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Anton Chekhov wrote no novels and several hundred short stories, which means that almost every book with his name on it in an English bookshop was put together by an editor or a translator after he died. He did assemble books himself — six or seven of them — and English readers can buy almost none of them. This page separates the two: the books Chekhov actually made, the plays, and the English collections you will realistically end up buying, with who translated what and why that matters more here than for almost any other writer.
By Lisanne Swart · 12 books in full · Classics · 1882–1904 · Updated September 2026
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Quick answer
Chekhov wrote seven full-length plays, about ten one-act farces, one book of reportage and somewhere between three hundred and six hundred short stories — the range is not sloppiness, it is two different canons being quoted as one. He assembled six or seven story collections himself; the ones you can buy in English are almost all somebody else’s selection. The twelve books that are genuinely his, and what each one is → If you are starting, start with Three Sisters (1901) for the plays, or a good selection of the late stories for the prose.
Where to Start with Anton Chekhov
If you have never read him
→ A selection of the late stories, not a complete works. Look for one that contains The Lady with the Dog (1899), Ward No. 6 (1892), The Bishop (1902) and In the Ravine (1900). Anything with all four is a good book.
If you want the plays
→ Three Sisters (1901) first, then The Cherry Orchard (1904). Read the stage directions properly; half of what happens in Chekhov happens in them.
If you want one story to decide by
→ “The Student” (1894). Six pages, and it was his own favourite of everything he wrote. If it does nothing for you, he may not be your writer.
If you want a single long thing
→ The Steppe (1888), the novella that got him out of the humour weeklies and into serious literature, or The Shooting Party (1884), a genuine crime novel and unlike anything else he did.
If you want the one nobody mentions
→ Sakhalin Island (1895). He travelled across Russia to a penal colony, interviewed thousands of convicts himself, and wrote it up as documentary social science. It changed penal policy, and it is not like his fiction at all.
If you are choosing a translator
→ Pevear and Volokhonsky for a first selection, Rosamund Bartlett if you care about prose rhythm, Ronald Wilks’s three Penguin volumes for the whole mature career in order, Constance Garnett if you want the historic text cheaply. None of them is accused of getting him wrong — the argument is about literalism against fluency. My best fiction list has more in this direction.
The 12 Chekhov Books He Actually Made, in Order
The Prank
At twenty-two, Chekhov gathered what he thought was the best of his early comic work into a collection, with illustrations by his brother Nikolay. The censor refused it and the book was never published. It did not appear in English until NYRB Classics printed it in 2015, with Nikolay’s original illustrations.
A real book by Chekhov that was suppressed for a hundred and thirty-three years, and it is missing from most bibliographies entirely. Not his best work — he was twenty-two — but the only chance to see what he thought of himself before anyone else did.
— LisanneThe Shooting Party
A murder mystery with an unreliable narrator, written as a serial for a Moscow daily while he was finishing medical school. It is the only thing he wrote that is a novel by length, and the only time he wrote plot for its own sake.
Everyone tells you Chekhov wrote no novels. This is the exception that makes the rule interesting. It is not great and it is enormously enjoyable, which is not a combination he offers often.
— LisanneMotley Stories
The second collection Chekhov assembled and the first through Suvorin’s St Petersburg house, which is the relationship that made his career. It went through fourteen editions, essentially unchanged after the second.
One of the books he actually built, and almost impossible to buy intact in English — the contents are scattered across other people’s anthologies. Worth knowing exists.
— LisanneIn the Twilight
The collection that won him the Pushkin Prize from the Imperial Academy of Sciences in 1888 and ended the argument about whether the comic journalist was a serious writer. Note the two dates: the book is 1887, the prize is 1888, and lists routinely merge them.
The one collection he made himself that you can still buy intact in English, which makes it the best available answer to the question of what a Chekhov book looked like when Chekhov made it.
— LisanneIvanov
Commissioned as a comedy and delivered as something else: a landowner in his thirties who has stopped being able to feel anything, and the people around him who will not accept that as an explanation. The first performance went badly and he rewrote it substantially.
The rough draft of everything he would do on stage. You can see him working out that a play does not need anyone to be at fault.
— LisanneThe Steppe
A nine-year-old boy travels across the southern steppe with his uncle and a priest to be sent to school. Nothing happens, at great length and in extraordinary detail. It was his first publication in a serious literary journal rather than a humour weekly, and it changed what he was allowed to be.
The place where his method arrives fully formed: no plot, no lesson, and an accumulation of noticing that adds up to more than plot would. Often sold as a standalone.
— LisanneGloomy People
The last story collection he assembled himself, published the year he left for Sakhalin. After this he made no more books of stories, which means every famous late story — Ward No. 6, The Lady with the Dog, The Bishop — first reached readers in a magazine and was put into a book by somebody else.
The quiet dividing line in his bibliography. Everything you think of as peak Chekhov comes after the last book he personally built.
— LisanneSakhalin Island
In 1890 Chekhov travelled across Russia to the penal colony on Sakhalin, spent three months there and conducted a one-man census, interviewing thousands of convicts and settlers himself. The result is a work of documentary social science: a census, a penal survey and a public-health indictment. It had real effect on penal policy.
The book that tells you what kind of person wrote the stories. He was thirty, already famous, already coughing blood, and he chose to spend a year on this. Nobody asked him to.
— LisanneThe Seagull
A young writer, an actress mother, a famous novelist and a girl who wants to be on stage, at a country house by a lake. The St Petersburg premiere in 1896 was a humiliation and he walked out of the theatre. Two years later Stanislavski revived it at the new Moscow Art Theatre and it made both the play and the company, which took the seagull as its emblem.
The play about how badly art goes for almost everyone who attempts it, which then went badly and then went extremely well. Read Act Four twice.
— LisanneUncle Vanya
A retired professor and his young wife come to live on the estate that has been worked for decades to support them, and the brother-in-law who did the working realises what it was for. Chekhov built it out of his earlier play The Wood Demon, halving the cast, turning a suicide into a botched murder and removing the happy ending.
The most quietly devastating of the four, and the one about wasted life rather than wasted love. The last two minutes are among the best endings in any play.
— LisanneThree Sisters
Olga, Masha and Irina, in a provincial garrison town, intending to go back to Moscow. They do not. Four acts across several years in which a great deal is said, almost nothing is done, and a whole family’s future quietly closes. The first play he wrote specifically for the Moscow Art Theatre.
If you read one Chekhov play, this one. It is the fullest version of what he invented: people talking past each other about something other than the thing that is happening to them.
— LisanneThe Cherry Orchard
An aristocratic family returns to an estate they can no longer afford, is offered a practical way to save it, and declines to hear it until the orchard is sold and the axes start. Chekhov called it a comedy. Stanislavski staged it as a tragedy and the two of them argued about it until Chekhov left for Germany, where he died six months later.
The argument about whether it is funny is the play. Both of them were right, which is the difficulty and also the point.
— LisanneThe Full Bibliography, and What to Buy in English
Four lists, because a Chekhov bibliography is really four different things. The plays are books. The eight collections he assembled himself are books, and you can buy almost none of them intact in English. Sakhalin Island is a book. And then there are the English collections — which are not by Chekhov at all, but are what you will actually be holding, so the translator is named for each one.
Open a form to see the titles.
The plays
16
Platonov c. 1878
also known as Fatherlessness or A Play Without a Title · found in a safe-deposit box and first published in 1923
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On the High Road 1884
one act · banned by the censor
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On the Harmful Effects of Tobacco 1886
one act · revised repeatedly; the standard version is from 1902
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Ivanov 1887
first performed at the Korsh Theatre, Moscow, 1887; revised 1889
Swan Song 1887
one act, adapted from his own story Kalkhas
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The Bear 1888
one act · premiered at the Korsh Theatre, 28 October 1888 · his biggest commercial hit
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The Proposal 1888–89
one act
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The Wood Demon 1889
first performed at the Abramova Theatre, Moscow, 27 December 1889 · later reworked into Uncle Vanya, but a separate play
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A Tragedian in Spite of Himself 1889
one act
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The Wedding 1889
one act
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Tatyana Repina 1889
one act · a private joke for Suvorin, unpublished in his lifetime; first printed in 1924
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The Anniversary 1891
one act
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The Seagull 1896
Chayka
Uncle Vanya 1897
Dyadya Vanya
Three Sisters 1901
Tri sestry
The Cherry Orchard 1904
Vishnyovy sad
Books he assembled himself
8
The Prank 1882
rejected by the censor; first published in English in 2015
Tales of Melpomene 1884
Moscow · his first published collection
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The Shooting Party 1884
serialised 1884–85 · his only novel-length fiction
Motley Stories 1886
Suvorin, St Petersburg · fourteen editions
In the Twilight 1887
Suvorin · Pushkin Prize 1888
Innocent Speeches 1887
Moscow
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Stories 1888
Moscow
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Gloomy People 1890
Suvorin · the last collection he made himself
Non-fiction and letters
2
Sakhalin Island 1895
serialised 1893–94 · his only book-length non-fiction
A Life in Letters 2004
edited and translated by Rosamund Bartlett and Anthony Phillips · Penguin Classics · the standard modern selection
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The English collections you will actually buy
10
The Tales of Chekhov c. 1916–1922
translated by Constance Garnett · thirteen volumes · reprinted by Ecco in 2006
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Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov 2000
translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky · thirty stories · Bantam
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The Complete Short Novels 2004
translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky · Everyman’s Library
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Fifty-Two Stories, 1883–1898 2020
translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky · Penguin Classics · deliberately not the greatest hits
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The Steppe and Other Stories, 1887–91 2005
translated by Ronald Wilks · Penguin Classics
Ward No. 6 and Other Stories, 1892–1895
translated by Ronald Wilks · Penguin Classics
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The Lady with the Little Dog and Other Stories, 1896–1904
translated by Ronald Wilks · Penguin Classics
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About Love and Other Stories 2004
translated by Rosamund Bartlett · Oxford World’s Classics · keeps the Little Trilogy together
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Peasants and Other Stories 1999
Garnett, selected and introduced by Edmund Wilson · NYRB Classics
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Anton Chekhov: The Complete Plays 2006
translated and edited by Laurence Senelick · Norton
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Quick facts about Anton Chekhov
- Born
- 29 January 1860 in Taganrog, on the Sea of Azov — 17 January in the old Russian calendar
- Died
- 15 July 1904 in Badenweiler, Germany, aged 44, of tuberculosis
- Trained as
- A doctor — qualified at the medical faculty of Moscow University in 1884
- Wrote as
- “Antosha Chekhonte” for the comic weeklies, from 1879
- Pushkin Prize
- 1888, for the collection In the Twilight
- Sakhalin
- Travelled to the penal island in 1890 and took a one-man census of its convicts
- Melikhovo
- Bought the estate south of Moscow in 1892; treated peasants free and built three schools
- Tuberculosis
- First symptoms around 1884; diagnosed after a major haemorrhage in March 1897
- Married
- The actress Olga Knipper, 25 May 1901, largely at a distance
- Plays
- Seven full-length, plus about ten one-act farces
- Stories
- Between three hundred and six hundred, depending which canon you count
- Novels
- None — The Shooting Party (1884) is the only novel-length fiction
- Last collection he made
- Gloomy People, 1890 — before almost all the famous stories
- His own favourite story
- “The Student” (1894), six pages long
- Moscow Art Theatre
- Four productions: The Seagull 1898, Uncle Vanya 1899, Three Sisters 1901, The Cherry Orchard 1904
- The one book of reportage
- Sakhalin Island, 1895
Why Almost Every Chekhov Book Is Somebody Else’s Selection
Chekhov wrote no novels and several hundred stories, which creates a publishing problem that has shaped how he reaches English readers for a century. A story is not a book. So almost every volume with his name on it in a shop — Selected Stories, The Essential Tales, About Love — is a container assembled by an editor or a translator, usually decades after he died. There is nothing wrong with that. But a bibliography that lists those as “Chekhov’s books” is describing the publishing industry rather than the writer.
The interesting part is that he did make books, and English readers have almost no access to them. Between 1884 and 1890 he assembled at least six collections himself, mostly through Suvorin in St Petersburg: Tales of Melpomene, Motley Stories, In the Twilight, Innocent Speeches, Stories and Gloomy People. Of those, only In the Twilight is currently available in English as an intact book. The rest exist here only dismembered, their contents scattered across other people’s anthologies.
And no major collection appeared after 1890 in his lifetime. Which means that every story a modern reader thinks of as peak Chekhov — Ward No. 6, The Lady with the Dog, The Bishop, In the Ravine — first appeared in a magazine and was put into a book by somebody else. The last book Chekhov personally built came before almost everything he is famous for.
There are two competing canons, and the wildly different story counts are simply these two being quoted as one. In 1899 Chekhov contracted with the publisher Adolf Marks for a collected edition, revised the texts himself, and left out great swathes of the early comic journalism he had filed to humour weeklies as “Antosha Chekhonte”. The Soviet thirty-volume complete edition later put all of it back. Count Chekhov’s own selection and you get something near three hundred stories; count everything and you pass five hundred. Both figures are honest and they are answers to different questions.
Two practical consequences. First, he protected one group from his own collected works: he asked that “The Man in a Case”, “Gooseberries” and “About Love”, all from 1898, be held back, calling them one cycle that was not finished. Those three are the Little Trilogy, the only linked sequence he insisted on — and most English selections print one or two of them and break it. Second, the same story circulates under four English titles. The Lady with the Dog is also the Little Dog, the Pet Dog and the Toy Dog; A Boring Story is also A Dreary Story and A Dull Story. People buy the same book twice without noticing.
Frequently asked questions about Anton Chekhov’s books
How many stories did Anton Chekhov write?
Between roughly three hundred and six hundred, and the range is real rather than careless. If you count only the mature stories Chekhov himself kept when he assembled his collected works in 1899, the figure is near three hundred. If you count every comic squib and sketch he filed to humour weeklies in the 1880s under the name Antosha Chekhonte, it passes five hundred. Both counts are correct about different things.
How many plays did Chekhov write?
Seven full-length: Platonov (c. 1878), Ivanov (1887), The Wood Demon (1889), The Seagull (1896), Uncle Vanya (1897), Three Sisters (1901) and The Cherry Orchard (1904). Plus about ten one-act farces, of which The Bear (1888) was his biggest commercial success by far.
Which Chekhov book should I read first?
For the plays, Three Sisters (1901). For the prose, a selection of the late stories rather than a complete works — Pevear and Volokhonsky’s Selected Stories (2000) or Rosamund Bartlett’s About Love and Other Stories (2004) are both good first books.
Which Chekhov translation is best?
There is no single answer and anyone who gives you one is choosing a side in an old argument about literalism against fluency. Pevear and Volokhonsky are the modern default and are accused of awkward English; Rosamund Bartlett is the choice if you care about rhythm; Ronald Wilks’s three Penguin volumes give you the mature career in chronological order; Constance Garnett made him available in English at all and is still in print from NYRB and Everyman. None of them is accused of getting him wrong.
Did Chekhov write any novels?
One, and only just. The Shooting Party (1884) is a murder mystery serialised in a Moscow daily while he was finishing medical school, and it is the only novel-length fiction he wrote. Everything else is stories, novellas and plays.
What are Chekhov’s best short stories?
The critical consensus is narrower than most lists suggest: The Lady with the Dog (1899), Ward No. 6 (1892), A Boring Story (1889), The Bishop (1902), In the Ravine (1900), Gusev (1890), The Steppe (1888) and The Student (1894). Almost nothing from before 1888 appears on anyone’s list, which is exactly the period that supplies most of the raw story count.
Which story was Chekhov’s own favourite?
“The Student” (1894), six pages long, which he told Ivan Bunin was the best thing he had written and described as his argument for optimism. It is in most good selections and it is the fastest way to find out whether he is your writer.
Who was Anton Chekhov?
A Russian doctor, short-story writer and playwright, born 29 January 1860 in Taganrog and died 15 July 1904 in Badenweiler, Germany, aged forty-four. He qualified in medicine in 1884 and practised for much of his life, often without charging. He is usually credited with inventing the modern short story and, with Ibsen, modern drama.
What is Sakhalin Island?
His only book-length non-fiction. In 1890 Chekhov crossed Russia to the penal colony on Sakhalin, spent three months there and conducted a census himself, interviewing thousands of convicts and settlers. It was serialised in 1893–94 and published as a book in 1895, and it had real effect on Russian penal policy. It reads nothing like his fiction.
What is the Little Trilogy?
“The Man in a Case”, “Gooseberries” and “About Love”, all published in 1898 and linked by their narrators. Chekhov asked that they be kept out of his collected works because they were one unfinished cycle. They are the only sequence he explicitly grouped, and many English selections break them up.
Are The Wood Demon and Uncle Vanya the same play?
No. Uncle Vanya (1897) is a reworking of The Wood Demon (1889), but Chekhov halved the cast, turned a suicide into a botched murder and replaced a happy ending with an unresolved one. Both plays exist and both are performed. Lists that give one entry for the two are wrong.
Why do Chekhov story titles keep changing?
Because they are translations and there is no authority to settle them. The Lady with the Dog also appears as the Little Dog, the Pet Dog and the Toy Dog; A Boring Story as A Dreary Story and A Dull Story; The Bride as The Betrothed and The Fiancée. It is worth checking the Russian title before buying, or you will end up with the same story twice.
What happened at the first performance of The Seagull?
It failed badly. The premiere at the Alexandrinsky Theatre in St Petersburg on 17 October 1896 was played to an audience expecting a comedy; Chekhov left the theatre during the performance and said he would never write for the stage again. Stanislavski revived it at the Moscow Art Theatre in December 1898 and it made the reputation of both the play and the company.
Was The Cherry Orchard meant to be funny?
Chekhov said so, repeatedly, and Stanislavski staged it as a tragedy anyway. They argued about it until Chekhov left for Germany, where he died six months after the premiere. The disagreement has never been settled and productions still divide along the same line.
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Footnotes
- Anton Chekhov — Wikipedia
- Anton Chekhov bibliography — Wikipedia
- Anton Chekhov — Britannica
- Guide to Further Reading — The Cambridge Introduction to Chekhov
- Sakhalin Island — Wikipedia
- The Prank — NYRB Classics
- Constance Garnett — Wikipedia, on the translation argument
- Translations — Rosamund Bartlett
Bibliography last verified 19 September 2026. Dates are given in the modern calendar; Russia used the Julian calendar until 1918, which ran twelve to thirteen days behind. Several first-performance dates for the one-act plays could not be verified and are therefore omitted rather than guessed. No authoritative total for the short stories exists, which is why a range is given here rather than a number.
Nothing here was suggested by a machine.
I read these myself,
and the reasons are on the page.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
— Anton Chekhov, widely quoted from his letters — the exact wording varies between translations and the phrasing above is the one in general circulation
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