Copyright © 1998 by Peter Constantine
Foreword © 1999 by Spalding Gray
A Seven Stories Press First Edition
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich, 1860-1904.
[Short stories. English. Selections]
The undiscovered Chekhov: forty-three new stories / by Anton Chekhov;
translated by Peter Constantine. —Seven Stories Press 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 1-888363-76-2 (cloth)
ISBN 1-58322-013-5 1. Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich, 1860-1904—Translations into English.
I. Constantine, Peter, 1963- . II. Title.
PG3456A15C66 1998
9876543
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CONTENTS
Foreword by Spalding Gray
Introduction and Acknowledgments
PART ONE
Sarah Bernhardt Comes to Town
On the Train
The Trial
Confession—or Olya, Zhenya, Zoya: A Letter
Village Doctors
An Unsuccessful Visit
A Hypnotic Seance
The Cross
The Cat
How i Came to Be Lawfully Wed
From the Diary of an Assistant Bookkeeper
A Fool; or, The Retired Sea Captain: A Scene from an Unwritten Vaudeville Play
In Autumn
The Grateful German
A Sign of the Times
From the Diary of a Young Girl
The Stationmaster
A Womans Revenge
O Women, Women!
Two Letters
To Speak or Be Silent: A Tale
After the Fair
At the Pharmacy
On Mortality: A Carnival Tale
A Serious Step
The Good German
First Aid
Intrigues
PART TWO
This and That: Four Vignettes
Elements Most Often Found in Novels, Short Stories, Etc.
Supplementary Questions for the Statistical Census, Submitted by Antosha Chekhonte
Questions Posed by a Mad Mathematician
A Lawyer’s Romance: A Protocol
Questions and Answers
America in Rostov on the Don
Mr. Gulevitch, Writer, and the Drowned Man
The Potato and the Tenor
Mayonnaise
At a Patient’s Bedside
My Love
Doctor’s Advice
A Glossary of Terms for Young Ladies
A New illness and an Old Cure
Dates of First Publication in Periodicals
FOREWORD
BY SPALDING GRAY
ICAME TO LOVE CHEKHOV early on because he felt good to speak. As an actor, when I spoke him, he felt familiar. He felt more familiar than most twentieth century playwrights I was speaking at the time.
I don’t act very much anymore, but when anyone ever asks me what role I would really like to play, I tell them that any male Chekhov role would be just fine.
When I was asked to do two public readings of stories from this collection I hesitated at first because I am not a good public reader. Then I thought, But it’s Chekhov so it’s got to be simple, in that gloriously divine way that my six year old is; simple in speech and complex in his being. So, I read some of these stories at two public gatherings and once again Chekhov felt good and I felt reconnected to him.
I rarely find life funny but I have often found it absurd. I think Camus defines the absurd as the meeting place between the rational and the irrational. That meet¬ing place, for me, is often found in these stories. They speak in a connected way about non-connectedness and social disorientation. These stories are like vivid, surreal dreams.
I suspect that it’s not only the writing, but also the translation that makes these stories feel like antique mirrors to our contemporary times. They portray a gracious irony that springs from a saddened idealist. They tickle my “absurd-bone.”
New York
April 1999
INTRODUCTION
BY PETER CONSTANTINE
“WRITE AS MUCH AS you can!! write, your fingers break!” This advice, which Anton Chekhov sent to Maria Kiselyova in a letter in 1886, was the motto by which he lived and worked. He was twenty-six, and had already published over four hundred short stories and vignettes in popular magazines, as well as two books of stories, with a third in the making. He had written his first series of plays, Fatherlessness, Diamond Cut Diamond, The Scythe Struck the Stone, Why the Hen Cackled, The Clean-shaven Secretary with the Pistol, and The Nobleman (none of which have come down to us), and Platonov and On the High Road, and he was about to begin writing Ivanov, his first major theatrical success.
Throughout this period Chekhov was also energetically studying medicine at Moscow University, from which he graduated in June 1884. The nameplate on the Chekhov family’s door now read “Dr. A. P. Chekhov.”
The stories and vignettes in The Undiscovered Chekhov are from this period, the most prolific of Chekhov’s life. They are some of the works that helped make him a literary star and contributed to his receiving the Pushkin Prize in 1888. None of these works has appeared in any English-language Chekhov collection, and all but two have never before been translated into English. (“To Speak or Be Silent: A Tale” appeared in the Nation in 1954, and “The Good German” in the Quarterly Review of Literature in 1962.)
For Chekhov, these early years were extremely difficult. The Russian literary giants of the nineteenth century—Tolstoy, Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky—had all come from the nobility. Chekhov was the grandson of a serf. His father had run a ramshackle grocery store in Taganrog, in southern Russia. When Chekhov was sixteen, his father went bankrupt and left town in a hurry. He took the whole family, including the two elder sons, with him to Moscow—everyone, that is, except for young Anton, who was left destitute and penniless to fend for himself in Taganrog.