The literary careers of Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Ivan Turgenev have ended by 1881.

Anton Chekhov, the major literary figure in the last decade of the nineteenth century, contributes in two genres: short story and drama.

Chekhov, a realist who examines not society as a whole but the foibles of individuals, produces a large volume of sometimes tragic, sometimes comic short stories and several outstanding plays, including The Cherry Orchard, a dramatic chronicling of the decay of a Russian aristocratic family.