Fifty-Two Stories Read online

  ALSO TRANSLATED BY RICHARD PEVEAR AND ARISSA VOLOKHONSKY

  Mikhail Bulgakov

  The Master and Margarita

  Anton Chekhov

  The Complete Short Novels of Anton Chekhov

  Selected Stories

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  The Adolescent

  The Brothers Karamazov

  Crime and Punishment

  Demons

  The Double and The Gambler

  The Eternal Husband and Other Stories

  The Idiot

  Notes from a Dead House

  Notes from Underground

  Nikolai Gogol

  The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol

  Dead Souls

  Nikolai Leskov

  The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

  Boris Pasternak

  Doctor Zhivago

  Alexander Pushkin

  Novels, Tales, Journeys

  Leo Tolstoy

  Anna Karenina

  The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories

  War and Peace

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2020 by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

  Preface copyright © 2020 by Richard Pevear

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich, 1860–1904, author. | Pevear, Richard, [date] translator. | Volokhonsky, Larissa, translator.

  Title: Fifty-two stories (1883–1898) / Anton Chekhov ; a new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

  Description: New York : Alfred A. Knopf, [2020] | Translated from the Russian.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019022613 (print) | LCCN 2019022614 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525520818 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525520825 (epub)

  Subjects: LCSH: Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich, 1860–1904—Translations into English.

  Classification: LCC PG3456.A13 P484 2020 (print) | LCC PG3456.A13 (ebook) | DDC 891.73/3—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019022613

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019022614

  Ebook ISBN 9780525520825

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design by John Gall

  ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Also Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Preface

  JOY

  FAT AND SKINNY

  AT THE POST OFFICE

  READING

  THE COOK GETS MARRIED

  IN A FOREIGN LAND

  CORPORAL WHOMPOV

  GRIEF

  THE EXCLAMATION POINT

  AN EDUCATED BLOCKHEAD

  A SLIP-UP

  ANGUISH

  A COMMOTION

  THE WITCH

  A LITTLE JOKE

  AGAFYA

  SPRING

  A NIGHTMARE

  GRISHA

  LADIES

  ROMANCE WITH A DOUBLE BASS

  THE CHORUS GIRL

  THE FIRST-CLASS PASSENGER

  DIFFICULT PEOPLE

  ON THE ROAD

  THE BEGGAR

  ENEMIES

  THE LETTER

  VOLODYA

  LUCK

  THE SIREN

  THE SHEPHERD’S PIPE

  COSTLY LESSONS

  THE KISS

  BOYS

  KASHTANKA

  THE NAME-DAY PARTY

  A BREAKDOWN

  THE BET

  THE PRINCESS

  AFTER THE THEATER

  HISTORY OF A BUSINESS ENTERPRISE

  NEIGHBORS

  FEAR

  BIG VOLODYA AND LITTLE VOLODYA

  THE TEACHER OF LITERATURE

  IN A COUNTRY HOUSE

  THE PECHENEG

  IN THE CART

  ABOUT LOVE

  IONYCH

  THE NEW DACHA

  Notes

  A Note About the Author

  PREFACE

  Our intention in making this collection has been to represent the extraordinary variety of Chekhov’s stories, from earliest to latest, in terms of characters, events, social classes, settings, voicing, and formal inventiveness. By chance the selection came to fifty-two stories—a full deck! But, as Chekhov once wrote, “in art, as in life, there is nothing accidental.”

  When Chekhov began to write humorous stories and sketches, he thought he was doing it simply for money. And so he was. His father’s grocery business, in their native Taganrog, on the Sea of Azov, had gone bankrupt in 1876, and to avoid debtor’s prison the family had fled to Moscow, where Chekhov’s two older brothers were already studying at the university. Chekhov, who was sixteen at the time, stayed behind to finish high school, supporting himself in various ways, one of them being the publication of humorous sketches in local papers, signed with various pseudonyms. In 1879 he graduated and moved to Moscow himself, where he entered medical school, and where his writing, still pseudonymous, became virtually the sole support of the family—mother, father, four brothers, and a sister.

  Chekhov paid no attention to the artistic quality of his sketches; he simply tossed them off, sometimes several a day, and sent them to various daily or weekly humor sheets, whose editors gladly printed them. But his true artistic gift—innate, intuitive—showed itself even in the most exaggerated, absurd, and playful of these early jottings. They were mainly jokes, often satirical, but he also played with words in them, for instance in naming his characters. In “At the Post Office” (1883), the postmaster’s name is Sweetpepper and the police chief’s name is Swashbuckle. The French tutor in “In a Foreign Land” is Monsieur Shampooing, the French word for shampoo. Corporal Whompov is the heavy-handed officer in the story named for him. In “An Educated Blockhead” (1885), the name of the accused is Slopsov and the justice of the peace is Sixwingsky, suggestive of a seraph. In “Romance with a Double Bass” (1886), the main character, owner of the double bass, is named Bowsky, after the instrument’s articulator; we also run into such men as Buzzkin, Flunkeyich, and Flaskov. And there are others. These names have almost always been simply transliterated in English, giving no hint of their literal meaning in Russian.

  After 1886, Chekhov stopped using such overtly comical names, but in later stories we still find characters like Zhmukhin in “The Pecheneg” (1897), whose name, while credible enough, also suggests pushing, squeezing, oppression. Chekhov also persisted in his transcribing of noises. The dog in “The Teacher of Literature” (1894) does not simply bark; his “grrr…nya-nya-nya-nya” pervades the story. The night owl in “The Pecheneg” keeps calling “Sleep! Sleep!”
The wind howls “Hoo! Hoo!” And in his descriptions of nature there is a pervasive anthropomorphism—trees that swoon, rivers that speak, the “malicious, but deeply unhappy” storm in “On the Road” (1886), the previous day’s mist in “Fear” (1892), which “timidly pressed itself to the bushes and hummocks.” In a letter of May 10, 1886, to his older brother Alexander, who was also trying to be a writer, he offers some advice:

  For instance, you will succeed in depicting a moonlit night if you write that on the mill dam a piece of glass from a broken bottle flashed like a bright star and the black shadow of a dog or wolf rolled along like a ball and so forth. Nature comes alive if you’re not squeamish about comparing natural phenomena to human actions…*1

  Yet in a letter dated January 14, 1887, to an acquaintance, Maria Kiselyova, who complained to him that he kept digging in the “dung heap” of immorality, Chekhov asserts: “What makes literature art is precisely its depiction of life as it really is. Its charge is the unconditional and honest truth.” And further on he says of the writer: “He’s no different from the run-of-the-mill reporter.”*2 It is true that Chekhov’s stories are filled with details of everyday existence, often very dark and always very keenly observed. He had an unusually wide personal experience of Russian life on all levels, and portrays a great variety of people: landowners, peasants, the military, bureaucrats, farmers, townspeople, clergy high and low, provincial school teachers, intellectuals, university students, boys, mistresses, wives, hunters, shepherds. In one story the central character is a boy two years and eight months old; in another the central character is a dog. But the stories he tells about them are hardly run-of-the-mill reporting.

  The formal variety of Chekhov’s stories is also far from “slice-of-life” realism. Sometimes he chooses suspended moments—on a train, on the road, in a cart—that allow for unexpected revelations, or pseudo-revelations. Many are essentially monologues, which occasionally lead to surprise reversals. In “The Siren” (1887), after a court session, the court secretary entices his superiors, even the stern philosopher, with an inspired and minutely detailed five-page discourse on Russian eating and drinking, ending with honey-spice vodka, of which he says: “After the first glass, your whole soul is engulfed in a sort of fragrant mirage, and it seems that you are not at home in your armchair, but somewhere in Australia, on some sort of ultrasoft ostrich…” There are doublings, as in the early “Fat and Skinny” or the late “Big Volodya and Little Volodya.” In his notes for the rather grim story “The Bet” (1889), he first refers to it as “a fairy tale.” The formal qualities of storytelling, of parables, anecdotes, and morality tales, are present throughout his work. It is nurtured by tradition, though he puts that tradition to his own use.

  Chekhov was well aware of the political movements of his time and their main spokesmen. His characters refer at various moments to Sergei Aksakov and the Slavophiles, to the Nihilists, to the utilitarian Dmitri Pisarev, to the populist Nikolai Mikhailovsky, as well as to the French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the German philosopher Schopenhauer. He was friends with the conservative writer, journalist, and editor Alexei Suvorin, who published many of his stories in his journal Novoye Vremya (“New Times”), but he did not share the editor’s increasingly reactionary views, and broke with him over the controversy of the Dreyfus affair. Chekhov never espoused any ideas as a writer; he had no program, no ideology; the critics of his time wondered what his work was “about.” Tolstoy wrote of him in a letter to his son dated September 4, 1895: “he has not yet revealed a definite point of view.”*3 Chekhov revealed his attitude to the peasantry by offering a large number of them free medical treatment while living on his small country estate in Melikhovo. He showed his concern for the environment, not like the old man in “The Shepherd’s Pipe,” who bemoans at great length the dying out of nature, but by planting trees, like Doctor Astrov in the play Uncle Vanya.

  In his stories, Chekhov does what storytellers have always done: he satirizes human pretensions and absurdities, he plays out the comedy of human contradictions, and ultimately, even in the darkest of them, he celebrates natural and human existence in all its conditional variety.

  Richard Pevear

  *1 Translation by Cathy Popkin, in her edition of Anton Chekhov’s Collected Stories (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014), p. 517.

  *2 Popkin, p. 518.

  *3 Popkin, p. 505.

  JOY

  IT WAS MIDNIGHT.

  Mitya Kuldarov, agitated, disheveled, came flying into his parents’ apartment and quickly passed through all the rooms. His parents had already turned in for the night. His sister was lying in bed, reading the last page of a novel. His schoolboy brothers were asleep.

  “Where have you been?” his astonished parents asked. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “Oh, don’t ask! I never expected it! No, I never expected it! It’s…it’s even incredible!”

  Mitya laughed loudly and sat down in an armchair, unable to stay on his feet from happiness.

  “It’s incredible! You can’t even imagine! Just look!”

  His sister jumped out of bed and, covering herself with a blanket, went over to her brother. The schoolboys woke up.

  “What’s the matter? You don’t look yourself!”

  “It’s from joy, Mama! I’m known all over Russia now! All over! Before only you knew that in this world there existed the Collegiate Registrar Dmitri Kuldarov,1 but now all of Russia knows it! Mama! Oh, lord!”

  Mitya jumped up, ran through all the rooms, and sat down again.

  “But what’s happened? Just tell us!”

  “You live like wild animals, don’t read newspapers, don’t pay any attention to publicity, yet there are so many amazing things in the newspapers! When something happens, it gets known right away, nothing escapes them! I’m so happy! Oh, lord! Newspapers only write about famous people, and now they’ve written about me!”

  “What’s that? Where?”

  The papa went pale. Mama glanced at the icon and crossed herself. The schoolboys leaped out of their beds and, just as they were, in their nightshirts, went up to their older brother.

  “That’s right! They’ve written about me! Now all of Russia knows me! Take this issue as a keepsake, mama! We’ll reread it sometimes. Look here!”

  Mitya took a newspaper from his pocket, gave it to his father, and poked his finger at a place circled in blue pencil.

  “Read!”

  His father put on his spectacles.

  “Go on, read!”

  Mama glanced at the icon and crossed herself. The papa cleared his throat and began to read:

  “On December 29th, at eleven o’clock in the evening, the Collegiate Registrar Dmitri Kuldarov…”

  “You see, you see? Go on!”

  “…the Collegiate Registrar Dmitri Kuldarov, leaving the alehouse on Malaya Bronnaya Street, at Kozikhin’s, and being in a state of inebriation…”

  “It was me and Semyon Petrovich…It’s all described in minute detail! Keep reading! Go on! Listen!”

  “…and being in a state of inebriation, slipped and fell under the horse of the cabby Ivan Drotov, a peasant from the village of Durykino, Yukhnovsky District. The frightened horse, having stepped over Kuldarov and dragged the sleigh over him, with Stepan Lukov, a Moscow merchant of the second guild, sitting in it, rushed off down the street and was stopped by the sweepers. Kuldarov, at first being in a state of unconsciousness, was taken to the police precinct and examined by a doctor. The blow which he had received on the back of the head…”

  “I was hit by the shaft, Papa. Go on! Go on reading!”

  “…which he had received on the back of the head, was classified as slight. The protocol of the incident was drawn up. The victim was given first aid…”

  “They told me to put cold compresses on my head. So you’ve read it now? Eh? Real
ly something! Now it’ll spread all over Russia! Give it here!”

  Mitya grabbed the newspaper, folded it, and put it in his pocket.

  “I’ll run to the Makarovs and show them…I’ve also got to show it to the Ivanitskys, Natalya Ivanovna, Anisim Vassilyich…I’m off! Goodbye!”

  Mitya put on a peaked cap with a cockade and, triumphant, joyful, dashed out of the house.

  1883

  FAT AND SKINNY

  TWO FRIENDS ran into each other at the Nikolaevsky train station:1 one fat, the other skinny. The fat one had just had dinner in the station, and his butter-smeared lips glistened like ripe cherries. He smelled of sherry and fleur d’oranger. The skinny one had just gotten off a train and was loaded down with suitcases, bundles, and boxes. He smelled of ham and coffee grounds. From behind his back peeked a thin woman with a long chin—his wife—and a tall schoolboy with a screwed-up eye—his son.

  “Porfiry!” exclaimed the fat one, seeing the skinny one. “Is it you? My dear fellow! Long time no see!”

  “Good heavens!” the skinny one said in amazement. “Misha! My childhood friend! Where did you pop up from?”