Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov

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.