In the Ravine (Russian: В овраге, romanized: V ovrage) is a 1900 novella by Anton Chekhov first published in the No.1, January issue of Zhizn magazine.

At his own wedding, he quickly gets drunk and starts bragging about a friend he has in the city, Samorodov, whom he refers to as "a special person."

On the day of Anisim's departure, Varvara Nikolayevna attempts to put it to him, that while their family is rich, its life is quite horrible, for what they do, is cheat the people in every conceivable way, and are being hated by them.

At the station Tsybukin the elder asks his son to stay at home, promising to "shower him with gold", but the latter says no: he seems to truly enjoy his job in the city, which involves uncovering all sorts of crookery and deception.

Anisim is jailed, and later sentenced to six years of hard labor in Siberia, despite his father's efforts to provide him with good defense in court.

This includes the brick factory that Aksinya had built in partnership with the local merchants, Khrymov brothers, on a plot of Tsybukin's land.

Formally Grigory Petrovich is still the head of the family, but it's Aksinya who runs everything at home, at the brick factory and at the station tavern, she's recently built with her friends Khrymins.

The last time Lipa and her mother see the old Tsybukin, he sits listlessly by the church, while a couple of men beside him argue about whether Aksinya, no matter how respected a figure she is in the village, has any right at all to deny food to her father-in-law, who hasn't eaten now for three days.

Since 1898, Maxim Gorky, one of Chekhov's great admirers, had been making attempts at drawing him closer to the magazine Zhizn which he himself was closely associated with.

[4] According to Mikhail Chekhov's memoirs, the story was based upon "the real life accident that happened while he was on Sakhalin; as for the setting, it is some place nearby Melikhovo.

"[1] Chekhov received numerous highly emotional letters from his followers, one of whom, Viktor Mirolyubov, the then editor of Zhurnal Dlya Vsekh, wrote on 9 February: "Three times I had to stop reading.

[...] It is not your gift that matters, but your heart, your deep feeling... towards all things suffering, for those who perish due to their ignorance, which is so common to this huge ghetto of our life, where only animal instincts win out.

Albov considered "In the Ravine" to be the author's best story in terms of "depth and subtlety of the plot," as well as "the manifestation of a new philosophy, which Chekhov has discovered for himself.

[1] In February 1900 Maxim Gorky wrote Chekhov to inform him of how strong was the effect the story had made upon Leo Tolstoy, as well as a group of the Poltava region peasants he himself had read it to.

[12] Mikhail Menshikov[13] concentrated on the story's female characters and divided them into three categories: destructive (Aksinya), constructive (Lipa) and conservative (Varvara).