The Steppe and Other Stories

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The present volume is the fifth selection of Chekhov's short stories to be brought out in The World's Classics, and it completes the paperback publication for this series of his entire CFuvre as a mature fiction-writer. This means that the five volumes contain all those stories which received their first publication between March 1888 and the author's death in 1904. The text is that of the original hardback translation, The Oxĵord Chekhov, except that the stories are grouped differently and that textual variants have been omitted, as has much other scholarly apparatus.' The five volumes contain sixty titles altogether, and they maintain so high a level of excellence that many readers will rate them as the finest collection of short stories which any of the world's literatures has to offer. This high standard is maintained in the present volume, with a few minor reservations indicated below, and with the obvious exception of four trifles from the year 1892 which Chekhov himself excluded from his first Collected Works of 1899-1901; these are admitted here more for the sake of completeness than for their literary qualities.2

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