"The Lady with the Toy Dog," "Goussiev" and other famous tales by Anton Chekhov (1860-1904). --- It was the conjunction of his peculiarly independent flexibility of mind with his keen scientific outlook that equipped Anton Pavlovich Chekhov for seizing and judging modern life from fresh angles. While representative of the changing horizons and complexity of the social organism of Russia, Chekhov's vision fused the detached, impartial attitude of the modern scientist with the deep humanism, the psychological insight, the caressing tenderness and the gay humour of his sensitive temperament. It is this element, the element of tenderness and sweetness of understanding, that forms the spiritual background of so many of Chekhov's Tales, and dominates invisibly the coarse web of the human struggle and the petty network of human egoism. --- Time's revenges or the irony of satisfied desires are treated in "The Lady with the Toy Dog." Yet one cannot say that Chekhov himself is "disillusioned." His sense of spiritual beauty is too strong; and his depth of acceptation of life's pattern forms, as it were, an aura enveloping his subject. This spiritual aura hovers about it and enwraps the gloomiest, greyest, most sardonic facts of life; death itself cannot diminish it. Examine "Goussiev," a sketch of the death of two worn-out soldiers on board a steamer, when returning from the East, a sketch that is so "modern" in its all-embracing outlook and bold acceptations as to shame nearly all our writers of today. It is so humanly broad, so tender, so infallibly true in its spiritual lightings, and it conveys the mystery of nature and all its transitory processes with sharp precision. In "Goussiev" there is a sharper consciousness of life's pulsating forces, of its inescapable laws and its evasive rhythms, than in any other "modern." (Edward Garnett)