Love, and Other Stories

Chekhov in his twenties, writing for the comic weeklies to keep his family while he studied medicine: a clerk who sneezes on a general and dies of apologising, two old schoolfellows who meet at a railway station until one learns the other's rank, a young man too happy to sleep at three in the morning. Most of these are sketches of a few pages, but Lights and A Living Chattel already have the long view and the unresolved endings of the later stories. Sixty plates of Russian and European painting, from Makovsky to Aivazovsky, hold the same Chekhovian weather: students, small girls, failed banks, and the ordinary light of rooms where lives quietly come apart.