32 Chekhov would repeat this line in an August 1887 letter to his brother Alexander.
33 Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 238–239. [To Mikhail Chekhov, April 25, 1886.]
34 Ibid., 241. [To Maria Chekhova, May 6, 1886.]
35 Unpublished as yet. Editorial director Rosamund Bartlett’s complete edition of the previously untranslated earliest stories is in the hands of a publisher as of May 2022. (Personal communication.)
May 1886
1 Translation by Marina Brodskaya. Five Plays. 85.
2 Letopis’. 248. [May 3, 1886.]
3 Ibid., [May 6, 1886.]
4 Translated by Constance Garnett.
5 Letters, Vol. 1. 241–242. [To Alexander Chekhov, May 10, 1886.]
6 Simmons. Chekhov: A Biography. 129.
7 Works. Vol. 5. 632.
8 Letopis’. 249. [May 11 or 12, 1886.]
9 Magarshack. Chekhov: A Life. 85. [To Leykin, April 28, 1885.]
10 Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 243. [To Leykin, May 24, 1886.]
11 In Cyrillic: A.П. Чехов—“На даче.” YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YcqKHUpRN4&t=94s.
12 Titled “Out of Sheer Boredom” and translated by April FitzLyon and Kyril Zinovieff. 107.
13 Translated by FitzLyon and Zinovieff. 111. “ ‘Nature herself,’ Mikhail writes, describing Chekhov’s life at Babkino, ‘provided Chekhov with innumerable subjects and purely Babkino stories emerged from his pen. The moonlit garden in ‘Verochka’ with the wisps of mist floating through it is the Babkino garden…. ‘The Witch’ was suggested by the lonely church and its caretaker’s lodge near the highway in the big Babkino forest. In almost all his stories of that period, some traces of the Babkino landscape or some figure from Babkino itself or from the neighboring villages can be detected.” (Magarshack. Chekhov: A Life. 87–88.)
14 The translators FitzLyon and Zinovieff entitled the story “Taedium Vitae” in The Woman in the Case and Other Stories. London: John Calder, 1913. 149–162. (The translators spell the estate name as Jenino. Otherwise I have left their words as they are.)
15 There’s a reproduction of the handwritten manuscript in the Russian edition with Chekhov’s note on it. Works. Vol. 5. 167.
16 The only discussion in English that I have found about it is Gitit Shimon’s excellent “Old Age as a Reflection to Everyday Life: A Deliberation on Two Stories by Anton Chekhov,” on her website: Things Chekhov Never Told O. Henry. http://www.chekhov-ohenry.com/old-age-as-a-reflection-to-everydays-life-a-deliberation-on-two-stories-by-anton-chekhov/?lang=en.
June 1886
1 Quoted in Gleb Struve. “On Chekhov’s Craftsmanship.” (Boris Pasternak. Dr. Zhivago. New York: Pantheon, 1958. 285.)
2 Letopis’. 252. [June 1 or 2, 1886.]
3 Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 248. [Letter to Leykin from Nikolay Chekhov, not earlier than June 5, 1886.]
4 “I write under the most abominable conditions. In front of me sits my nonliterary work drumming away at my conscience. The child of a visiting relative is screaming in the next room. Nearby my father is reading aloud to my mother from ‘The Sealed Angel’ [Leskov] and someone has wound up the musical box and I can hear strains of La Belle Helene. It makes me want to flee into the country. You can hardly imagine more difficult conditions for a writer. My bed is taken by a visiting relative who comes along now to ask my medical advice. ‘My daughter must have colic to make her scream like that.’ I have the misfortune of being a medical student and everyone thinks they can come and have a little chat about medicine. And when they are tired of medicine they want to talk about literature.” Coope. Doctor Chekhov: A Study in Literature and Medicine. 24–25. [To Leykin, August 1883.]
5 Translated by Louis S. Friedland. Letters on the Short Story, the Drama, and Other Literary Topics. 283. [To Ivan Leont’ev (Shcheglov), March 22, 1890.]
6 Quoted in Chekhov i Evrei (Chekhov and the Jews) by Mark Ural’skiy. 307–308.
7 Translated by Constance Garnett.
8 Magarshack. Chekhov: A Life. 1952. 88.
9 Translated by Constance Garnett.
10 Translated by Constance Garnett.
11 Translated by Peter Constantine.
12 Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 249–251. [To Leykin, June 24, 1886.]
13 Ural’skiy. Chekhov i Evrei. n.p.
14 According to the Soviet editors of the Collected Works, Kiseleva was born “about 1859” (Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 544). According to Rosamund Bartlett, Kiseleva was born in 1859 (A Life in Letters, lvi). Donald Rayfield (2021), having little patience for Kiseleva, calls her a “prude” (115) and accepts her birth-year as 1847. Ernest Simmons, who also never met her, says, “She was a beautiful, vivacious, strong-minded woman” (83). In Chekhov. Dokumenty. Fotografii. (Moscow: Sovetskaya Rossiya, 1984), her birth year is given as “about 1850.” The photo that Vladimir Kataev uses of Maria Kiseleva in the A. P. Chekhov Entsiklopediya (383) is labeled in A. P. Chekhov v Portretakh, Illyustratsiyakh, Dokumentakh as Sasha Kiseleva, Maria’s daughter, in the 1890s. (A. P. Chekhov v Portretakh, Illyustratsiyakh, Dokumentakh. Edited by E. M. Prokof’eva. Leningrad. 1957. 102.) Kataev’s Chekhov encyclopedia sets her birth in 1847, in accordance with the “Russian Writers” reference series (Gitovich, Russkie Pisateli, 1800–1917). There are thirty-five known letters from Chekhov to her; thirty-one from her to him…. Tchaikovsky wrote her a letter, in verse!, in 1876 [http://en.tchaikovsky-research.net/pages/Letter_460]. She was the only child from her father’s first marriage. Her mother died. Her father remarried in 1866…. Mikhail Chekhov says Kiseleva’s stepmother was jealous of her beauty. So, 1847 makes sense.
July 1886
1 Sergei Yakovlev, “Memories of A. P. Chekhov,” in Memories of Chekhov: Accounts of the Writer from His Family, Friends and Contemporaries. 22.
2 Translated by Constance Garnett.
3 Kenneth Branagh’s reading and performance of the story (translation by Garnett) is superb. Read/hear In the Ravine and Other Stories (CD). Then compare, if you will, two Russian-language very short film versions of the story. The first one is as dreary as could be, with nothing of Chekhov’s spirit. The second, bawdy, loud, over-the-top, would have pleased him. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hN1tX3J6Sg&t=631s
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9EbtcYGD2k
4 Letopis’. 257. [July 5, 1886.]
5 Ibid., 257. [July 8, 1886.]
6 Translated by Constance Garnett.
7 Finke. Freedom from Violence and Lies: Anton Chekhov’s Life and Writings. 193.
8 Translated by Constance Garnett.
9 Translated by Avrahm Yarmolinsky.
10 Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 254–255. [To Leykin, July 30, 1886.]
August 1886
1 Letters on the Short Story, the Drama, and Other Literary Topics, 65. [To Lidia Avilova, October 6, 1897.]
2 Translated by Constance Garnett.
3 Cited by Armin Arnold in “D. H. Lawrence, the Russians, and Giovanni Verga,” Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 2, No. 3 (1965). Letter to Rhys Davies in Collected Letters II. 1109.
4 Translated by Thomas Marullo. About Chekhov: The Unfinished Symphony by Ivan Bunin. xxx. [To Suvorin, July 24, 1891.]
5 Translated by Constance Garnett.
6 I made a few minor emendations to Garnett’s translation in a new edition of Chekhov’s love stories, The Lady with the Dog and Other Love Stories (Dover, 2021), and I repeat one here: I changed Garnett’s “making love to” to “wooing” to prevent misunderstandings by my fellow 21st-century Americans.
7 Finke, in Freedom from Violence and Lies: Anton Chekhov’s Life and Writings: “Rayfield’s 1997 biography of Chekhov, where every ambiguous remark in letters to or from Chekhov is interpreted as evidence of a liaison.” 214.
8 Hingley. A Life of Chekhov. 11.
9 Mikhail Chekhov. Anton Chekhov: A Brother’s Memoir. 39.
10 Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 256–257. [To Leykin, August 20, 1886.]
11 Translated by Constance Garnett.
12 Letopis’. 261. [August 28–30, 1886.]
13 Ibid. [August 25, 1886.]
14 Translated by Constance Garnett.