Short Stories

This collection gathers Chekhov's short fiction from brief comic sketches of the 1880s to the longer stories of the 1890s and after. Provincial doctors, teachers, landowners, clerks, and peasants move through country estates, zemstvo hospitals, and cheap hotels. Plots are slight: a proposal fails, a hunt ends, a woman looks at her marriage. Recurring subjects are boredom, wasted ability, illness, and the gap between talk and action. The stories observe rather than judge. First written in the last decades of the nineteenth century, they treat ordinary Russian life without a continuous novel plot.

Bound in yellow cloth with a design in brown by Lambourne. Dark green endleaves. Brown slipcase.