The Wife, and Other Stories

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About this book

An appeal from a famine-stricken village interrupts Pavel Andreitch's work on a history of railways. He wants to help the hungry peasants, yet distrusts local officials and recoils from the practical arrangements that relief would require. Within his own country house, his strained marriage to Natalya Gavrilovna adds another layer to his unease. Chekhov begins the title story by placing a man's confidence in his own judgment beside the needs and feelings of others.

Translated into English by Constance Garnett, this collection also includes Difficult People, The Grasshopper, A Dreary Story, Gooseberries, and About Love. Scenes of rural hardship and domestic distance sit alongside arguments about the theatre and a young woman's hopes for an acting career. Readers interested in Russian social life will find stories attentive to money, work, affection, and the ways people explain themselves, often revealing more than they intend.

About the author

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) was a Russian short-story writer and playwright who worked as a physician for much of his life. A master of the modern short story and author of plays such as The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard, he shaped twentieth-century drama and fiction alike before dying of tuberculosis at forty-four.