Grisha, a fat, solemn little person of seven, was standing by the kitchen door listening and peeping through the keyhole. In the kitchen something extraordinary, and in his opinion never seen before, was taking place. A big, thick-set, red-haired peasant, with a beard, and a drop of perspiration on his nose, wearing a cabman's full coat, was sitting at the kitchen table on which they chopped the meat and sliced the onions. He was balancing a saucer...

Ivan Chervyakov, a petty government official, while in the theatre, sneezes right upon the head of a man sitting in front of him, who happens to be a high-ranking government official. He spends the evening and the next day fawning before his sneeze victim trying to extract forgiveness, but what he succeeds instead is only bringing out a fit of rage in him. Shocked, Chervyakov returns home to lie there and die, due to the sheer stress of having endured...

Unique Elements • About the Author • About the Translator • A Literary Classic by ANTON CHEKHOV. The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories by RUSSIAN author ANTON CHEKHOV is a collection of short stories first published in 1890 in RUSSIA. The title story of this collection, "The Horse-Stealers," tells of an unfortunate hospital assistant, Yergunov, whose horse is stolen by a couple of guys he met in a tavern. Sneak Peak 'A...

The Bishop and Other Stories (1919) is a collection of short stories by Russian writer, Anton Chekhov. The title story of the collection, originally published in 1902, finds the author at his most introspective. Written while Chekhov was dealing with the long term effects of tuberculosis, a period in which he began to accept the inevitability of his own death, "The Bishop" is a meditative story that follows a dedicated man who, in the face of oblivion,...

By 1888, when he was just twenty-eight, Chekhov had published a staggering 528 stories, about half of them comic. Unpretentious, lively, and inventive, these comic stories have long been affectionately regarded in Russia, but publishers in the West, overawed by the prevailing image of Chekhov as a melancholy genius, have resisted the down-to-earth humorist. This collection is the first substantial volume in English devoted solely to the comic stories....

The Schoolmistress and Other Stories (1920) is a collection of short stories by Russian writer Anton Chekhov. "The Schoolmistress" was written in 1897 and published in an issue of Moscow's daily newspaper, Russkiye Vedomosti. Even for Chekhov, whose work is characteristically bleak and noted for its unsparing realism, the title story of this collection is particularly hopeless. And yet, reading it alongside these other stories by a true icon of world...

Pyotr, the Bishop at the Staro-Petrovski Convent feels weak and unwell. During the evening service, on the eve of Palm Sunday, while distributing the palm, he sees in the crowd a woman who looks like his mother whom he had not seen for nine years. For no particular reason tears start flowing from his eyes... Tired and in a kind of haze, he returns to his monastery bedroom, then learns from Father Sysoi, a lay brother, that his mother indeed had come...

Ivan Dmitritch, a middle-class man who lived with his family on an income of twelve hundred a year and was very well satisfied with his lot, sat down on the sofa after supper and began reading the newspaper.

It was past midnight. Nikolay Yevgrafitch knew his wife would not be home very soon, not till five o'clock at least. He did not trust her, and when she was long away he could not sleep, was worried, and at the same time he despised his wife, and her bed, and her looking-glass, and her boxes of sweets, and the hyacinths, and the lilies of the valley which were sent her every day by someone or other, and which diffused the sickly fragrance of a florist's...

Doctors and kind relations will succeed in stupefying mankind, in making mediocrity pass for genius and in bringing civilisation to ruin.' Kovrin is a gifted man, well educated. Following advice of his doctor he decides to leave his busy city lifestyle and travels to recover his health in a beautiful family country estate. There he meets this mystical and prophetic Black Monk, a character from an ancient legend, which he thought was nothing more than...