Anton Chekhov was a working doctor who wrote at night and changed two kinds of writing forever. Our free collection of Anton Chekhov books in PDF gathers his stories, his plays, and the letters he wrote alongside them.
He wrote hundreds of short stories and the four dramas that made the Moscow Art Theatre famous: The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard. These 25 free books bring together the Tales of Chekhov collections, the major and one act plays, and his notebooks and letters.
Read The Bet if you have ten minutes, or The Cherry Orchard if you have an evening. Every title here is public domain, free to download, and yours to keep.
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Short Stories
Anton Chekhov Short Story Books
Chekhov wrote more than five hundred stories, and Constance Garnett's Tales of Chekhov is the translation most English readers meet first. These collections hold the famous ones, The Bet, The Darling and The Lady with the Dog, next to the quieter work that made his name in Russia.
A factory heiress spends Christmas weighing her wealth against the loneliness it bought her. A short, sharp study of class and the chances people let pass.
Opens with the famous wager between a banker and a lawyer over fifteen years of solitary confinement. The rest of the collection keeps the same interest in what people trade away.
Stories built around the ordinary confusions of affection, from a man dissecting his own love letter to quieter domestic portraits. A good entry point for new readers.
A landowner and his estranged wife clash over famine relief while their marriage quietly collapses. The longer pieces here give the characters room to turn.
Volume twelve of the Garnett series, seen largely through the eyes of children and servants. The title story turns a household marriage arranged over the kitchen table into something stranger.
The title novella pits a drifting romantic against a rigid scientist until the argument reaches a pistol duel. The longest sustained work among the story collections.
The late title story follows a dying churchman through Holy Week as memory and illness blur together. Among the most quietly moving of the collections.
Twelve stories including Ward No. 6, his study of an asylum where doctor and patient trade places. The title story follows a scholar visited by a hallucination he comes to prefer to sanity.
The Seagull failed on its opening night in 1896 and became a triumph two years later at the Moscow Art Theatre under Konstantin Stanislavski. All four major plays are here in full, along with Ivanoff and the one act farces he wrote for quick money.
The play that failed on its opening night and two years later made the Moscow Art Theatre. Four acts of writers and actors circling ambition, and each other.
The early full length play about a landowner sinking under debt, boredom and a marriage he no longer wants. Useful for seeing the method before it matured.
Seven short plays, including the marriage proposal that collapses into an argument about land and the widow ambushed by a creditor. This is the comic side of his writing.
Ivanoff, The Sea-Gull, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard gathered in one volume. The complete major dramas for readers who want them together.
Chekhov's letters and working notebooks show the craft from the inside, including his advice to other writers about what to cut. The notebook is mostly overheard lines and story ideas he never used.
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in Taganrog, Russia, in 1860, trained as a physician, and married the actress Olga Knipper in 1901. He died of tuberculosis in 1904 at forty four, months after The Cherry Orchard premiered at the Moscow Art Theatre.
Writers from Katherine Mansfield to Raymond Carver built on what he proved a story could do. Read his Russian contemporaries Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, or browse every writer in our classic authors collection.
