IT IS THE WORK THAT MADE CHEKHOV, launching his career as a writer and playwright of national and international renown. And it is an elegiac, beautiful story of a bygone era, with compelling characters and incomparable imagery.Biographer Donald Rayfield said the tale was Chekhov's "memorial to a wild countryside that was now engulfed... Steppe is literally a masterpiece."Retranslated and updated, this new bilingual edition is a super way to improve your Russian.