Considered by many to be the world’s greatest writer, (including the professor teaching my English course at Harvard, James Wood), Chekhov was a physician who wrote in the final years of the 19th C and the beginning of the 20th before dying of TB in 1904.

Among his most famous stories are the four I read for Wood’s course:  ‘Gussev’, ‘The Lady with the Dog’, ‘The Bishop’, and ‘Rotchschild’s Fiddle’ written between 1894-1902.  From the voice of a soldier dying on board a ship to a Russian Orthodox bishop who’s dying in his monastery, from the adulterous couple of Dimitri Dmitrich Gurov and Anna Sergeyevna to the music making peasants in a rural village Chekhov was able to discern and detail the humanity and the tragedy in everyday life.

The writer of four classic plays and author of dozens of short stories, Chekhov was admired during  his life by Tolstoy and after his death by short story writers Raymond Carver and William Boyd.  Virginia Woolf wrote in “The Common Reader” of Chekhov as follows:  “But is it the end, we ask? We have rather the feeling that we have overrun our signals; or it is as if a tune had stopped short without the expected chords to close it. These stories are inconclusive, we say, and proceed to frame a criticism based upon the assumption that stories ought to conclude in a way that we recognize. In so doing we raise the question of our own fitness as readers. Where the tune is familiar and the end emphatic—lovers united, villains discomfited, intrigues exposed—as it is in most Victorian fiction, we can scarcely go wrong, but where the tune is unfamiliar and the end a note of interrogation or merely the information that they went on talking, as it is in Tchekov, we need a very daring and alert sense of literature to make us hear the tune, and in particular those last notes which complete the harmony.

This brief taste of four stories has renewed my appreciation for Chekhov and I hope to read more as time goes on.