Peasants and Other Stories

The ever maturing art and ever more ambitious imaginative reach of Anton Chekhov, one of the world’s greatest masters of the short story, led him in his last years to an increasingly profound exploration of the troubled depths of Russian society and life. This powerful and revealing selection from Chekhov’s final works, made by the legendary American critic Edmund Wilson, offers stories of novelistic richness and complexity, published in the only edition to present them in chronological order.

Table of Contents

A Woman’s Kingdom

Three Years

The Murder

My Life

Peasants

The New Villa

In the Ravine

The Bishop

Betrothed

Praise

No one understood as clearly and finely as Anton Chekhov the tragedy of life's trivialities, no one before him showed men with such merciless truth the terrible and shameful picture of their life in the dim chaos of bourgeois everyday existence.
— Maxim Gorky

This is Chekhov with his eye on the big social picture....Longer than his earlier stories, these late works have more in common with The Sea Gull and The Cherry Orchard than with, say,The Doctor; depending on your taste, these stories may be most filling from a social observer's point of view....Subtlety isn't exactly the driving aim here.
—Washington Post Book World