Sorrow

Well, you brought this on yourself. Not only were you browsing the Russian classics section – literature with a reputation so dour and depressing that it has reached meme status, but when you on top of that pick out the one book titled "Sorrow", we can only imagine that you've taken the advice of the people complaining about your sunny disposition and the spring in your step. Fortunately, you're in good hands as Chekhov is a virtuoso of the moody human blues.

The plot is very simple: An old man must take his wife to the hospital before she expires. Then we learn that it's a 20 mile trip on an awful road, that it's biting cold and snowing, that the man is an alcoholic (and a mean one at that), that his horse is a wreck and then real adversity eventually sets in.

Still, Russian literature is famous for a reason – and that reason might just be its similarity to Finnish sauna tradition: That sometimes you have to go roll around naked in the cold, cold snow to truly appreciate the nice, relaxing warmth you have around you.

A prolific writer of seven plays, a novel and hundreds of short stories, Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) is considered one of the best practitioners of the short story genre in literature. True to life and painfully morbid with his miserable and realistic depictions of Russian everyday life, Chekhov’s characters drift between humour, melancholy, artistic ambition, and death. Some of his best-known works include the plays "Uncle Vanya", "The Seagull", and "The Cherry Orchard", where Chekhov dramatizes and portrays social and existential problems. His short stories unearth the mysterious beneath the ordinary situations, the failure and horror present in everyday life. Contrary to pop culture belief, Chekhov was neither a gun enthusiast or a crew member of the USS Enterprise in Star Trek.