This paper explores the religious interpretation of Anton Chekhov's short story “The Student.” By analyzing the parallels between Ivan's spiritual transformation and the Gospel Passion narrative, the article reveals how Chekhov constructs a “story within a story” to combine the personal journey of the protagonist and Jesus' suffering and redemption in Russian Orthodox theology. The paper examines the intentional use of religious elements and the dual roles that Ivan plays as both a Christ-like figure and a Peter-like figure, raising questions about the reliability of Ivan’s epiphany and the broader implications for Russian history and its cyclical suffering. Through a close reading of the text, the paper argues that Chekhov's narrative strategy blurs the boundaries between storyteller and protagonist, inviting readers to question the nature of historical repetition, the inevitability of suffering, and the possibility of redemption.

In contemporary contexts, cats continue to inspire digital culture, fashion, and design, reinforcing their timeless appeal. From ancient Egyptian deities to modern artistic movements, cats have symbolized mysticism, resilience, and an intrinsic connection to the unseen. Writers, poets, and artists often draw from the cat’s elusive presence, using it to represent curiosity, self-sufficiency, and the balance between domesticity and wildness. This Article explores the enduring influence of cats as an inspiration, examining their symbolic significance and metaphoric impact on human creativity, aesthetics, and storytelling. The idiom ‘cats and dogs’ has been widely used in the English language, most commonly in the phrase ‘raining cats and dogs’. Though the origins of some cat expressions remain uncertain, the author touches upon various interesting aspects with theories linking it to Norse mythology, medieval drainage systems, and 17th-century literary usage. Beyond weather-related meanings, ‘cats and dogs’ has also symbolized oppositional relationships, as seen in the phrase ‘fight like cats and dogs’ ,which describes constant conflict or rivalry. Cat words like copy cat, cool cat, cat walk or idioms like cats and dogs, bail the cat, all cats are grey in the dark reflect broader cultural perceptions of the contrasting natures of cats and dogs—independent versus loyal, aloof versus affectionate. Over time, the expression has evolved in literature, media, and colloquial speech, demonstrating how animal imagery shapes language and metaphor.

Key Words: Cats, cats and dogs, cool cat, copy cat, cat walk, cat and language, cat and culture

In Rabi Singh’s Odia poem “Charamapatra”, the speaker issues an ultimatum to God, warning Him to either vacate his divine throne within twenty-four hours or face dire consequences of the speaker’s wrath. This apparently heretical act is prompted by the speaking self’s disenchantment with the institution of religion in ‘modern’ times as a response to suffering of others. Similarly, in Hindi poet Nagarjun’s “Anna-pachchisi ke dohe”, the speaker proclaims food-grains as the ultimate godly truth and other gods as vampires. These two poets writing in two modern Indian languages from 1930s onwards were part of a progressive literary movement called pragativaad that manifested simultaneously in both Odia and Hindi literatures. Their works responded to the dominant structures of feeling of their times characterized by the problems of modernity in a colonized and later newly independent country. In this context, the ethics of the literary was forged in the lyrical self’s resistance in response to and in solidarity with the suffering of others which the pragativaadis— ranging from Marxist-socialist to liberal-humanist in their political orientation—believed was a result of unequal (and hence, unethical) socio-political structures.

Using Jacques Rancière’s formulation of “regimes of the arts” and Sisir Kumar Das’s “prophane and metaphane”, in this paper I attempt to synchronically trace the shared repertoire of signification in the progressive literary movements across two languages and understand how they offer a phenomenology of suffering and resistance through poetry. I argue that poetry in this context becomes ‘heretic’ by offering, in Edward Said’s words, a “secular critique” of religiously held dogmas and dominant hierarchies. Through a comparative reading of the select poems of Rabi Singh, Sachi Routray, Nagarjun, and Kedarnath Agrawal, I will be looking at how this movement made a space of articulation of difference by offering us (in slight modification of Simone de Beauvoir’s) a “taste of another’s life’s” suffering by mediating their “lived experience” through poetry.