In the final years of his life, Chekhov had reached the height of his powers as a dramatist, yet he also wrote short stories that rank among his masterpieces.

In ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ a man and a woman indulge in an affair that could ruin both their marriages, but their feelings for each other compel them towards betrayal. ‘Peasants’ focuses on the brutality of peasant life, where the locus of evil is the tavern in which the men spend the last of their meagre earnings on vodka and go home drunk to beat their wives. And in ‘My Life’ Misail rejects the life of a gentleman to become a labourer despite his father’s protestations and threats to disown him.

These later works show how Chekhov moved away from the realism of his earlier stories, forging a style that would inspire modern short story writers such as Hemingway, Faulkner and the Bloomsbury Group.

• with a chronology, further reading, and publishing history and notes for each story •