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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;...

In the cheapest room of a big block of furnished apartments Stepan Klotchkov, a medical student in his third year, was walking to and fro, zealously conning his anatomy. In the window, covered by patterns of frost, sat Anyuta, a thin little brunette of five-and-twenty, very pale with mild grey eyes....

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.

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....

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.

On a hot summer day two carpenters, Gerasim and Lyubim, sit in a pond, floundering about in the water under a willow tree, beside the unfinished bathing shed they were supposed to be working on. Blue from cold and wrangling, they struggle to drag a large eelpout by the gills, from under the root.

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.

The retired general Buldeyev, suffering from a toothache, has tried all possible means of treating it, to no avail. He is not willing, though, to remove the tooth, so some cure is to be found. The steward, Ivan Evseyevich, remembers he knew once an extremely gifted 'tooth conjurer', who used to just...

Natalya just returned from Yalta, Crimea and is telling her husband over dinner of all the charms of the Crimea. Her husband, delighted, gazed tenderly at her enthusiastic face, listened, and from time to time put in a question. Natalya's never-ceasing babble gets her into serious trouble however....

The importance of women and their influence can never be underestimated. This story vividly shows how in 19th century Russia women pull strings behind scenes to influence even the most principled and seemingly unbreakable of decision makers. And only Chekhov knows how to express such delicate matters in the most enjoyable and humorous way.

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.

There were once two old men who decided to go on a pilgrimage to worship God at Jerusalem. One of them was a well-to-do peasant named Efím Tarásitch Shevélev. The other, Elisha Bódrof, was not so well off.

There was once a man who lived for seventy years in the world, and lived in sin all that time. He fell ill but even then did not repent. Only at the last moment, as he was dying, he wept and said: 'Lord! Forgive me, as Thou forgavest the thief upon the cross.' And as he said these words, his soul left his body.

In Petersburg in the eighteen-forties a surprising event occurred. An officer of the Cuirassier Life Guards, a handsome prince who everyone predicted would become aide-decamp to the Emperor Nicholas I and have a brilliant career, left the service, broke off his engagement to a beautiful maid of honour,...