Three Years: New Translation

On a visit to a provincial town to see his sister Nina who is suffering from cancer, Alexei Laptev, who works for his father's Moscow haberdashery business, falls in love with Yulia, the daughter of her doctor, and proposes to her. Although she does not reciprocate his feelings, she agrees to marry him and live with him in the capital, where the couple's relationship is marred by tensions: Yulia is filled with regrets about her choice and boredom with her new existence, while Alexei is nagged by the suspicion that she married him for his money alone. However, as time passes and misfortune strikes, they both learn to reassess all of their assumptions. Chekhov's second-longest prose work after The Steppe, Three Years is, in the author's own words, 'a novel of Moscow life' and an examination of its merchant classes. A powerful story of redemption and the nuances of human relationships, the novella helped cement Chekhov's reputation as a major figure in Russian literature.

If you enjoyed Three Years, you might like to read In the Twilight, The Kiss and Other Stories, The Story of a Nobody and The Woman in the Case, all published by Alma Classics.

ABOUT THE SERIES: The 101 Pages series has been created with the aim of redefining and enriching the classics canon by promoting unjustly neglected works of enduring significance. These texts have been treated with a fresh editorial approach, and are presented in an elegantly designed format.

Pages: 128

Publication year: 2020