Showing results by author "Anton Chekhov" in All Categories

In this moody Russian drama, Ivanov is a melancholic impoverished landowner whose wife is dying of tuberculosis. However, he finds himself irresistibly drawn to the beautiful Sasha, the daughter of his wealthy neighbors. Augmented by a diverse array of colorful supporting characters and intrigues, this play provides a glimpse of master dramatist Anton Chekhov's early work.

The Cherry Orchard (1903) is the final play by the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov. It is considered as one of four outstanding plays by Chekhov, along with The Seagull, Three Sisters, and Uncle Vanya. The narrative recounts an aristocratic landowner who returns to her family estate just before it is auctioned to pay the mortgage. It dramatizes the socio-economic developments in Russia at the turn of the 20th century, including the rise of the middle class after the abolition of serfdom and the waning power of the aristocracy.

This work by Chekhov is about Musatov, who finds himself fortunate to have such dedicated children. Musatov is a drunkard and is constantly seeking out money from his sons, which they routinely give to him. His children indulge their father continually, even though he doesn't deserve it for all the trouble he brings them and the fact that he has nothing to give in return.

Besides being a great short story writer, Anton Chekhov was also a master of the novella. One of his best is My Life, the tale of a rebellious young man so disgusted with bourgeois society that he drops out to live amongst the working classes, only to find himself once more disillusioned.

In the time of paranoia and religious fanaticism, one young woman's life falls into the hands of two very misguided men.

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860-1904) was a Russian playwright, writer, and doctor. Known best for his plays, he had also written a great multitude of short stories for and about people of all ages and all walks of life. Life as It Happens is a selection of just such stories and novellas. From sad to ridiculous, to dramatic, to funny, by way of tragic or bittersweet - there is something here for everyone.

A lawyer encounters a beggar and offers him a menial job, after which he regularly comes to do odd jobs. Eventually, the lawyer gets him a clerical position. Years later, the beggar has risen in life, but it turns out that it was the lawyer’s servant Olga who caused the change of heart which set the beggar’s life in a new direction.

The story of an isolated man and wife visited by the postman and his coachman. This visit triggers all sorts of interpersonal dynamics, as the husband accuses his wife of being a witch who ensorcels young men, while the wife feels that her life has been wasted with her useless husband.

"Zinotchka" is a story told through the eyes of a young boy. He saw his governess, Zinotchka, kissing and cuddling with his older brother, Sasha. Eventually, Zinotchka became his sister-in-law.

Yegor the huntsman, walking down a country road, accidentally meets his estranged wife Pelageya to whom he's been married for 12 years, but who he seldom visited. She weeps and implores him to visit her more often. He tries to explain why he could not abide living in a village.

Years before his marriage to Olga Knipper and his self-imposed medical exile to Yalta, years before he even began writing the seminal works of dramatic literature for which he is renowned, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, to support his financially and physically struggling family, wrote stories...many, many stories. Starting in his early 20s, living in Moscow, he made a name for himself by capturing the peculiarities of Russian life through satire, humor, pathos, and passion. Myriad influences inspired his eventual words for the stage.

In this story, two peasants keeping a three-day vigil over a dead body wrapped in sheets, are interrupted by a man wearing a cassock. The younger peasant agrees to guide the third man to his destination, while the older one stays behind.

"Dreams" is a story about identity and fate. Two peasant constables are escorting a tramp to a district town. A conversation arises, and it becomes clear that the tramp may be a prisoner, but is not really a tramp.

"A Daughter of Albion" is a short story first published in 1883 in a satirical magazine. Anton Chekhov’s stories are often ambiguous and bizarre. Fyodor Andreitch Otsov, the district marshal of nobility, went to the landowner called Gryabov, who was catching fish with the English governess.

In this masterful story of numb desperation and farcical humor of everyday life by Russian playwright and writer Anton Chekhov, Fyodor Nilov, a poor shoemaker who longs to become rich, is granted his wish. But he soon discovers something he wasn't prepared for.

On a hot summer day two carpenters, Gerasim and Lyubim, sit in a pond, floundering about in the water under a willow tree, beside the unfinished bathing shed they were supposed to be working on. Blue from cold and wrangling, they struggle to drag a large eelpout by the gills, from under the root....

Honored sir, father and benefactor, a petty clerk called Nevyrazimov sitting in his office on the Easter Eve in the company of a cockroach scurrying the table, muses upon what he might do to make it in the world. Read in English, unabridged.

The cabman Iona's son recently died. He desperately and unsuccessfully tries to have a talk with the people he meets and tell them of how shattered he is. He ends up talking to his horse. Read in English, unabridged.

Ivan Chervyakov, a petty government official, while in the theatre, sneezes right upon the head of a man sitting in front of him, who happens to be a high-ranking government official. He spends the evening and the next day fawning before his sneeze victim trying to extract forgiveness, but what he succeeds instead is only bringing out a fit of rage in him. Shocked, Chervyakov returns home to lie there and die, due to the sheer stress of having endured such horror. Read in English, unabridged.

A boy of two years and eight months makes his first foray into the outside world in a company of his somewhat wayward nanny and is quite overwhelmed, having got even his first taste of alcohol. In the evening he cannot get to sleep. The soldiers with the brooms, the big cats, the horses, the bit of glass, the tray of oranges, the bright buttons, all gathered together, weigh on his brain. He tosses from side to side, babbles, and, at last, unable to endure his excitement, begins crying.