by Chekhov, Anton; Bartlett, Leverhulme Research Fellow in Russian Cultural History Rosamund ;
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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
ANTON CHEKHOV
About Love
and Other Stories
Translated with an Introduction and Notes by
ROSAMUND BARTLETT
OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
ABOUT LOVE
AND OTHER STORIES
ANTON PAVLOVICH CHEKHOV was born in 1860 in Taganrog, a port in southern Russia. His father was a former serf. In 1879, after receiving a classical education at the Taganrog Gymnasium, he moved to Moscow to study medicine. During his university years he helped support his family by writing stories and sketches for humorous magazines. By 1888 he was contributing to Russia’s most prestigious literary journals and regarded as a major writer. He also started writing plays: his first full-length play, Ivanov, was produced in 1887. After undertaking a journey to visit the penal colony on the Siberian island of Sakhalin in 1890, he settled on a country estate outside Moscow, where he continued to write and practise medicine. His failing health forced him to move to Yalta in 1898, where he wrote his most famous short story, ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ (1899), and two of his best-known plays: Three Sisters (1901) and The Cherry Orchard (1904), written with Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theatre in mind. In 1901 he married the company’s leading actress, Olga Knipper. He died from tuberculosis in Badenweiler, Germany, in July 1904 at the age of 44.
ROSAMUND BARTLETT lectures in Russian and music at the University of Durham. She has published Wagner and Russia (1995), Literary Russia: A Guide (with Anna Benn, 1997), Shostakovich in Context (2000), Chekhov: Scenes From a Life (2004), and Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters (2004).
CONTENTS
Introduction
Note on the Translation
Select Bibliography
A Chronology of Anton Chekhov
ABOUT LOVE AND OTHER STORIES
The Huntsman (1885)
On the Road (1886)
The Letter (1887)
Fortune (1887)
Gusev (1890)
Fish Love (1892)
The Black Monk (1894)
Rothschild’s Violin (1894)
The Student (1894)
The House with the Mezzanine (1896)
In the Cart (1897)
The Man in a Case (1898)
Gooseberries (1898)
About Love (1898)
The Lady with the Little Dog (1899)
At Christmas Time (1900)
The Bishop (1902)
Explanatory Notes
INTRODUCTION
Evolution as a Writer
Chekhov became a writer at an inauspicious time in Russia’s history. Alexander II had initiated a series of long-overdue reforms at the beginning of his reign, the most important of which was the abolition of serfdom which took place in 1861, when Chekhov was 1 year old. By the time Chekhov published his first story in 1880, when he was 20, however, Alexander’s modernization programme had ground to a halt. Growing unrest at its slow progress had led the most radical of Russia’s young revolutionaries to resort to terrorism, and a year later the Tsar was assassinated. Contrary to their hopes, however, the assassination of Alexander II in fact brought an end to any possibility of further reform. It was also the end of an era in literary terms. The ‘age of the great novels’ was brought to a close by the deaths of Dostoevsky in 1881 (shortly after the publication of The Brothers Karamazov) and Turgenev two years later. Tolstoy, meanwhile, had decided to abandon fiction-writing in favour of fighting moral causes—such as vainly appealing for clemency to be granted to Alexander II’s assassins, who were all hanged.
Alexander II’s successor, his son Alexander III, reacted to the violent circumstances of his accession by increasing censorship and and introducing measures which actually attempted to undo some of the 1860s reforms. His highly reactionary policies caused widespread despondency amongst the educated population, who came to see Alexander’s reign as a sterile era of ‘small deeds’. The stultifying atmosphere of prohibitions and denunciations is well evoked in Chekhov’s satirical masterpiece ‘The Man in a Case’. It is no coincidence that the voluminous, soul-searching novels of the 1860s and 1870s gave way to less ambitious short stories after Alexander III became tsar. The government’s closure of the country’s leading literary journal in 1884 was a further blow to morale. In the doldrums of the 1880s and the 1890s, Chekhov was almost the only young writer to appear on the literary scene who was of international calibre.
Even Alexander III could not completely halt the wheels of change, however. Industrialization belatedly reached Russia at the end of the nineteenth century, and with it came the inevitable
mass exodus from the villages, where it was becoming increasingly difficult for Russia’s peasant population to earn a living. Urbanization was also a direct consequence of the emancipation of the serfs, and it was the burgeoning and increasingly literate lower classes in Russian cities who were the regular readers of the lightweight comic journals which flourished at this time. The St Petersburg weekly Fragments immediately became the most popular publication when it was founded in 1881. Like other such journals, it was full of cartoons, corny jokes, amusing little stories, and vignettes of contemporary life. There were no pretensions to literary merit. This was the arena in which Chekhov learnt his craft as a writer.
Chekhov began contributing to magazines like the Dragonfly and the Alarm Clock because he needed to help support his impoverished family. The fee he was paid for each piece printed was so small that like other impecunious contributors, he had to write a lot in order to earn anything, and this necessitated the adoption of a number of pseudonyms. The writing was a sideline, of course—Chekhov was a full-time medical student at Moscow University from 1879 to 1884—but he proved astonishingly adept at dashing off stories in his spare time. His prodigious comic gifts also ensured his success in the medium. In 1882 Chekhov started writing for Fragments, and he soon became its most popular contributor. Three years later he was headhunted by a St Petersburg newspaper, and shortly after that he was taken up by Alexey Suvorin, the proprietor of Russia’s biggest daily newspaper, New Times. Most Russian newspapers had a small fiction section, often in their Saturday supplements, and this is where Chekhov’s stories started appearing. Suvorin insisted that Chekhov now write under his own name, rather than as Antosha Chekhonte, his most common pseudonym. Chekhov had hoped one day to use his real name for writing medical articles, wary that disclosure of the identity of his comic alter ego might harm his reputation as a doctor and scientist, but he acquiesced. By the time Chekhov’s first story appeared in New Times in early 1886, he had written almost 400 stories and features. The esteem in which he later held his juvenilia is apparent from the fact that he discarded two-thirds of these early writings when he came to compile his own collected works at the end of his life. None of the stories he had written in the first two years made the cut.
As Chekhov’s literary talents developed in the early 1880s, he had begun to chafe at having to write to strict deadlines, adhere to fixed word limits, and be unfailingly witty. From being a means to an end (feeding his family), the fiction-writing started to become an end in itself. Chekhov was the first to recognize that the restrictions imposed by his editors had provided him with an excellent training, and an appreciation for the values of concision, if nothing else, but he wanted to explore new ground. The brief story ‘The Huntsman’, published in the summer of 1885, represents one of his first attempts at writing serious fiction. It also strikes one of the first notes of elegy in Chekhov’s writing. As the publications in which Chekhov published became more high-profile, he took increasing care in crafting his stories, particularly when he started signing them with his own name. As a result, he started to attract critical attention from the literary establishment. And after he received a letter from a venerable Petersburg writer Dmitry Grigorovich exhorting him to take his literary endeavours seriously, Chekhov realized his future really did lie in writing rather than in medicine.
Finally, in 1887, when he was 27, Chekhov was invited to submit a story to one of Russia’s prestigious literary journals. After the publication of ‘The Steppe’ early the following year in the Northern Messenger, Chekhov’s career was meteoric. When he won the Pushkin Prize in 1888, soon after making his debut in a ‘thick journal’, as the serious literary monthlies were called (and which still remain the most important outlets for the publication of belles lettres in Russia), Chekhov joked to his friend Suvorin that second- and third-rate magazine writers ought to put up a statue to him or at the very least present him with a silver cigarette case. ‘I have paved the way for them to the thick journals, and into the hearts and approbation of respectable people,’ he wrote proudly (and with his usual dose of irony).1 It was quite unprecedented for a Russian writer to begin a literary career in such an unpretentious way. Publication in the ‘thick journals’ denoted Chekhov’s endorsement as a major writer. He now changed his work patterns accordingly. Once he was given carte blanche with word limits and no longer had the threat of a deadline hanging over him, he significantly expanded the length of his stories and significantly decreased his output. Where he had previously been publishing an average of at least two stories a week, that figure was now reduced to a handful of stories a year. The number of stories Chekhov wrote declined still further when he concentrated on writing plays in the last years of his life. His last great prose work is, by common consent, considered to be ‘The Bishop’, which was published two years before his death in 1902.
In the 588 pieces of fiction Chekhov wrote between 1880 and 1902, he ranged more widely than any Russian writer before him had in terms of subject matter. His upbringing in Taganrog gave him an unparalleled insight into life in Russian provincial towns, which were to provide the setting for so many of his fictional masterpieces. His pious family background provided him with an intimate knowledge of the Russian Orthodox Church and its clergy. His medical practice brought him into contact with a huge cross-section of the Russian population, whose poorer members he could identify with because of his own humble origins. His life as a small-time landowner acquainted him intimately with rural life. His education bought him an entrée into the upper sections of Russian society. Chekhov rarely mingled with the high aristocracy, but he found a natural milieu amongst the educated members of the declining gentry class who are the most common protagonists of his stories and plays—the so-called intelligentsia. His literary and dramatic talent, meanwhile, brought him into Russia’s artistic world. This rich diversity is reflected in the pages of Chekhov’s stories, whose characters range from priests and schoolboys to peasant wives and princesses.
What is immediately striking about Chekhov’s stories is his even-handed approach to his characters. What interests him as a writer are individual human qualities (or the lack thereof); social hierarchies recede into the background. Much of Tolstoy’s fiction is taken up with persuading the Russian educated public of the virtues of simple peasant living, but it remains aristocratically centred. By contrast, it is entirely typical that Chekhov’s story ‘In the Cart’ focuses on the downtrodden village schoolteacher rather than the roué landowner. As Diaghilev’s cousin, the critic Dmitry Filosofov, noted in 1910, Chekhov not only noticed inconspicuous people, but he had a deep affection for them, and it was this quality which endeared him to the Russian public when his stories first appeared. A writer like Tolstoy may have noticed inconspicuous people, but it is equally characteristic of the very different nature of his fiction that they are invariably transformed into giants in his hands, the peasant Karataev in War and Peace, for example, emerging as a philosopher spouting Confucius-like wisdom.2 It is Chekhov’s compassion which led Petr Bitsilli in 1930 to speak of his writing being suffused with the ‘unclear, warm, even light of Russian Orthodoxy’: it is a religion in which a high value is placed on humility and forgiveness. Chekhov stopped going to church when he was an adult, but he exhibited far more Christian qualities than many self-consciously religious writers. His compassion was all-encompassing, but never sentimental. As Bitsilli comments: ‘He has pity on his heroes, tiresome, awkward, incapable of loving and of being heroic; he has pity on the steppe, pity on its sunburnt grass, pity on a lone poplar standing on a hill.’3
The Biographical Context
The stories in this collection have been chronologically arranged so that is possible to follow Chekhov’s evolution as a writer. The earliest story, ‘The Huntsman’, was written on a hot summer’s day in 1885, while the Chekhov family was staying at a dacha in the Moscow countryside. Chekhov wrote it while he was sitting on a riverbank, and had either just been swimming, or was about to do s
o. It was this story, about the futile attempt of an unhappy peasant woman to persuade the huntsman who had married her when he was drunk to live with her, that prompted the writer Dmitry Grigorovich to write his famous fan letter to Chekhov on 25 March 1886: ‘About a year ago I happened to read a story by you in the Petersburg Newspaper; I don’t remember what it was called now; I just remember that I was struck by qualities of particular originality, but mainly by the remarkable authenticity and truth in the depiction of the characters and the descriptions of nature. Since then I have read everything signed by Chekhonte.’4 Chekhov had been writing professionally under his Chekhonte and other pseudonyms for five years when ‘The Huntsman’ was published. He claimed that he never spent more than a day on anything he wrote, but the qualities remarked upon by Grigorovich suggest that this slight work was not dashed off quite as casually as Chekhov claimed.
By contrast, the story ‘On the Road’ took Chekhov a full three weeks, during which time he suffered the creative agony of four false starts, and a great deal of anxiety. He readily admitted that he had first started engaging in ‘self-criticism’ after being invited to contribute to New Times by its proprietor Alexey Suvorin in early 1886. Now that he was publishing stories under his own name, in a prestigious daily newspaper, he was taking the writing process much more seriously. ‘On the Road’ was submitted to New Times at the end of that year, and was published on Christmas Day, echoing the seasonal theme in the story. It was the longest short story Chekhov had ever written for New Times, and by far the most ambitious. Set in the southern Russia of Chekhov’s childhood during a night-time blizzard, it portrays a larger-than-life, ruined landowner who has spent his life in thrall to one passion or another, to the detriment of both his livelihood and his personal life. Chekhov was nervous about how the story would be received, but his fears proved to be groundless: his brother wrote to him from St Petersburg to tell him ‘On the Road’ had created a furore in the capital. It was one of Chekhov’s first stories, indeed, to win him wide recognition, and so inspired Rachmaninov that in 1893 he wrote an orchestral fantasy (op. 7, The Rock) based on it. Critics immediately made a connection between the quixotic main character Likharyov and earlier incarnations of the literary type of the Russian ‘superfluous man’.
