Anton Chekhov

“On Christmas Eve, Vanka Zhukov, a nine-year-old orphan apprenticed to a Moscow shoemaker, secretly writes a letter to his grandfather in the village, begging him to come and take him home.”

“Nikolai Ivanov, a landowner of thirty-five, once full of energy and ideals, has burned out. Deep in debt, no longer loving the wife who gave up everything for him and is now dying, he drifts towards a young girl who believes she can save him — while the district gossips, and a self-righteous young doctor resolves to expose him.”

“A young red dog, half dachshund and half mongrel, loses her master, a drunken carpenter, in the streets on a winter evening. She is taken in by a kind stranger who lives with a gander, a cat and a pig — and is training them all for the circus.”

“One July morning a nine-year-old boy, Yegorushka, is taken from his mother's home across the endless southern steppe, to be put to school in a distant town. Riding with his merchant uncle and an old priest, then on top of a wool convoy among rough, strange carters, he sees heat and storm, nights by the fire, a famous rich man everyone is hunting for — and the immense, lonely beauty of the land.”

“At a party, a rich banker bets a young lawyer two million roubles that he cannot endure fifteen years of solitary confinement. The lawyer accepts, and is shut up in a lodge in the banker's garden with nothing but books. Fifteen years later, the banker is ruined — and the prisoner has learned something neither of them expected.”

“A retired professor and his beautiful young wife come to live on a country estate, and the household falls apart around them: the professor's brother-in-law, who has worked for him all his life, despairs; a young doctor who plants forests — the 'Wood Demon' — loves the professor's daughter but judges everyone harshly. Chekhov's early comedy, which he later rebuilt as Uncle Vanya.”

“In a little town on the Black Sea coast of the Caucasus, Laevsky, an idle young official, is sick of the married woman he ran away with. A cold, brilliant zoologist, von Koren, despises him as a parasite who ought to be destroyed for the good of mankind. Their hatred ends in a duel at dawn — watched, from the bushes, by a young deacon who cannot stop laughing.”

“In a filthy provincial hospital, a gentle, idle doctor who has long since stopped trying to change anything finds, in the locked ward for the insane, the one intelligent man in town to talk to — and learns, too late, what his comfortable philosophy is worth.”

“Yakov, an old coffin-maker in a poor little town, counts every day of his life as a loss. Only when his wife dies, and his own end draws near, does he see how much he wasted — and in his last hours he makes a gift to the man he has always tormented.”

“Kovrin, a brilliant young scholar worn out by overwork, goes to rest at the estate of his old guardian, a passionate fruit-grower, and his daughter Tanya. There he begins to see a phantom — a monk in black, who tells him that he is a genius, one of God's chosen. The visions make him happy; being cured of them ruins everyone he loves.”

“On a country estate by a lake, a young writer stages his strange new play to impress his mother, a famous actress, and the girl he loves — who falls instead for his mother's lover, a celebrated novelist. A comedy, Chekhov called it, in four acts: about art, fame, love, and wasted lives.”

“For twenty-five years Ivan Voynitsky — Uncle Vanya — and his niece Sonya have worked a country estate to support a famous professor in the city. When the professor retires there with his beautiful young wife, everyone's quiet life is thrown into disorder — and Vanya realises that he has wasted his life on a fraud.”

“On a rainy morning at his farm, the landowner Alyokhin tells his two guests why he never married: for years he loved a friend's young wife, and she loved him — and neither of them ever said a word, until the day she left for ever.”

“Sheltering from the rain at a friend's farm, a veterinary surgeon tells the story of his brother, a petty clerk who gave up everything — even his wife's comfort — to buy a little estate where he could grow his own gooseberries. Seeing his brother's contentment, he understood something terrible about happiness.”

“Two friends, a veterinary surgeon and a schoolmaster, spend a night in a village barn after a day's hunting, and the schoolmaster tells of Belikov, a teacher of Greek who lived his whole life as if in a protective case — galoshes, umbrella, rules and dread — and who terrorised a whole town, until he tried to fall in love.”

“In Yalta, a bored Moscow banker who has had many affairs picks up a young married woman walking a little white dog. It is meant to be one more holiday adventure — but back in the Moscow winter he cannot forget her, and finds himself, for the first time in his life, really in love.”

“In a dull provincial town, three sisters — Olga, Masha and Irina — dream of going back to Moscow, where they were happy as children. Over four years, as the army garrison comes and goes, their brother marries a woman who takes over their house, their loves come to nothing, and Moscow drifts further and further away.”

“Lyubov Ranevskaya comes home from Paris to her family estate, with its famous cherry orchard, to find it about to be sold for debt. A merchant, the son of her father's serfs, shows her how to save it — but she and her brother cannot bring themselves to act, and the orchard falls under the axe.”

“Mikhail Platonov, a village schoolmaster who once promised great things, is brilliant, bitter and irresistible to women. Over one summer on a ruined country estate, he is pursued by a beautiful widow, by his first love — now a friend's wife — and by a young student, while his own wife watches; and his inability to choose ends in a pistol shot.”