Anton Chekhov Ward Number Six
and Other Stories
OXFORD WORLD'S CLASSICS
WARD NUMBER SIX
AND OTHER STORIES
Anton Chekhov was born in i860 in south Russia, the son of a poor grocer. At the age of 19 he followed his family to Moscow, where he studied medicine and helped to support the household by writing comic sketches for popular magazines. By 1888 he was publishing in the prestigious literary monthlies of Moscow and St Petersburg: a sign that he had already attained maturity as a writer of serious fiction. During the next 1 5 years he wrote the short stories—so or more of them—which form his chief claim to world pre-eminence in the genre and are his main achievement as a writer. His plays are almost equally important, especially during his last years. He was closely associated with the Moscow Art Theatre and married its leading lady, Olga Knipper. In 1898 he was forced to move to Yalta, where he wrote his two greatest plays, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. The premiиre of the latter took place on his forty-fourth birthday. Chekhov died six months later, on 2 July 1904.
Ronald Hingley, Emeritus Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford, edited and translated The Oxford Chekhov (9 volumes), and is the author of A Life of Anton Chekhov (also published by Oxford University Press). He is the translator of four other volumes of Chekhov stories in the Oxford World's Classics: The Russian Master and Other Stories, The Steppe and Other Stories, A Woman's Kingdom and Other Stories, and The Princess and Other Stories. His translations of all Chekhov's drama will be found in two Oxford World's Classics volumes, Five Plays and Twelve Plays.
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OXFORD WORLD'S CLASSICS
ANTON CHEKHOV
Ward Number Six
and Other Stories
Translated with an Introduction and Notes by RONALD HINGLEY
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
CONTENTS
Introduction vii
Select Bibliography xviii
A Chronology ofAnton Chekhov xix
THE BUTTERFLY i
(Попрыгунья ; 1892)
WARD NUMBER SIX 23
(Палата No.6; 1892)
ARIADNE 70
(Apuadna; 1895)
A DREARY STORY 92
(Скучиоя история;i 889)
NEIGHBOURS 143
(Cocedu; 1892)
AN ANONYMOUS STORY i60
(Рассказ неизвестного человека; 1893)
DOCTOR STARTSEV 227
(Ионыч; 1898) Explanatory Notes 243
INTRODUCTION
Chekhov and the Short Story
Chekhov carne of humbler social origins than the leading Russian fiction-writers of earlier generations: he was the third son, born in i86o, of a struggling grocer in the southern Russian port ofTaganrog.
He was a lively boy: a gifted mimic, a keen attender of the gallery at his home-town theatre, a great practical joker. He read widely, and was fortunate in attending the local grammar school, where the study of Latin and Greek loomed large in the curriculum. Though these studies bored the boy—whose school marks tended to be average— his school provided him with a stimulating social framework within which to develop. It also helped to qualify him for entering Moscow University.
In I 879 the nineteen-year-old Chekhov moved more than six hundred miles north from Taganrog to settle in Moscow, after which that city and its environs remained his base for two decades. He qualified as a doctor in 1884, but was to practise only sporadically, having already become an established writer of short humorous sketches and tales. From the proceeds of these the undergraduate Chekhov had already been helping to support his family—including his once strict father (now often unemployed) and mother as well as a sister and two younger brothers.
Chekhov's first writings were published under a variety of comic pseudonyms in a variety of scurrilous comic magazines, and seem to have little in common with his mature work. Though he turned them out by the hundred, he had all along been unobtrusively experimenting with a more serious—at times tragic—approach. Meanwhile he was being awarded a sequence of literary promotions as his work found its way into increasingly respectable periodicals or newspapers published in the capital city, St. Petersburg: Fragments (1882), The St. Petersburg Gazette (1885), New Time (1886). Finally, in 1888, Chekhov breaks into one of the 'fat journals': literary monthlies in which nearly all the major works of Russian literature have first appeared in print.
With this event—the publication of the story Steppe in the Northern Herald in 1888—Chekhov has been accepted, in effect, as an author who might hope to claim a permanent place in Russian literature.
Henceforward most of his longer stories' are first issued in one or other of the 'fat journals' as a prelude to publication in book form. He is now concentrating on quality rather than quantity. He has also transformed his humorous approach, for though humour always remains a basic ingredient in his technique it is no longer cultivated for its own sake.
In 1890 Chekhov suddenly astounds his friends by undertaking a one-man expedition across Siberia to the convict settlement on the island of Sakhalin. He conducts a painstaking sociological survey and publishes the results in Sakhalin Island: a treatise as well as a travelogue, and a landmark in Russian penological literature.