A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
The readership the story was written for.
A landowner discovers the exact price of being noticed in a government office.
An impoverished young bride enters a joyless marriage, then discovers that beauty can confer a power her husband never expected.
An impoverished young woman supports a medical student who treats her body, labor, and loyalty as conveniences.
On a Black Sea steamer, a disillusioned landowner recounts how his worship of a beautiful neighbor drew him across Europe.
Once a year, a lazy village drunk becomes an exacting artist whose work belongs to an entire community.
At Christmas, an elderly village couple hires a letter writer to reach the daughter they have not heard from in four years.
Returning to her family estate, a young heiress finds the freedom of the steppe at odds with the narrow life waiting for her at home.
An impoverished landowner lectures a promising guest on aristocratic superiority while his daughters wait for a chance to speak.
An anonymous love letter sends a respectable married man to a garden rendezvous, where an unexpected rival refuses to leave.
A barber learns midway through a free haircut that poverty has cost him the woman he loves.
Five rainy days without her husband send a devoted young wife into town, where his empty flat raises an unwelcome question.
Weeks before her wedding, a young woman begins to see her comfortable provincial life—and the future chosen for her—with new clarity.
A hotel waiter misplaces a piano-tuner’s boots, sending their anxious owner into an increasingly dangerous mix-up.
Two schoolboys arrive home for Christmas with maps, a pistol, and a secret plan to cross Siberia and seek gold in America.
At a remote railway station on New Year’s Eve, a bored official dares fate to prove that his life can still become worse.
Five children turn a forbidden late-night game of loto into a small world of greed, vanity, kindness, quarrels, and sudden sleep.
A village choirmaster drills his singers for months to impress a visiting count who may not care to hear them.
A peasant asks every authority he can find to free his convicted brother, but no one can tell him where justice actually resides.
A student asks his volatile father for money to return to Moscow, turning an ordinary family dinner into a reckoning none can resolve.
Escorted through autumn mud, a nameless tramp describes the free Siberian life he hopes awaits him beyond prison.
After a ball, a wealthy manufacturer drinks through the night and confesses that money has made every relationship feel bought.
On Easter night, a ferry monk mourns the gentle hymn writer whose words the celebrating monastery never learned to value.
Minutes after his only child dies, a doctor is summoned to another household and must weigh private grief against professional duty.
A self-assured critic and his widowed sister grow apart when her search for moral certainty challenges his literary convictions.
