The Steppe

The Steppe is the carriage ride of a country boy sent by his mother to study at the gymnasium of a big city: the vast Ukrainian steppe, the surprise encounters along the way, the little boy's enchanted feelings, the bathing in the great, placid river, the stops, the fearful tales of the peasants. Written in 1888, at the age of twenty-eight, Chekhov considered this tale his masterpiece; a judgment also shared by other writers such as Leskov and Saltykov-Sčedrin, who compared it to Gogol and ...