Chekhov's Dama s sobachkoy (1899) is perhaps the most celebrated example of his shorter prose and one of the most famous stories in Russian literature. The tale of an adulterous liaison, set in Yalta, it shows to greatest effect Chekhov's propensity for the conjuring of mood and atmosphere. The tale's modernity is displayed too in its anticlimactic conclusion of poignant open-endedness: ' ...and it was clear to both that the end was still far, far off and that the most complicated and difficult part was only beginning.'

Uncle Vanya has been described as the least pleasant and most bitter of
Chekhov's plays - yet the difficulty in communication is one of its
outstanding features.

Chayka (1896) is the first of Anton Chekhov's four celebrated plays. While its first performance was a fiasco, the play was revived in 1898 and staged by the newly founded Moscow Art Theatre, who 'adopted' Chekhov and built their own success on masterly performances of his plays, beginning with The Seagull. Produced by Nemirovich-Danchenko, with Konstantin Stanislavsky as Trigorin and Meyerhold as Treplev, it was a triumph for both the Theatre and the playwright. In this play Chekhov first demonstrated his innovatory technique of indirect action and new dramatic structure and...

This book contains the Russian text of Chekhov's Three Stories and is accompanied with an introduction and notes.

Chekhov's penultimate play has inspired a bewildering variety of interpretations since its premiere at the Moscow Arts Theatre on 31 January 1901. Three Sisters has been viewed both as tragedy and as comedy, as a poignant testimony to the eternal yearning for love, happiness, beauty and meaning, and as a devastating indictment of the folly of inert gentility and vacuous day-dreaming. Its characters have been deemed worthy embodiments of the universal 'human condition', keenly experiencing hope, disappointment, frustration, loneliness and the passage of time - or passive products of...