A prolific writer of seven plays, a novel, and hundreds of short stories, Anton Chekhov (1860 -1904) is a master of the short story as a genre. His detailed and often miserable descriptions of everyday Russian life speak to his own experiences, and his characters drift between humour, melancholy, artistic ambition, and death, no matter their storyline. In his plays, he tends to dramatize and explore social and existential problems, whilst his short stories focus more on the horror present in everyday life, and the mystery that cloaks monotony. The majority of his popular plays, such as 'Uncle Vanya', 'The Seagull', and 'A Hunting Accident' have been adapted into movies starring actors like Toby Jones, Roger Allam and Elisabeth Moss.