Short Stories by Chekhov

About the book

This compilation ranges across Chekhov's short fiction rather than presenting a single connected narrative. Doctors, teachers, officials, families, travellers, and people living at the margins encounter circumstances that expose the limits of their familiar explanations. Ward No. 6 gives institutional neglect and abstract reasoning a particularly disturbing proximity, while stories such as The Betrothed attend to the possibility of changing a life whose expected course has begun to feel intolerable. Elsewhere a brief visit, a journey, or an awkward conversation carries the weight of disappointment or recognition. The variety rewards reading in small groups, allowing each voice and situation its own space. Across the collection, Chekhov's restraint leaves readers responsible for noticing what a character's words evade and what an apparently uneventful ending continues to unsettle.

• Ordinary lives
• Recognition and evasion
• Social constraint

Why read it

For a broad route into Chekhov's fiction that lets readers compare his treatment of different occupations, relationships, and moments of recognition.

Compilation of English translations of Chekhov's stories