CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
TRANSLATORS’ NOTE
THE DEATH OF A CLERK
SMALL FRY
THE HUNTSMAN
THE MALEFACTOR
PANIKHIDA
ANYUTA
EASTER NIGHT
VANKA
SLEEPY
A BORING STORY
GUSEV
PEASANT WOMEN
THE FIDGET
IN EXILE
WARD NO. 6
THE BLACK MONK
ROTHSCHILD’S FIDDLE
THE STUDENT
ANNA ON THE NECK
THE HOUSE WITH THE MEZZANINE
THE MAN IN A CASE
GOOSEBERRIES
A MEDICAL CASE
THE DARLING
ON OFFICIAL BUSINESS
THE LADY WITH THE LITTLE DOG
AT CHRISTMASTIME
IN THE RAVINE
THE BISHOP
THE FIANCÉE
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
In the autumn of 1844 a young writer named Dmitri Grigorovich was sharing rooms with a friend of his from military engineering school, the twenty-three-year-old Fyodor Dostoevsky, who was at work on his first novel, Poor Folk. Through Grigorovich the finished manuscript reached the hands of Vissarion Belinsky, the most influential critic of the time, whose enthusiasm launched Dostoevsky’s career. More than four decades later, in 1886, this same Grigorovich, now an elder statesman of literature, came across the humorous sketches of someone who signed himself “Antosha Chekhonte,” brought them to the attention of the publisher Alexei Suvorin, and thus “recognized” the last great Russian writer of the nineteenth century—Anton Chekhov.
Grigorovich also wrote to the young man himself, scolding him for not taking his work seriously and for hiding behind a pseudonym. Chekhov was astonished and deeply moved. In his reply, dated March 28, 1886, after apologizing for scanting his talent, though he suspected he had it, and thanking Grigorovich for confirming that suspicion, he explained:
… In the five years I spent hanging around newspaper offices, I became resigned to the general view of my literary insignificance, soon took to looking down on my work, and kept plowing right on. That’s the first factor. The second is that I am a doctor and up to my ears in medicine. The saying about chasing two hares at once has never robbed anybody of more sleep than it has me.
The only reason I am writing all this is to justify my grievous sin in your eyes to some small degree. Until now I treated my literary work extremely frivolously, casually, nonchalantly; I can’t remember working on a single story for more than a day, and “The Huntsman,” which you so enjoyed, I wrote in a bathing house … All my hope lies in the future. I’m still only twenty-six. I may manage to accomplish something yet, though time is flying …*
Just a month earlier, Chekhov had written to a friend saying that his real commitment was to medicine, while literature was a mistress he would one day abandon. Now he likened the effect of Grigorovich’s letter on him to “a governor’s order to leave town within twenty-four hours.” And he obeyed the order. He began to write less and work more. The first story signed with his real name, “Panikhida,” appeared in Suvorin’s magazine New Time that same year—the start of a close and sometimes difficult collaboration between writer and editor that would continue for the rest of Chekhov’s life. Though a delight in the absurd and a sharp eye for human folly remained central to his work, he was no longer merely a humorist. The repentant sketch-writer had made his entry into serious literature.
Chekhov’s contemporaries were struck by his originality. He invented a new kind of story, which opened up areas of life that had not yet been explored by Russian literature. Tolstoy saw it at once. “Chekhov is an incomparable artist,” he is quoted as saying, “an artist of life … Chekhov has created new forms of writing, completely new, in my opinion, to the whole world, the like of which I have not encountered anywhere … Chekhov has his own special form, like the impressionists.” Tolstoy was not alone in using the term “impressionism” to describe Chekhov’s art. We may see what he meant if we look at “The Huntsman,” the story that first caught Grigorovich’s eye. Written entirely in the present tense, it opens with some fragmentary observations about the weather, a brief but vivid and (typically for Chekhov) slightly anthropomorphized description of the fields and forest, a few spots of color—the red shirt and white cap of the huntsman. A woman appears out of nowhere. She and the huntsman talk, she tenderly and reproachfully, he boastfully and casually. “Ashamed of her joy,” she “covers her mouth with her hand.” He scratches his arm, stretches, follows some wild ducks with his eyes. It is clear from what he says that they cannot live together. He gets up and leaves; she watches him go: “Her gaze moves over the tall, skinny figure of her husband and caresses and fondles it …” He turns, hands her a worn rouble, and goes on. She whispers, “Good-bye, Yegor Vlasych!” and “stands on tiptoe so as at least to see the white cap one more time.” That is all. The story does not build to any moment of truth; it does not reach any significant conclusion. It simply stops.
In a letter of May 10, 1886, to his older brother Alexander, who had taken up writing before him with only modest success, Chekhov, from his new position as a recognized author, set forth six principles that make for a good story: “1. Absence of lengthy verbiage of a political-social-economic nature; 2. total objectivity; 3. truthful descriptions of persons and objects; 4. extreme brevity; 5. audacity and originality: flee the stereotype; 6. compassion.” It is a remarkably complete description of Chekhov’s artistic practice. Authorial commentary, if not entirely absent, is kept to an absolute minimum. The most ordinary events, a few trivial details, a few words spoken, no plot, a focus on single gestures, minor features, the creation of a mood that is both precise and somehow elusive— such is Chekhov’s impressionism. “This seemingly slight adjustment of tradition,” wrote the critic Boris Eikhenbaum, “had, in fact, the significance of a revolution and exerted a powerful influence not only on Russian literature, but also on the literature of the world.”*
Chekhov’s way of composition wordlessly extends the limited scope of the story by means of juxtaposition, alternation, simultaneity, that is, by means of a new kind of poetic logic. His art is constructive not in a narrative but in a musical sense, to borrow D. S. Mirsky’s terms.** Not that he wrote “musical” prose; on the contrary, his language is perhaps the plainest in Russian literature; but he built his stories by musical means—curves, repetitions, modulations, intersecting tones, unexpected resolutions. Their essence, as Mirsky says, is not development but envelopment in a state of soul. They are “lyric constructions.” That may partly explain the importance Chekhov gives to sounds, to precisely transcribed noises—night watchmen rapping on their wooden bars, the distinctive calls of corncrakes, cuckoos, bitterns, and “angry, straining frogs,” the banging of shutters in a storm, the howling or singing of wood stoves, the humming of samovars, the ringing of bells—symbolic sounds, of which the most famous is the very last note in his work, the breaking string at the end of The Cherry Orchard.
Another aspect of Chekhov’s originality is the inclusiveness of his world. He describes life in the capitals and the provinces, city life, village life, life in the new industrialized zones around the cities, life in European Russia, Siberia, the Crimea, the Far East, the life of noblemen, officials, clergy high and low, landowners, doctors, intellectuals, artists, actors, merchants, tradesmen, peasants, prisoners, exiles, pampered ladies, farm women, children, young men, old men, the sane, and the mad. “One of the basic principles of Chekhov’s artistic work,” Boris Eikhenbaum notes, “is the endeavor to embrace all of Russian life in its various manifestations, and not to describe selected spheres, as was customary before him. The Chekhovian grasp of Russian life is staggering; in this respect, as in many others, he cannot be compared with anyone …” His characters are not monumental personalities dramatically portrayed, like the heroes of Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, they are sharply observed types—the darling, the explainer, the fidget, the student, the malefactor, the man in a case, the heiress, the bishop, the fiancée. They are made of “the common stuff of humanity,” as Mirsky has said, “and in this sense, Chekhov is the most ‘democratic’ of writers.” There is something in them reminiscent of Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims—the knight, the miller, the prioress, the parson, the manciple, the pardoner, the wife of Bath— but Chekhov’s world is more scattered, and his people are transients of a more accidental sort: summer guests, doctors on call, hunters in the field, riders on ferries, passersby, city people displaced to the country, country people out of place in the city. Their pilgrimage has no definite goal.