Little Apples

Translator’s Note

Anton Chekhov’s short and remarkably productive writing career spanned the last two decades of the nineteenth century. He was forty-four years old when he died in 1904, a man about to reach his prime (though the most lasting image of him has been a photograph from his final years: frail, wizened, and with a walking stick, an elder of Russian literature). From his two decades as a writer, Chekhov’s greatest output was when he was in his twenties. It is in this period, the 1880s, that he published some of his best-known comic and tragicomic stories—“Oysters,” “The Swedish Match,” “The Kiss,” “The Steppe”—and his first play, Ivanov.

One of the pleasures of translating the Chekhov stories in this edition, works from the first half of his literary career that are lesser-known and even unknown in the English-reading world, is his ever-changing range of styles and story formats, his innovative and unexpected approach. The reader is struck by the creative energy and by Chekhov’s take on the absurd: one has to remind oneself that these pieces were written in the 1880s, some thirty years before Futurism, Dada, and other avant-garde writing. Chekhov’s comic and tragic timing is masterful, whatever the story’s format, whether in the guise of a traditional narrative or the zany forms of a medical prescription, or an administrative directive from the Russian railroads stating that horses, donkeys, and oxen in the service of the railroads are permitted to travel free of charge in second-class compartments. Chekhov’s words are arranged for the best theatrical effect. This mastery of timing is part of the dramatic skill that comes to the fore in his plays.

Chekhov has been an elusive author: for over a century people have been trying define what is “Chekhovian.” Nabokov’s unkind (or perhaps humorous) definition of the word is “dragging, hopelessly complicated.” Other definitions have been “bleakly Russian,” and “evocative of a mood of introspection and frustration.” The aim of this collection is to widen the horizons of what “Chekhovian” means.

I am grateful to the National Endowment of the Arts, the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and the Ellen Maria Gorrissen Berlin Prize of the American Academy of Berlin for their generous support of this project. I am also thankful to Burton Pike for his scholarly advice and encouragement.