Here are the most unforgettable stories of a master writer who saw all of life and rejected none of it.
In The Kiss, a lonely, love-starved soldier keeps a secret rendezvous for another man and becomes enamored with a woman he is never to see again. The Duel describes the collisions between men and women in hopeless relationships, and how two men are driven to settle the score in a clandestine meeting on a bridge, pistols in hand. In all of these stories, Chekhov’s brilliant portrayal of people from all walks of life and how they deal with the moral dilemmas their circumstances press upon them comes to vivid life in the listener’s mind. In all of these stories, Chekhov’s brilliant portrayal of people from all walks of life and how they deal with the moral dilemmas their circumstances press upon them come to vivid life in the reader’s mind.
Other stories included here are “Excellent People,” “Mire,” “Neighbours,” and “The Princess.”
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“In Chekhov literature seems to break its wand like Prospero, renouncing the magic of artifice, ceremony, and idealization, and facing us, for the first time, with a reflection of ourselves in our unadorned ordinariness as well as our unfathomable strangeness.”
— Guardian (Manchester)
“The magic of the man is inescapable.”
— Saturday ReviewBe the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904), the author of hundreds of short stories and several plays, is regarded by many as both the greatest Russian storyteller and the father of modern drama. He described the Russian life of his time using a deceptively simple technique devoid of obtrusive literary devices, thereby becoming the prominent representative of the late nineteenth-century Russian realist school. His early stream-of-consciousness style strongly influenced the literary world, including writers such as James Joyce.
Fred Williams, a graduate of the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, works in theater, film, television, and radio in England, Ireland, and America. Besides narrating audiobooks, he is a performer in living-history reenactments, an archer, and a poet.