D. S. Mirsky, the noted Russian literary historian, justly calls Chekhov one of the three finest letter writers in the Russian language (Mirsky's other two paragons are Alexander Pushkin and the philosopher Vladimir Solovyov). We have accordingly decided to print every letter we have selected in its entirety, preferring the practice of elucidating occasional trivial detail in footnotes to that of making the whimsical and often distorting cuts which all our predecessors have allowed themselves. And because maximal comprehension of the letters requires that the reader have some idea of the people to whom and about whom Chekhov is writing, we have provided more detailed annotations than the usual "X was a writer who lived in St. Petersburg" sort of thing.
We have taken particular pains to identify the frequent quotations which Chekhov liked to incorporate into his letters. His principal sources are the Bible, Alexander Griboyedov's verse comedy The Misfortune of Being Clever (1828), the fables of the Russian neoclassical poet Ivan Krylov (1769-1844) and the plays of William Shakespeare (in early nineteenth-century Russian translations, usually those of Nikolai Polevoy). The biblical quotations, cited by Chekhov in Russianized Old Church Slavic, are given in their standard King James equivalents, the Griboyedov and Krylov lines in our own translation.
The letters are arranged in sections, each of which is preceded by an introduction outlining the literary and biographical background for that particular group. For the most part, they appear in chronological order, but in a few instances, when their contents so dictated, we have taken them out of sequence. These instances are indicated in the annotations.
In line with our principle of presenting complete and undoctored texts, we have aimed at producing a translation that respects the original. When Chekhov repeats a word, we do not make him more eloquent by casting about for synonyms. When he uses an ambiguous phrase, we do not make up his mind for him by smoothing it over. When he writes a long or convoluted sentence, we do not explicate him by breaking it up into easily digestible morsels. Repetition, ambiguity and sentence structure combine to form a writer's style, and though style is commonly associated with talent, it may also be influenced by such external factors as haste (the bugaboo of Chekhov's early period) and illness (which plagued him from the late nineties on).
For the sake of accuracy and authenticity we have retained the Julian calendar (to calculate the date of any letter according to the Gregorian calendar, now in use throughout the world, add twelve days to nineteenth- century dates and thirteen days to twentieth-century dates); the centigrade temperature scale (according to which 36.6 degrees is normal body temperature); Russian weights and measures (one pood equals about 40 pounds, one verst equals 3,500 feet, one arshin equals 28 inches, one sazhen equals three arshins, one dessiatine equals 2.7 acres) and monetary units (the ruble was worth slightly more in purchasing power than the American dollar was at that time; a common laborer was paid twelve rubles a month and a qualified factory worker got thirty). We have converted the typographical term pechatny list, which corresponds to the English signature in octavo and consists of sixteen printed pages, to the actual number of pages involved. When an addressee is known by a name other than his real name, we give his real name and then his pseudonym in parentheses. Finally, we have tried to be especially precise in our renditions of plant and animal nomenclature—another area in which previous translators have been notoriously lax—because Chekhov's involvement in medicine and the natural sciences clearly warrants it (for an example of Chekhov's concern over the correct name of a plant, see Letter 161).
No complete, unexpurgated edition of Chekhov's letters is available in any language. To obtain maximally complete texts, however, we have collated the versions presented by the three most complete collections to appear in his native country:
The pre-revolutionary six-volume edition published by his sister Maria between 1912 and 1916.
Volumes XIII-XX of the twenty-volume edition of Chekhov's complete works published between 1944 and 1951 by special decree of the
Soviet government to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of his death.
3. Volumes XI and XII of the twelve-volume edition of collected works published in 1963 and 1964.
We have also taken several letters from Volume 68 of Literary Heritage (Moscow, 1960), a regularly appearing miscellany specializing in literary documents and documentary studies.
Passages considered censorable vary considerably from one edition to the next, with the mode and extent of variation reflecting the development of Russian cultural attitudes. Chekhov's sister brought out her edition during the period after the abortive 1905 revolution, when Russian censors interfered less with literature than in almost any other period of recent history. She could accordingly include passages of political and religious commentary that would have had a hard time passing the censor in Chekhov's own lifetime. For many of the most important letters her edition remains the least-impaired source.
But Maria Chekhova was handicapped by the fact that most of the people Chekhov discussed in his letters were still alive when her edition appeared. Some of them were personal friends or members of the family. To spare their feelings, she found it desirable to eliminate numerous passages.
By the 1940s, however, there was no longer any need for such delicacy, and many of the passages Maria Chekhova had deleted were restored in the 1944-51 edition. In addition, the editors gathered together several thousand previously unpublished letters and provided the entire corpus with a scholarly apparatus of astounding scope and thoroughness. Theoretically, then, the eight volumes of letters in this edition are the fullest and most complete collection of Chekhov's letters ever published.
At the same time, however, they are a monument to the ruthlessness of Stalinist censors, to their mania for tampering with texts and rewriting history—even, as in Chekhov's case, when dealing with an officially approved national classic. There is no other instance on record of a comparable procedure being applied to a major nineteenth-century Russian writer on such a scale, which of itself speaks for the deeply felt, if unacknowledged, subversive potential of Chekhov's views within the Soviet context.
Literally hundreds of deletions come to light when the 1944-51 Soviet edition is set beside the 1912-16 Maria Chekhova edition. There are cuts made for political and nationalistic considerations, as when Chekhov makes too much of life in Western Europe or fails to sound patriotic enough to suit the Stalinist censor. There are cuts of passages that mention Jews, because the word he uses for "Jew" is zhid. Though ugly and highly pejorative when used by a present-day anti-Semite, this happened to be the normal word for Jew in the South Russian dialect Chekhov grew up speaking. (When Chekhov does in fact wish to use an anti-Jewish epithet, he chooses a different word, shmul, which was also carefully deleted throughout the edition.) Even a passage that compares newly hatched nightingale fledglings to naked Jewish children was not allowed to appear in print. Also excluded were all passages that might have seemed offensive to the Soviet Union's allies in the late 1940s—the Chinese and Yugoslavs, for example; occasional derogatory references to the Germans and French, on the other hand, were allowed to stand.
Since Soviet neo-Victorian prudery abhors all references not only to sex but to many other normal bodily functions such as childbirth and digestion, many letters underwent extensive bowdlerizing. Here is one example from several dozen, the postscript to a letter Chekhov wrote to his friend Ivan Shcheglov from a village in the Ukraine on May 10, 1888.