The paper aims to compare the narrative techniques of two short stories: Spat’ cho?etsja (1888) by Anton Pavlovi? ?echov and The-Child-Who-Was-Tired (1911) by Katherine Mansfield. A number of critics have taken the similarities of the plots as evidence of plagiarism and only in the beginning of the Eighties of the last century, the researchers noted the peculiarities of the narrative structure and writing of the Mansfield’s work. This paper examines the use of the similarities and differences of the narrative techniques worked out by the two writers, in order to highlight the originality of the two works. This research focuses mainly on three recurrent and alike aspects of these two stories, the street, the heroines, the infanticides, aiming to stress their different symbolic meaning and ideological contents.