Prudently constructed and pithily told, Anton Chekhov’s short stories take one to another, and quite unfamiliar, world with miraculous ease. There are a few gems among them, which entice strong emotions when they are least expected. But every third or fourth story disappoints with its ever-so-slightly clumsy ending. He explains things away with a sentence, or even a single clause, too many. Like explained jokes, these stories plummet like lead balloons. And his contemporaries kept complaining his stories suffered not only from plotlessness, but also from pointlessness! In the end, poor Chekhov occasionally became their unwitting victim.