Collected Stories
Chekhov invented the modern short story as we understand it: no plot, no resolution, no moralizing. Just a slice of life that somehow illuminates everything. Every subsequent short story writer works in his shadow.
The longer, more literary entries, Peasants, The Duel, The Steppe, A Dreary Story, In the Ravine, are where complaints land hardest: readers call them slow and hard to connect with next to the shorter pieces. One reviewer says outright the reputation oversells the book and wasn't sure they'd recommend it, arguing Chekhov's plotless, internal style has been so absorbed by later fiction that it no longer feels startling a century on. Infidelity and cuckolded husbands turn up often enough that one reader flags it as a fixation rather than incidental material. Ambiguous endings frustrate too: the staged declaration in A Joke baffles readers expecting sincerity. Even a reader who rated the whole collection two stars still singled out individual pieces, calling Swansong “sad and beautiful” and saying On the Evils of Tobacco “was pleasantly endearing,” proof the shorter Chekhov survives even when the rest doesn't land for everyone.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
