Well, Mr. Mudrick Said… A Memoir
Endnotes
Introduction
1 Chapter 1 A New Order of Things. Translated by Louis S. Friedland. Letters on the Short Story, the Drama, and Other Literary Topics. 219. [To Leont’ev (Shcheglov), February 22, 1888.]
2 Translated by Rosamund Bartlett. Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters. 194. [To Suvorin, October 17, 1889.]
3 This is how Vladimir B. Kataev, the editor of the Russian-language A. P. Chekhov Entsiklopediya (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 2011. 14), and the editors of the Collected Works count them. More numbers from Kataev: “more than 130 pieces” in 1883, “more than 100” in 1884, “more than 130” in 1885, and only 12 (eight of them short stories) in 1888.
4 I use, for the most part, the standard transliteration of Russian names, most prominently among them Lev (rather than Leo) Tolstoy.
5 Quoted by Gleb Struve in “On Chekhov’s Craftsmanship” (472) from Yu. Sobolev’s Chekhov (Moscow, 1930).
6 Magarshack. Chekhov: A Life. 333. [To Maxim Gorky, November 16, 1898.]
7 For free and downloadable translations by Constance Garnett of Chekhov’s stories, see the splendid “201 Stories by Anton Chekhov”: https://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/ac/jr/ or other Internet sites. The other translators of out-of-copyright or Internet-accessible stories are listed in the bibliography, page 407.
Except for several in Garnett’s last volume, Love and Other Stories, almost all of the 201 stories she translated were the ones that Chekhov selected for his Collected Works in 1899–1901. Chekhov was choosier than most of his readers would have been, and this means that part of my project has been reading in Russian all the pieces from these years that he chose not to include in the Collected Works. Eventually I discovered that many of the stories I thought I was discovering on my own in Russian had already been translated, just not by Garnett.
8 This site, Chehov-lit.ru, has the complete Collected Works and supplementary materials. I am grateful to the original Soviet editors of the Collected Works and to the unnamed coordinators of this 21st century Russian site who made those volumes and supplements accessible.
9 L. D. Gromova and N. I. Gitovich. Letopis’ Zhizni i Tvorchestva A. P. Chekhova [Chronicle of the Life and Works of A. P. Chekhov]. Volume 1, 1860–1888. Moscow: Nasledie, 2000. Hereafter, this work will be noted as Letopis’.
10 “The worse the rows, the more the family longed for Anton, the one member of the family never to shout, hit out or weep.” Rayfield. Chekhov: A Life (2021). 78.
11 Chekhov’s grandfather, Egor Chekhov, bought his and his family’s freedom from the aristocratic grandfather of Tolstoy’s late-in-life closest friend, Vladimir Chertkov. (See Rayfield’s Chekhov: A Life. [2021]. 2, 471.)
12 Mikhail Chekhov. Anton Chekhov: A Brother’s Memoir. 7–8.
13 Quoted in Koteliansky, Anton Tchekhov: Literary and Theatrical Reminiscences. xxiv.
14 In Memories of Chekhov: Accounts of the Writer from His Family, Friends and Contemporaries. 16.
15 Rayfield. Anton Chekhov: A Life (1997). 25.
16 The biographies agree that Chekhov and Nikolay contracted tuberculosis in 1884: “The first discharge from the lungs had occurred in 1884,” writes Dr. John Coope. “He had been attending the Moscow District Court as a part-time reporter…. Suddenly he was aware that blood was pouring into his mouth, and it seemed to be coming from his right lung every time he coughed. It continued on and off for four days. He did not seek further advice but he must have realized at once that such a symptom could have a very serious significance. There was known tuberculosis in his family.” Dr. Coope explains: “He tried to talk himself into ignoring the signs of disease that he would immediately have recognized in a patient.” (John Coope. Doctor Chekhov: A Study in Literature and Medicine. 133–134.)
17 “After I finished high school, my brother paid for me to take Ladies’ Teachers Education Courses, a kind of teaching program. […] After completing the Teachers Courses, I got a job as a history and geography teacher at a private school in Moscow.” Maria Chekhova, “My Memories.” In Memories of Chekhov: Accounts of the Writer from His Family, Friends and Contemporaries. 19.
18 Hingley. A Life of Chekhov. 30.
19 Ibid., 29.
20 Alexander Chekhov. In Memories of Chekhov: Accounts of the Writer from His Family, Friends and Contemporaries. 12.
21 Mikhail Chekhov. Anton Chekhov: A Brother’s Memoir. 180.
22 Simmons. Chekhov: A Biography. 200.
23 Translated by Sidonie K. Lederer, The Selected Letters of Anton Chekhov. 243. [May 11, 1899.]
24 I mention the transliterated Cyrillic title of each story, as the translated titles widely vary. This particular story, “Отрава,” was not translated by Constance Garnett, so I have translated the excerpt.
25 A. P. Chekhov. Polnoe Sobranie Sochineniy i Pisem [Collected Works and Letters]. Works, Vol. 5. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Nauka.” 1976. 9. Hereafter, his creative works (stories and plays) from the thirty-volume Soviet edition will be noted as Works.
26 A. P. Chekhov. Polnoe Sobranie Sochineniy i Pisem (Collected Works and Letters). Vol. 1. Moscow. 1974. 209–210. [To Nikolay Leykin, March 4, 1886.] Hereafter, his letters, which comprise twelve volumes of the thirty-volume Soviet edition (the letters are labeled Volumes 1–12; the creative works are labeled Volumes 1–18), will be noted as Pis’ma.
27 Leykin replied, “ ‘Poison’ really turned out bad, but all the same it’s being published in No. 10. I don’t even understand why it’s called ‘Poison.’ ” Leykin later told Chekhov he had taken out “the recollection of the advocate,” and because there’s no surviving manuscript, there’s no sign of which passage that was. Despite Leykin’s harping at it (and if it truly was bad, Leykin would have squashed it), when Chekhov was sorting through all of his stories thirteen years later for his Collected Works, he had forgotten its existence or where it had been published until a bibliographer found it and brought it to his attention. Having reread it, Chekhov wrote across the top: “It doesn’t go in the Collected Works.”
28 Translated by Heim and Karlinsky. Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary. 55.
29 Compared to English and Americans, the Russians are prudish about publishing details about their classic authors’ sex lives. In the relatively open, pre-Putin days of the 1990s, the British scholar Donald Rayfield was able to delve into previously inaccessible Chekhov materials in Russian libraries. His biography has been translated into Russian and is frequently cited by Russian scholars.
30 John Richardson. A Life of Picasso: The Early Years, 1881–1906. New York: Random House, 1991. 3.
31 Alexander Kuprin recorded Evgenia Chekhova’s words. See Reminiscences of Anton Chekhov by Maxim Gorky, Alexander Kuprin, and I. A. Bunin. Translated by S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf.
32 Translated by Heim and Karlinsky. Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary. 85. [To Aleksei Suvorin, January 7, 1889.]
33 The single-most important book in writing this biography beyond the Collected Works edition of Chekhov’s works and letters is the Letopis’ Zhizni i tvorchestva A. P. Chekhova (Chronicle of the Life and Work of A. P. Chekhov), edited by L. D. Gromova and N. I. Gitovich (2000).
January 1886
1 Translated by Heim and Karlinsky. Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary. 300. [To Rimma Vashchuk, March 28, 1897.]
2 Magarshack. Chekhov: A Life. 91.
3 How old was she, then? Unknown. Her brother, the artist Aleksandr Stepanovich Yanov, a friend of Chekhov’s brother Nikolay, was born in 1857. Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 572.
4 Translated by Heim and Karlinsky. Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary. 65. See also: “In agony, the dying sister grabbed Anton’s hand just before she passed away. Her cold handshake instilled such feelings of helplessness and guilt in Anton that he contemplated abandoning medicine altogether.” (Mikhail Chekhov. Anton Chekhov: A Brother’s Memoir. Translated by Eugene Alper. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.)