«I sincerely advise you to frequently look into Chekhov's books... to experience these fairy-tale dreams as they were intended, losing yourself in them», — said V. V. Nabokov. Chekhov's artistic world, like a mosaic, consists of individual paintings and situations, from various manifestations of human characters, sometimes unexpected, sometimes paradoxical. It is often difficult to give Chekhov's works an unequivocal interpretation: familiar evaluative categories (ideological, social, psychological) are not so much inapplicable but not absolute. «You can cry and moan over the stories, you can suffer along with your heroes, but I believe it should be done in such a way that the reader does not notice. The more objective it is, the stronger the impression», — words from Chekhov's letter could serve as an epigraph to this collection, which includes works from 1887–1903. Among them are such well-known pieces as «The Duel», «Ward No. 6», «The Man in a Case», «The Gooseberry», «On Love» and others.
