Plays by Anton Chekhov, Second Series

This volume contains Anton Chekhov's last two great plays and six of his comic one-act 'vaudevilles'. In The Three Sisters, Olga, Masha and Irina, stranded in a provincial garrison town, dream endlessly of returning to Moscow while their lives slip away. In The Cherry Orchard, the charming, careless Madame Ranevsky returns from Paris to her family estate, which is about to be sold for debt, and cannot bring herself to save it by cutting down the beloved orchard. The farces include The Proposal, The Bear and The Wedding.

Chekhov wrote The Three Sisters in 1900 and The Cherry Orchard in 1903, the year before his death, and both were first staged by Stanislavsky's Moscow Art Theatre. Bernard Shaw said that every time he saw a Chekhov play he wanted to throw his own into the fire. This translation, with an introduction, is by Julius West. Read Chekhov's stories in The Darling.

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) was the grandson of a serf who bought his family's freedom. He studied medicine in Moscow and paid for his studies and his family's keep by writing hundreds of humorous sketches for magazines. 'Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress,' he once wrote, and he practised both all his life.

In 1890 he crossed Siberia to study the prison island of Sakhalin. His short stories, like The Lady with the Dog, and his plays for the Moscow Art Theatre, like Uncle Vanya, transformed both forms with their quiet, open endings. He died of tuberculosis in Germany at forty-four.