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Seven Short Novels
Including "The Duel," "Ward No. 6," "A Woman's Kingdom," "Three Years," "My Life," "Peasants," and "In the Ravine," as well as a biographical introduction and a chronology.
448 pages, Paperback
Published August 17, 2003
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95 people want to read
About the author
Anton Chekhov
5,969 books9,793 followers
Antón Chéjov
(Spanish)
Dramas, such as The Seagull (1896, revised 1898), and including "A Dreary Story" (1889) of Russian writer Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, also Chekov, concern the inability of humans to communicate.
Born ( Антон Павлович Чехов ) in the small southern seaport of Taganrog, the son of a grocer. His grandfather, a serf, bought his own freedom and that of his three sons in 1841. He also taught to read. A cloth merchant fathered Yevgenia Morozova, his mother.
"When I think back on my childhood," Chekhov recalled, "it all seems quite gloomy to me." Tyranny of his father, religious fanaticism, and long nights in the store, open from five in the morning till midnight, shadowed his early years. He attended a school for Greek boys in Taganrog from 1867 to 1868 and then Taganrog grammar school. Bankruptcy of his father compelled the family to move to Moscow. At the age of 16 years in 1876, independent Chekhov for some time alone in his native town supported through private tutoring.
In 1879, Chekhov left grammar school and entered the university medical school at Moscow. In the school, he began to publish hundreds of short comics to support his mother, sisters and brothers. Nicholas Leikin published him at this period and owned Oskolki (splinters), the journal of Saint Petersburg. His subjected silly social situations, marital problems, and farcical encounters among husbands, wives, mistresses, and lust; even after his marriage, Chekhov, the shy author, knew not much of whims of young women.
Nenunzhaya pobeda , first novel of Chekhov, set in 1882 in Hungary, parodied the novels of the popular Mór Jókai. People also mocked ideological optimism of Jókai as a politician.
Chekhov graduated in 1884 and practiced medicine. He worked from 1885 in Peterburskaia gazeta.
In 1886, Chekhov met H.S. Suvorin, who invited him, a regular contributor, to work for Novoe vremya, the daily paper of Saint Petersburg. He gained a wide fame before 1886. He authored The Shooting Party , his second full-length novel, later translated into English. Agatha Christie used its characters and atmosphere in later her mystery novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd . First book of Chekhov in 1886 succeeded, and he gradually committed full time. The refusal of the author to join the ranks of social critics arose the wrath of liberal and radical intelligentsia, who criticized him for dealing with serious social and moral questions but avoiding giving answers. Such leaders as Leo Tolstoy and Nikolai Leskov, however, defended him. "I'm not a liberal, or a conservative, or a gradualist, or a monk, or an indifferentist. I should like to be a free artist and that's all..." Chekhov said in 1888.
The failure of The Wood Demon , play in 1889, and problems with novel made Chekhov to withdraw from literature for a period. In 1890, he traveled across Siberia to Sakhalin, remote prison island. He conducted a detailed census of ten thousand convicts and settlers, condemned to live on that harsh island. Chekhov expected to use the results of his research for his doctoral dissertation. Hard conditions on the island probably also weakened his own physical condition. From this journey came his famous travel book.
Chekhov practiced medicine until 1892. During these years, Chechov developed his concept of the dispassionate, non-judgmental author. He outlined his program in a letter to his brother Aleksandr: "1. Absence of lengthy verbiage of political-social-economic nature; 2. total objectivity; 3. truthful descriptions of persons and objects; 4. extreme brevity; 5. audacity and originality; flee the stereotype; 6. compassion." Because he objected that the paper conducted against [a:Alfred Dreyfu
Dramas, such as The Seagull (1896, revised 1898), and including "A Dreary Story" (1889) of Russian writer Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, also Chekov, concern the inability of humans to communicate.
Born ( Антон Павлович Чехов ) in the small southern seaport of Taganrog, the son of a grocer. His grandfather, a serf, bought his own freedom and that of his three sons in 1841. He also taught to read. A cloth merchant fathered Yevgenia Morozova, his mother.
"When I think back on my childhood," Chekhov recalled, "it all seems quite gloomy to me." Tyranny of his father, religious fanaticism, and long nights in the store, open from five in the morning till midnight, shadowed his early years. He attended a school for Greek boys in Taganrog from 1867 to 1868 and then Taganrog grammar school. Bankruptcy of his father compelled the family to move to Moscow. At the age of 16 years in 1876, independent Chekhov for some time alone in his native town supported through private tutoring.
In 1879, Chekhov left grammar school and entered the university medical school at Moscow. In the school, he began to publish hundreds of short comics to support his mother, sisters and brothers. Nicholas Leikin published him at this period and owned Oskolki (splinters), the journal of Saint Petersburg. His subjected silly social situations, marital problems, and farcical encounters among husbands, wives, mistresses, and lust; even after his marriage, Chekhov, the shy author, knew not much of whims of young women.
Nenunzhaya pobeda , first novel of Chekhov, set in 1882 in Hungary, parodied the novels of the popular Mór Jókai. People also mocked ideological optimism of Jókai as a politician.
Chekhov graduated in 1884 and practiced medicine. He worked from 1885 in Peterburskaia gazeta.
In 1886, Chekhov met H.S. Suvorin, who invited him, a regular contributor, to work for Novoe vremya, the daily paper of Saint Petersburg. He gained a wide fame before 1886. He authored The Shooting Party , his second full-length novel, later translated into English. Agatha Christie used its characters and atmosphere in later her mystery novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd . First book of Chekhov in 1886 succeeded, and he gradually committed full time. The refusal of the author to join the ranks of social critics arose the wrath of liberal and radical intelligentsia, who criticized him for dealing with serious social and moral questions but avoiding giving answers. Such leaders as Leo Tolstoy and Nikolai Leskov, however, defended him. "I'm not a liberal, or a conservative, or a gradualist, or a monk, or an indifferentist. I should like to be a free artist and that's all..." Chekhov said in 1888.
The failure of The Wood Demon , play in 1889, and problems with novel made Chekhov to withdraw from literature for a period. In 1890, he traveled across Siberia to Sakhalin, remote prison island. He conducted a detailed census of ten thousand convicts and settlers, condemned to live on that harsh island. Chekhov expected to use the results of his research for his doctoral dissertation. Hard conditions on the island probably also weakened his own physical condition. From this journey came his famous travel book.
Chekhov practiced medicine until 1892. During these years, Chechov developed his concept of the dispassionate, non-judgmental author. He outlined his program in a letter to his brother Aleksandr: "1. Absence of lengthy verbiage of political-social-economic nature; 2. total objectivity; 3. truthful descriptions of persons and objects; 4. extreme brevity; 5. audacity and originality; flee the stereotype; 6. compassion." Because he objected that the paper conducted against [a:Alfred Dreyfu
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
February 12, 2016
This was originally published at The Scrying Orb.
I had never read any Chekhov. This was grave misstep, a gap in my western canon. I’ve read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky but was missing the Russian who has a smoking literary gun named after him. He’s supposed to be the master of the short story. He’s so ubiquitous, this book doesn’t even have a title or an author but just says CHEKHOV on the front. How do I even index this? Chekhov by Chekhov?
Anyway. I’ve read Chekhov now. I probably should have read his better known short stories, but I started with novellas. And let me tell you, I now know just how miserable it is to be a 19th century Russian peasant. I can feel the cockroaches crawling in my sleep, taste the stale black bread and porridge.
The Duel
The Duel is my favorite novella in this collection. It’s the first story and unlike all the others, it’s not about the class divide of declining Tsarist Russia nor the impact of the Industrial Revolution on village life.
A bunch of Russian immigrants — the deacon, the zoologist, the government official and his wife, and other archetypes — live their lazy lives in a hazy desert outpost in the Caucasus. It’s so hot outside, you can’t do much more than swim in the warm sea or sit in the shade. Laevsky, the official, came out here to start a new life with his married lover, but has had enough. The plot revolves around him trying to borrow enough money to skip town, while lying to himself and everyone else that he’ll pay for his woman to come along later.
Much of the story is these characters having conversations while completely misunderstanding each other. The blurb on this book declares Chekhov’s interest in mutual unintelligibility. This is an excellent term that encapsulates the human problem of The Duel. None of the characters are bad people, though some are quite weak, they’re just locked into their own narrow vision of the world and cannot see themselves in anyone else’s shoes. Sound familiar? This story feels it. You could meet these people in your modern day to day.
Ward No. 6, A Woman’s Kingdom, Three Years
I’m lumping these three together because they’re similar in theme and also the least interesting to me. Ward No. 6 is about a doctor at a mental asylum, A Woman’s Kingdom is about an unhappy woman who inherits a booming factory business. They’re both about the divide between the people on the inside (wealth, class, etc) and the people on the outside (the poor, the workers, the mentally ill) and the various philosophies and personalities involved. I found them sort of interesting but mostly tedious.
Three Years, while still somewhat tedious, earns its tedium. Because it’s a story about tedium. A man marries a woman who does not love him. They move to Moscow. Both of them are miserable. There’s not much to look forward to when even romantic love has failed. They try to convince themselves love doesn’t matter but little else stimulates them. Yeah. Even the version I know was objectively good I found difficult to actually like.
My Life
This one is great. A twenty something good-for-nothing from a formerly aristocratic family decides to become a working man and is promptly disowned by his father. As the title says, this is the first person story of his life. It’s meandering and melancholy. Life can be unfulfilling and unhappy no matter how hard you try to attach principles and meaning to it. But unlike the other stories, there are moments of joy, however fleeting. It’s almost like Chekhov arguing with himself here. The pointless tedium of life that he fears and portrays in other stories is present here but is shown as possible to combat. Maybe.
Peasants and The Ravine
Peasants is an excellent depiction of living life poor in a village in the late 19th century. It was terrible. You cannot read this story without feeling honestly glad you live in the modern day and have at least some means that these poor sods didn’t. It also has the best quotes:
The Ravine is more of the same but not as effective as Peasants, though it does include the most shocking and horrifying scene in the whole collection.
I had never read any Chekhov. This was grave misstep, a gap in my western canon. I’ve read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky but was missing the Russian who has a smoking literary gun named after him. He’s supposed to be the master of the short story. He’s so ubiquitous, this book doesn’t even have a title or an author but just says CHEKHOV on the front. How do I even index this? Chekhov by Chekhov?
Anyway. I’ve read Chekhov now. I probably should have read his better known short stories, but I started with novellas. And let me tell you, I now know just how miserable it is to be a 19th century Russian peasant. I can feel the cockroaches crawling in my sleep, taste the stale black bread and porridge.
The Duel
The Duel is my favorite novella in this collection. It’s the first story and unlike all the others, it’s not about the class divide of declining Tsarist Russia nor the impact of the Industrial Revolution on village life.
A bunch of Russian immigrants — the deacon, the zoologist, the government official and his wife, and other archetypes — live their lazy lives in a hazy desert outpost in the Caucasus. It’s so hot outside, you can’t do much more than swim in the warm sea or sit in the shade. Laevsky, the official, came out here to start a new life with his married lover, but has had enough. The plot revolves around him trying to borrow enough money to skip town, while lying to himself and everyone else that he’ll pay for his woman to come along later.
Much of the story is these characters having conversations while completely misunderstanding each other. The blurb on this book declares Chekhov’s interest in mutual unintelligibility. This is an excellent term that encapsulates the human problem of The Duel. None of the characters are bad people, though some are quite weak, they’re just locked into their own narrow vision of the world and cannot see themselves in anyone else’s shoes. Sound familiar? This story feels it. You could meet these people in your modern day to day.
Ward No. 6, A Woman’s Kingdom, Three Years
I’m lumping these three together because they’re similar in theme and also the least interesting to me. Ward No. 6 is about a doctor at a mental asylum, A Woman’s Kingdom is about an unhappy woman who inherits a booming factory business. They’re both about the divide between the people on the inside (wealth, class, etc) and the people on the outside (the poor, the workers, the mentally ill) and the various philosophies and personalities involved. I found them sort of interesting but mostly tedious.
Three Years, while still somewhat tedious, earns its tedium. Because it’s a story about tedium. A man marries a woman who does not love him. They move to Moscow. Both of them are miserable. There’s not much to look forward to when even romantic love has failed. They try to convince themselves love doesn’t matter but little else stimulates them. Yeah. Even the version I know was objectively good I found difficult to actually like.
My Life
This one is great. A twenty something good-for-nothing from a formerly aristocratic family decides to become a working man and is promptly disowned by his father. As the title says, this is the first person story of his life. It’s meandering and melancholy. Life can be unfulfilling and unhappy no matter how hard you try to attach principles and meaning to it. But unlike the other stories, there are moments of joy, however fleeting. It’s almost like Chekhov arguing with himself here. The pointless tedium of life that he fears and portrays in other stories is present here but is shown as possible to combat. Maybe.
Peasants and The Ravine
Peasants is an excellent depiction of living life poor in a village in the late 19th century. It was terrible. You cannot read this story without feeling honestly glad you live in the modern day and have at least some means that these poor sods didn’t. It also has the best quotes:
The lamp went out. And the darkness, the two little windows, sharply lit by the moon, the silence, and the creak of the cradle for some reason called to mind only that life had already slipped by, that you can’t turn it back . . . You doze, lose consciousness, then suddenly someone touches your shoulder, breathes on your cheek– and there’s no sleep. Your body seems numbed as if circulation had stopped, and all the thoughts of death creep into your head; you turn on the other side– death already forgotten, but through your head drift the old, tiresome, tedious thoughts about want, about food, about flour becoming dearer, and shortly thereafter, you remember again that life has already slipped by, that you can’t turn it back…
The Ravine is more of the same but not as effective as Peasants, though it does include the most shocking and horrifying scene in the whole collection.
December 27, 2024
Seven Short Novels is a collection of novels by Anton Chekhov, known for his short stories. These are some of the longest novels he wrote. The book consists of The Duel, Ward NO.6, A woman’s Kingdom, Three Years, My Life (A story of a Provincial), Peasants and The Ravine. These are the first Chekhov stories I have read, and they all read as though they are short excerpts from longer books.
Ther does not seem to be a single unifying theme to the stories for example the first is about a dual over honour and the second about a doctor who finds that the only person he can talk to on a level similar to himself is one of his patients in Ward NO.6 which is the mental illness ward.
The characterisation of the people in his books is very good and, in each novel, the main characters are detailed so that you either feel for them or dislike them but feel that you know them either way.
However, the storylines are at best weak, there seems to be no real driving story to follow and at time the story seems to drift into a simple description of people’s everyday lives so that when the novel ends there is a feeling of disappointment.
Chekhov is one of those writers, like Dostoevsky, Dickens and Shakespeare that everyone should read but these stories make me feel that he is a little over hyped.
Ther does not seem to be a single unifying theme to the stories for example the first is about a dual over honour and the second about a doctor who finds that the only person he can talk to on a level similar to himself is one of his patients in Ward NO.6 which is the mental illness ward.
The characterisation of the people in his books is very good and, in each novel, the main characters are detailed so that you either feel for them or dislike them but feel that you know them either way.
However, the storylines are at best weak, there seems to be no real driving story to follow and at time the story seems to drift into a simple description of people’s everyday lives so that when the novel ends there is a feeling of disappointment.
Chekhov is one of those writers, like Dostoevsky, Dickens and Shakespeare that everyone should read but these stories make me feel that he is a little over hyped.
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July 12, 2022From the Publisher
Anton Chekhov's best stories display a detached sympathy for the Russian people and a controversial skill in portraying the decaying world of czarist Russia. Though not a political man, Chekhov could be cutting in his criticisms of upper-class society, and he turned a lens on its manners and shortsightedness. His finely observed and sharp-as-nails writing created unforgettable characters. In these short novels, Chekhov was interested, above all, in human relationships, especially mutual unintelligibility and frustration between lovers and the evolution of affection over time
Anton Chekhov's best stories display a detached sympathy for the Russian people and a controversial skill in portraying the decaying world of czarist Russia. Though not a political man, Chekhov could be cutting in his criticisms of upper-class society, and he turned a lens on its manners and shortsightedness. His finely observed and sharp-as-nails writing created unforgettable characters. In these short novels, Chekhov was interested, above all, in human relationships, especially mutual unintelligibility and frustration between lovers and the evolution of affection over time
June 22, 2019
Shortly before reading Seven Short Novels by Chekhov, I read Short Stories, by Chekhov, both published by Norton. I have been reading Chekhov and treasuring my time with him for many years, so his genius as a writer of fiction is not unknown to me. This Norton edition contains seven what I would call "Long Short Stories"in that they are structured more or less as stories with a limited number of characters and settings. In his correspondence he refers to some of these as "novels," though I would take issue with that. The long stories (or novels if you will) range in length from 35 to 100 pages.
Chekhov's recurrent themes are here: loneliness, failures of communication and of connections, disappointment, and hopelessness. His writing style is frankly Realistic, and he writes with economy (his intention, consistent throughout his mature writing, is to use as few words as possible). His descriptions are brief but masterful. I find that his mature works speak to me more than his compositions as a young man. His stories put me in mind of Thomas Hardy.
I particularly recommend the following: "The Duel," "Three Years," "Peasants," and "In the Ravine."
Chekhov's recurrent themes are here: loneliness, failures of communication and of connections, disappointment, and hopelessness. His writing style is frankly Realistic, and he writes with economy (his intention, consistent throughout his mature writing, is to use as few words as possible). His descriptions are brief but masterful. I find that his mature works speak to me more than his compositions as a young man. His stories put me in mind of Thomas Hardy.
I particularly recommend the following: "The Duel," "Three Years," "Peasants," and "In the Ravine."
January 12, 2020
In the Ravine is probably the best story in this collection. Very disturbing without obvously trying to be. Hard to describe.
May 19, 2025
My favorite was Ward No.6
“ When we met in the bathhouse, you made me shudder. Your outer clothing was still presentable but your petticoat, your chemise . . .”
“ When we met in the bathhouse, you made me shudder. Your outer clothing was still presentable but your petticoat, your chemise . . .”
May 10, 2007
I'm assuming, perhaps incorrectly, that this is a version of Chekhov's "Seven Short Novels" collection that I first read in high school. In fact, this book could be credited with getting me sucked into Russian lit and history in general... could be...
February 18, 2009
Finally finished up these short novels. My favorites were "Ward No. 6" and "My Life." Chekhov's realism is tragic and comic. However, I must say that Chekhov's short stories are better than these novella things ("The Duel" was particularly plodding).
July 14, 2008
An interesting read in light of his well-known short stories and dramatic works.
July 9, 2013
I only read one of the short novels "My Life." Beautifully written and sad.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews