Chekhov in his twenties, writing for the comic weeklies to keep his family while he studied medicine: a clerk who sneezes on a general and dies of apologising, two old schoolfellows who meet at a railway station until one learns the other's rank, a young man too happy to sleep at three in the morning. Most of these are sketches of a few pages, but Lights and A Living Chattel already have the long view and the unresolved endings of the later stories.











