A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How quickly the story moves.
An impatient scholar waits to dismiss his late young secretary, then finds that their digressions are the part of the evening he values most.
On a remote railway line, an engineer’s late-night argument leads him to confess the human cost of his youthful nihilism.
A man tries to explain why the ordinary habits that once irritated him become forgivable when they belong to the woman he loves.
A young officer visits an unconventional distillery owner to collect a debt and finds his principles tested by her unsettling charm.
When his sister leaves home for a married neighbor, a self-described liberal rides out to settle the scandal and tests his own beliefs.
Stranded by a blizzard beside a suicide, a young magistrate begins to see the hidden ties between official duty and human suffering.
Snowbound at a roadside tavern on Christmas Eve, a young landowner hears how a ruined idealist’s convictions consumed his life.
A sick Moscow waiter returns with his wife and daughter to the village he remembers, only to find a family trapped by poverty, drink, and fear.
A sleepy family turns the last evening before Lent into an earnest campaign of lessons, tea, ritual, and still more food.
A Sunday animal market in Moscow becomes a crowded portrait of commerce, expertise, affection, and cruelty.
A cattle merchant crosses Russia by freight train, paying at every stop while schedules, regulations, and neglect consume his profit.
One accidental kiss awakens a shy officer’s hope that his ordinary life might contain love after all.
On Easter Eve, a worried deacon asks a learned priest to condemn his wayward son in a letter neither man can truly own.
A pregnant hostess endures a long name-day party while resentment, jealousy, and fatigue expose the strain in her marriage.
A bailiff meets an old shepherd in a rain-soaked wood, where a dwindling natural world gives voice to their own despair.
A provincial household prepares for a high-ranking uncle whose summer visit unsettles its routines, loyalties, and ideas about cultivated life.
A young teacher wins the domestic happiness he imagined, only to find contentment raising questions about the life he has chosen.
In a shuttered provincial house, a mother and daughter sew endlessly for a marriage that remains only a hope.
Two impoverished hunters, unable to reclaim a pawned gun, walk to the spring woods to see whether the snipe have arrived.
At a crowded monastery, a traveller shares a room with a young convert whose restless search for learning has left him without a home.
On his last night in the country, a young statistician walks into the moonlit mist with his host’s daughter and an unexpected confession.
Psyche Zenobia climbs an Edinburgh steeple in search of material for a sensation article and puts her head through a clock face.
A reclusive scholar's fixation on his cousin's teeth grows stronger as illness changes her body and mind.
A cook who considers himself a great philosopher receives a visit from the Devil and tries to bargain away his soul.
