Stories Read online

  RICHARD PEVEAR

  * Quotations of Chekhov’s letters, unless otherwise noted, are from Letters of Anton Chekhov, selection, introduction, and commentary by Simon Karlinsky, trans. by Michael Henry Heim in collaboration with Simon Karlinsky, New York, 1973.

  * “Chekhov at Large” (1944), in Chekhov: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. R. L. Jackson, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1967.

  ** See the chapter on Chekhov in his History of Russian Literature.

  * “Chekhov as Naturalist” (1914), in Chekhov, ed. R. L. Jackson.

  * Trans. by Elizabeth Henderson, in Chekhov, ed. R. L. Jackson.

  ** According to the memoirs of his brother Mikhail, Chekhov sometimes swam off the ship with a towline and in that way once happened to observe the movements of a shark and a school of pilot fish. He also witnessed the burial of two men at sea: “When you see a dead man wrapped in sailcloth flying head over heels into the water … you grow frightened and somehow start thinking that you are going to die too and that you too will be thrown into the sea” (letter of Suvorin, December 9, 1890).

  TRANSLATORS NOTE

  No one who makes a one-volume selection of Anton Chekhov’s stories can help being painfully aware of what has been left out. Our selection represents all periods of Chekhov’s creative life, from his first sketches to his very last story We have included short pieces from different periods (it is interesting to see Chekhov return to the extreme brevity of his earliest work in “At Christmastime,” written in 1900), and the most important of the longer stories, those of thirty-five to fifty pages. We have not included any of the “novelized stories” of eighty to a hundred pages—“The Steppe,” “My Life,” “The Duel,” “Three Years”—thinking they would go better in a separate volume. As for the rest of the collection, it is meant to show the best of Chekhov’s work in all its diversity.

  Chekhov’s prose does not confront the translator with the difficulties found in Gogol, Dostoevsky, or Leskov. “His temperament,” as Nabokov remarked, “is quite foreign to verbal inventiveness.” Words cannot be translated, but meanings can be, and rhythms can be. Every good writer has an innate rhythm, which “tells” the world in a certain way. Chekhov has a preference, especially in his later stories, for stringing clauses and sentences together with the conjunction “and”: “Far ahead the windmills of the village of Mironositskoe were barely visible, to the right a line of hills stretched away and then disappeared far beyond the village, and they both knew that this was the bank of the river, with meadows, green willows, country houses, and if you stood on one of the hills, from there you could see equally vast fields, telegraph poles, and the train, which in the distance looked like a caterpillar crawling, and in clear weather you could even see the town.” Often he begins sentences and even paragraphs with an “and,” as if events keep accumulating without quite integrating. A related feature, and one more difficult to maintain in English, is his use of the continuous tense, with sudden shifts to the simple present or past and back again. We have tried as far as possible to keep these stylistic qualities in our translation.

  We would like to express our gratitude to two Chekhovians, Cathy Popkin of Columbia University and Michael Finke of Washington University, for their suggestions of stories to be included. Limitations of space have kept us from following all of them, but without them the collection would not be what it is.

  R. P., L. V.

  THE DEATH OF A CLERK

  One fine evening the no less fine office manager Ivan Dmitrich Cherviakov1 was sitting in the second row of the stalls, watching The Bells of Corneville2 through opera glasses. He watched and felt himself at the height of bliss. But suddenly … This “but suddenly” occurs often in stories. The authors are right: life is so full of the unexpected! But suddenly his face wrinkled, his eyes rolled, his breath stopped … he put down the opera glasses, bent forward, and … ah-choo!!! As you see, he sneezed. Sneezing is not prohibited to anyone anywhere. Peasants sneeze, police chiefs sneeze, sometimes even privy councillors sneeze. Everybody sneezes. Cherviakov, not embarrassed in the least, wiped his nose with his handkerchief and, being a polite man, looked around to see whether his sneezing had disturbed anyone. And now he did become embarrassed. He saw that the little old man sitting in front of him in the first row of the stalls was carefully wiping his bald head and neck with his glove and muttering something. Cherviakov recognized the little old man as General Brizzhalov,3 who served in the Department of Transportation.

  “I sprayed him!” thought Cherviakov. “He’s not my superior, he serves elsewhere, but still it’s awkward. I must apologize.”

  Cherviakov coughed, leaned forward, and whispered in the general’s ear:

  “Excuse me, Yr’xcellency, I sprayed you … I accidentally …”

  “Never mind, never mind …”

  “For God’s sake, excuse me. I … I didn’t mean it!”

  “Ah, do sit down, please! Let me listen!”

  Cherviakov became embarrassed, smiled stupidly, and began looking at the stage. He looked, but felt no more bliss. Anxiety began to torment him. In the intermission he went up to Brizzhalov, walked around him, and, overcoming his timidity, murmured:

  “I sprayed you, Yr’xcellency … Forgive me … I … it’s not that I …”

  “Ah, come now… I’ve already forgotten, and you keep at it!” said the general, impatiently twitching his lower lip.

  “Forgotten, but there’s malice in his eyes,” thought Cherviakov, glancing suspiciously at the general. “He doesn’t even want to talk. I must explain to him that I really didn’t mean it … that it’s a law of nature, otherwise he’ll think I wanted to spit. If he doesn’t think so now, he will later! …”

  On returning home, Cherviakov told his wife about his rudeness. His wife, it seemed to him, treated the incident much too lightly. She merely got frightened, but then, on learning that Brizzhalov served “elsewhere,” she calmed down.

  “But all the same you should go and apologize,” she said. “He might think you don’t know how to behave in public!”

  “That’s just it! I apologized, but he was somehow strange … Didn’t say a single sensible word. And then there was no time to talk.”

  The next day Cherviakov put on a new uniform, had his hair cut, and went to Brizzhalov to explain … Going into the general’s reception room, he saw many petitioners there, and among them was the general himself, who had already begun to receive petitions. Having questioned several petitioners, the general raised his eyes to Cherviakov.

  “Yesterday, in the Arcadia, if you recall, Yr’xcellency,” the office manager began, “I sneezed, sir, and … accidentally sprayed you … Forg …”

  “Such trifles … God knows! Can I be of help to you?” the general addressed the next petitioner.

  “He doesn’t want to talk!” thought Cherviakov, turning pale. “That means he’s angry … No, it can’t be left like this … I’ll explain to him …”

  When the general finished his discussion with the last petitioner and headed for the inner rooms, Cherviakov followed him and murmured:

  “Yr’xcellency! If I venture to trouble Yr’xcellency, it’s precisely, I might say, from a feeling of repentance! … It wasn’t on purpose, you know that yourself, sir!”

  The general made a tearful face and waved his hand.

  “You must be joking, my dear sir!” he said, disappearing behind the door.

  “What kind of joke is it?” thought Cherviakov. “This is no kind of joke at all! A general, yet he can’t understand! If that’s the way it is, I won’t apologize to the swaggerer any more! Devil take him! I’ll write him a letter, but I won’t come myself! By God, I won’t!”

  So Cherviakov thought, walking home. He wrote no letter to the general. He thought and thought, and simply could not think up that letter. So the next day he had to go himself and explain.

  “I came yesterday to trouble Yr’xcellency,” he began to murmur, when the general raised his questioni
ng eyes to him, “not for a joke, as you were pleased to say. I was apologizing for having sneezed and sprayed you, sir … and I never even thought of joking. Would I dare joke with you? If we start joking, soon there won’t be any respect for persons … left…”

  “Get out!!” barked the general, suddenly turning blue and shaking.

  “What, sir?” Cherviakov asked in a whisper, sinking with terror.

  “Get out!!” the general repeated, stamping his feet.

  Something in Cherviakov’s stomach snapped. Seeing nothing, hearing nothing, he backed his way to the door, went out, and plodded off… Reaching home mechanically, without taking off his uniform, he lay down on the sofa and … died.

  JULY 1883

  SMALL FRY

  Dear sir, father and benefactor!” the clerk Nevyrazimov1 wrote in the draft of a letter of congratulations. “May you spend this bright day,2 and many more to come, in good health and prosperity And may your fam …”

  The lamp, which was running out of kerosene, smoked and stank of burning. On the table, near Nevyrazimov’s writing hand, a stray cockroach was anxiously running about. Two rooms away from the duty-room, the hall porter Paramon was polishing his Sunday boots for the third time, and with such energy that his spitting and the noise of the shoe brush could be heard in all the rooms.

  “What else shall I write to the scoundrel?” Nevyrazimov reflected, raising his eyes to the sooty ceiling.

  On the ceiling he saw a dark circle—the shadow of the lampshade. Further down were dusty cornices; still further down—walls that had once been painted a bluish-brown color. And the duty-room looked like such a wasteland to him that he felt pity not only for himself but even for the cockroach …

  “I’ll finish my duty and leave, but he’ll spend his whole cockroach life on duty here,” he thought, stretching. “Agony! Shall I polish my boots, or what?”

  And, stretching once more, Nevyrazimov trudged lazily to the porter’s lodge. Paramon was no longer polishing his boots … Holding the brush in one hand and crossing himself with the other, he was standing by the open vent window,3 listening …

  “They’re ringing!” he whispered to Nevyrazimov, looking at him with fixed, wide-open eyes. “Already, sir!”

  Nevyrazimov put his ear to the vent and listened. Through the vent, together with the fresh spring air, the ringing of the Easter bells came bursting into the room. The booming of the bells mingled with the noise of carriages, and all that stood out from the chaos of sounds was a pert tenor ringing in the nearest church and someone’s loud, shrill laughter.

  “So many people!” sighed Nevyrazimov, looking down the street, where human shadows flitted one after another past the lighted lamps. “Everybody’s running to church … Our fellows must’ve had a drink by now and be hanging around the city. All that laughter and talking! I’m the only one so wretched as to have to sit here on such a day. And every year I have to do it!”

  “Who tells you to get yourself hired? You weren’t on duty today, it was Zastupov hired you to replace him. Whenever there’s a holiday, you get yourself hired … It’s greed!”

  “The devil it’s greed! What’s there to be greedy about: two roubles in cash, plus a necktie … It’s need, not greed! And, you know, it would be nice to go with them all to church now, and then break the fast4… Have a drink, a bite to eat, then hit the sack … You sit at the table, the kulich5 has been blessed, and there’s a hissing samovar, and some little object beside you … You drink a glass, chuck her under the chin, and it feels good … you feel you’re a human being … Ehh … life’s gone to hell! There’s some rogue driving by in a carriage, and you just sit here thinking your thoughts …”

  “To each his own, Ivan Danilych. God willing, you’ll get promoted, too, and drive around in carriages.”

  “Me? No, brother, that I won’t. I’ll never get beyond titular councillor,6 even if I burst… I’m uneducated.”

  “Our general hasn’t got any education either, and yet …”

  “Well, the general, before he amounted to all that, stole a hundred thousand. And his bearing is nothing like mine, brother … With my bearing you don’t get far! And my name is so scoundrelly: Nevyrazimov! In short, brother, the situation’s hopeless. Live like that if you want, and if you don’t—go hang yourself…”

  Nevyrazimov left the vent window and began pacing the rooms in anguish. The booming of the bells grew louder and louder … It was no longer necessary to stand by the window in order to hear it. And the clearer the sound of the ringing, the noisier the clatter of the carriages, the darker seemed the brownish walls and sooty cornices, and the worse the smoking of the lamp.

  “Maybe I’ll skip work?” thought Nevyrazimov.

  But escape did not promise anything worthwhile … After leaving the office and loitering around town, Nevyrazimov would go to his place, and his place was still grayer and worse than the duty-room … Suppose he spent that day nicely, in comfort, what then? The same gray walls, the same work for hire and letters of congratulations …

  Nevyrazimov stopped in the middle of the duty-room and pondered.

  The need for a new, better life wrung his heart with unbearable anguish. He passionately longed to find himself suddenly in the street, to merge with the living crowd, to take part in the festivity, in honor of which the bells were all booming and the carriages clattering. He wanted something he used to experience in childhood: the family circle, the festive faces of his relatives, the white table cloth, light, warmth … He remembered the carriage in which a lady had just passed by, the overcoat in which the office manager strutted about, the gold chain adorning the secretary’s chest … He remembered a warm bed, a Stanislas,7 new boots, a uniform with no holes in the elbows … remembered, because he did not have any of it …

  “Maybe try stealing?” he thought. “Stealing’s not hard, I suppose, but the problem is hiding it … They say people run away to America with what they steal, but, devil knows, where is this America? In order to steal, you also have to have education.”

  The ringing stopped. Only the distant noise of a carriage was heard, and Paramon’s coughing, and Nevyrazimov’s sadness and spite grew stronger and more unbearable. The office clock struck half-past midnight.

  “Maybe write a denunciation? Proshkin denounced somebody and started rising in the world …”

  Nevyrazimov sat down at his desk and pondered. The lamp, which had completely run out of kerosene, was smoking badly now and threatening to go out. The stray cockroach still scurried about the table and found no shelter …

  “I could denounce somebody, but how write it out! It has to be with all those equivocations and dodges, like Proshkin … Not me! I’ll write something and get in trouble for it myself. A complete nitwit, devil take me!”

  And Nevyrazimov, racking his brain for some way out of his hopeless situation, stared at the draft of the letter he had written. The letter was to a man he hated and feared with all his soul, and from whom he had been trying for ten years to obtain a transfer from a sixteen-rouble post to an eighteen-rouble …

  “Ah … running about here, you devil!” With the palm of his hand he spitefully swatted the cockroach, which had had the misfortune of catching his eye. “What vileness!”

  The cockroach fell on its back and desperately waved its legs … Nevyrazimov took it by one leg and threw it into the lamp. The lamp flared and crackled …

  And Nevyrazimov felt better.

  MARCH 1885

  THE HUNTSMAN

  Asultry and stifling day. Not a cloud in the sky … The sun-scorched grass looks bleak, hopeless: there may be rain, but it will never be green again … The forest stands silent, motionless, as if its treetops were looking off somewhere or waiting for something.

  A tall, narrow-shouldered man of about forty, in a red shirt, patched gentleman’s trousers, and big boots, lazily saunters along the edge of the clearing. He saunters down the road. To his right are green trees, to his left, all the way to th
e horizon, stretches a golden sea of ripe rye … His face is red and sweaty. A white cap with a straight jockey’s visor, apparently the gift of some generous squire, sits dashingly on his handsome blond head. Over his shoulder hangs a game bag with a crumpled black grouse in it. The man is carrying a cocked double-barreled shotgun and squinting his eyes at his old, skinny dog, who runs ahead, sniffing about in the bushes. It is quiet, not a sound anywhere … Everything alive is hiding from the heat.

  “Yegor Vlasych!” the hunter suddenly hears a soft voice.

  He gives a start and turns around, scowling. Beside him, as if sprung from the ground, stands a pale-faced woman of about thirty with a sickle in her hand. She tries to peer into his face and smiles shyly.

  “Ah, it’s you, Pelageya!” says the hunter, stopping and slowly un-cocking his gun. “Hm! … How did you turn up here?”

  “The women from our village are working here, so I’m here with them … Hired help, Yegor Vlasych.”

  “So-o …” Yegor Vlasych grunts and slowly goes on.

  Pelageya follows him. They go about twenty steps in silence.

  “I haven’t seen you for a long time, Yegor Vlasych …” says Pelageya, gazing tenderly at the hunter’s moving shoulders and shoulder blades. “You stopped by our cottage for a drink of water on Easter day, and we haven’t seen you since … You stopped for a minute on Easter day, and that God knows how … in a drunken state … You swore at me, beat me, and left … I’ve been waiting and waiting … I’ve looked my eyes out waiting for you … Eh, Yegor Vlasych, Yegor Vlasych! If only you’d come one little time!”