Anton Chekhov's Short Stories: Why the Greatest Are Also the Quietest

Anton Chekhov was a doctor who wrote short stories and plays to pay his medical school fees, and never stopped. He wrote hundreds of stories in a career that lasted less than twenty-five years — he died of tuberculosis at 44 — and the best of them changed what the short story is allowed to do.

The Chekhovian story does not build to a climax. It does not deliver a moral. It does not resolve. Things happen, often small things, and at the end there is a sense of something understood — not stated, understood — that was not there at the beginning. His critics in Russia called this formlessness. His admirers, who now include almost every serious short story writer working today, call it life.

The Lady with the Dog (1899)

This is where most people should start, and many critics consider it the finest short story ever written. Gurov, a Moscow banker and serial womanizer vacationing alone in Yalta, begins an affair with Anna Sergeyevna, a young married woman he dismisses as just another conquest. When she returns home to her husband, he expects to forget her. Instead, he cannot.

He goes to her provincial town, finds her, and they resume the affair in secret. The story ends with them sitting together, facing the fact that this relationship, which began as something trivial, is the most real thing either of them has ever felt — and they have no idea what to do about it.

The last lines are famous: "And it seemed as though in a little while the solution would be found, and then a new and glorious life would begin; and it was clear to both of them that the end was still far off, and that what was to be most complicated and difficult for them was only just beginning."

No resolution. No rescue. Just the recognition that the complicated thing is ahead of them. That is a Chekhov ending — not an answer but a clear view of the question.

The Bishop (1902)

Written just two years before Chekhov's death, and clearly shaped by his awareness of his own illness. A bishop in a Russian town thinks he sees his mother in the crowd during a Palm Sunday service — she lives far away and he has not seen her in nine years. She visits the next day. He grows ill. He dies.

Almost nothing happens, by conventional standards. The story moves at the pace of a liturgy — slow, repetitive, full of small physical details. But the emotional accumulation is extraordinary. By the end, the death of this solitary and gentle man feels like a genuine loss, even though we have only known him for a few pages. Chekhov does not explain the bishop's life — he shows a few days of it, from the inside, and trusts the reader to feel its completeness.

Ward No. 6 (1892)

This is Chekhov in a more political mode. Doctor Ragin runs a psychiatric ward in a provincial Russian town. The ward is a horror — overcrowded, filthy, run by a corrupt orderly. Ragin does nothing to improve it. He is a fatalist: people suffer, that is their nature, there is nothing to be done.

He begins visiting Ward 6 to argue philosophy with one of the patients, Gromov, an educated man committed against his will. Their debates about suffering and acceptance are the story's engine. Eventually Ragin is committed to his own ward. He dies there. The story is a savage critique of passive acceptance in the face of injustice — told not through polemic but through the specific, accumulating logic of one man's life.

Tolstoy said this story terrified him and he could not sleep afterward. Lenin reportedly read it and said it was one of the reasons he became a revolutionary.

The Student (1894)

Chekhov's own favorite. A seminary student walking home on a cold Good Friday evening stops by a widow's fire and tells the story of Peter's denial of Christ — how Peter warmed himself by a fire just like this one and three times denied knowing Jesus. The widow begins to cry. Her daughter begins to cry.

The student continues home and realizes something: the story he told connected that fire, that woman, and this woman, across nineteen centuries. The past is not past. It is continuous. And this continuity — of pain, of human feeling across time — suggests that meaning is possible after all.

It is five pages long. It is one of the most complete things ever written.

Gooseberries (1898)

Part of a trilogy with "About Love" and "The Man in a Case," this story follows Ivan Ivanich, who tells a story about his brother Nikolai. Nikolai spent his entire life saving money to buy a small estate and grow gooseberries on it. He achieved his dream. When Ivan visits, Nikolai is fat, happy, and utterly smug. He sits eating gooseberries — which Ivan notices are hard and sour — with the satisfaction of a man who has gotten everything he wanted.

Ivan is disturbed rather than happy for his brother. He looks at contentment and sees complacency. He makes a speech — to his host, who has already fallen asleep — about the crime of happiness in a world with so much suffering. Nobody listens. Nothing changes. The gooseberries sit there, sour.

Why Chekhov Is Difficult for New Readers

If you are used to plots, Chekhov can feel slow or pointless on first reading. His stories do not deliver the satisfactions we are trained to expect: resolution, revelation, decisive action, moral clarity. They deliver something else — a sense of having spent time inside a life that felt real, and having come away knowing something about it that cannot quite be stated.

The best approach is to read slowly and without agenda. Do not look for the plot. Watch what Chekhov notices. He is extraordinarily precise in what he includes and what he leaves out. Every detail he includes is doing work, even if it is not obvious work. By the time you reach the end, look back at the beginning, and you will see that everything was prepared, quietly, from the first page.

Where to Begin

Start with "The Lady with the Dog." Then "The Student." Then "The Bishop." Then "Ward No. 6." If you want his earlier, funnier work, try "The Darling" or "Anyuta." If you want to be unsettled, try "In the Ravine."

Almost everything he wrote is available free online in English translation. The Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translations are the most recent and scrupulous. The Constance Garnett translations are looser but have their own charm — they are the ones that shaped the first generation of English-language writers who learned from him.

More author guides available in our fiction blog.