The Complete Short Novels of Anton Chekhov: Introduction by Richard Pevear [Hardcover]

Anton Chekhov, widely hailed as the supreme master of the short story, also wrote five works long enough to be called short novels–here brought together in one volume for the first time, in a masterly new translation by the award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

The Steppe—the most lyrical of the five—is an account of a nine-year-old boy’s frightening journey by wagon train across the steppe of southern Russia.The Duelsets two decadent figures—a fanatical rationalist and a man of literary sensibility—on a collision course that ends in a series of surprising reversals. InThe Story of an Unknown Man, a political radical spying on an important official by serving as valet to his son gradually discovers that his own terminal illness has changed his long-held priorities in startling ways.Three Yearsrecounts a complex series of ironies in the personal life of a rich but passive Moscow merchant. InMy Life, a man renounces wealth and social position for a life of manual labor.

The resulting conflict between the moral simplicity of his ideals and the complex realities of human nature culminates in a brief apocalyptic vision that is unique in Chekhov’s work.

Praise for previous translations by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, winners of the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize:

The Brothers Karamazov

“One finally gets the musical whole of Dostoevsky’s original.” –New York Times Book Review

“It may well be that Dostoevsky’s [world], with all its resourceful energies of life and language, is only now–and through the medium of [this] new translation–beginning to come home to the English-speaking reader.” –New York Review of Books


Crime and Punishment

“The best [translation] currently available…An especially falo