Anton Chekhov is one of the giants of modern literature, exerting a strong influence on many present-day novelists and dramatists. As a playwright, he ranks in popularity second only to Shakespeare in the English-speaking world. As a prose writer, he was one of the first to use the stream-of-consciousness technique, and his anti-heroic realism, full of ambiguity and allusion, provides no easy moral conclusions and results in a new kind of narrative approaching real life in a way no writer had achieved before him.

What writers influenced me as a young man? Chekhov! As a dramatist? Chekhov! As a story writer? Chekhov!

• THIS VOLUME INCLUDES: The Lady with the Little Dog The Kiss Ward Number Six The Black Monk The House with the Mezzanine The Peasants