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