Chekhov: 475 books

Between five and six in the evening. A fairly well-known man of learning is sitting in his study nervously biting his nails. 'It's positively revolting,' he says, continually looking at his watch. 'It shows the utmost disrespect for another man's time and work. In England such a person would not earn a farthing, he would die of hunger. You wait a minute, when you do come . . . .'

I understood that when you love you must either, in your reasonings about that love, start from what is highest, from what is more important than happiness or unhappiness, sin or virtue in their accepted meaning, or you must not reason at all.

A flock of sheep was spending the night on the broad steppe road that is called the great highway. Two shepherds were guarding it. One, a toothless old man of eighty, with a tremulous face, was lying on his stomach at the very edge of the road, leaning his elbows on the dusty leaves of a plantain;...

Tickets please... A phrase familiar to every train passenger. And every now and then there's one without a ticket with a good excuse ready. When Podtyagin, a seasoned ticket collector on a train, decides to give up drinking and work honestly at his job it sounds like a good resolution. And this very day he comes across an 'unreasonable' passenger who finds the very word 'tickets' cruel and absurd.

The wife of a former collegiate assessor walks into a bank and demands the missing pay of her dismissed husband. 'I am a weak, defenceless woman', she reasons. She repeats this endlessly, exhausts the already exhausted and gout afflicted bank manager and the rest of his staff. In the end she gets...

A local investigating magistrate unsuccessfully tries to explain that it is wrong to take nuts off the railroad track to a peasant, Grigoryev, who simply cannot see why he's to be deprived of his right to use an iron nut as a weight for his fishing line.

Doctors and kind relations will succeed in stupefying mankind, in making mediocrity pass for genius and in bringing civilisation to ruin.' Kovrin is a gifted man, well educated. Following advice of his doctor he decides to leave his busy city lifestyle and travels to recover his health in a beautiful...

Smirnov is scared of being robbed. To compensate and deter the cabman from attacking him, he blusters on in a comical way about his fighting abilities, the three revolvers he doesn’t have, and how a party of armed friends will join him soon.

Mashenka, a young girl who had only just finished her studies at a boarding school, returning from a walk to the house of the Kushkins, with whom she was living as a governess, found the household in a terrible turmoil. Mihailo, the porter who opened the door to her, was excited and red as a crab.

Young impressionable Masha sees a tragic actor Fenogenov during his benefit night and falls madly in love with him. Masha decides to run away with the actor and marry him despite her father's clear disapproval. Her father disowns her describing her husband as idle, stupid, and of no fixed home or occupation....

Unhappy in his marriage, a Moscow bank worker, Dmitri Gurov is vacationing in Yalta, Crimea, where he sees a young lady walking along the seafront with her small dog. They are soon engaged in an affair, and spend most of their time together walking and taking drives to Oreanda. Returning to Moscow...

Vasilisa had not seen her daughter for four years. Her daughter Yefimya had gone after her wedding to Petersburg, had sent them two letters, and since then seemed to vanish out of their lives; there had been no sight nor sound of her. And whether the old woman were milking her cow at dawn, or heating...

A drawing-room in POPOVA’S house. POPOVA is in deep mourning and has her eyes fixed on a photograph. LUKA is haranguing her. LUKA. It isn’t right, madam… . You’re just destroying yourself. The maid and the cook have gone off fruit picking, every living being is rejoicing, even the cat understands...

Sergey Kapitonlch Akhineyev, the teacher of calligraphy, gave his daughter Natalya in marriage to the teacher of history and geography, Ivan Petrovich Loshadinikh. The wedding feast went on swimmingly. They sang, played, and danced in the parlor. Waiters, hired for the occasion from the club, bustled...