No one understood as clearly and finely as Anton Chekhov the tragedy of life's trivialities, no one before him showed men with such merciless truth the terrible and shameful picture of their life in the dim chaos of bourgeois everyday existence.
– Maxim Gorky
This is Chekhov with his eye on the big social picture....Longer than his earlier stories, these late works have more in common with
The Sea Gull and
The Cherry Orchard than with, say, The Doctor; depending on your taste, these stories may be most filling from a social observer's point of view....Subtlety isn't exactly the driving aim here.
– Washington Post Book World
