A Night in the Cemetery

PREFACE

While the plays and novellas by Anton Chekhov are known and loved the world over, it will come as a surprise to many to learn that he actually began his career as a crime and mystery writer. He had always been fond of the genre, and during his mid-twenties, he began writing suspense stories as a hobby while still in medical school at Moscow University. His first story, “What is Met in the Novels,” was published shortly thereafter in Dragonfly magazine. As befitting Chekhov’s exceptional style and sensibilities, the letter he received from the editors at Dragonfly on January 13, 1880, began his writing career in an equally absurdist way: “This isn’t bad at all. We will publish the material you sent us. Best blessings to you and your future work.” He continued to write suspense stories as a young doctor, eventually segueing into the more “literary” forms that cemented his place in literary history, returning to the crime and mystery genre at the end of his life.

From 1881 to 1883, Chekhov lived in Moscow and continued to study medicine at the university. He wrote many humorous crime stories for Dragonfly, Spectator, and Alarm-Clock magazines, including “The Swedish Match” and “Night of Horror.” His stories were very popular, and a close friend mentioned in his memoirs that since Chekhov was so prolific, his writing was the main source of income for his entire family. His attention to his formal studies, however, never wavered, and he continued to excel in the classroom and clinic. (M. Chelnov, “Chekhov and Medicine.” Russian News, 1906) If anything, Chekhov was able to use his medical knowledge to supplement his literary pursuits—his thorough knowledge of anatomy recurs again and again throughout this collection as various police officers and detectives sort their way through every kind of murderous mystery.

Chekhov graduated from medical school in 1884 and moved to the countryside outside Moscow as a practicing family doctor. In January 1885, he wrote to his brother, Mikhail Chekhov, betraying mixed feelings about his current profession. “Medicine is all right. I continue to treat sick patients…. I have a lot of friends, many of whom also seem to need medical care, and of course I treat half of them for free.” In another letter later that month, he writes: “Sick patients bore me to death. I had several hundred patients this summer, and made only one ruble.” Fortunately, life soon became more interesting out in the villages, as Chekhov began to accompany the local police on criminal investigations and perform autopsies for them. Many of stories from 1884 to 1886 feature a doctor or medic assisting the detective as the main protagonist, most notably in “Drama at the Hunt,” “The Dead Body,” and “Double Murder.”

In 1886, Dmitry Grigorovich, a prominent writer then in his mid-seventies and a close personal friend of the literary luminaries Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Nekrasov, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, wrote a letter to Chekhov, expressing admiration for his literary talents. Grigorovich passed Chekhov’s stories around to his various acquaintances, and Chekhov’s star continued to rise in the Russian literary world, with the St. Petersburg Daily, a prominent national paper, publishing several more of his stories.

As his reputation grew, friends and critics encouraged Chekhov to move away from these short crime and suspense pieces and focus on “big” literature. In a letter dated August 9, 1886, the journalist M. Remezov wrote: “I think the time has come for you to write serious, lengthy stories, and claim your place in literature.” Taking this advice to heart, Chekhov became more and more entrenched in literary society, establishing close friendships with Leo Tolstoy and composer Peter Tchaikovsky. He staged his first play, Ivanov, later that year. But he was not quite ready to give up the mystery genre entirely. He published three collections of his crime stories between 1886 and 1889, and wrote twenty more new stories. Most of these stories were scattered throughout a variety of periodicals (see Annotated Table of Contents), and until now have managed to escape the notice of contemporary translators and editors.

The year 1889 was a watershed in Chekhov’s life and career. Following the deaths of his father and his brother Nikolai, Chekhov traveled throughout Siberia, visiting Russian prisons and observing village life in the easternmost parts of the country. His travels took him through the Volga Valley, Perm, Tiumen, Tomsk, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, Khabarovsk, and Sakhalin. He kept an extensive diary, complete with detailed sketches and interviews of hundreds of officers and inmates from the notorious Sakhalin prisons. Upon his return, this diary was serialized in the newspaper The New Time under the title “From Siberia,” and was his darkest published piece to date. In a letter to his publisher, Anton Suvorin, he wrote: “I have been in northern Sakahlin for two months…. I don’t know what will come of this, but it will be big. I have enough material here for three books. Every day, I got up at 5 a.m. and went to bed late and stressed, as there are many things I have yet to do…. There is not a single prisoner out of the several thousand here, nor is there a settler in Sakhalin, with whom I haven’t spoken.” In December of 1890, following his return to Moscow, Chekhov wrote several more, and darker, crime stories, but these were the last of such stories for many years, as he turned his focus to theater and more literary short stories.

Needless to say, Chekhov’s plays, novellas and short fiction pieces were met with great success, and it is for these that he is best remembered. As he neared the end of his short life, Chekhov spent more and more time writing longer novellas. He married the actress Olga Knipper and won several prestigious literary prizes, and as he wrote his novellas, he came full circle and turned back to the mystery and suspense genre that had started his career. These crime and suspense stories are an important part of Chekhov’s literary journey, and even at this early stage in his literary career, his unique absurdist sensibilities, so beloved in his plays and novellas, are evident in raw form and are a compelling addition to the Chekhov canon.