A landowner is told, in his own house, that his relief work during the famine is worthless and his wife despises him — and the story simply follows what he does next. Chekhov practiced medicine throughout his career, ran famine relief and cholera districts himself, and knew precisely how well-meaning gentlemen behave when the peasants are actually starving. Fifty-five plates by painters including Isaac Levitan and Ivan Shishkin carry the Russian landscape through the nine stories, from golden autumn to the snow of the famine years.
