The comic stories

"By 1888, when he was just twenty-eight, Chekhov had published a staggering 528 stories, about half of them comic. Unpretentious, lively, and inventive, these comic stories have long been affectionately regarded in Russia, but publishers in the West, overawed by the prevailing image of Chekhov as a melancholy genius, have resisted the down-to-earth humorist. This collection is the first substantial volume in English devoted solely to the comic stories."--BOOK JACKET.