So much of Chekov's writing could be summed up with 'be careful what you wish for', only, of course, why sum up his writing? Why miss out on the beautifully-rendered heartbreak and achingly gorgeous settings and whip-smart, startling dialogue?

Chekhov is the master of the Russian "minimalist" short story. The story that I liked most, "In Exile" is a dialogue between a young Tartar and an older man, Semyon nicknamed the "Preacher." Both are sentenced, and living in Siberia. Semyon tries to encourage the young Tartar to accept his lot, that it is best to be content and not fight what fate has brought into a man's life. And is this not truly a story of life, and life's struggles? Who is wise? Is it the one who challenges fate or the one who accepts its verdict?

My interest in the works of Anton Chekhov was kindled by my primary care physician. On a recent visit to her clinic, we got to talk about literature and discovered that we have similar reading interests. As she is a Russian immigrant, I mentioned that among Russian novelists, I like Leo Tolstoy --his “Anna Karenina” and “War and Peace” in particular-- as he made it possible for me to roam the Russian landscape of the late 1800s.

She recommended that I explore Anton Chekhov –according to her, his works were timeless and that anybody could identify with his characters. After reading this collection of five short novels, I understand why she said that and more.

“The Steppe” is the first novel in this book. In the Introduction, translator Richard Pevear said this about the novel: “The prose is lyrical, musically constructed, full of alliterations and internal rhymes, its sentences shaped after what they describe, rendering the movement of the carriage, the mysteriously alive nights and immobile, stifling noondays of the steppe. . . “

This was how Chekhov described the steppe through the eyes of the main character, a 9-year old boy leaving his widowed mother to attend school hundreds of miles away not knowing when he would see home again. Chekhov’s description also metaphorically reflected the loneliness and inner conflict felt by Egorushka:

“And then, in the chirring of the insects, in the suspicious figures and barrows, in the blue sky, in the moonlight, in the flight of the night bird, in everything that you see and hear, you begin to perceive the triumph of beauty, youth, flourishing strength, and a passionate thirst for life; your soul responds to the beautiful, stern motherland, and you want to fly over the steppe with the night bird. And in the triumph of beauty, in the excess of happiness, you feel a tension and anguish, as if the steppe were aware that it is lonely, that its riches and inspiration go for naught in the world, unsung by anyone, unneeded by anyone, and through the joyful hum you hear its anguished, hopeless call. . .”

And I’m reading the English translation. It must be enchanting to read this in the original Russian as Dr. M did! Chekhov’s “lyrical prose” appears again and again in the collection. Here is how the main character in “My Life” felt when his wife, who he loved dearly, felt out of love with him:

“Oh, what anguish it was at night, in the hours of solitude, when I listened every moment with anxiety, as if waiting for someone to cry out to me that it was time to go. I was not sorry for Dubechnya (n.b., the farm that was their home), I was sorry for my love, whose autumn had obviously also come. What enormous happiness it is to love and be loved, and how terrible to feel that you’re beginning to fall from that high tower!”

I read that “The Steppe” was partly autobiographical and described the scene of Chekhov’s childhood in Taganrog in southern Russia. I have not read enough of Chekhov’s life to know if the other novels in the collection were also autobiographical, but the last three –The Story of an Unknown Man, Three Years, and My Life—had two common themes: they involved love stories that did not end happily every after, and the main character in each work ended up caring for the young daughter/daughters of a loved one who was/were not his own. Also, Chekhov was a medical doctor and two of the novels had medical doctors as minor characters.

The plots of the novels in this collection are refreshingly unpredictable in their twists and turns –only a writer with a very creative imagination could concoct those plots. Aside from this and his powerful prose, what makes Chekhov an excellent storyteller was his ability to describe, through the narrator in each novel, the psyche, the inner character of his dramatis personae.

Its very possible that I'm going about this all backwards. Most people who encounter Chekhov generally do so by the medium he's most famous for: his short stories. He's got quite a few that are considered outright classics and it sounds like if you're into classic literature hanging out with a good selection of his shorter works isn't a terrible way to spend your time. If for some reason you're not a short story kind of person then you may have run into his work via one of the many plays he wrote that still get produced by some theatre group near you practically every season ("The Seagull", "Uncle Vanya", "Three Sisters" and "The Cherry Orchard" seem to be the big guns in that regard).

Or, if you're me, you have zero experience with Chekhov and for some reason decide to dive into his work through his least well known format of storytelling . . . novellas.

Why I have this and (as far as I can tell) not a good sized collection of his short work probably comes to the eternally enticing word for me . . . "complete." Billed as "The Complete Short Novels" (turns out he only wrote five) there's something irresistible to me about diving into a fairly comprehensive collection of an author's work, even if its not the best way to introduce yourself to him. That's not as feasible from a short story standpoint since he wrote about five hundred of them, meaning that even if they were all about two pages long it will still be an unwieldly tome and chances are a large chunk of them are only of passing interest unless you have his name tattooed on your body somewhere and have named all of your children "Anton", even the girls. A lot of them are probably also public domain so if you can make friends with a good translator or get your hands on a decent Russian-English dictionary, have at it. For the lazier, there appears to be a collection of fifty-two stories available by the same translator as this volume, which I imagine probably covers most of the highlights.

But the ideal method isn't the way I went about this since it doesn't seem like Chekhov's forte was longish stories (he did write one actual novel, "The Shooting Party", apparently it’s a murder mystery with a fairly innovative twist for its time but it doesn't go down as one of his top-tier efforts). Each of these stories are roughly a hundred pages long and written in the period between 1888-96, which I would say coincides with sone of his more prolific years except that he was for the most part a story generating machine once his career got underway and only the first story "The Steppe" felt somewhat embryonic, while the rest felt like the kind of Chekhov once would expect, for better or for worse.

They're never less than interesting, but there are times when I wondered if the length worked against them slightly. In shorter works, he'd get to the point much quicker and probably be a bit punchier in how it resolved. Here the extra space doesn't seem to give him the opportunity to go dramatically deeper, so they just feel like longer Chekhov stories, which isn't always necessarily a good thing. For most of them the real impact arrived at the end, but that was mostly due to the story becoming just a little bit sharper as things were winding up and not from the cumulative impact of everything that had gone before. Cut out a chunk of the middle, as sacrilegious as that sounds, and I think several of these might have affected me the same way.

Even so, its probably best not to think of these as conventional "beginning-middle-end" stories with pat resolutions and standard conflicts. Chekhov did a lot to steer the short story toward the form as we know it today but the novellas seem to come across as a kind of strange hybrid. The stories themselves come in with what seem these days to be easily understood conflicts (a man pretends to be a servant so he can get back at someone whose politics he disagrees with, two dudes get angrier and angrier until someone calls for a duel, a guy marries a woman who doesn't love him) but then instead of intensely veering toward anything resembling a climax they just kind of ramble on their way with the characters and dialogue all tumbling along in a sort of enlightening conversation with the misery of human existence as nothing seems to improve or resolve but just goes on and on and on until there's finally a small shift that leads the main character to have the melancholy revelation that life just isn't worth living because its so awful and unpleasant even as they kind of shrug with a "But what can you do?" and take another shuffling step along the road to death and merciful oblivion.

Having worked in retail pharmacy, I understand this attitude perhaps more than you might imagine and I actually found the conclusions of the stories quite appealing despite them being almost confrontational in how open-ended they were. Which is the opposite of the problem I normally have with authors, where I like how we're getting to the end and the author just can't bring the ending home properly. Chekhov doesn't grip me in the telling, but I do like how he wraps it up, if that makes any sense.

"The Steppe" is probably the most observational of the stories, depicting a young boy's journey across Russia by probably the slowest method that doesn't involve crawling, a wagon train. Probably due to its nature as the epitome of "Are we there yet?" it feels the most rambly of the set, with the boy and his companions running into various people along the way without it feeling like we're going anywhere other than wherever it is they're going to. But Chekhov has a good eye for how a kid sees the world and he absolutely nails the mixed emotions of the ending, where someone isn't so much growing up against their will but sort of grasping the nearest edge of what growing up is going to feel like and not sure if its something they're going to like. That sense of change he packs in right at the end is remarkable for how condensed it feels but as I said, I'm not sure it justifies the length.

"The Duel" feels the most soap operaish of the set but as I like guilty pleasures as much as the next person it actually goes down as bit easier than "The Steppe". Ivan Laevsky (it’s a Russian story so get used to everyone having two names, neither of which will be obviously connected) is a guy living with a married woman who isn't so into his woman anymore, or working in general. With her the feeling is becoming mutual but when Ivan gets word that her husband has died he hides the note because he doesn't want to be the marrying kind. However, his general attitude is starting to piss off everyone around him until someone finally snaps and the title of the story starts to make sense (hint: they're not challenging each other in a bake-off). Surprisingly, the most optimistic of the stories, which probably tricked me into thinking that the tone of "The Steppe" was a fluke and this was more what Chekhov was like. Nope.

Meanwhile, "The Story of an Unknown Man" has my favorite setup, sort of a "The Remains of the Day" if the butler was only there to spy on his boss and gather dirt to use on someone else. The protagonist of this story assumes he's dying and pretends to be one of the working class so he can find a way to get back at his employer's dad, whose politics he utterly hates. Along the way he turns out to be a not terrible butler and winds up getting involved in the domestic troubles of his boss without hardly trying as the girl he has on the side finally decides to leave her husband and move in with him. Needless to say, this is not viewed as a positive development. Its actually the funniest story for a while as a guy who took on a role for one reason finds himself not only failing at his goal but watching someone's homelife start to unravel around him as the woman arrives and starts to give the place a woman's touch.

That's all well and good but then Chekhov's shifts things in a different direction entirely as the story winds on and it ends not on some farcical note but as something much more thoughtful and reserved, people trying to do what's right in spite of themselves and the trepidation of not knowing if your own plans are going to survive you.

"Three Years" takes on a sort of rom-com scenario, where a young merchant falls desperately in love with a woman taking care of his ailing sister, proposes to her in the heat of passion even though She's Just Not That Into Him and then spends a lot of time discovering what marriage is like when your wife just can't ever get to the stage where she's doodling your names in hearts in the margins of her notebook. It feels mostly all over the place, as we establish the core issue early on and the story keeps insisting on circling their various shades of unhappiness, bringing in his equally unpleasant family to spice things up and in a sense presaging the ending of "Paradise By the Dashboard Light" decades before the song ever existed.

I found it the hardest to get into (probably tied with the next story) and it may be an example of Chekhov's style at its fullest flowering or a good reason that his stories should be a lot shorter than what we get here. Because again, while the story seems determined to drive its central point into the permafrost as it explores every nuance of the scenario, it also feels the most realistic of the tales in this collection . . . something that really makes the conclusion pay off. Its despairing, in a sense ("What have I done with my life") but also thoughtful and hopeful and kind of grim, aware that you can't turn back time but you can enjoy what you have. It makes the story worth it but ask me about the story halfway through reading it and I might have given you a different answer.

Then there's "My Life". A nobleman's son decides to live like the common folk and do all the things the common folk and as you can imagine discovers years before David Lee Roth did that the simple life isn't very simple. But despite all that it never quite becomes a comedy, unless there's a really dark sense of Russian humor at play here. Again, it feels strangely realistic in how Chekhov approaches it, where our first-person protagonist actually gives everything the ol' college try, even attracting his sister to his new ways while causing a rift with his father, who can't understand why his kid wants to go farming and fool around in the countryside. The results are never comical but earnest and if the protagonist is deluded its only because he hasn't quite smashed face-first into the learning curve yet.

It makes for interesting reading, if not totally accessible because the story feels airy and plotless at times, somewhere along the lines of me chronicling my workday and daily routines surrounding it. For most of the story I feel at a distance from these people, not necessarily because of the style (the translator makes everything in here readable) but because there's no easy entry into these people or their lives. Its not that I can't relate, its that the story doesn't seem to care if I do or not.

But once more Chekhov pulls it out with something that sticks to you, with the protagonist leaving us with reflections on his life and life in general that give you the sort of uneasy feel that any change in your life should. You don't know how its going to turn out for these people, and neither do they and its their accepting of the unknown even though they seem to be convinced that unknown doesn't hold any favors for them that makes the stories linger.

With all that said, is this the best place to start with Chekhov? I'd venture "no" if only because its better to get used to his work in concentrated bursts before moving onto the longer stuff. These stories are good but they're slippery in a way that other Russian novels I've read aren't and I think diving into these requires more familiarity with the terrain that I currently possess. I'm willing to try that short story collection someday, but if you've already seen every production of "Uncle Vanya" in a hundred mile radius then this may be the next logical step.

Read The Steppes and watch The Duel on Amazon Prime. I get a kick out of Chekov, find he has a sense of humor when he writes. Also hard to remember he wrote in the late 1800's/early 1900's. Seems like a modern writer and such a great writer.

The Story of an Unknown Man:

Chekov is a masterful story teller. Many people have gone over the story line so I will skip all that. I was struck by how this story can relate to us today. Stepan knows he is dying and sadly feels that he will die having lived a meaningless life. Many of us as we age look over our life and wonder what meaning there was in it. He looks at the early part of his life before age 30 and feels it was so promising, but despairs that it has trailed off into nothing. This is what makes a classic a classic. It has the power to move us and to speak to us thru time.

As the French saying goes, "The more things change, the more they stay the same." Zinaida thinks she has broken free from the constraints of societal expectations, but is overcome by them in the end. Women today have much greater freedom than 19th century Russian noble women. But in many ways things have not changed that much. Human relations between the sexes are just as complicated today, if not more so, than they were then.

The thing I most admire in Chekov is his compassion for his characters. He has the extraordinary ability to discern how people appear to others as well as what is going on in their inner life.

Each novella more perfect than the next.

OK, so my favorite librarian says Chekhov is the best Russian writer, and some literary lists say the same. He only wrote one novel of any length so this was a collection of his short novels. I liked 'The Duel', 'The Steppe' and 'My Life' but the others were so-so for me. I still prefer Dostoevsky , Tolstoy and Solzenhitshen itsyn as novelists and I'd put the poet Mayakovsky a bit ahead of Chekhov. Next I may try some Pushkin to see where he fits.

A review for the novice and unsophisticated

This was my first dip into the work of anton Chekhov after reading an extol of his literary prowess from Robert Greene. At first, I really couldn't see what all the fuss was about... I felt (and somwhat still do) that maybe some of the life of his writting is lost when translated but thats just a guess ...
As I continued to read, I did begin to appreciate a few things. The depth of the characters in each short story is quite extraordinary. Chekhov has the ability to portray the banal and ordinary in such a way that it becomes mesmorizing. You feel like you woud be able to predict how a particular character would react to any number of situations and that you know and understand them intimately even though you have only 'met' them over a few pages.
I also found myself fustrated with the lack of colsure in the stories. There were no cliff hangers, no satisfying climax... they would end abruptly without warning and left me yearning for some kind of clousure. It was almost amusing.

I've come to appreciate them not as stories in the normal sense with a beginning, middle and end but more as a snapshot into the lives of characters so real that you can easily imagine them or something like them existing at that time and in that place. A window into their world, without frills or superfluous drama. Chekhov in my limited and weak understanding writes about the real and the only glamour he adds is the depth of his understanding and empathy able to dig deeper into he grit of a characters persona than anyone else ive ever read.

“The Steppe” [1888]
A long and masterful story in which Anton Chekhov revisits the Ukrainian and South-Russian steppes of his boyhood summer holidays; he was inspired by a trip back to his hometown of Taganrog in 1887. The story is saturated with landscape, with the immense plains and the mysteries they harbored: from the coarse grass to ancient burial places and menhirs, windmills, water-towers, and Cossacks and Ukrainian peasants. The story is slight: a boy travels through the seemingly endless steppe with a caravan of carts loaded with cotton to the city where he will go to high-school. His companions are a priest and a merchant. During the trek there are various small incidents, above all the clashes with the bully Dymov. But instead of letting that come to a showdown, Chekhov deftly deflates the crisis into inconsequentiality - something which feels shockingly true to life.

“The Duel” [1891]
Novella about a catharsis, about a life-changing experience. The story is set in the hot and humid Caucasus, in a seaside town on the Black Sea, among the small Russian community of officials and administrators living away from Russia itself. The town is a sort of "colonial" backwater.
The story has two elements. One is the relation between Ivan Andreich Laevsky and Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, lovers who have run away to the Caucasus. Nadyezhda is Laevsky's married mistress - she has run away from her husband and the two are trying to build up a new existence in this faraway place. They can't marry because a separation was legally impossible in those days. Of course, their relation sets tongues wagging among the community - the majority of the residents shun their improper courtship. On top of that, Laevsky no longer loves Nadyezhda, as he confides to his friend Samoylenko, a jovial doctor. He doesn't even tell her the news that her husband has recently died, so they could marry. Laevsky has a weak character: he drinks, gambles, and lacks direction. He is the type of the "superfluous man" and only perfunctorily performs his duties as a minor bureaucrat. As he neglects Nadyezhda, she has grown bored and has started flirting rather dangerously with other men.

The second element is the hate relation between Laevsky and the scientist Von Koren. Von Koren is a follower of social-Darwinism and the philosophy of Nietzsche - he feels that Laevsky's slovenly lifestyle is worthless. In fact, Von Koren feels killing Laevsky would be beneficial to society, an act of natural selection. Here he shows himself a gruesome predecessor of the 20th c. Nazis. Von Koren's dislike builds until he formally challenges Laevsky to a pistol duel. Chekhov has made the feelings of hatred between these two men, the rigid disciplinarian and the apathetic immoralist, very tangible.
The tension of the novella steadily increases until finally the duel takes place. Neither men is slain, but Laevsky has been grazed by Von Koren's bullet. His near-death experience leads to a psychological catharsis and leads him back to Nadyezhda. He realizes she is all he has... He marries her and starts working seriously to pay off his debts as well.

Typical for Chekhov, there are no clear heroes and villains in this novella, all characters are flawed, if not distasteful - but isn't that like real life? There is nothing human about the cold and hard Von Koren. Laevsky suffers from his apathy, Nadyezhda wastes her life in vain flirting. The town doctor, Samoylenko is good-hearted but useless, and so on.

Also typical for Chekhov, there is no clear plot - again, as in real life. There are no clear judgments either - Chekhov is not a preacher - he said it is the task of the artist to raise questions, not to answer them.

“The Story of an Unknown Man” [1893]
A mix of bits and pieces of Russian literary themes. The narrator ("Stefan") seems to be a political activist or spy (reminding us of Dostoevsky's Demons), and therefore remains anonymous - he gets the job of footman in the house of Orlov, a young Petersburg playboy, whose father is an important political figure. But this is not at all a political story: it is a love story (in the style of Turgenev, with Orlov as the typical "superfluous man"). The narrator observes how Orlov charms a beautiful young married woman, Zinaida, who leaves her husband, and moves in with Orlov. But the playboy soon grows tired of her, even moving in with friends in order to escape her presence, although Zinaida continues to love him passionately.

As it happens, the narrator in his turn has fallen one-sidedly in love with her, and finally manages to persuade her to flee with him to Venice, and afterwards Florence and Nice. But when he tells her about his love, Zinaida is disappointed in him for she believed he was helping her purely out of altruism. In the meantime, Zinaida discovers that she is pregnant (from Orlov) and the narrator has an attack of "pleurisy" (in reality tuberculosis, but just like Chekhov he does not admit this). When Zinaida dies in childbirth (with the help of some poison), the narrator decides to bring up the child which has been delivered safely. He returns to Russia to do so, but after two years his tuberculosis becomes worse, so he resolves his conflict with Orlov and takes measures for the care of Zinaide's child after his death. A strange story that does not entirely convince.

"Three Years" [1895]
Another of Chekhov's five novellas, showing how people can change in the course of three years. When visiting his severely ill sister, Laptev falls in love with Julia, the 22-year-old daughter of the doctor treating the sister. The bland Yulia marries the good-hearted Laptev, not because she is attracted to him, but because she feels bad about disappointing him and also because she wants to live in the big city, Moscow. Although Laptev remains in love with Yulia, the marriage is not a success - Yulia dislikes her husband and his family. But she does not act on the cheap advice of a friend to take a lover or return to her father. The sister dies and her children stay for a while with the couple. Laptev and Yulia have a baby but the child soon dies of diphtheria. Then Laptev's family business fails and his brother has to be put into an asylum. Now Laptev becomes depressed... and, for the first time, Yulia, starts feeling tenderness for her battered husband. The story shows how people are neither good nor bad, they all have their faults. They muddle through to make the best of a given situation and with the passage of time, accommodation occurs. From blind infatuation in the case of Yakov and dislike in the case of Yulia, the feelings between the married couple finally mature into mutual understanding and appreciation.

"My Life" [1896]
The narrator Misail Poloznev lives in a provincial town (Chekhov's own hometown of Taganrog, a port town in southern Russia on the Sea of Azov) with his father, an architect, and his sister, Cleopatra. He has no liking for the standard office-type employment for the middle or upper classes, but instead wants to earn his bread with manual labor – his own class is morally corrupt, he thinks. His father and others in his environment think that manual labor is demeaning, so when Misail starts working for a house painter, his father disowns him. The local governor also warns him about his immoral behavior. Through his friend, Dr Blagovo, who thinks that Russia is still a savage country (he talks a lot about improving the peasant's lot, but does nothing about it), he meets Masha Dolzhikov, the daughter of an engineer, whose ideal it is to work on the land and help the peasants. She thinks that Misail embodies her ideals and they marry, moving to the countryside and trying to farm. But the peasants cheat them and Masha's project of setting up a school is also sabotaged. Finally she tires of the hard life and gives up, asking Misail for a divorce. In the meantime, the sister, Cleopatra, has become close to Dr Blagovo and even is pregnant with his child. But Dr Blagovo refuses to marry her and leaves. The outcast brother and sister now start living together, until Cleopatra dies of tuberculosis after having the baby. Misail takes on the care of the child and continues his career as a workman. His commitment to a simple life is authentic.

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Others can better explain or describe the literary and historical meaning and value in Chekhov's short novels. All I will say is that they aren't "stories" or "novellas" - they are life. Slices of real life, and not just in late 19th century Russia. They are a window into my life, and into yours and into everyone's. No start, no end, just a momentary view out of the window as you sit, being yourself, and your life rushes past you. Perfection.

The Steppe: 3/5 - Enjoyable enough but ultimately wasn't really about much of anything.

The Duel: 5/5 - This was easily my favorite

The Story of an Unknown Man: 5/5 - the narration made this really good.

Three Years: 4/5 - the beginning parts were the best

My Life: 5/5 - has some similarities to Three Years but was stronger from beginning to end.