Tout au long de sa carrière, Tchekhov a eu le goût et le désir d’écrire des farces et des pièces en un acte. On aurait tort de voir dans ces écrits un genre mineur ou un aspect secondaire de son talent. C’est le même goût de la concision dépouillée qui fait de lui un maître de la nouvelle brève.
Les "petites" pièces sont des miniatures, comme des pochades :

L'Ours, fut dédiée à N.N. Solovtsov, un ami acteur; Tchekhov l'avait vu joué une adaptation russe d'un vaudeville de Pierre Berton - Les Jurons de Cadillac -, où Solovtsov jouant un marin molesté par une dame.

Tolstoï ne manquait aucune occasion de la voir jouée et riait aux larmes, alors qu'il n'appréciait pas trop le théâtre de Tchekhov.

Tatiana Répina écrite à partir d'une comédie en quatre actes de son ami éditeur, Souvorine, elle ne sera pas jouée de son vivant, en raison de la parodie de rituel du mariage orthodoxe qui lui sert de trame. Souvorine avait écrit sa comédie par rapport à un fait divers : en 1881, une actrice s'était empoisonnée durant une représentation au théâtre de Kiev. Ce même fait divers avait inspiré Tougueniev pour sa nouvelle Après la mort. Il s'agit d'un drame,un drame issu d'une comédie: chose unique dans l'oeuvre de Tchekhov.

La Noce est tirée de plusieurs nouvelles dont Noce avec général et Un mariage d'argent (1884) Jouée pour la 1ère fois le 28.11.1900 lors d'une soirée d'hommage à l'auteur.

La Nuit avant le procès est tirée de la nouvelle au titre similaire (1884), publiée en 1886.

Le Jubilé "plaisanterie en un acte" d'après la nouvelle Une créature sans défense, de 1887.

1890-1892

Lika Mizinova
Chekhov and Mizinova met in the autumn of 1889, when Lika became a teacher of the Rjevsky Gymnasium, where the writer’s sister, Maria Chekhova was working. Lika really impressed Chekhov already when first visiting his family. Contemporary notes mention them as inseparable; they went together to concerts, exhibitions, and meetings. Mizinova made notes about Sahalin for Chekhov; she helped him in preparations. When taking farewell, Chekhov gave a photograph to Mizinova, writing on the backside the following: "For the ever nicest person who I flee from to Sahalin, and who has clawed my nose. I solicit the suitors and admirers to wear a nose-pad. Chekhov. P.S. this note as well as our postcards does not commit me for anything." The atmosphere of the note is similar to the mood the correspondence of Chekhov and Mizinova in the first years radiates. The letters from 1891-1892 prove the existence of a close, intimate friendship. But when it came to enthusiasm for each other (the first letters demonstrate a liking and a wish for being liked), they seemed to have different behaviours.
Chekhov didn’t even react to Lika’s undefined or sometimes defined sentiments. The motive of hopelessness appeared in Lika’s letters in the autumn of 1892, when she realised that she could not force Chekhov to put his cards on the table. "Oh, please come, and save me!" - she desperately wrote to him. Chekhov didn’t answer but he wrote to Suvorin : "I don’t want to marry and I don’t have anybody to marry. Damn it ! I would be bored by the problems of a wife. Of course it wouldn’t be bad to fall in love. It is boring to live without love." Shortly afterwards the adventure with Chekhov turned publicly into a different affair, the romance of Lika and Ignaty Potapenko. The new love seemed to make disappear the previous, defining, strongest sentiments. Although the correspondence and relation of Chekhov and Lika lasted for many years, they have parted for ever. Lika’s life got harder and harder. She gave birth to Potapenko’s child in 1894, who left her not much later and returned to his wife. Lika experienced again a tragedy when her daughter died in pneumonia in 1896. Lika was lost, her unshaped talent could not develop in any direction. Her ambitions in the domains of teaching, singing, acting, translating and fashion design all ended in a fiasco.
Their letters in the following years were friendly and colloquial. At the end of the 1890’s Olga Knipper has appeared in Chekhov’s life. In this period the correspondence between Lika and Chekhov almost came to an end. In 1901 Lika applied for a place to the workshop of the Art Theatre, but she was accepted only as an extra. She became an extra in the place where Knipper was the heroine. In 1902 she married Alexander Akimovich Sanin, the actor and director of the Art Theatre and soon they moved abroad. After the Great October Revolution the returned for a short while, but afterwards they settled for good in Paris. Lika came never back again to Russia.

Radnai Annamária : Introduction Csehov szerelmei (Chekhov’s loves),
ed. by Annamária Radnai, Magvető Publishing House, Budapest, 2002.

Lidia Avilova
At one time with the Mizinova-affair lasting for years, Chekhov developed a less problematic but nevertheless affectionate relationship with Avilova, the delicate young writer from Saint Petersburg. They also have met in 1889; she was also a Lidia and she was not less charming than Mizinova. She always met Chekhov when visiting the capital, they were regularly writing to each other. This relationship was never as developed as with Mizinova; it was no source of a "danger" as the girlish Avilova was a mother with three children.
However, she would have followed Chekhov without a moment’s hesitation if he had asked her. In the winter of 1895, when Czehov had allegedly confessed : "I was in love with you", Avilova offered to go with him. Namely she sent a small medallion in secret - she thought that it was also an incognito - to the writer and engraved onto it : "Novels and short stories by A. Chekhov, page 267, line 6 and 7." In the indicated place it says : "If you ever need my life, come and take it."
The addressee realised whom the present came from, but he was not far the person to overturn the life of a family. Neither were his feelings strong enough for taking such a step. But he has used the idea afterwards : the Seagull’s Nina Zarechnaya confesses her love in this way.

Ágnes Gereben : Csehov világa (The world of Chekhov)
Európa Publishing House, Budapest, 1980