"Betrothed" (Russian: Невеста, romanized: Nevesta), translated also as "The Fiancée", is a 1903 short story by Anton Chekhov, first published in the No.12, December 1903 issue of Zhurnal Dlya Vsekh.

Another important character, Sasha, who prompts her to take this step, in the finale dies at a tuberculosis sanitarium, just as Chekhov himself was to do in 1904.

On 23 January 1903 he informed Olga Knipper: "I am writing now a story for Zhurnal Dlya Vsekh, in a slightly archaic manner, the 1870s style.

[2] Nadya Shumina, a provincial 23-year-old, living on her grandmother's estate with her mother, is engaged to be married to Andrey Andreyevich, the son of a local priest.

When Nadya goes with Andrey Andreitch to see the house that is being prepared for the couple, she despises everything about it, feeling it represents "stupid, naïve, unbearable vulgarity."

She begins to see her mother as a weak, unhappy person, completely dependent on the charity of her mother-in-law, and does not want to follow in her footsteps.

The story ends on an uncertain note: Nadya packs up her things, says goodbye to her family, and "full of life and high spirits [leaves] the town—as she supposed, forever."

"[For the heroine] to leave the city means to abandon the thought of an egotistic existence... of life's banalities and join the shiny road of selfless labour," Maximilian Voloshin wrote in Kiyevskiye Otkliki.

He compared Nadya favourably to Turgenev's girls, noting that while the latter were engaged mostly in the quest for love, Chekhov's heroines were longing for the meaning of life.

[2] Positive reviews came from Mir Bozhy (Angel Bogdanovich, writing in the January 1904 issue), Pravda magazine (I. Johnson, May 1904) and Rus.

[5] Among those who thought little of Chekhov's new optimism, were Mikhail Gershenzon (Nauchnoye Slovo, January 1904) and the Marxist critic Viktor Shulyatikov.

"[7] Shulyatikov, while recognizing some positive moments in the story, still considered Nadya's motives to be vague, and opined that from the point of view of a true Marxist, Chekhov was but an "unreliable fellow traveller.