Page:Five Russian plays and one Ukrainian.pdf/19

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went to the local classical school. His father’s little shop came to grief and the whole family moved to Moscow, where he studied medicine at the University. He started writing, often forced to work in one room with his parents and brothers and their friends. In 1884 he qualified as a doctor, and in 1886 published a first book of stories that had already appeared in a score of newspapers and reviews. He practised as a doctor merely on occasion, but was a most prolific writer of stories and plays, in which the influence of French literature, especially de Maupassant, conflicted with the current ultra-nationalism. Some, in fact most, of his work is simply Russian, for example, The Three Sisters, of his plays, and The Duel, of his stories. At the same time there are innumerable short stories European in style and, among his plays, The Wedding and The Jubilee, here translated, show the best quality of his work and the service he was rendering Russian literature. His life was cut short by consumption, which forced him to leave the intellectual centres of the north for the warm, barbaric Crimea. In 1890, however, he travelled in Siberia to observe the conditions of the political and