Where to Start with Anton Chekhov: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Anton Chekhov — how to approach The Cherry Orchard and his essential short stories. A complete reading guide to the Russian master.
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) was the Russian physician and writer who is generally regarded as the greatest short-story writer of the nineteenth century and one of the four great dramatists of Western theatre (alongside Ibsen, Strindberg, and Shakespeare). Chekhov practised medicine throughout his writing life — ‘medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress,’ he wrote — and his dual perspective as scientist and artist produced fiction and drama of unusual observational precision and emotional intelligence. His four major plays (The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard) defined the dramaturgy of psychological realism; his short stories created the modern short story as a form.
Where to Start: The Cherry Orchard (1904)
The essential Chekhov for theatre — and his most perfectly realised play. The Ranevskaya family returns to their Russian estate in spring: Madame Ranevskaya and her daughter Anya from Paris, where they’ve been living on dwindling funds; her brother Gaev, ineffectual and attached to a childhood bookcase; various servants and neighbours. The estate, which includes the famous cherry orchard, is to be auctioned for debts.
Lopakhin, a merchant whose family were serfs on the estate, has a practical solution: cut down the cherry orchard and develop the land for summer cottages. The money would save the family. The family cannot do it — the orchard represents everything they are, or were. They talk, they drift, they fail to act. The estate is sold at auction. Lopakhin buys it. In the final act, the family departs while the sound of axes cutting the cherry orchard begins.
Chekhov called it a comedy. The comedy is in the gap between the characters’ pretensions and their actions, their failure to see clearly, their inability to change. The sadness is in the same material: these are real people, fully rendered, losing everything that gave their lives its particular texture. The play holds both simultaneously.
For readers approaching Chekhov through his drama, The Cherry Orchard is the ideal starting point — better than The Seagull (his masterwork but harder to follow in reading) and more representative than the equally great Three Sisters.
Reading Anton Chekhov
Begin with The Cherry Orchard for the drama. For the short stories — which many consider his most important work — start with ‘The Lady with the Dog,’ ‘Ward No. 6,’ and ‘The Darling.’ His four major plays can be read in any order.
For the full Anton Chekhov bibliography, reviews, and biography, visit the Anton Chekhov author page on Editors Reads.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Anton Chekhov?
For Chekhov's drama: The Cherry Orchard (1904) is the recommended starting point — his final play, a comedy about an aristocratic family losing their estate that is simultaneously a lament for a vanishing social world. For Chekhov's fiction: his short stories are the essential work — particularly 'The Lady with the Dog,' 'Ward No. 6,' 'The Bishop,' 'Gooseberries,' and 'The Darling.' Chekhov is considered the greatest short-story writer in any language by many writers; his plays are his second major achievement.
What is The Cherry Orchard about?
The Cherry Orchard follows an aristocratic Russian family returning to their estate in the spring of 1904 — the estate that includes a famous cherry orchard that is about to be sold for debt. A merchant offers to save them by cutting down the orchard and developing the land; the family cannot bring themselves to do it. The play observes their paralysis and their eventual displacement with equal compassion and irony. Chekhov described it as a comedy; Stanislavski staged it as a tragedy; most productions find the aching space between.
Why are Chekhov's short stories considered so important?
Chekhov invented what is now the dominant mode of the literary short story: the plotless story that renders a state of being rather than a sequence of events, that ends not with resolution but with a deepened understanding of the situation. Before Chekhov, stories ended with something happening; after Chekhov, the best stories end with a revelation that something has always been happening, unseen. His influence on the short story as a form is comparable to Joyce's influence on the novel: essentially every serious short story written after him is in some relationship to his method.
Which Chekhov short story collection should I start with?
Most collections of Chekhov's stories are good; the key is to read many of them rather than a single carefully curated selection. Penguin's Chekhov: The Complete Short Stories is the most comprehensive; Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky's translation (Bantam, 2000) is widely considered the best recent translation. Among individual stories to start with: 'The Lady with the Dog,' 'Ward No. 6,' 'The Student,' 'The Darling,' and 'Gooseberries' — five stories that represent his full range.
