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ANTON CHEKHOV 1890

-KTTERS OF ANTON CHEKHOV Vanslated by Michael Henry Heim i collaboration with Simon Karlinsky [election, Commentary and Introduction by iimon Karlinsky

'his is not only the first adequate selection f Chekhov's letters to appear in English (Con- tance Garnett's, now out of print, drew on :ss than half the letters now available in Russian), ut also the first to provide the full text, un- larred by editorial omission or Russian censor- hip, of each letter chosen. From over four lousand extant letters, the editors have newly -anslated nearly two hundred. The emphasis f the selection is on Chekhov's public life, and ic letters intimately reflect his preoccupations s a writer, doctor, social reformer and observer f men and women. They are divided into fteen sections which follow his career chrono- )gically. There are short introductions to each action, and in some cases to individual letters, nd footnotes provide needed background in­sulation. Professor Karlinsky's valuable ltroduction discusses Chekhov's running attle with the literary critics and the censors, nd his deeply held views on literature, religion, olitics and sex - often startlingly modern, for e believed in 'the most absolute freedom im- ginable, freedom from violence and from lies', nd in his concern for ecology and minority roups he was well in advance of his time.

> 470 10661 x

Chekhov and Pushkin are the two greatest .ussian letter-writers. Chekhov's range of itercsts is enormous, his touch is invariably ght, and bv his insistence on considering any uestion in human rather than theoretical ?rms, he succeeds in being perpetually fresh nd subversive.

£5*oo net

in u.k. only

Professor Karlinsky is head of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature, University of California at Berkeley. Professor Heim teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Jacket by michael harvey

Photograph on back paneclass="underline" chekhov in 1888. Photograph by permission of the Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR.

BODLEY

9 bow street, covent garden, london

HEAD

Letters of

Translated from the Russian

Selection, Commentary

london sydney toronto

ANTON CHEKHOV

by Michael Henry Heim

in collaboration with Simon Karlinsky

and Introduction by Simon Karlinsky

THE BODLEY HEAD

letters of anton chekhov.

Copyright © 1973 by Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. isbn 0-370-10661-x

Printed in the United States of America for The Bodley Head Ltd 9 Bow Street, London w с 2 e 7 a l First published in Great Britain 1973

CONTENTS

Foreword ix

introduction: the gentle subversive i

i. the taganrog metamorphosis 33 ii. the medical student who wrote

for humor magazines 38

iii. serious literature 53

iv. success as a playwright: "ivanov" 68

v. a sense of literary freedom 87

vi. the journey to sakhalin 152

vii. western europe 183

viii. the busy years 201

ix. settled life 248

x. "the seagull" 280

xi. the inescapable diagnosis 29o

xii. nice. the dreyfus case 305

yalta 321

"three sisters." marriage 385 xv. "the cherry orchard" 44o

epilogue 475

Bibliography 479

Index 483

FOREWORD

To our knowledge there have been four previous publications of Anton Chekhov's letters in English. Constance Garnett's two volumes (Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends and Letters of Anton Chekhov to Olga Knipper), Louis S. Friedland's Anton Chekhov's Letters on the Short Story, the Drama and Other Literary Topics, and The Life and Letters of Anton Tchekhov, translated and edited by S. S. Koteliansky and Philip Tomlinson, all appeared in the early twenties. They were fol­lowed thirty years later by The Selected Letters of Anton Chekhov, edited by Lillian Hellman and translated by Sidonie Lederer, which is now, in paperback, the most readily available source of Chekhov's letters for the general reader.

A comparison of these editions with Chekhov's Russian originals has left us with a lasting sense of admiration for Constance Garnett's talent as a translator. Despite occasional misreadings she manages to convey both the tone and spirit of the letters with a resourcefulness and fidelity no one else has matched. Unfortunately, she did her translations at a time when fewer than half the letters presently available in Russian had been pub­lished; moreover, her prunings and abridgments frequently reduced the text to a mere skeleton of the original. In contrast to Garnett, the Kotelian- sky-Tomlinson translation often misses the mark stylistically; its excessive adherence to the letter of the original makes many of its passages needlessly ambiguous or simply incomprehensible. Louis Friedland's 1924 volume, recently reissued with a new introduction by Ernest J. Simmons, is a not very coherent patchwork of snippets accompanied by a regrettably unin­formed commentary (which among other blunders places the heroes of the most famous comedies of Gogol and Griboyedov in a melodrama by Alexei Suvorin and confuses Thoreau with the Russian woman novelist Yevgenia Tur). The Hellman-Lederer volume, which is widely quoted in studies of modern drama, abounds in mistranslations and arbitrary cuts of crucial passages. These are the factors which convinced us of the need for a new, enlarged edition of Chekhov's letters in English.

Out of the more than four thousand published letters of Anton Chekhov we have tried to select those that give a comprehensive picture of his literary, social and scientific interests and views. To put together a coherent intellectual portrait, we have found it necessary to sacrifice several groups of letters emphasized by our predecessors: the vituperative, painfully humorous letters to Chekhov's older brother Alexander; the letters to his sister Maria from the Ukraine and Siberia (the latter are mostly identical in content to his series of articles "Across Siberia," which is available in English in a fine translation by Avrahm Yarmolinsky in the collection The Unknown Chekhov); and the flirtatious letters to various women who were of no real importance in his life. On the other hand, letters dealing with medical and biological topics, usually omitted in non-Russian editions of Chekhov's letters, receive their full due.