Idea for a story. A beautiful young girl lives by a lake all her life. She loves this lake. She's happy and free, like that bird was once. Then a man comes along and for no reason at all ...what do you think he does? - He destroys her. A story about how we make stories, a story about unrequited love, The Seagull is one of the great plays of the modern era. Chekhov explores emotion and creativity with the clarity of a doctor and the heart of a poet. John Donnelly's version of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull premiered in a Headlong and The Nuffield, Southampton co-production, in association with...

This collection features Chekhov's best-known short plays in brand new translations: three farces, two comic duologues and a monologue, all of them referred to by Chekhov as 'vaudevilles' and all written in the late 1880s before any of his great full-length plays. 'I don't much care for theatre, ' he wrote at the time, 'but I do enjoy vaudevilles.'
The Bear, The Proposal and The Wedding are all farces on the preposterous business of courtship and marriage. A Tragic Figure and Swansong are comic duologues: one about a civil servant sweltering in Moscow...

Five masterful dramatic works from one of the world's best-loved playwrights. This collection includes The Cherry Orchard, now on Broadwayin a Roundabout Theater Company production at the American Airlines Theater. Directed by Simon Godwin and starring Diane Lane, John Glover and Susannah Flood.

At a time when the Russian theatre was dominated by formulaic melodramas and farces, Chekhov created a new sort of drama that laid bare the everyday lives, loves and yearnings of ordinary people. Ivanov depicts a man stifled by inactivity and lost idealism, and The...

Tales of madness, alienation, and insight from a master of the short story

Ward No. 6 and Other Stories 1892-1895 collects stories which show Anton Chekhov beginning to confront complex, ambiguous and often extreme emotions in his short fiction. These stories from the middle period of Chekhov's career include - influenced by his own experiences as a doctor - 'Ward No. 6', a savage indictment of the medical profession set in a mental hospital; 'The Black Monk', portraying an academic who has strange hallucinations, explores ideas of genius and insanity; 'Murder', in which...

A story of concealed love and fatal jealousy wrapped into a classic murder mystery
When a young woman dies during a shooting party at the country estate of a dissolute count, a magistrate is called to investigate. But suspicion descends upon virtually everyone, for, as we soon learn, the victim was at the center of a tangled web of relationships with her elderly husband, with the lecherous count, and with the magistrate himself. One of Anton Chekhov's earliest experiments in fiction, The Shooting Party prefigures the mature style he would develop in his magnificent stories...

The life story of a Russian master as he told it to others

From the teenager in provincial Russia in 1875 to his premature death in Germany in 1904, Chekhov wrote over 4,500 letters to a range of correspondents, including family and friends, his publisher and fellow writers - not to mention actresses. These letters tell the story of Chekhov's life as a man and a writer and he emerges from them as a tough, generous, life-enhancing, and enigmatic character.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world....

Raymond Carver called Anton Chekhov "the greatest short story writer who has ever lived." This unequivocal verdict on Chekhov's genius has been echoed many times by writers as diverse as Katherine Mansfield, Somerset Maugham, John Cheever and Tobias Wolf. While his popularity as a playwright has sometimes overshadowed his achievements in prose, the importance of Chekhov's stories is now recognized by readers as well as by fellow authors. Their themes--alienation, the absurdity and tragedy of human existence--have as much relevance today as when they were written, and these superb new...

Chekhov's worldwide reputation as a dramatist rests on five great plays: Ivanov, The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard. All are presented in this collection, taken from the authoritative Oxford Chekhov, in Ronald Hingley's acclaimed translation. Hingley has also written an introduction specifically for this volume in which he provides a detailed history of Chekhov's involvement in the theater and an assessment of his accomplishment as a dramatist.
About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's...

Taken from The Oxford Chekhov, the stories in this collection include "The Butterfly," "Ariadne," "A Dreary Story," "Neighbours," "An Anonymous Story," and "Doctor Startsev," as well as the title story.
About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date...

The fifth volume of Chekhov short stories completes the publication in the World Classics series of his entire work as a mature fiction-writer. Here are 22 stories, including "The Steppe," Chekhov's first short story to be published in a serious Russian literary journal. All the texts are taken from the highly-acclaimed translation by Ronald Hingley.
About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text...