The foibles of human nature haven't changed since Russian playwright Anton Chekhov's time. Also a prolific author of short stories, Chekhov gently satirized his often-flawed human subjects. By turns ...

FIFTY-TWO STORIES. By Anton Chekhov. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Knopf. 508 pages. $35. In a lecture published posthumously in 1981, Vladimir Nabokov had this to say about ...

Instead of sheets – dirty tablecloths.’ The notebooks of Anton Chekhov are full of enigmatic observations such as this, the unexplained details that suggest a whole scene, short story or character.

The Complete Plays by Anton Chekhov Edited and translated by Laurence Senelick Norton, 992 pp., $39.95 Of great modern writers, the one readers tend to think of as most like themselves is Anton ...

As a teenager, my aunt bought me a copy of Tolstoy's War and Peace before I was about to leave the UK for a few months travelling alone. She herself had read it on a similar trip at the same age and ...