Introduction

Chekhov wrote seven or eight hundred short stories in his lifetime and is acknowledged as the master of the form. His early comic pieces include The Death of a Government Clerk, in which a petty official sneezes by accident on a general's bald head at the theatre and, apologising again and again, frightens himself to death, and The Chameleon, in which a police officer faced with a dog that has bitten a man changes his verdict each time the dog's owner seems to change. His mature work turns deeper: in Ward No. 6 the doctor ends up locked in the asylum he was in charge of; The Man in a Case describes a schoolmaster who keeps everything in a case and fears anything new; in The Lady with the Dog two married people meet at Yalta and, expecting only a brief affair, discover the first true love of their lives. Writing of ordinary lives in a quiet voice, he leaves the reader with boundless sadness and compassion.