The Seagull (Russian:, Chayka) written in 1895 and first produced in 1896 is the first of the four major plays by the Russian dramatist Anton Chekhov. These are considered his great Russian classics. It dramatises the romantic and artistic conflicts between four characters: the ingenue Nina, fading actress Irina Arkadina, her son the symbolist playwright Konstantin Treplev, and the famous middlebrow story writer Trigorin. As with the rest of Chekhov's full-length plays, The Seagull relies upon an ensemble cast of diverse, fully-developed characters. Characters tend to speak in ways that skirt...

Chekhov, widely hailed as the supreme master of the short story, also wrote five works long enough to be called short novels. The Steppe-the most lyrical of the five-is an account of a nine-year-old boy's frightening journey by wagon train across the steppe of southern Russia to enroll in a distant school. The Duel sets two decadent figures-a fanatical rationalist and a man of literary sensibility-on a collision course that ends in a series of surprising reversals. In The Story of an Unknown Man, a political radical plans to spy on an important official by serving as valet to his son,...