THE
BEST STORIES
ANTON CHEKHOV
THE
BEST STORIES
ANTON CHEKHOV
Edited by John Kulka
Barnes &.NOBLE
B O O K S
NLW Y ORK
Introduction and compilation © by Barnes & Noble, Inc.
This edition published by Barnes & Noble, Inc.
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200 Barnes & Noble Books ISBN 0-7607-1981-0 Printed and bound in the United States of America 01 02 03 MP 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 FG
CONTENTS
Introduction vn
The Lady with the Dog i
Gusev 2 7
An Upheaval 4 9
Neighbours 6i
Ward No. 6 91
The Darling 173
The Husband 193
Ariadne 201
Peasants 243
The Man in a Case 293
Gooseberries 313
About Love 329
INTRODUCTION
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born on january 17, 1860, in the southern Russian seaport town of Taganrog. He was the third child in a family of five boys and a girl. If not for 3,500 rubles scraped together by a shrewd and ambitious grandfather, with which he purchased his own and his family's freedom, the future writer would have been born a serf. The writer's father, Pavel, rose further into lower-middle-class respectability as the proprietor of a small grocery in Taganrog. He was a religious, church-going man and a strict disciplinarian who took it as his parental duty to beat his children. Chekhov thought him a tyrant. "It is sickening and dreadful to recall," he wrote to his brother Alexander, "the extent to which despotism and lying mutilated our childhood."
Chekhov's mother, on the other hand, was kind but unable to alter the course of the situation at home. When the grocery business failed in 1876, Pavel fled to Moscow to escape an angry creditor. The rest of the family soon followed—all but the sixteen-year-old Anton, who remained behind to appease the creditor by tutoring his son for a pit- tance. Left to fend for himself, Chekhov finished high school in Taganrog, then rejoined the family and enrolled in Moscow University to study medicine.
Chekhov's beginnings as a writer were humble. While attending the university, he began to write humorous sketches for periodicals to ease the family's poverty. He would later recall these earli- est efforts as "trash." The first of his stories was published in 1880, and in the next half-dozen years he finished perhaps as many as six hun- dred. In 1884, he took up the practice of medi- cine in a provincial district—by no means a lucra- tive career move, but one that appealed to Chekhov's civic-mindedness. He continued to earn his living chiefly through his pen, however. As a provincial doctor, Chekhov came into close contact with the peasants, army officers, petty officials, and innumerable provincial types that became the subjects of his stories. It was only his poor health that dictated his decision to give up the practice of medicine. (Before graduating from the university, he had already contracted the tuberculosis that would kill him.) Chekhov had always seen medicine and writing as allied in his quest for spiritual fulfillment.
Speckled Tales, Chekhov's first collection of short stories, appeared in 1886 to public and criti- cal acclaim. In the same year, Dimitry Grigorovich, a venerable old man of letters, wrote encouragingly to Chekhov after reading "The Huntsman" in the Petersburg Gazette and hailed him as a writer possessed of talents that "set you far above other writers of the younger genera- tion." This bit of recognition was nearly as important to the future of Russian literature as Emerson's congratulatory letter to Walt Whitman was to the future of our own. From this time on, Chekhov was considered among Russia's leading writers, and he published his stories in the most important periodicals of the day. He enjoyed an enormous popular following. Recognition as a playwright came somewhat later. Not until 1898, when Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theatre present- ed The Seagull—a miserable failure in its first pro- duction in 1896—did Chekhov finally find an appreciative audience for his plays.
In 1901, Chekhov married Olga Knipper, a gift- ed actress in the Moscow Art Theatre. Husband and wife spent little of their married life togeth- er. For health reasons, Chekhov relocated to Yalta, while Olga pursued her theatrical career in Moscow. Much of their relationship was carried on by correspondence that reveals genuine feel- ing on both sides. Olga was with Chekhov at a health resort in Badenweiler, Germany, when he died of a severe pulmonary hemorrhage on July z, 1904. His body was transported to Moscow in a refrigeration car bearing the legend "Fresh Oysters."
Chekhov inspires almost universal praise and adoration among readers. His stories are especially admired by other writers. His champions com- prise a wide and surprisingly diverse group of tal- ents: Leo Tolstoy, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, James T. Farrell, V. S. Pritchett, Vladimir Nabokov, John Cheever, john Barth, and Flannery O'Connor. For Tolstoy, Chekhov was the most astute and gifted photographer of the Russian countryside; James T. Farrell proclaimed him the most influential practitioner of the short story form; and Nabokov—not one to mince words—insisted that to prefer Dostoyevsky or Gorky to Chekhov is to be unable to grasp "the essentials of universal literary art." What other writer commands such high praise from fellow writers? Ovid. Dante. Shakespeare. James Joyce, perhaps, in our own age.
Chekhov is a simple writer, one who easily exceeds the sum of his parts. He is neither a styl- istic innovator nor a writer of pretty prose. He rarely engages in metaphor or simile, and his working vocabulary is small. He is the antithesis of a clever writer. Instead, his modest prose, always in the service of his art, is notable for swiftness, compression, understatement, gray and twilight tonalities, freedom from all temporizing, and, above all else, emotional truth. His stories give the impression of being very close to direct experience, yet few stories have been written that equal the heartbreaking beauty of "The Lady with the Dog," or "\Vard Six."
Chekhov is arguably the first writer to employ understatement and suggestion to convey stab- bing pathos. In "The Lady with the Dog," he rarely discusses Gurov's moods or feelings, and he never touches on the difficult moral dilemma of marital infidelity. Instead, he captures these elements through the details of his character's life. When Gurov breaks off his affair with Anna (the lady with the dog), and returns to Moscow, he settles into the routine of winter life with the rest of the city. It is the tedium of life that con- trasts so sharply with the affair. Unable to contain himself any longer, he speaks warmly but abstractly on the subject of love to his wife, who, with raised eyebrow, merely responds, "The part of a lady-killer does not suit you at all, Dmitri." The narrator reports nothing further about this exchange, but we feel Gurov's silently mounting frustration, and we understand exactly how the comment cuts him. In the hands of a lesser artist, this scene would have been protracted and explained, with questions raised about the wife's SUSpiCIOnS.