The Chekhov Omnibus (Selected Stories) by Anton Chekhov

Dreamers, idlers, bores, eccentrics – and cranks. The muddle of Imperial Russia. A fight against life itself … and few of them can win. Chekhov is best known for a handful of plays which have become the staple of modern theatre. He also wrote some four hundred or more short stories, sketches and novellas. Acclaimed as masterpieces of compression and precision – Gorky termed them ‘exquisite as cut glass’ – Chekhov’s stories cover the same, often bleak, territory as his plays. Always permeated by his training as a doctor, stories such as The Lady with the Dog, A Dreary story and Ionych hover on the brink of despair, in the shadow of mortality and on the line of tragedy and farce. The most comprehensive paperback edition available, with introduction, notes, selected criticism, and chronology of Chekhov’s life and times”