meaning I also read a Chekhov novel
Anton Pavlovich wrote a lot of stuff -- humoristic sketches, short stories (rasskazy), novellas (povesti), plays, non-fiction, but he never wrote a single novel. The few longer stories or novellas (like Степь) are less than 100 pages long; his only long (relatively speaking) book is Остров Сахалин, which is non-fiction.
As for wordiness, try Aleksandr Pushkin; Anna Akhmatova praised his prose for its "head-spinning laconism".
There is so much Russian literature that is quite different from that chimera that Navokov once called "Tolstoyevsky"...