title: Longer Stories from the Last Decade (Modern Library)
author:  Anton Chekhov 
description: "'Chekhovian.' It's clear that this adjective had to be invented for the new voice Chekhov's genius breathed into the world--elusive, inconclusive, flickering; nuanced through an underlying disquiet, though never morbid or disgruntled; unerringly intuitive, catching out of the air vibrations, glittering motes, faint turnings of the heart, tendrils thinner than hairs, drift. But Chekhov's art is more than merely Chekhovian. It is dedicated to explicit and definitive portraiture and the muscular trajectory of whole lives. Each story, however allusive or broken-off, is nevertheless exhaustive--like the curve of a shard that implies not simply the form of the pitcher entire, but also the thirsts of its shattered civilization."<br />--Cynthia Ozick
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  First Vintage Classics Edition, March 1991
  
  
  Copyright © 1963 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
  
  
  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
  Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of
  Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of
  Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published under the title _The Image of
  Chekhov_ in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1963.  
    
  
  
  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data  
  Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich, 1860–1904.  
  [Short stories. English. Selections]  
  Forty stories / by Anton Chekhov; translated and with an  
  introduction by Robert Payne.—1st Vintage classics ed.  
  p. cm.—(Vintage classics)  
  Originally published: The image of Chekhov, New York:  
  Knopf, 1963.  
  eISBN: 978-0-307-77853-6  
  1\. Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich. 1860