A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
The readership the story was written for.
While Easter bells summon the city outside, an impoverished clerk spends another holiday night trapped in a smoky office.
Driving his gravely ill wife through a blizzard, a drunken turner discovers remorse only when time is almost gone.
A boastful young lover challenges a lawyer to argue him out of marriage—and discovers how quickly conviction can yield to eloquence.
A penniless painter prepares to leave his summer lodging while dreaming of fame and avoiding the young woman who believes in his future.
A landowner confides his fear that ordinary life is incomprehensible, unaware that his closest friend desires his wife.
A pompous official receives a tribute from his subordinates whose solemn meaning may not survive the trip home.
Two chance encounters with remarkable young women leave a traveler pondering why beauty can bring as much sadness as delight.
A lawyer catches a beggar lying, offers him work, and assumes stern advice is enough to restore a life.
A banker’s reckless wager condemns a young lawyer to fifteen years of voluntary solitude for a fortune.
A Sunday animal market in Moscow becomes a crowded portrait of commerce, expertise, affection, and cruelty.
During Holy Week, an ailing bishop longs to meet his visiting mother as a son rather than as the distant office everyone sees.
A cattle merchant crosses Russia by freight train, paying at every stop while schedules, regulations, and neglect consume his profit.
Unable to sleep in a provincial chemist’s shop, a lonely young wife welcomes two officers whose late-night errand becomes open flirtation.
A chorus girl opens her door to her lover’s desperate wife and is made to answer for money she never received and choices she did not make.
A seven-year-old watches the household arrange its cook’s marriage and struggles to understand why a stranger can claim authority over her.
On Easter morning, a newly married farmer passes a sick soldier on the road and cannot quiet his conscience afterward.
Olenka can live only through someone else’s passions, adopting each beloved’s work, worries, and opinions as her own.
One accidental sneeze sends a timid clerk into an escalating panic over rank, manners, and official displeasure.
An impoverished old man can no longer feed the horse and dog that depend on him, yet neither anger nor dismissal can break their attachment.
As a child lies gravely ill, his mother and longtime doctor confront a question that has festered between them for years.
On the road to an inquest, a magistrate challenges a doctor to explain a healthy woman’s precisely foretold death.
An accomplished engineer complains that the public knows performers and criminals better than builders and scholars—until his seatmate tests the claim.
One enormous eelpout under a riverbank root draws workers, a shepherd, and their master into the water.
A society hostess dazzled by artistic celebrity overlooks the quiet distinction of the doctor she has married.
