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    Forty Stories
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    Forty Stories
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    Forty Stories
    Ebook443 pages7 hours

    Forty Stories

    By Anton Chekhov and Robert Payne

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    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    If any writer can be said to have invented the modern short story, it is Anton Chekhov. It is not just that Chekhov democratized this art form; more than that, he changed the thrust of short fiction from relating to revealing. And what marvelous and unbearable things are revealed in these Forty Stories. The abashed happiness of a woman in the presence of the husband who abandoned her years before. The obsequious terror of the official who accidentally sneezes on a general. The poignant astonishment of an aging Don Juan overtaken by love. Spanning the entirety of Chekhov's career and including such masterpieces as "Surgery," "The Huntsman," "Anyuta," "Sleepyhead," "The Lady With the Pet Dog," and "The Bishop," this collection manages to be amusing, dazzling, and supremely moving—often within a single page.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRandom House Publishing Group
    Release dateMar 9, 2011
    ISBN9780307778536
    Unavailable
    Forty Stories
    Author

    Anton Chekhov

    Anton Chekhov was born in 1860 in Southern Russia and moved to Moscow to study medicine. Whilst at university he sold short stories and sketches to magazines to raise money to support his family. His success and acclaim grew as both a writer of fiction and of plays whilst he continued to practice medicine. Ill health forced him to move from his country estate near Moscow to Yalta where he wrote some of his most famous work, and it was there that he married actress Olga Knipper. He died from tuberculosis in 1904.

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    Reviews for Forty Stories

    4/5

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    • 5/5
      I think what amazes me the most about Anton Chekhov is the way he is able to paint such vivid images of characters who epitomize humanity. You know these people. Even over 130 years later, you recognize them.
    • 3/5
      Checkhov is, of course, a master storyteller, and the worlds he creates are fascinating and complex. The bleakness of the landscape in all of them, though, is crushing. One comes away with the impression of a late nineteenth-century Russia that is dark, cold, drunk, dirty, emotionally starved and straitened, rigidly socially classified, and on the verge of something, anything - and of course, it was - like a teenager waiting for her life to start. Despite this, Checkhov is very, very, drily funny, mocking his characters even as he paints them a sympathetic creatures. The work itself is brilliant, but the reading is not altogether enjoyable. Not for reading when you yourself are feeling bleak, however black your sense of humor might be. Checkhov's women, also, tend to irritate, and feel much less real, much less three-dimensional, than his men. They are often flighty, un-self-aware, ridiculous, capricious, clinging, dependent, and melodramatic, which becomes tiresome. Payne's introduction to the Vintage Classics translation is enlightening, but it's so loaded with devotional praise of Checkhov that I was surprised to discover these caricatures inhabiting the same space as his legitimately brilliant characters. It doesn't make the stories not worth reading, but it does take away from the enjoyment one might otherwise experience.