After Anton Chekhov's slow death from tuberculosis, his wife Olga sends a hotel-boy on an important errand to ensure that no attention is called to the death of the famous Russian playwright.

A college student uses brutal method acting techniques to rehearse Anton Chekhov's play The Seagull under a tyrannical director. In the process, he and his co-star confront their own misery and arising feelings of love.

A writing critic reviews the construction of Charles Chesnutt’s stories and how to write surfiction.

In 1990s Leningrad, a Russian man prepares to emigrate, but things don't quite go as planned—twists of fate, complex friendships, and the omnipresent KGB stand in his way.

When the devoted wife of a Yiddish writer recruits a young man to translate her husband's work in 1960's New York, the young man must contemplate his priorities and mission in life.

When a professor of French literature attends a tribute event in New York City for her old playwriting teacher, she remembers how young she was when their unconventional relationship transpired.

A man recalls his intimate friendship with his former English professor, who resolved to fuel his unsatisfied desire for playwriting during the time they were apart. In their reunion decades later, instead of the brilliant play he promised, the professor shows his former student a disturbing product of his mental instability.

When a Soviet state official attempts to coerce a celebrated poet into apologizing for a political joke he made, the official gets a taste of his own predatory medicine at the hand of the poet's vengeful wife.

While touring Russia to better understand the lives of its inhabitants, an Englishman is invited to stay at a local man’s home, where he witness one of the region’s infamous holy men perform a miraculous, but dubious healing.

A fiercely competitive screenwriter is initially furious when the biggest production of the year gets handed to an Austrian foreigner - then astonished when he reads what the Austrian writes.