Watch Chekhov Comedy Shorts

In The Dangers of Tobacco, Nyukhin, a brow-beaten husband, delivers a lecture on the harmful effects of smoking tobacco. Then, in The Proposal, nervous hypochondriac Lomov visits his neighbor Natasha to ask for her hand in marriage.

Rude and boorish landowner Smirnoff calls on the recently widowed Popova to collect a debt owed to him by her late husband. When the grieving widow is unable to pay him, Smirnoff simply refuses to leave - and in the passionate, fiery altercation which follows, they agree to fight a duel to the death with a pair of pistols.

Tolkachov, a frustrated and exasperated family man, exhausted from running countless errands for friends and family, visits his good friend Murashkin for some much needed sympathy. But his rant leaves him with more problems than he started with.