The Party and Other Stories

A pregnant woman gets through her husband's name-day party, smiling at the guests while her body and her marriage give way under her; around it, ten more stories — Terror, A Woman's Kingdom, The Kiss, Anna on the Neck, The Teacher of Literature, Typhus and A Misfortune among them. Chekhov wrote The Party in 1888, a long story told almost entirely from inside one woman's exhaustion, and many of the others are about households where someone is quietly suffocating. The Kiss, in which a shy officer is kissed in the dark by mistake and cannot forget it, is among the most perfect things he wrote. Sixty plates, from Serov's Girl with peaches to Korovin's Crimean seashore, catch the same Russian light and quiet rooms these stories inhabit.