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Universally acclaimed as the master of the short-story form, Anton Chekhov began his literary career as the author of brief tales and vignettes of Russian life when he was still a young medical student. Later rejected by the writer in the same self-effacing way in which he repudiated some of his most celebrated works, the stories in this collection not only testify to the early promise of his genius, but deserve to be appreciated for their lapidary vividness and their intrinsic stylistic quality. Mostly dealing with the lives of downtrodden “little” men and low-ranking civil servants as they navigate the corruption and malpractice of Russian officialdom, this volume – here presented in Stephen Pimenoff’s lively new translation – bristles with wit and humour, and is tinged by that understated note of melancholy and lyricism that is a trademark of Chekhov’s writing.

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Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) is one of the giants of modern literature, exerting a strong influence on many present-day novelists and dramatists. As a playwright, he ranks in popularity second only to Shakespeare in the English-speaking world. As a prose writer, he was one of the first to use the stream-of-consciousness technique, and his anti-heroic realism, full of ambiguity and allusion, provides no easy moral conclusions and results in a new kind of narrative approaching real life in a way no writer had achieved before him.

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