Selected Stories by Anton Chekhov
Published 1899 · 150,000 words · about 10 hours at an average pace · Short Stories, Literary Fiction, Russian Literature, Classics
How hard is Selected Stories to read?
Selected Stories scores 48 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 36 out of 100
- In standard English translation, Chekhov uses plain, concrete vocabulary — provincial doctors, hospital wards, servants, weather — with almost no specialized jargon or archaism. It sits below The Remains of the Day's formal register, closer to The Great Gatsby stripped of its ornament, since the words themselves are never where the difficulty lives.
- Sentence structure: 34 out of 100
- Sentences run short and declarative, built for clarity rather than display, closer to 1984's directness than to Tolstoy's rolling subordination. Chekhov will occasionally let one sentence carry an entire emotional turn, but the grammar stays plain even when the feeling underneath it is not.
- Abstraction: 46 out of 100
- The stories stay concrete — a doctor's rounds, a garden full of gooseberries, a boy's letter to his grandfather — but the moral and emotional weight beneath the surface runs deep. That puts this collection closer to The Remains of the Day's hidden interiority than to anything that states its ideas outright.
- Information density: 38 out of 100
- Chekhov strips backstory and exposition to almost nothing, trusting a gesture or a piece of weather to carry what another writer would spend a paragraph explaining. It reads lighter than The Great Gatsby's compressed but complete scenes, closer to the spare surface of Pedro Páramo.
- Narrative indirection: 62 out of 100
- Chekhov's characters rarely say what they feel; Gurov's love in "The Lady with the Dog" surfaces only through what he can't stop doing, and Dr. Ragin's decline in "Ward No. 6" is legible to everyone but him. That places these stories above The Great Gatsby's narrated bias, closer to the inference Beloved demands, since no narrator steps in to explain what to feel.
- Symbolic density: 42 out of 100
- Chekhov distrusts overt symbol-making — a garden of gooseberries or a locked ward carries meaning through repetition and irony rather than allegory. It sits below The Great Gatsby's green light, closer to The Remains of the Day's restraint, since the symbols work by seeming almost unremarkable.
- Ironic distance: 58 out of 100
- Nearly every story turns on the gap between how a character sees himself and what the story quietly demonstrates instead — the banker in "The Bet" who forgets what his money was for, Olenka in "The Darling" who has no opinions but other people's. That's closer to The Great Gatsby's simultaneous sympathy and critique than to Ulysses' constant self-mockery.
- Resolution withholding: 64 out of 100
- The "Chekhovian ending" is practically a genre term: stories stop rather than conclude, denying the payoff a reader has been trained to expect. "The Lady with the Dog" ends with the affair unresolved and, in the text's own words, the hardest part only just beginning — higher than The Great Gatsby's closed plot, closer to the deliberate irresolution of The Crying of Lot 49.
- Structural complexity: 34 out of 100
- Most stories run single-strand and chronological, though the "Little Trilogy" (The Man in a Case, Gooseberries, About Love) nests a tale within a frame of hunters trading stories after dinner. Across the collection that sits below Midnight's Children's braided timelines, near The Great Gatsby's simple retrospective frame.
How Selected Stories is regarded
Selected Stories holds a literary regard score of 94 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.