Anton Chekhov: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn
1860 to 1904
Quick answer: A craft file on Anton Chekhov for story writers: how he withholds judgement, ends without resolving, and which of his stories to read first.
Quick facts
- Born: 1860, Taganrog, on the Sea of Azov
- Died: 1904, Badenweiler, Germany, aged 44
- Wrote in: Russian
- Known for: "The Lady with the Dog", "Ward No. 6", "The Student"
- Signature move: The ending that refuses to settle anything
- Start with: "Misery" (1886), about ten pages
Chekhov wrote several hundred stories in about twenty-five years, most of them short enough to read on a tram, and the short story has been arguing with him ever since. He removed the things his readers had been trained to expect: a plot that pays off, a moral, an author who tells you whom to like. What he left behind is a method for making a reader feel a life without being told what it means.
What he actually does on the page
He refuses to judge. In "Misery" (1886) the cab driver Iona tries three times to tell his passengers that his son died that week. The passengers change the subject. Chekhov never says the word grief; he ends with Iona telling the whole story to his horse, and lets the reader do the feeling. In "Sleepy" (1888) a thirteen-year-old nursemaid, kept awake for days, strangles the baby that will not stop crying, and the prose does not raise its voice once.
He builds atmosphere out of one object rather than a paragraph of weather. His advice to his brother Alexander in an 1886 letter was, in effect, that a moonlit night is made by a piece of broken bottle glittering on a mill dam. The stories keep that promise: the pince-nez in "The Lady with the Dog", the sour gooseberries in "Gooseberries" (1898) that the brother eats with tears of joy while the narrator finds them hard and unripe.
He lets dialogue miss. In "The Kiss" (1887) the shy officer Ryabovich finally tells his comrades about the kiss that has filled his summer, and the telling takes under a minute. The gap between how large a thing feels and how small it sounds is the story.
The signature move
The unresolved ending, done properly, is not a shrug. Look at the last page of "The Lady with the Dog" (1899). Gurov and Anna have met secretly in a Moscow hotel; they have been talking about how to stop hiding. A lesser writer would either part them or free them. Chekhov gives them a plan they have not made yet, and closes on the sentence that "the most complicated and difficult part of it was only just beginning." The affair has become a marriage in everything but paperwork, and the story ends at the exact point where their real lives start. Character & Emotional Impact carries 25 of Writory's 100 points, and Chekhov collects them by stopping before the reader is comfortable.
Stories to read first
Read them in this order and you will watch the method grow.
What to steal for your own stories
Four exercises, each drawn from a named story.
What not to copy
Drift is not automatically depth. Chekhov's stasis works because the pressure underneath is enormous; imitators produce quiet stories in which nothing is at stake and call the emptiness restraint. His subject matter also dates: the bored provincial gentry, the samovar, the dacha, and a handful of stories, "The Darling" (1899) among them, treat a woman as a type to be diagnosed. Take the method, not the furniture.
Life at a glance
- 1860: Born in Taganrog, the son of a grocer who later went bankrupt
- 1879: Enters medical school at Moscow University and starts selling comic sketches to pay the family's bills
- 1884: Qualifies as a physician; first collection, Tales of Melpomene
- 1888: "The Steppe" appears in a serious journal and he receives the Pushkin Prize
- 1890: Crosses Siberia to survey the penal colony on Sakhalin island
- 1892: Buys the Melikhovo estate; "Ward No. 6" published
- 1899: "The Lady with the Dog"; moves to Yalta for his tuberculosis
- 1904: The Cherry Orchard opens in January; he dies in Badenweiler in July
What writers can take from this
- Give the reader the facts and withhold the verdict; if you catch yourself explaining what a scene means, cut the explanation.
- One precise object beats a paragraph of scenery.
- Let a character fail to communicate; the failure is often the plot.
- End at the moment of change, not the consequence.
- Write the antagonist's argument so well that you half believe it, as Chekhov does with Dr Ragin in "Ward No. 6".
- Read "Misery" aloud and count the adjectives; then do the same with your last draft.
Try it yourself
A night worker (a security guard, a nurse, a delivery rider) has had news today that changes everything. Write the shift in 800 words. They try to tell three different people. Nobody listens. End with whom, or what, they finally tell, and do not name the feeling anywhere in the story.
Questions
What is Anton Chekhov's best short story?
Readers most often name "The Lady with the Dog" (1899), "Ward No. 6" (1892) or "The Student" (1894). For a first encounter "Misery" (1886) shows the whole method in ten pages.
How did Chekhov influence the short story?
He proved a story could work without a plot twist or a moral, that mood and a single turned detail could carry the weight. Katherine Mansfield, James Joyce, Raymond Carver and Alice Munro all learned directly from him.
Is Chekhov hard to read?
No. The sentences are plain and the stories are short. The difficulty is only that he asks the reader to notice small things and decide their meaning; the Constance Garnett translations are free online and still readable.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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