed to using his talents to the fullest to serve others. Olga's artist friends disdained her husband for what they saw as his bourgeois motivations, failing to see that he was far more a fulfilled human being than they. The question for Chekhov in the matter of class is how successful the individual is in becoming a loving and giving person, regardless of income, gender, social standing, or profession. As Troyat writes:
As first [Olga] sees herself deceiving the most ordinary of men with a genius. Not until her husband's death . . . does she realize how wrong she was. In "the Grasshopper," as in so many other stories, Chekhov pits the modesty and dignity of a life spent in unsung labor against the tinsel of success (Troyat 157).
"Oysters" presents Chekhov at perhaps his most blatant in portraying the conflict between th
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