During the last ten years of his life, Anton Chekhov penned his great plays, spent time treating the sick, and wrote a small number of stories that are considered his masterpieces. The eleven stories collected here-"The Lady with the Little Dog, " "The House with the Mezzanine, " "My Life, " "Peasants, " "A Visit to Friends, " "Ionych, " "About Love, " "In the Ravine, " "The Bishop, " "The Bride, " and "Disturbing the Balance"-hail from this fertile period. They reveal a writer who, in response to the techniques of Symbolism and Impressionism, moved beyond nineteenth-century realism to become an innovator of the modern short story, influencing such key twentieth-century literary figures as Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner.