A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How quickly the story moves.
At Christmas, an elderly village couple hires a letter writer to reach the daughter they have not heard from in four years.
An impoverished landowner lectures a promising guest on aristocratic superiority while his daughters wait for a chance to speak.
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.
At a remote railway station on New Year’s Eve, a bored official dares fate to prove that his life can still become worse.
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.
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.
A scholar hires a French teacher to advance his research, but discovers that attraction is much easier than conjugation.
At an Epiphany fête, three prosperous old men recall what severe cold meant before wealth protected them from it.
A visit to his brother’s long-dreamed-of estate forces a traveler to ask what private happiness costs those left outside it.
At a remote Siberian ferry, a hardened exile tells a homesick young man that survival depends on wanting nothing.
A boy approaches confession with fear, rivalry, hunger, and a vivid hope that absolution will make him new.
A merchant who signed bank audits he never read cannot understand why the law treats carelessness as complicity.
While servants play cards in a dark coach-house, a lodger dies nearby and an old tale turns a child’s unease into terror.
In a weary provincial courtroom, a peasant faces a murder charge while officials move through justice as if following a machine.
A wet graveyard walk leads to an actor drinking beside the neglected grave of the man who shaped and ruined his life.
Lost in a winter city, a carpenter’s dog is rescued by a circus clown who sees in her the makings of a performer.
A homeopathic healer’s grateful patients praise miraculous cures before mentioning their urgent material needs.
A grieving cabman carries strangers through the snowy city, searching among them for someone willing to hear about his son.
