Chekhov: Stories for Our Time

By Anton Chekhov, Boris Fishman, Matt McCann and 2 more

The Restless Classics edition of Chekhov: Stories for Our Time presents a must-have collection by the great Russian author who captured humanity in all its complexity, and reintroduces Chekhov as a funny, playful, deeply human, and thoroughly modern writer.

The great 19th-century Russian author and playwright Anton Chekhov wrote nearly one thousand stories, a body of work that is unmatched in its alchemy of sensitivity, wisdom, precision, verve, soulfulness, and economy. Chekhov’s sensibility was radically human and thoroughly modern: write not how you think things should be, but rather as they are. Universally recognized as one of the greatest short story writers of all time, he revolutionized the form and had a profound influence on his successors from Flannery O’Connor to Alice Munro.

As the celebrated Russian-immigrant author Boris Fishman writes in his bold, incisive, and delightfully counterintuitive introduction to this Restless Classics collection, Chekhov is funny, optimistic, ceaselessly curious, and undogmatic—a significant break from the bleak and morally rigid tradition of his contemporaries Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Unlike those peers born to privilege, Chekhov was raised in the peasantry and worked as a doctor. In his writing, he portrays the complexity of human beings as changeable and contingent, neither saints nor sinners—an approach intimately linked with his work as a clinician and humanitarian.

Chekhov’s humanity, just as much as his mastery of the writing craft, is potent medicine in times that seem so divided by ideology and antipathy for groups seen as “other.” The first new selection of his work in over a decade, the Restless Classics edition of Chekhov: Stories for Our Time pairs beloved favorites with lesser known gems, all stunningly illustrated by Matt McCann: a perfect introduction for novices and a must-have for Chekhov devotees.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Restless Books
• Release date: Jul 24, 2018
• ISBN: 9781632061812

Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) was a Russian doctor, short-story writer, and playwright. Born in the port city of Taganrog, Chekhov was the third child of Pavel, a grocer and devout Christian, and Yevgeniya, a natural storyteller. His father, a violent and arrogant man, abused his wife and children and would serve as the inspiration for many of the writer’s most tyrannical and hypocritical characters. Chekhov studied at the Greek School in Taganrog, where he learned Ancient Greek. In 1876, his father’s debts forced the family to relocate to Moscow, where they lived in poverty while Anton remained in Taganrog to settle their finances and finish his studies. During this time, he worked odd jobs while reading extensively and composing his first written works. He joined his family in Moscow in 1879, pursuing a medical degree while writing short stories for entertainment and to support his parents and siblings. In 1876, after finishing his degree and contracting tuberculosis, he began writing for St. Petersburg’s Novoye Vremya, a popular paper which helped him to launch his literary career and gain financial independence. A friend and colleague of Leo Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky, and Ivan Bunin, Chekhov is remembered today for his skillful observations of everyday Russian life, his deeply psychological character studies, and his mastery of language and the rhythms of conversation.

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Praise for

Anton Chekhov

Chekhov’s stories are as wonderful (and necessary) now as when they first appeared. It is not only the immense number of stories he wrote—for few, if any, writers have ever done more—it is the awesome frequency with which he produced masterpieces, stories that shrive us as well as delight and move us, that lay bare our emotions in ways only true art can accomplish.

—Raymond Carver

I heartily recommend taking as often as possible Chekhov’s books and dreaming through them as they are intended to be dreamed through. In an age of ruddy Goliaths it is very useful to read about delicate Davids. Those bleak landscapes, the withered sallows along dismally muddy roads, the gray crows flapping across gray skies, the sudden whiff of some amazing recollection at a most ordinary corner—all this pathetic dimness, all this lovely weakness, all this Chekhovian dove-gray world is worth treasuring in the glare of those strong, self-sufficient worlds that are promised us by the worshippers of totalitarian states.

—Vladimir Nabokov

No one puts life onto the page as Chekhov does.

—E. L. Doctorow

Reading Chekhov, I felt not happy, exactly, but as close to happiness as I knew I was likely to come. And it occurred to me that this was the pleasure and mystery of reading, as well as the answer to those who say that books will disappear.

—Francine Prose

The revolution that Chekhov set in train—and which reverberates still today—was not to abandon plot, but to make the plot of his stories like the plot of our lives: random, mysterious, run-of-the-mill, abrupt, chaotic, fiercely cruel, meaningless…. Chekhov is the father of the modern short story and his influence is still massive and everywhere…. Katherine Mansfield and Joyce were among the first to write in the Chekhovian spirit, but his cool, dispassionate, unflinching attitude to the human condition resounds in writers as diverse as William Trevor and Raymond Carver, Elizabeth Bowen, John Cheever, Muriel Spark and Alice Munro.

—William Boyd

These stories are inconclusive, we say, and proceed to frame a criticism based upon the assumption that stories ought to conclude in a way that we recognize. In so doing we raise the question of our own fitness as readers. Where the tune is familiar and the end emphatic—lovers united, villains discomfited, intrigues exposed—as it is in most Victorian fiction, we can scarcely go wrong, but where the tune is unfamiliar and the end a note of interrogation or merely the information that they went on talking, as it is in Chekhov, we need a very daring and alert sense of literature to make us hear the tune, and in particular those last notes which complete the harmony.

—Virginia Woolf

Contents

Introduction by Boris Fishman

Chronology

A Note on the Text

Stories of Love

The Darling

Anna on the Neck

About Love

Zero Is the Highest Number

The Kiss

Slow Fiction

The House with the Mezzanine (An Artist’s Story)

The Privy Councilor

The Name-Day Party (The Party)

Russia, She Is a Hard Country

Gooseberries

On Official Business (On Official Duty)

An Attack of Nerves (A Nervous Breakdown)

The Man in a Case

In the Ravine

Miscellaneous Delights

Gusev

The Siren

The Letter

Suggestions for Further Reading

A Guide for Restless Readers

About the Authors

I am neither a liberal nor a conservative, neither a gradualist nor a monk nor an indifferentist. I would like nothing more than to be a free artist, and I regret that God did not give me the gift to be one. I hate falseness and coercion in all their forms… Pharisaism, stupidity, and arbitrariness reign not merely in merchants’ houses and police stations: I see them in science, in literature, among the young. That is why I have no particular passion for either policemen or butchers or scientists or writers or the young. I consider brand names and labels a prejudice. My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and absolute freedom, freedom from force and falseness in whatever form they express themselves.

—From a letter to an older poet, 1888

There are a great many opinions in this world, and a good half of them are professed by people who have never been in trouble!

—From A Calamity (1886)

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Introduction

Man Out of Time

Everything you know about Anton Chekhov is wrong.

Chekhov, the downcast tubercular writing magnificently mournful plays about the declining aristocracy on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution. Chekhov, the king of the country whose national anthem is the minute-long sigh. The picture lasts because it’s what we want from our nineteenth-century Russians: gravity, fatalism, melancholy, minds wracked by the Big Questions. We wouldn’t want this kind of writing today—too unironic, too free with emotion, too un-relativist, too naive in thinking that the Big Questions have resolution at all. But we love the echo.

This isn’t the person I think of when I think of Chekhov. I think of an 1890 photograph of a 30-year-old man returning by steamer from Asia. He’s no rake on a grand tour—he’s just completed a journey that would be arduous even today: a humanitarian visit to a penal colony in the Russian Far East. But neither is he a brow-furrowed Marxist scribbling a manifesto as his train races back to the capital. No, he has taken the long way home: Hong Kong, Singapore, and Sri Lanka, about which he has written, to a patron and friend, When I have children, I’ll say to them, not without pride: ‘Hey, you sons of bitches, in my day I had sexual relations with a black-eyed Hindu girl, and you know where? In a coconut grove on a moonlit night….’

This isn’t a sodden aberration. Mr. Chekhov likes his ladies—his Lydias—of the capital; sometimes he goes out with Lydia Yavorskaya, and sometimes Lydia Avilova.¹

And he’s no urban snob. At a rural wedding at which he served as best man, as he wrote to his sister Maria, he saw a lot of wealthy marriageable girls… but I was so drunk the whole time that I took bottles for girls and girls for bottles! One of them… kept striking me on the hand with her fan and saying, ‘Oh, you naughty man!’²

In that 1890 photograph, the sun seems high, and Chekhov takes shelter on a bench alongside an acquaintance. Each is cradling a mongoose—why not. Chekhov is dressed like a cross between a peasant, an Eastern guru, and a rake: a fedora high on his forehead, an open-necked shirt, loose white pants. He’s grinning like a man who’s just risen from a choice bed, his hair mussed and his rumpled goatee clearly Leonardo DiCaprio’s secret inspiration all these years. He is the very picture of joy and vitality.

Chekhov was as gravely preoccupied with the fate of his country as the other great Russian authors of the nineteenth century. But no one was funnier amid the sobriety.³

Forget that, early on, Chekhov made his living through humor pieces, a Dickens-in-reverse who got paid only if he came in under a hundred lines. (He was paying for his medical education then, the wife to which literature was a mistress. Not for long.) I’m talking about The Siren, a lip-licking ode to food in the Russian mouth that reads like an extended version of that Gogol exultation about Ukrainian dumplings in sour cream flying into a certain gentleman’s maw by themselves.⁴

I’m talking about the wry, playful humor that breaks through the foliage of even the darkest story: Hundreds of miles of desolate, monotonous, scorched steppe cannot induce such deep depression as one man when he sits and talks, and you don’t know when he will leave, he writes in An Artist’s Story, otherwise an account, included in this collection, of multiple sorrows. Or take the second epigraph of this essay. Take any dark story and count the exclamation marks.

Nabokov came from the library. Gogol from the government office. Dostoevsky and Tolstoy from the clouds, where they wrote books meant to deluge the ground and sweep away the old order, ushering in a utopia of Christian suffering and redemption, in the former’s case, and moral rectitude, rural life, and vegetarianism, in the latter’s. Chekhov came from the earth. He was the only great Russian writer of the nineteenth century born to the peasantry rather than the nobility, the reason why the peasants in his stories are complex human beings, neither saints nor sinners, and as understandable as they are sometimes degenerate, rather than pegs in grand philosophies.

While Tolstoy and Dostoevsky both believed that Christian faith was the main source of moral strength for the impoverished and ignorant Russian peasants, the Chekhov scholar Simon Karlinsky has written, Chekhov’s much more closely observed and genuinely experienced picture of peasant life shows nothing of the sort. Just read In the Ravine, included in this volume. After the funeral for a defenseless creature gruesomely murdered out of greed and spite by an extended family member, a funeral during which the guests and the priests ate a great deal, and with such greed that one might have thought that they had not tasted food for a long time, listen to the priest, lifting his fork on which there was a salted mushroom, offer to the creature’s meek and suffering mother this magnanimous comfort: Don’t grieve for the babe. For of such is the Kingdom of Heaven. One imagines that just then the salted mushroom meant far more to him. As Chekhov wrote in a letter, I have peasant blood flowing in my veins, and I’m not the one to be impressed with peasant virtues…. Tolstoy’s moral philosophy has ceased to move me…. Prudence and justice tell me there is more love for mankind in electricity and steam than in chastity and abstention from meat."

But it’s also in Chekhov that you find the opposite portrait of a religious man. (Consider The Letter, included in this volume.) For all their preoccupation with religion, Karlinsky writes, [Tolstoy and Dostoevsky] never thought of making an Orthodox priest, deacon or monk a central character in a work of fiction as Chekhov did…. Most of these men of the Church are presented as full-blooded human beings with their own joys and problems.

As radical as it is simple: tell things how they are, not how they should be. This approach is as natural today as it was extreme a century ago. If Dostoevsky was concerned with humanity in extremis, if Tolstoy sought final, unvarying answers, Chekhov concerned himself with ordinary people, and felt that no single philosophy could answer for a world of perennially shifting circumstances, to say nothing of the fungibility of human nature—the view of an empiricist and clinician, as per his training. He went quietly about the same work others went about loudly. As Dr. Zhivago says in Pasternak’s famous novel, Chekhov’s work has a modest reticence in such high-sounding matters as the ultimate purpose of mankind or its salvation. It’s not that he didn’t think of such matters… but to talk about such things seemed… pretentious, presumptuous. It was a matter of creative philosophy: I think that it is not for writers to solve such questions as the existence of God, pessimism, etc., Chekhov wrote in another diamond of craft advice. The writer’s function is only to describe by whom, how, and under what conditions the questions of God and pessimism were discussed.

But temperament played a part, too; it won’t come as a surprise that Chekhov had no great notions of himself. If I have a gift that should be respected, he wrote to an older novelist who had written to urge him to take on a novel, I had got used to thinking it insignificant. Some of this had to do with his beginnings: no one has diagnosed as articulately the self-abnegating servility which the lowborn of the time and the place—the serfs, Russia’s version of the feudally bonded, and their descendants—carried within them.⁵

Try writing a story about how a young man, the son of a serf… brought up venerating rank, kissing the hands of priests, worshipping the ideas of others, thankful for every crust of bread… hypocritical toward God and man with no cause beyond an awareness of his own insignificance—write about how this young man squeezes the slave out of himself drop by drop. Chekhov managed to do just that, a course of rigorous self-education and -improvement despite low means and a petty tyrant of a father that accomplished, in the elegantly acidic formulation of Chekhov scholar Aileen Kelly, what Tolstoy spent his life trying vainly to do: he reinvented himself as a person of moral integrity, free from the disfigurements inflicted by the despotism that pervaded Russian life.

If Chekhov took his talent lightly, he ignored his health altogether. He had tuberculosis for a decade before he finally bothered to have it diagnosed, so busy was he with writing and the social-improvement projects to which he constantly devoted himself. He spent the winter of 1891–92 working to relieve a countrywide famine caused by the previous summer’s failed harvest, concentrating, with characteristic practicality, not on charity handouts, but on an organized campaign to prevent the peasants from slaughtering their horses for food, a practice that perpetuated the famine cycle, since it left no horses for next year’s spring plowing (Karlinsky). The following summer, a cholera epidemic broke out in the area several hours outside Moscow where Chekhov had just purchased a home; he spent the next two seasons in an unpaid position battling the epidemic, treating a thousand peasants along the way.

Every community he encountered was left the better for it: the library in Taganrog, in southern Russia, where Chekhov was born, was the beneficiary of a lifetime’s steady supply of books in multiple languages, as were libraries near his country home and in Siberia. He built schools, arranged for the construction of a local highway, created a clinic for alcoholics, bought horses for peasants who needed them, fund-raised for a journal of surgery, and even helped set up a marine-biology laboratory. Pleaded with to relent, he said he was happier giving medical care to peasants than enduring the literary chatter in Moscow.

Even on his deathbed, he couldn’t bear to turn away all those who crowded his doorstep. Maxim Gorky, one of the many writers who benefited from Chekhov’s encouragement and intervention, put it well: In the presence of Anton Pavlovich everyone felt an unconscious desire to be simpler, more truthful, more himself, and I had many opportunities of observing how people threw off their attire of grand bookish phrases, fashionable expressions, and all the rest of the cheap trifles with which Russians, in their anxiety to appear European, adorn themselves, as savages deck themselves with shells and fishes’ teeth. A single sentence of Chekhov’s, after Tolstoy visited him at his rural clinic, says it all: We had an extremely interesting conversation, extremely interesting for me because I listened more than I spoke.⁶

Chekhov brought the same values to his writing and his politics, though here they were far less welcome. The craft moves pioneered by Chekhov are de rigueur in high-end literary fiction today, but they were heretical in their time. Chekhov’s stories are all middle like a tortoise, John Galsworthy is supposed to have said; many have referred to Chekhov’s zero ending. It’s true that he can spend two-thirds of a story winding up, with conventional plot an afterthought. But if you ease into it, if you suspend the expectation of dramatic convention that is the norm even today, you will find yourself transported by description and characterization—of people, places, the human condition—as close as anything Flaubert observed about his clerk in felt slippers and, perhaps, unmatched in its alchemy of sensitivity, wisdom, precision, and verve. And there is the miracle of its simultaneous soulfulness and lack of adornment. Look, in this volume, at the descriptions lavished on the secondary characters as The Privy Councilor gets going (Spiridon measured him several times, walking around him during the process like a lovesick pigeon around its mate), the evocation of winter that opens An Attack of Nerves, the casually aphoristic pronouncements that litter every story (e.g., intelligent and learned things always ruin one’s appetite, in The Siren). He says in a line what would take another writer a paragraph: I am old and am not fit for the struggle; I am not even capable of hatred (Gooseberries). Chekhov’s language is as precise as ‘Hello!’ and as simple as ‘Give me a glass of tea’, the early Soviet poet Mayakovsky wrote. (And here was a man in search of revolutionary forms for a new nation.) ‘In his method of expressing the idea of a compact little story, the urgent cry of the future is felt: ‘Economy!’

But no Chekhov reader need subsist on high aesthetics alone. On so many occasions, the situation the author has been laying out for us suddenly coheres into something devastating and whole, the story snaps straight as a sail in high wind, and one begins to read feverishly. See if you can pinpoint this moment in The Privy Councilor, The Artist’s Story, The Name-Day Party, and In the Ravine. Far less Chekhov ends at zero—that is, where things started—than the stereotype has it, but there was philosophy behind the stories that do. Sometimes things change, sometimes not, non? Sometimes the sinner repents (Crime and Punishment), sometimes she goes unpunished (In the Ravine). Sometimes the adulterers go for it (and pay for it, as in Anna Karenina), but sometimes they don’t (and are no happier for their restraint). Read a story like About Love and tell me that it ends at zero, even though, technically, nothing happens. To my mind, it’s a more moving exploration of love than the famous The Lady with the Pet Dog, where something certainly does.

For all its flickering beauty, real life offers little moral justice or dramatic convention. Take the moment, in The Lady with the Pet Dog, after the adulterers, Gurov and Anna Sergeyevna, have slept together for the first time. Anticipation has given way to postcoital gloom. Her features drooped and faded, and her long hair hung down sadly, Chekhov writes of Anna. ‘It’s not right,’ she tells Gurov. ‘You don’t respect me now.’ The story, imagined conventionally, seems to beg for anything other than what follows: There was a watermelon on the table. Gurov cut himself a slice and began eating it without haste. They were silent for at least half an hour. Gurov doesn’t do this because he’s unfeeling, but because it’s the at once unexpected and inevitable thing that a person finds himself doing in such a circumstance, like plosive newlywed kisses triggering calf spasms and the taste of oversweet raisins.

This is not the way Dostoevsky and Tolstoy wrote, and is, perhaps, the reason we wouldn’t call either of them a modern writer or, for that matter, a direct influence on much of posterity, geniuses though they were. Some of the most progressive literature of the last century—from Russia’s Silver Age surrealists to Western Europe’s modernists to Flannery O’Connor’s flaying precision (if not Chekhov’s tenderness) to W. G. Sebald’s anti-narrative instinct—has Chekhov’s mark on it. Alice Munro, the Canadian short-story master and recent Nobel Prize winner, is most aptly called our Chekhov. From the portraiture so close, it makes you forget you’ve read twenty pages and the story hasn’t started; to all that setup suddenly shaping into a predicament that clamps your heart in a vise; to the way Munro situates so many stories inside stories told by others: it’s Chekhov.

It’s no surprise that Chekhov declined to inhabit the straitjacket into which every Russian writer of the late nineteenth century was expected to fit himself by the literary establishment: the liberal critic of autocracy. It isn’t that Chekhov didn’t agree with the politics; he objected to the lack of freedom in the establishment’s dictates on how freedom should be promoted. He was against falsehood, hypocrisy, and compulsion in all corners, and didn’t hesitate to disagree with his own (just reread the first epigraph of this essay). He had friends on both sides of the aisle, and, with a naïveté as poignant for America today as for Russia then, it [did] not even occur to him that unbiased observations… might be incompatible with patriotism (Karlinsky). In staid times, such a man feels like a seer. In divided times, like a miracle. You want to live in his country, except it has so few citizens.

Chekhov was savaged for his supposed lack of ideology. Usually, it didn’t get to him: he nominated an especially scathing critic of his work to the Russian Imperial Academy. But sometimes it did. (He was no wallflower.) You once told me, he wrote to another author, that my stories lack an element of protest, that they have neither sympathies nor antipathies. But doesn’t the story protest against lying from start to finish? Isn’t that an ideology? (Pity an author in a politicized society in a polarized time. Lampedusa, who portrayed Italy’s old, pre-Republican guard with nuance and empathy, and who himself, in the words of his biographer, remained too skeptical and disillusioned to be a genuine democrat or a liberal, was excoriated for the same reasons, in his case by the Marxists who dominated Italian literary criticism after the war.) As Nabokov wrote, Chekhov’s genius almost involuntarily disclosed more of the blackest realities of hungry, puzzled, servile, angry peasant Russia than a multitude of other writers, such as Gorki for instance, who flaunted their social ideas in a procession of painted dummies. I shall go further and say that that the person who prefers Dostoevski or Gorki to Chekhov will never be able to grasp the essentials of Russian literature and Russian life.

A doctor committed to observable reality rather than to ethical or dramatic convention, Chekhov also wrote about sex as a physical phenomenon rather than a moral dubiety best seen through Victorian gauze. (This didn’t endear him to Tolstoy, either.) Radically, he wrote about the predicaments faced by women with the clarity of a non-ideological feminist. (By non-ideological, I mean that he saw women as clearly as he saw their oppressors.) He got married, at 39, to Olga Knipper, an actress who spent most of her time in Moscow and St. Petersburg while he remained in southern Russia for his health, an arrangement so unusual for its time, if not ours, that even Chekhov’s most intelligent critics have been unable to refrain from seeing it as pathetic and unhappy. But if you read Chekhov’s letters, you’ll see that the terms not only suited him—he agreed to marriage for Olga’s sake—but made him rather frisky. (He called her doggie.) A man of the earth to the finish, he also wrote about ecological ruin, a subject that has trouble getting traction even today. He was nineteenth-century Russia’s greatest modern.

I used to feel little for Chekhov. I was born in the Soviet Union and majored in Russian literature at university to reconnect with my heritage after a decade of trying hard to pass for American. I was riven with confusion and doubt—so is every undergraduate, but I had an extra piece due to losing my home country at nine—and was easily seduced by the grandeur, nobility, moral preoccupation, and clarity of the grandees we read. America felt freer, but more frivolous, than the Soviet Union. Here was the opposite of frivolity. Here were writers who believed—no, took for granted—that the writer was a moral accountant to a fallen world, charged with showing the way forward. (And that there was a way forward, an ultimate truth to aim for, as opposed to an endless array of compromises.) From a young age, my parents had generously fostered in me a self-respect that many children don’t get to feel. That ego was trampled by immigration. In America, I felt inept and painfully out of place. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky—even the hand-wringing Turgenev—helped me find value, dignity, purpose.

It would take nearly twenty years to begin to see the occasional falsehood in the neat tie-ups of traditional storytelling, or in the protagonist breaking through to some understanding at the end of the story—to see that writing this way often has as much to do with the author’s needs as with those of his characters. In my early years here, I craved only one thing: certainties. I cycled through many false ones before Chekhov put me at peace with their impossibility even for less bifurcated people. If you can hold on to that, he seemed to be saying, you might live in a little more peace and write in a little more truth.

Perhaps the saddest way in which Chekhov remains relevant for our times is how accurate, in spirit, his portrait of Russia remains: power without account; greed, nepotism, and boot-licking; stability at the expense of freedom. What would Chekhov say of Vladimir Putin? He wouldn’t say anything about Putin. He might write a story about Putin’s press secretary misplacing the cuff links the President gave him, which sends the man into such a frenzy that he commits a crime so the most noticeable thing about his wrists is the handcuffs around them. Except that law enforcement doesn’t dare touch the President’s circle, and the poor man remains free, his torment in full view. (It would be called: Cuff Links. Or: The Press Secretary.) Or, less pointedly, the story of a Moscow man with a long walk home from the metro station, long and deflating, until he steps into a grocery and somehow—well, out of desperation, to feel alive, perhaps—manages a flirtation with the counterwoman that leads to a relationship. Only there is just enough initiative in him for that gesture, and little by little the initiative in the family must migrate to the woman. Only she does not want the initiative. She wants to be looked after. But they don’t divorce. They keep going, partly from fear, partly from suspicion that the human spirit has enough grace in it for them to discover kindredness. And enough mystery that we never know when we’ll manage to rise above ourselves once again.

And what would Chekhov say of America today, and America of him? Would it revere him as much as it reveres the playwright-of-twilight hologram, or would his actual perspective prove a little too sandpapery? For he would savage, equally, the witch-hunts enacted by social justice warriors, the soul-sellers lining up to lie for Trump, the provincialism of liberal echo chambers like New York and San Francisco, and the media’s reductions and manipulations. He wouldn’t touch the actual headlines, of course—he would write about individuals in concrete situations—but his brief would be the same: human nature, and its tendency equally to confusion and clarity; to small-mindedness, greed, and vulgarity as much as to generosity, self-transcendence, and love, all heavily dependent on circumstance. His stories highlight this above all, usually without judgment, always without bombast and remedy. How did such a quiet man and non-ideologue manage to survive such an unquiet, ideological century?

Instead of the more comprehensive view taken by some Chekhov collections—no view could be truly comprehensive; the man wrote nearly a thousand stories—and the overly academic tone assumed by a second contingent, this collection tries to assemble Chekhov in the spirit of the man: it’s for civilians. The short, and ultimately minor, early and humorous pieces are not here. Neither is the story roster, or page count, very long. Some of the stories are frequently anthologized, others less so. Each tries to show a different glimpse of what preoccupied him, and how. If you know him by The Lady with the Pet Dog (the rare Chekhov love story with a hopeful ending), read About Love and Anna on the Neck (bracing in its heroine’s assumption of a cruel power that has until recently victimized her). To understand why a piece of the Russian mind worships submission, read The Man in a Case. For perfect examples of stories that take the slow, scenic route, read An Artist’s Story and The Privy Councilor. (The former doubles nicely as a takedown of Tolstoyanism and political radicalism both, the latter of the hypocrisy and self-importance of people with power in Russia.)

Gusev is Chekhov on LSD. The delirium of the dying sailors becomes the story’s own: it slouches, trips, bangs its head. Just as The Name-Day Party—too long, but ultimately harrowing in showing the cost of the Important Russian Man’s self-regard and concern with appearances—becomes as dislocated as the heroine in her ordeal. To see how a story that goes nowhere can leave you stunned by the simple truth of its portrayal, read The Kiss and An Attack of Nerves. For men coming into consciousness of the squalid, ruinously unequal, and abusive society in which they live, read On Official Business and Gooseberries. And don’t forget The Siren. But don’t read it if you’re hungry.

—Boris Fishman

Notes

1

Naturally, the latter used the acquaintance to press a manuscript on the author. When you describe the miserable and unfortunate, and want to make the reader feel pity, he responded, try to be somewhat colder—that seems to give a kind of background to another’s grief, against which it stands out more clearly. Whereas in your story, the characters cry and sigh. This advice wouldn’t be out of place in an MFA program today.

2

The entire time, he adds, her face wore an expression of fear. He goes on to report that the newlyweds kissed so vehemently that every time their lips made an explosive noise … I had a taste of oversweet raisins in my mouth, and got a spasm in my left calf. In its precise and contradictory observations, the acute perceptiveness of its ostensibly illogical associations, and the way its humor lives alongside something darker, the letter is a Chekhov story in miniature.

3

As Nabokov wrote, Chekhov’s books are sad books for humorous people; that is, only a reader with a sense of humor can really appreciate their sadness… . Things for him were funny and sad at the same time, but you would not see their sadness if you did not see their fun.

4

This kind of antic epicureanism, so readily associated with Gogol, has as much to do with the man—a megalomaniacal, hypochondriac priss and sexual paralytic—as the gloom-and-doom caricature does with Chekhov.

5

I shiver every time I read what Denis Grigoryev, a puny little peasant, exceedingly skinny, wearing patched trousers and a shirt made of ticking, says to the magistrate investigating him for a minor infraction in the story The Culprit: That’s what you’re educated for, our protectors—to understand. The Lord knew to whom to give understanding.

6

Is there a greater pair of frenemies in literary history? Tolstoy had been mortified by Chekhov’s perspective on the peasantry, but, according to Gorky, he had tears in his eyes over the saintly heroine of Chekhov’s The Darling, included in this volume, the story of a woman who assumes the views of the men with whom she takes up. Tolstoy didn’t realize Chekhov felt that this made her pathetic. And he came to revile Tolstoy’s anti-sex manifesto The Kreutzer Sonata: To hell with the philosophy of the great men of this world! All great wise men are as despotic as generals … because they are confident of their impunity. Diogenes spat in people’s beards knowing that he would not be called to account; Tolstoy calls doctors scoundrels and flaunts his ignorance of important [medical] issues because he is another Diogenes whom no one will report to the police or denounce in the papers. But Chekhov venerated Anna Karenina because, he felt, it ideally formulated a problem it did not try to resolve—Chekhov’s measure for true fiction. That didn’t stop Chekhov, of course, from rewriting its plot in at least a half dozen short stories, three of which—About Love, Anna on the Neck, The Darling—are included in this collection, all of them implicit rebukes to Tolstoy’s quite undeniable resolution of Anna’s problem: the adulterous shall be smitten. And yet, it was typical of Chekhov that, for all their disagreements, the men maintained a warm, cordial relationship.

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Chronology

1860 Anton Pavlovich Chekhov born January 17 in Taganrog, Russia to Pavel Yegorovich Chekhov and Evgenia Yakovlevna Morozova.

1867–79 Enrolls in a local Greek school before entering the