Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) was born in Taganrog, Russia, the son of a grocer. While training as a physician he supported his family with his freelance writing, composing hundreds of short comic pieces under a pen name for local magazines. He went on to write major works of drama, including The Seagull, Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard, but continued to write prize-winning short stories up until his death from tuberculosis at the age of 44.

Translator Nicolas Pasternak Slater is the nephew of the great Russian novelist and translator Boris Pasternak. During his National Service he qualified as a Russian interpreter, then read Russian and German at Oxford. After a period working on computer translation in Milan, he changed direction, qualified as a doctor and worked as a consultant haematologist at St Thomas's Hospital, London. In 1998 he took early retirement from medical practice, and has been translating Russian literature ever since. His literary translations include Boris Pasternak's autobiographical essay People and Propositions, Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time, Pushkin's A Journey to Arzrum and Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich and other stories.