Reading Chekhov's Stories in Russian, Volume 2: A Parallel-Text Russian Reader: 5 (Reading Russian)

This second volume of Chekhov’s best short stories includes the original Russian and a facing English translation, together with all the vocabulary notes and reference tables you need to enjoy Chekhov in Russian.

Designed to help students of Russian begin to enjoy real Russian literature in the original without constantly reaching for a dictionary, this parallel-text edition features a new translation made specifically for this purpose, as well as detailed Russian vocabulary notes, including all the important forms you need (especially aspectual pairs and conjugation types for all verbs). The original Russian text is marked for stress, but is otherwise unedited and unsimplified.

The nine classic stories included in this volume are: “Fat and Thin” (a satirical depiction of how social hierarchies can stand in the way of real human relationships); “Sadness” (a comically moving portrait of a coachman, searching — in vain, perhaps? — for someone to confide in following the death of his son); next, all three stories in Chekhov’s so-called “Little Trilogy”: 1) “The Man in a Case” (the tale of how provincial townspeople, terrorized by a paranoid, authoritarian schoolteacher, try to get him married); 2) “Gooseberries” (the tale of a man’s fixation with gooseberries turns into a meditation on the ambiguities of human happiness, and an urgent call for social justice); 3) “About Love” (a reflection on a love that might have been, and what stood in its way); “The Beauties” (two random and unforgettable encounters lead to speculation concerning the nature of beauty itself); “Fear” (a man confesses, to a supposed friend, how much life terrifies him, thereby unexpectedly causing his greatest fear to come true); “Kashtanka” (a delightful story of a lost dog’s misadventures that many Russians will remember reading in school!); and “The Black Monk” (a deeply disturbing tale dealing with mental illness and the costs of trying to “cure” it).