A Chekhov Circus

A guide to the short stories of Anton Chekhov

Category: First appeared in print in 1886

  • No. 92 – The Husband

    A miserable married woman experiences a little happiness when attending a dance for a visiting army regiment.

  • No. 96 – The Chorus Girl

    An angry wife confronts her husband’s mistress, demanding that she give up the jewelry he bought for her.

  • No. 45 – The Dependents

    This is one of the more painful Chekhov stories, I must say, and that’s surprising given that the beings that suffer most greatly in it are animals. I can hardly bring myself to offer a thumbnail sketch of the plot, but here goes: Zotov, a grouchy old man, alone and lonely, can no longer afford…

  • No. 22 – The Requiem

    This is an extremely economical tale of a man who is so deeply troubled that his daughter became an actress that, even after her death, he cannot stop himself from referring to her as a “harlot.” The man, a simple shopkeeper named Andrey Andreyitch, submits a note to his priest, asking that his daughter be…

  • No. 37 – (tie) Polinka/Anyuta

    These two brief sketches focus on wretched love affairs. In the Constance Garnett translations of Chekhov, they appear side-by-side, and as a reader you can’t help but see them as a single piece of fiction, even though they stand completely separate, and were written months apart. Of the two, “Anyuta” is the harsher, more painful…

  • No. 31 – Difficult People

    Chekhov’s father was a petty tyrant who immiserated his wife and children, but only rarely did Chekhov portray cruel, overbearing fathers in his fiction. “Difficult People,” like “The Head of the Family,” is one of those rare cases. The title, “Difficult People,” would probably better be, “A Difficult Person.” It is a portrait of a…

  • No. 131 – Martyrs

    A woman makes the most of a sick day, exhausting her husband in the process.

  • No. 132 – The First-Class Passenger

    Chatting up a stranger on a train, an engineer laments the fact that for all his accomplishments, he is not as well known as actors, writers and the like.

  • No. 136 – A Story Without an End

    An actor’s failed suicide spurs his neighbor, a writer, to use him as the subject for a story.

  • No. 138 – A Nightmare

    A wealthy man fails to understand the effects of poverty on the local priest, who has been tasked with opening a schoo.