'Chekhov is Pushkin in prose. Just as in Pushkin's poetry everyone can find a response to their own personal experience, so too can everyone find a similar response in Chekhov's stories,' Leo Tolstoy wrote of the works of his younger contemporary. Chekhov's artistic world, like a mosaic, is composed of individual scenes and situations, of diverse manifestations of human character, sometimes unexpected, sometimes paradoxical. Yet, we are unlikely to find 'pure' colors or an openly expressed authorial position in Chekhov's work: 'An artist should not be a judge of his characters and what they say, but only an impartial witness'—this is how the writer formulated his creative credo. His works are often difficult to interpret unambiguously: familiar evaluative categories (ideological, social, psychological) are not exactly inapplicable, but they are not absolute. 'You can weep and lament over stories, you can suffer alongside your characters, but I believe you should do it in such a way that the reader doesn't notice. The more objective you are, the stronger the impression,' these words from Chekhov's letter could serve as an epigraph to this collection, which contains works from 1886–1902.