Anton Chekhov's Short Stories
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (Russian: Анто́н Па́влович Че́хов, Anton Pavlovič Čehov) was a Russian physician, short story writer, and playwright. He was born in Taganrog, southern Russia, on 29 January 1860 [O.S. 17 January], and died of tuberculosis at the health spa of Badenweiler, Germany, on 15 July 1904 [O.S. 2 July]. His brief playwriting career produced four classics of the repertoire, while his best short stories are highly valued by writers and critics. Chekhov practised as a doctor throughout his literary career: "Medicine is my lawful wife," he once said, "and literature is my mistress".
Tolstoy admired Chekhov's short stories, and called him the Pushkin of prose. Chekhov at first wrote only for money, but as his artistic ambition grew, he made formal innovations which have influenced the evolution of the modern short story. His originality consists in an early use of the stream-of-consciousness technique, later exploited by Virginia Woolf and other modernists, combined with a disavowal of the moral finality of traditional story structure. Chekhov habitually removed the opening and ending of a finished story, the places where he believed writers are least honest, and he preferred inconclusive endings. He made no apologies for the difficulties posed to readers, insisting that the role of an artist was to ask questions, not to answer them. Chekhov was famously enigmatic about the meaning of his stories, explaining no further than: "There's no making out anything in this world".
Excerpt from: Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 19:27, December 22, 2006
VeoVeo is publishing these short stories:
In a hotel
The Witch
Peasant Wives
The Post
The New Villa
Dreams
The Pipe
Agafya
