Authors Like Anton Chekhov

Ivan Turgenev

Russian · A Sportsman’s Sketches (1852), Fathers and Sons (1862)

Turgenev was born into a landowning family in Oryol in 1818 and spent much of his adult life in Germany and France. A Sportsman’s Sketches, short pieces narrated by a hunter wandering the countryside, showed serfs as individuals and was read as an argument against serfdom, which Russia abolished in 1861. Fathers and Sons made the word “nihilist” famous through its young doctor, Bazarov.

Leo Tolstoy

Russian · War and Peace (1869), Anna Karenina (1878)

Tolstoy, thirty-two years older than Chekhov, admired his stories and knew him personally. When he reprinted Chekhov’s “The Darling” (1899), about a woman who takes on the opinions of each man she loves, he added an afterword arguing that Chekhov had meant to mock her but had, against his own intention, written a portrait of selfless love. The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) is his closest work to Chekhov in length and subject.

Ivan Bunin

Russian · The Gentleman from San Francisco (1915), Dark Avenues (1943)

Bunin was born in Voronezh in 1870, became a friend of Chekhov’s in the 1890s and left Russia after the Revolution, settling in France. In 1933 he became the first Russian writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Dark Avenues is a late collection of short stories about love, most of them ending in loss; he also left an unfinished memoir of Chekhov.

Katherine Mansfield

New Zealander · Bliss (1920), The Garden Party (1922)

Mansfield was born in Wellington in 1888 and discovered Chekhov’s work in Bavaria in 1909. Her early story “The Child-Who-Was-Tired” (1910), later collected in In a German Pension (1911), follows Chekhov’s “Sleepy” (1888) so closely that critics and biographers have called it plagiarism. She went on to write some of the finest stories in English and died of tuberculosis, as Chekhov did, in 1923, aged 34.

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Raymond Carver

American · What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981), Cathedral (1983)

Carver was born in Oregon in 1938 and wrote about waitresses, salesmen and out-of-work husbands in plain, short sentences. One of his last stories, “Errand” (1987), imagines Chekhov’s death in Badenweiler and the young waiter who brings champagne to the room. After Carver’s death in 1988 it emerged that his editor, Gordon Lish, had heavily cut the stories in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love; the longer versions appeared as Beginners in 2009.

William Trevor

Irish · The Ballroom of Romance (1972), Felicia’s Journey (1994)

Trevor was born in Mitchelstown, County Cork, in 1928 and lived most of his adult life in Devon. He published more than a dozen collections of stories; the title story of The Ballroom of Romance follows a farmer’s daughter at a country dance hall where she has given up hope of the man she wanted. Felicia’s Journey won the Whitbread Book of the Year. He died in 2016.

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Brian Friel

Irish · Translations (1980), Dancing at Lughnasa (1990)

Friel was born in County Tyrone in 1929 and became the leading Irish playwright of his generation. He wrote versions of Three Sisters (1981) and Uncle Vanya (1998), and in Afterplay (2002) imagined Sonya from Uncle Vanya meeting Andrey from Three Sisters in a Moscow café years later. Dancing at Lughnasa follows five unmarried sisters in Donegal in 1936.

Claire Keegan

Irish · Foster (2010), Small Things Like These (2021)

Keegan was born in County Wicklow in 1968. Foster follows a girl sent to live with relatives on a farm for a summer. Small Things Like These, about a coal merchant who finds a girl locked in a convent coal shed at Christmas 1985, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.

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Elizabeth Strout

American · Olive Kitteridge (2008), My Name Is Lucy Barton (2016)

Strout was born in Portland, Maine, in 1956. Olive Kitteridge, thirteen linked stories about a retired maths teacher and her coastal Maine town, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2009. She has returned to the same characters in later books, including Olive, Again (2019).

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George Saunders

American · Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (2021)

Saunders was born in Amarillo, Texas, in 1958, trained as a geophysical engineer and has taught creative writing at Syracuse University since 1997. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain grew out of that class: seven Russian stories, three of them by Chekhov (“In the Cart”, “The Darling” and “Gooseberries”), read closely to show how a story works. Lincoln in the Bardo won the Booker Prize.

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