This collection contains the following eleven stories:
Grief
Agafya
Misfortune
A Boring Story (From an Old Man's Notebook)
The Grasshopper
Ward No. 6
Ariadne
The House with an Attic
Ionych
The Darling
The Lady with the Lapdog
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov may be likened to his contemporaries, the "pointilliste" painters. Piece by piece, episode by episode, character by character, he constructs in prose a survey of the human condition. As David Magarshack writes in his introduction, on reading these stories 'one gets the impression of holding life itself, like a fluttering bird, in one's cupped hands'.