While his popularity as a playwright has sometimes overshadowed his achievements in prose, the importance of Chekhov's stories is now recognized by readers as well as by fellow authors. Their themes - alienation, the absurdity and tragedy of human existence - have as much relevance today as when they were written, and these superb new translations capture their modernist spirit. Elusive and subtle, spare and unadorned, the stories in this selection are among Chekhov's most poignant and lyrical. The book includes well-known pieces such as The Lady with the Little Dog, as well as less familiar work like Gusev inspired by Chekhov's travels in the Far East, and Rothschild's Violin, a haunting and darkly humorous tale about death and loss. The stories are arranged chronologically to show the evolution of Chekhov's art.About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

    She documents the great beauty that can emerge from marginalized existence.

    In the early 1960s Akhmatova encouraged Emma Gerstein to record her memories of Mandelstam, but Gerstein's vivid and uncompromising account was not at all what she had expected. When first published in Moscow in 1998, her memoirs provoked a wide array of responses, from condemnation to rapturous praise. A shrewd observer and serious literary specialist in her own right, Gerstein was uniquely qualified to remove both poets from their pedestals, and to bring the extraordinary atmosphere of the Soviet 1930s back to life. Part biography, part autobiography, this book radically alters our view of Russia's two greatest twentieth-century poets and provides memorable vignettes of numerous other figures, Boris Pasternak among them, from that partly forgotten and misunderstood world. Gerstein's integrity and perceptive comments make her account compulsively readable and enable us to reexamine that extraordinary epoch.