Published to mark the 150th anniversary of Chekhov’s birth, this Folio Society edition unites 60 of his greatest stories, beginning with his earliest literary success, ‘The Steppe’, and ending with ‘A Marriageable Girl’, which first appeared in 1903, the year before his death. Few writers can rival Chekhov’s influence, as found in the works of later short fiction virtuosos such as Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka and Raymond Carver. Using the acclaimed translation by Ronald Hingley, introduced by writer James Lasdun and illustrated by the award-winning artist Laura Carlin, this comprehensive collection is a beautiful tribute to the master of the short story.

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in 1860 in Taganrog, south-west Russia. His grandfather was a serf who had bought his freedom, and his father ran a grocery shop. After Chekhov’s father went bankrupt, the family fled to Moscow, leaving the 16-year-old Anton at home to finish his schooling at his own expense. After three years, he moved to Moscow to study medicine, where he wrote comic stories to earn money to finance his studies and support his family. In 1888, at the age of 28, Chekhov produced ‘The Steppe’, which saw him hailed as a luminary of Russian literature. Over the next decade and a half, his literary output was astounding. By the time of his death aged just 44, he had not only become a major playwright, thanks to such celebrated works as The Seagull and Uncle Vanya; he had forever changed the landscape of the short story.

Chekov was dedicated to the cause of human progress, both as a doctor who treated the poor for free, a landowner committed to relieving rural poverty and a campaigner against cruelty in penal colonies. As a writer, he turns a compassionate eye on suffering, loneliness and boredom without ever slipping into the sentimental. His stories cover the entire range of Russian society, from discontented aristocrats and provincial doctors to Armenian and Ukrainian peasants and labourers. He neither idealises the worker, nor shies away from portraying the hierarchic nature of Russian society. A philanthropist in ‘The Princess’ is forced to see the selfish meddling at the heart of her charity, while a well-meaning bourgeois couple in ‘New Villa’ who try to make friends with their peasant neighbours are cold-shouldered, in contrast to their successor, a rude and arrogant official whom the peasants respect.

Despite a pervasive melancholy, beauty is never far away, whether it is found in the flowering summer steppe, the peeling paintwork of an isolated farm, or in a young girl glimpsed at a provincial railway station. Chekhov is also famous for the wit and ironic humour which illuminate his stories: in ‘The Party’, a group of idle aristocrats discuss ‘the advantages of physical labour, culture, and the evils of money and property’; and in ‘From a Retired Teacher’s Notebook’, the narrator insists that children’s books should be bound since ‘one cannot bang them on the head with the spine of an unbound book’. Chekhov’s genius lay in his ability to capture the truth of a scene or incident without attempting to impose a moral or solution. Rather, he leaves readers to draw their own conclusions. As introducer James Lasdun says of ‘A Lady with a Dog’, one of Chekhov’s most famous stories, ‘this masterpiece of tender bewilderment fades to white’.

‘This proud, satanic sensation is something that only a Russian can feel – he whose thoughts and emotions are as broad, as boundless and as austere as his plains, forests and snows’ Lights

Anton Chekhov’s contribution to world literature is without parallel. He created a body of short fiction that is widely acknowledged as the greatest ever written. The 60 stories in this collection span the length of his career, from his early stories including ‘The Beauties’, ‘Lights’ and ‘The Princess’ to his final works, ‘A Lady with a Dog’, ‘In the Hollow’ and ‘Angel’, Tolstoy’s favourite tale. Each is a masterpiece in miniature, presenting a character, a town, a landscape or an entire way of life in a few delicately sketched pages.

This major new Folio publication of Chekhov’s stories uses Ronald Hingley’s acclaimed text. In the 1960s, Hingley, who was later Emeritus Professor at St Antony’s College, Oxford, undertook an entirely new translation of Chekhov, paying particular attention to the many forms of speech used – the colloquial language of peasants or the liturgically cadenced speech of priests. This edition also contains a specially commissioned introduction by James Lasdun, himself the author of four critically acclaimed collections of short stories, and winner of the inaugural National Short Story Prize.

Laura Carlin, whose awards include a V&A Illustration Award and the Quentin Blake Drawing Prize, has created over 30 illustrations for the four volumes, along with some delightful cover and spine designs. Beautiful and original, her arresting images form an evocative accompaniment to Chekhov’s stories.