The Collected Stories

This gathering of Chekhov's short fiction runs from brief comic sketches of the 1880s to the longer late stories. Provincial doctors, teachers, landowners, clerks, and peasants move through zemstvo hospitals, country estates, and cheap hotels. Plots are slight: a proposal fails, a hunt ends badly, a clerk's evening collapses, a woman looks at her marriage and cannot explain it. Recurring subjects are boredom, wasted ability, the gap between talk and action, and the pressure of illness and money. The stories observe rather than judge. First written in the last decades of the nineteenth century, they treat ordinary Russian life without a single continuous plot.

Bound in blue cloth with gilt titles. Blue-green four-volume slipcase with decorated paper sides.