The Complete Short Novels

<p>Anton Chekhov widely hailed as the supreme master of the short story also wrote five works long enough to be called short novels&#150;here brought together in one volume for the first time in a masterly new translation by the award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.<br><i><br>The Steppe</i>&#151;the most lyrical of the five&#151;is an account of a nine-year-old boy&#146;s frightening journey by wagon train across the steppe of southern Russia. <i>The Duel </i>sets two decadent figures&#151;a fanatical rationalist and a man of literary sensibility&#151;on a collision course that ends in a series of surprising reversals. In <i>The Story of an Unknown Man</i> a political radical spying on an important official by serving as valet to his son gradually discovers that his own terminal illness has changed his long-held priorities in startling ways. <i>Three Years</i> recounts a complex series of ironies in the personal life of a rich but passive Moscow merchant. In <i>My Life</i> a man renounces wealth and social position for a life of manual labor.<br><br>The resulting conflict between the moral simplicity of his ideals and the complex realities of human nature culminates in a brief apocalyptic vision that is unique in Chekhov&#146;s work.<br><br></p>