Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) the son of a grocer and serf, worked as a physician and ran an open clinic for the poor, while also writing the plays and short stories that have established him as one of the greatest figures in Russian literature. »

Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) is widely regarded as the preeminent American man of letters of the twentieth century. Over his long career, he wrote for Vanity Fair, helped edit The New Republic, served as chief book critic for The New Yorker, and was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. Wilson was the author of more than twenty books, including Axel's Castle, Patriotic Gore, and a work of fiction, Memoirs of Hecate County. »

Peasants and Other Stories

By Anton Chekhov
Translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett
Introduction by Edmund Wilson

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

Read the introduction (PDF)


Reviews

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

Also see:

Randall Jarrell's Book of Stories
Edited by Randall Jarrell

This wonderful anthology, with its celebrated introductory essay, enlarges and deepens our perception of the storyteller's art and its central place in the world of our feelings.


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Format: Paperback
Retail Price: $19.95
Price: $14.96 (25% off)


Sep 30, 1999
496 pages
ISBN: 0940322145
9780940322141
All Literature in Translation
NYRB Classics
Literature in Russian

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