chekhov's short novels

Took it off from one of my friend's bookshelves about a month back and have been religiously plodding through it for sometime now. I haven't read much of the Russians so thought this will be a welcome break from my regular Indian author reading material.. The setting of the stories are a bit archaic at times, but somehow the description of the land, the environment and settings are extraordinarily vivid in this translated text.. Morning bus journeys, flat steppes showing the vastness of the landscape, Russian peasant life with all it's tidings form a majority of the stories. Couple of them relate to the city gentry with it's usual pretentiousness and obsequious behavior to the higher social classes. In short life in general.. An interesting read :)