Ward No. 6 and Other Stories, 1892-1895

WARD NO. 6 AND OTHER STORIES

ANTON PAVLOVICH CHEKHOV, the son of a former serf, was born in 1860 in Taganrog, a port on the Sea of Azov. He received a classical education at the Taganrog Gymnasium, then in 1879 he went to Moscow, where he entered the medical faculty of the university, graduating in 1884. During his university years he supported his family by contributing humorous stories and sketches to magazines. He published his first volume of stories, Motley Tales, in 1886 and a year later his second volume, In the Twilight, for which he was awarded the Pushkin Prize. His most famous stories were written after his return from the convict island of Sakhalin, which he visited in 1890. For five years he lived on his small country estate near Moscow, but when his health began to fail he moved to the Crimea. After 1900, the rest of his life was spent at Yalta, where he met Tolstoy and Gorky. He wrote very few stories during the last years of his life, devoting most of his time to a thorough revision of his stories, of which the first comprehensive edition was published in 1899–1901, and to the writing of his great plays. In 1901 Chekhov married Olga Knipper, an actress of the Moscow Art Theatre. He died of consumption in 1904.

RONALD WILKS studied Russian language and literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, after training as a Naval interpreter, and later Russian literature at London University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1972. Among his translations for Penguin Classics are My Childhood, My Apprenticeship and My Universities by Gorky, Diary of a Madman by Gogol, filmed for Irish Television, The Golovlyov Family by Saltykov-Shchedrin, How Much Land Does a Man Need? by Tolstoy, Tales of Belkin and Other Prose Writings by Pushkin, and five other volumes of stories by Chekhov: The Party and Other Stories, The Kiss and Other Stories, The Fiancée and Other Stories, The Duel and Other Stories and The Steppe and Other Stories. He has also translated The Little Demon by Sologub for Penguin.

J. DOUGLAS CLAYTON studied modern languages at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and then completed a Ph.D. in Russian at the University of Illinois. He is Professor of Russian at the University of Ottawa, where he has been since 1971. Professor Clayton’s publications on Russian literature include a study of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, a volume on Russian modernist theatre and collections of essays on Pushkin and Chekhov. His current research focuses on the cultural dialogue between Russia and France.

ANTON CHEKHOV Ward No. 6

and Other Stories,

1892–1895

Translated with Notes by RONALD WILKS

With an Introduction by J. DOUGLAS CLAYTON

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First published 2002

1

Translation, Chronology and Publishing History and Notes © Ronald Wilks, 2002

Introduction and Further Reading © J. Douglas Clayton, 2002

‘The Grasshopper’, ‘Ward No. 6’ and ‘Ariadna’ newly translated 2002.

‘The Black Monk’ first published 1984, pre-existing translation © Ronald Wilks, 1984.

‘Murder’ first published 1984, pre-existing translation © Ronald Wilks, 1984.

‘A Woman’s Kingdom’ first published 1985, pre-existing translation © Ronald Wilks, 1985.

‘The Two Volodyas’ first published 1984, pre-existing translation © Ronald Wilks, 1984.

‘Three Years’ first published 1986, pre-existing translation © Ronald Wilks, 1986.

‘The Student’ first published 1986, pre-existing translation © Ronald Wilks, 1986.

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Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject

to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

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EISBN: 978–0–141–90687–4

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

FURTHER READING

CHRONOLOGY

NOTE ON TEXT

PATRONYMICS

The Grasshopper

Ward No. 6

Ariadna

The Black Monk

Murder

A Woman’s Kingdom

The Two Volodyas

Three Years

The Student

PUBLISHING HISTORY AND NOTES

INTRODUCTION

The period 1892–5 was one of relative calm and considerable success in Chekhov’s life; the journey to Sakhalin was now receding into the past, although it served as the inspiration for several stories, as well as his account of the journey, published in Russian Thought in 1893–5. It was in 1892 that Chekhov purchased a modest but charming country estate at Melikhovo, outside Moscow. There he settled into the life of a country doctor and writer, with his parents Pavel Yegorovich and Yevgeniya Yakovlevna and his sister Masha. The role of doctor proved to be a demanding one, as the country was ravaged by the scourges of famine and cholera, and Chekhov was called upon to help in the struggle with these social disasters. His personal life was marked by numerous flirtations and affairs, especially fed by his acquaintance with the world of Muscovite actresses, but it was his sister Masha who was to prove the most stable female element in his life. Finally, Chekhov the doctor could not help but be aware of the signs of his intensifying tubercular infection; the disease had already carried away his brother Nikolay in 1889, and its continually more insistent presence lent urgency to all Chekhov’s plans, both literary and personal, however much he was to deny its importance in conversation. In Chekhov’s literary activity the years 1892–5 represent a period of transition. It was during this time that he spread his wings and, in response to readers’ demands, became sought after by different publishers. He ceased to publish in Suvorin’s New Times, although his personal relationship with that right-wing publisher was to continue, especially in the correspondence. In addition to his activity as a short story writer, Chekhov began to look to the world of the theatre for new heights to conquer, and also, perhaps not insignificantly given his new commitments, an additional source of revenue.

‘The Grasshopper’ (1892) was the source of considerable scandal at the time of its publication, since numerous readers of Chekhov’s acquaintance perceived in it a fictionalized account of the affair between S. P. Kuvshinnikova, a minor artist and doctor’s wife, and the writer’s friend, the painter Isaak Levitan. Chekhov himself was indignant that his readers should so trivialize the story, and, indeed, the point of it lies elsewhere. On the philosophical level the story is about the dichotomy between the aesthetic movement of fin de siècle culture and scientific positivism, symbolized respectively by the impressionist painter Ryabovsky and Olga Ivanovna’s husband, the doctor Dymov. Ryabovsky defends the notion that all is appearance and all that counts is the moment; it is typical of Chekhov’s ironic humour that Ryabovsky’s speechifying on the subject should simply be a device to get Olga into bed. Dymov, on the other hand, is wedded to scientific progress; his self-absorption is different from that of Ryabovsky, but no less complete. Ironically, Ryabovsky is always declaring that he is tired, when it is Dymov who is working late into the night; Ryabovsky declares to Olga that it would be good to die, while Dymov does precisely that.

In the story Chekhov draws an understated but devastating portrait of the lack of communication between husband and wife; the tragedy receives additional emphasis through the missed opportunity for a renewal of the relationship when Dymov defends his dissertation successfully. If the title of the story – a reference to the Krylov fable of the grasshopper who sings all summer and makes no provision for the winter – would seem to point the finger of indictment at Olga, the carelessness to the point of suicide with which Dymov carries out postmortems suggests that he is just as responsible as she is for the breakdown of the marriage and the tragic outcome. Both Dymov and Olga suffer from an infantile inadequacy in dealing with life. This is subtly suggested by his calling her ‘Mother’ (something that is totally bizarre in her case), while she transfers to him her dependence on her deceased father. Typically for many of Chekhov’s works, on the deepest level the story is about perception – the ironical gap between appearance and reality, the way we see things as we would like them to be, not as they are. This is expressed in the text by the frequent use of the verb ‘to seem’ and its synonyms, by the obsession with appearances common to Dymov, Ryabovsky and Olga Ivanovna, and by Olga Ivanovna’s talentless and inappropriate comparisons of her husband to different artistic subjects – she paints him as a Bedouin, for example. Typically also, the self-deception is followed by a moment of recognition, an epiphany, when the hero (in this case Olga) sees him or herself as others do.

As a writer Chekhov was acutely aware that he was following in the footsteps of the ‘greats’ of the previous generation – Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. In ‘Ward No. 6’ he is generally seen as overcoming Tolstoy’s credo of non-resistance to evil; however, as Andrew Durkin has shown, the tale can also be read as an ironic pastiche of Dostoyevsky. This accounts for the abandonment of his usual style, with its understatement and oblique use of detail, in favour of an overtly satirical stance, and adoption of Dostoyevsky’s practice of an intrusive narrator who addresses the reader directly. The depressing details of life in the mental ward of a provincial hospital – the guard Nikita and the grey fence topped with nails – can hardly be interpreted as anything other than a metaphor of the Russian state, to be read allegorically in the best ‘Aesopian’ tradition of Russian literature. Evidently, Chekhov’s observation of the prisons and prison hospitals on Sakhalin had also left a deep impression, as well as his reading of a report on Russian mental hospitals. The carefully sketched inmates of the ward – the Jew who has lost his business, the totally insensate peasant, the minor functionary of the postal service who is obsessed with receiving a medal for good service – all serve as devastating, sarcastic indictments of the system, which is maintained by the indiscriminate beatings meted out by Nikita.

However, the principal target of Chekhov’s satire is the Russian educated class, represented by the doctor Ragin and the paranoid inmate of noble origin, Ivan Dmitrich. A typical and telling detail in both their portraits is the passion for indiscriminate reading and their ability to indulge in endless and meaningless discussions about life. Ragin’s vapid chatter ultimately serves one purpose – to justify inaction and complacency. His readings of Marcus Aurelius reflect the pessimism and indifferentism that was fashionable at the end of the nineteenth century (and which greatly interested Chekhov himself), and continue on a different plane Ryabovsky’s self-serving arguments about the meaninglessness of reality. In Ivan Dmitrich’s tauntings of the doctor who denies the reality of pain it is difficult not to hear Chekhov’s exasperation with the inertia and complacency of many of his profession. The terrifying irony of the doctor’s fate – to become himself an inmate of the ward that it was his function to supervise – serves as an unspoken expression of Chekhov’s conclusion that if, despite everything, one does not do one’s best to improve the lot of one’s countrymen, one deserves to share their fate. It conveys too his anger and frustration at the self-serving attitudes of the Russian intellectual class.

Chekhov was acutely aware of the most fashionable preoccupations of the 1890s, for example, the notion of ‘degeneration’ or the excessive, morbid refinement of the nervous system, propagated by the appearance of Max Nordau’s book on the subject, Degeneration; the Nietzschean idea of the genius who would advance humanity ‘ten thousand years’; and the general interest in psychology, mysticism and subconscious states. All these are reflected in ‘The Black Monk’, written in Melikhovo in 1893. In it Kovrin wavers between two poles: extreme refinement and preoccupation with the mysteries of aesthetic pleasure – the path that defines him as a genius – or capitulation to the banality and meaninglessness of the ‘herd’ – the state to which he is reduced when he is being treated for his illness. The fantastic hallucinations that cause him to see the black monk may have one source in the stimulants – wine and tobacco – that Kovrin indulges in, and in the repeated motif of the violin music, but much more substantial is the fact, gradually conveyed to the reader, that he has tuberculosis. That is to say, the moments of intense bliss that he experiences are the result of the heightened nervous state caused by the disease, and may be seen as the precursors of death. Indeed it is in death that Kovrin attains the ultimate happiness, as suggested by the last words of the text – the ‘smile’ that appears on his face as he dies.

There is evidence from Chekhov’s contemporaries that he himself experienced hallucinations (because of his illness), so that this aspect of Kovrin has certain roots in his own biography, but at the same time in the image of the old man Pesotsky we see another aspect of Chekhov’s life at Melikhovo, namely his preoccupation with horticulture – planting trees and cultivating the garden. The descriptions of the orchards and garden have a carefully detailed poetry to them that affirms Chekhov’s attachment to and interest in the scientifically perceived realia of the world, and his desire to improve that world. While evoking echoes of the myth of Eden, these descriptions also correspond to Chekhov’s socially reformist vision of a regenerated landscape, to be expressed more fully in the image of Astrov in Uncle Vanya. Related to the descriptions of the estate is the issue of inheritance and preservation of a family enterprise. Pesotsky’s only child is Tanya, who, despite her interest, will scarcely be able to maintain things after the death of the old man. Pesotsky’s desire to see Kovrin as his son-in-law is therefore ironical, since it is motivated by respect for the ‘magister’ Kovrin and his scholarly career, and not by any common interest in horticulture. (Kovrin, despite his learning, has to have explained to him why the smoke protects the orchard from frost.) It is an unspoken element of the end of the story that the earthly Eden, on which Pesotsky has lavished so much care, is destined to be destroyed.

Chekhov had begun his career in the 1880s by writing short pieces, mostly humorous, for popular magazines and newspapers. ‘The Two Volodyas’ is a minor story that harks back to this earlier phase. As in ‘The Grasshopper’, the central figure is a young woman who has married foolishly and has a brief affair with another man. Here, too, the point of the story is the moment of recognition, when the young woman realizes her error and is left to face the truth – that she is empty-headed and mediocre, and now must face alone the truth of her own worthlessness. To intensify the effect, Chekhov introduces the figure of the young nun Olga. Olga too has undergone a change – a spiritual one that is signalled by the change in her appearance. Ironically, if in ‘The Grasshopper’ Olga is the name of the foolish heroine, here the latter is called ‘Sophia’ (meaning ‘wisdom’). Another common motif of Chekhov’s stories to be found here is the sound of the church bells, a reminder of the deep presence of at least the formal aspects of religion in Chekhov’s life.

Chekhov was born in 1860, on the eve of the reforms that liberated the Russian serfs, and his life covered a period of intense social and economic transition in the country. These included the construction of the railways, a frequent motif in his stories, industrialization, with all the social ills and factory accidents that accompanied it, and the urbanization of the peasant population, which had begun to drift to the towns and cities in search of employment. Overcrowded tenements, prostitution and disease were among the undesirable byproducts of this process. The process of industrialization had created another new phenomenon – people from humble backgrounds who had become rich and moved up the social hierarchy. Himself from a family of liberated serfs, Chekhov had gone through the agonizing process of learning to be at ease socially, and knew at first hand the difficulties caused by social displacement. Such is the plight of the heroine in the tale ‘A Woman’s Kingdom’.

In the figure of Anna Akimovna in ‘A Woman’s Kingdom’ Chekhov explores one of the undeveloped topics of ‘The Black Monk’, namely the situation of an only daughter who inherits the family enterprise. The father–daughter relationship, and the fate of the daughter of a deceased father, are key, related themes in Chekhov’s oeuvre. Anna, unlike Tanya, is in a more complex situation in that she has to deal with the additional problem of social displacement, on top of the questions of financial management and social responsibility that being the owner of a factory or other enterprise entails. It would be wrong to see Chekhov’s treatment of Anna’s inadequacy as an indictment of women, even though the last word of the original story is dury – ‘silly geese’ – for the word comes from her lips, and expresses her own realization that women are foolish to seek happiness in men. In any case many of Chekhov’s male characters are in their own way as inadequate and feckless. Chekhov’s concern is simply to uncover the psychological quandary that lies at the root of her actions or lack of them. Anna has had the ownership of the factory thrust upon her by fate, and finds herself living in a strange double world. On the one hand there is the traditional Russian world of the merchant class, with its traditional food and beverages – the ‘downstairs’ world of her aunts and maids and cooks and hangers-on; and then there is the westernized world of the lawyer Lysevich, with his reading of western literature (Maupassant!), and his partiality to wine and French food.

Chekhov depicts Anna Akimovna’s inner feelings with delicacy and understanding, especially the contradiction between her social displacement and her natural search for a mate. As often happens in Chekhov this, the central question of the text, is left unresolved. What kind of husband would be appropriate for her, considering the double world she lives in? Her attraction to Pimenov is natural, given her own background and the strong masculine qualities that he exudes; moreover, as a worker like her father, he would be able to provide the strength and direction the enterprise needs: stop the director from defrauding the company, send the blood-sucker Lysevich packing – in a word, save the factory. But then Anna tries to imagine Pimenov in her world, and immediately the attraction is lost. Moreover, the advice she gets from different quarters is contradictory: some recommend a husband from the nobility, others recommend a worker, while others recommend debauchery. Anna’s problem is that she has too much – too much money, too much femininity to lavish on a potential partner, too many choices.

Philanthropy is an important secondary theme in the story. As Anna recalls, the Russian merchants prefer to give their money to the indigent rather than their own workers. While this idea is not explained directly, the perspicacious reader might suspect that it is because they relish the servile expressions of gratitude that such charity evokes. To salve her own conscience, Anna decides to give the fifteen hundred roubles that have fallen into her lap to an out-of-work bureaucrat, Chalikov, chosen at random. The picture of misery evoked by Chekhov in his depiction of the Chalikov household is subtly nuanced and unsentimental, and is realized from the perspective of Anna herself. Anna is too honest with herself to accept the insincere expressions of gratitude and self-abasement that her generosity evokes. Disgusted by Chalikov’s self-abasement, she quickly renounces her idea of giving all the money to him: however much he receives, he will simply drink it. Chalikov wallows in self-pity and finds solace in vodka and in beating his wife and children. No charity will change that. Eventually the fifteen hundred roubles end up in the hands of the lawyer Lysevich, who will squander them. The Chalikov episode is suggestive of Chekhov’s view of the hopelessness of out-and-out charity, its inability to change circumstances. At the same time, the portrait of Chalikov’s shiftlessness and self-pity serves as a background for the contrasting image of Pimenov – the intelligent and industrious factory-worker, who has both her father’s and her picture on his table and who, for his pains, will receive nothing. Chekhov’s indictment of human attitudes is, as usual, understated and merciless.

Chekhov’s art at its best constitutes an intense condensation of motifs and themes into a poetic whole. ‘The Student’ is perhaps the finest example of this, and indeed this was the opinion of the author himself. Among the typically Chekhovian images that we find in this work are the hunter, the sound of the birds (i.e. the hunter’s prey…), the sudden springtime frost and the light of the fire. However, we find in it a new theme too, and one that was to light the way to certain key works of Russian literature in the century to come. It is the notion of the interconnectedness of history – the continuous chain of events that links the past to the present. The events from the Gospel that the theology student Ivan Velikopolsky recounts to the two widows acquire an unsuspected immediacy and relevance, to the point that the two widows, mother and daughter, react – the mother Vasilisa by smiling and bursting into tears, and the daughter by turning red. The English reader is tempted to compare the situation to Eliot’s ‘even now, in sordid particulars, / The eternal design may appear’. More relevant for Russian literature is the immediacy with which the retelling of the Gospel speaks to a suffering people; this was to become the leitmotif of two central works of twentieth-century Russian literature, Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita and Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago.

As in other works we have discussed, in this story too there is an epiphany. Velikopolsky has left his father, a parish priest, coughing at home (evidently suffering from tuberculosis); his barefoot mother is cleaning the samovar, while their twenty-two-year-old son goes shooting, hardly the most sacred Good Friday activity for a theology student from a religious family. Velikopolsky is hungry, since his family is observing the fast; his keenly felt hunger (golod) echoes the sudden drop in temperature (kholod). The student is reminded of two constants in the life of the Russian people. At the same time the two widows he encounters have just eaten and are warm because of the fire, yet there is a sense that their religious sentiments are more deeply and directly felt than his, even if they observe the outward trappings of religion less. It is through their reaction to his recounting the story from the Gospel that the student is suddenly overtaken by an intense feeling of joy: ‘… and an inexpressibly sweet anticipation of happiness, of a mysterious unfamiliar happiness, gradually took possession of him. And life seemed entrancing, wonderful and endowed with sublime meaning’. Much of Chekhov’s search seems to be precisely for a definition of happiness; here, for a moment, it is captured – and indeed one gets the strong conviction from Chekhov’s works that for him happiness can only be momentary. As a fin de siècle writer Chekhov echoes the impressionist notion that one can only capture the moment. To this, however, the story suggests two corollaries: first, that such joy is a chance occurrence, and second, that although it is momentary, it is linked to other such moments in a chain of recurrences. This is an important corrective to Ryabovsky’s flashy ‘impressionist’ philosophy of the unrepeatable moment: for Velikopolsky the present joy holds within it the promise of joy to come.

There is, moreover, another, concealed message to be drawn from the story, namely the importance of literature. The student recounts the events from the Gospel: the widows are moved precisely by his words. That is to say, the role of Velikopolsky is analogous to that of a writer, and the story therefore has a metapoetic aspect to it. In other words, it constitutes among other things a reflection on the importance and meaning of art. One may compare Velikopolsky’s function to that of the Russian icon-painter. The icon-painter’s role is to reproduce through a miracle, an act of grace, the presence of the holy person in material form. It matters not that the end result resembles closely other icons – in fact, it is important that it should resemble them, should be the latest in a chain of miracles, a chain of moments of grace extending back in time. This is the realization that Velikopolsky has of the interconnectedness of history, of touching the two ends of a chain. Now more than ever, from the perspective of over a hundred years of bloodshed and tumult in Russia, we can see the justice of the idea that literature can provide consolation and catharsis to a suffering people through a retelling of age-old truths – the verbal equivalent of the consolation that the Russian people through history have derived from the icon.

Chekhov attempted several times to write a novel; the story ‘Three Years’ resulted from one of these attempts. The result is far from the novel form; rather it is an extended short story or ‘tale’. Chekhov’s art had moved far from the classical architecture of the Russian realist novel: its carefully developed beginning, evolution and lengthy epilogue contrasted radically with his brevity, truncated structures and open ending (for example, the astonishing last sentence of the tale). His notion of plot was different, since for him what was important was the internal evolution of feelings, not any overt set of events, and his elliptical form focused, not on detail, as the art of, say, Tolstoy had done, but on the detail – a crucial difference. That is to say, by a process of elimination, the details that remain acquire a force they do not have in the copious descriptions typical of the realist novel. As an example, one may point to the umbrella in this story that Julia leaves at Laptev’s sister’s and which serves as the crucial element that leads to his proposal of marriage. It is of deep significance that, at the end of the tale, Julia, dressed elegantly in fashionable clothes, is holding the old umbrella, which Laptev has recently produced from the chest of drawers where he had been keeping it, and given to her. Indeed, after the mention of this detail, the declaration of love that she makes to him is almost unnecessary.

The process of writing led to a concentration on fewer characters, rather than the development of multiple plot lines that would have been necessary for a novel. Nevertheless, in this case the extended form, and especially the longer chronological extent marked by the title of the work (the phrase ‘three years’ recurs several times in the text itself), enables Chekhov to develop his themes with greater effect. The central theme is, of course, Laptev and Julia’s marriage; how it begins without love on her part, and how it is only after she has grown and changed that she begins to love him and makes her declaration. Chekhov very carefully nuances the effect by describing Laptev’s inner feelings at this declaration (he is hungry and, we infer, unaffected), and Yartsev’s apparent infatuation with Julia. The message is very Chekhovian – we should not rely on marriage as a source for happiness; Laptev recalls that the only time he had been happy was when he spent the night under Julia’s umbrella. The marriage theme is developed in other parallel lines: Polina and Yartsev’s relationship, for example, a relationship that, as Yartsev stresses, has nothing to do with love (an affirmation we might do well to question); and the outrageous behaviour of Panaurov towards women.

The growing maturity of Julia is reflected in her relationship with her father-in-law. In this figure we see the other profoundly Chekhovian theme, a theme that is related to that of marriage, namely that of fatherhood. Laptev recalls with bitterness his upbringing, especially the beatings he received from his dictatorial father (in a passage that surely has autobiographical overtones). Like Anna Akimovna in ‘A Woman’s Kingdom’, Laptev and his brother Fyodor have made the wrenching social transition from being the grandchildren of a serf to inheriting a family business worth millions. Their father, although wealthy, had retained the patriarchal ways and the dictatorial manners of a peasant family head. The situation of Lida and Sasha, Laptev’s nieces, and the loss of their father Panaurov to another woman also speak of the theme of fatherhood (and its concomitant, abandonment or orphanhood). It is predictable that Panaurov would eventually abandon his second wife, and also that he would even try to flirt with Julia and encourage her to acquire a lover. Panaurov’s attitude to both marriage and fatherhood is totally cynical, and his shameless sponging off his brother-in-law Laptev simply confirms his spinelessness. At the end Laptev, although he and Julia have lost their own child, has become a father – to his sister’s children, Lida and Sasha. This is part of his becoming a man, as is replacing his autocratic father at the head of the family business and taking over the reins.

As we have come to expect in Chekhov’s work, the secondary characters are drawn with carefully chosen, often devastating detail that ‘rubs the reader’s nose’ in reality. For example, there is the carefully noted fact that Panaurov’s second wife has the beginnings of a moustache. We learn that Laptev’s brother Fyodor is seriously ill, and that his flowery manner of speech and flippant manner hide a deep unhappiness; tellingly, it is Julia who consoles him when he breaks down. Yartsev is a typical member of the Russian intelligentsia; Chekhov first mocks his literary strivings – again the detail that he signs his articles with a single letter ‘Ya’ (‘I’) reads as ironical, a literary cliché – so that when we learn that his belief in science is matched by his optimism that ‘we’re on the threshold of some fantastic triumph’ we know to take it with a huge pinch of salt. Yartsev’s boosterism contrasts totally with Laptev’s feelings of resignation: ‘I feel as if our life’s over and that some dull half-life is just beginning.’ Such details might be multiplied many times over: what is important is that the reader becomes attuned to Chekhov’s carefully modulated irony.

However understated, and however much the reader has to look between the lines to discover it, Chekhov’s ultimate concern is spiritual. The crisis of faith that he documents may legitimately be seen as the theme of nineteenth-century Russian literature, as it grapples with the imported values of western culture and politics, and as the industrialization and westernization of the country led to a questioning and rejection of traditional religious values. It is precisely this crisis that is central to the story ‘Murder’. Here we see the journey of the murderer Yakov from a stifling and stultifying preoccupation with the form of religion that leads to the murder of his cousin, to a new faith – religion’s true spiritual content. Buried in the text are clues pointing back to two other key texts in Russian literature – Dostoyevsky’s The Devils (in Russian Besy) and Pushkin’s poem of the same name that Dostoyevsky used as an epigraph to his own work. Chekhov could rely on his readers’ knowledge of the previous works to evoke certain echoes. Essentially, Pushkin’s poem describes the situation of a young man who is lost in a snowstorm. Enough clues are built into the description of Matvey’s return to the inn to create a resonance between the poem and the story; this is then maintained by the repeated use of the word besy. In using Pushkin’s poem as an epigraph to his novel, Dostoyevsky had seized upon the latent potential of the poem to serve as a metaphor for the spiritual crisis of the young Russian lost in a world without faith, and document its consequences in terms of Stavrogin’s sexual debauchery and Pyotr Verkhovensky’s disdain for human life. The howling of the storm, that Pushkin had likened to the wailing of demons or devils, thus assumes an enormous symbolic significance.

At the same time, there are crucial differences between Chekhov’s story and the two preceding texts. In part, they are class differences. Chekhov describes, not the milieu of a young Russian officer who has hired a coach, nor that of the provincial aristocracy we find in Dostoyevsky’s story, but rather the world of the impoverished innkeeper who has been displaced by the advent of the railway, his cousin, the victim of an industrial accident, and the owner of a railway buffet who has fallen on hard times. There is a gritty reality to Chekhov’s descriptions of a milieu he knew only too well. Moreover, the last part of the story takes place on Sakhalin Island and is the direct result of his observations of the life of the prisoners there. Chekhov simply describes this reality – unsentimentally, with an eye to the telling detail, without any attempt to sugar the pill and gloss over his characters’ faults. Ironically, in the slight format of a short story, he achieves something that eluded Dostoyevsky in vastly organized novel after novel (e.g. Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment) – namely a convincing description of the spiritual renewal of one man. One might call this the holy grail of nineteenth-century Russian literature.

The topography of Chekhov’s work is largely located in two areas of Russia. The first of these is the south of Russia, initially the southern steppe around the town of Taganrog, where he was born and grew up; typical steppe landscapes with their two dominant features – the coal mine and the cherry orchard – are found in numerous works, not only of his early period. In the last years of his life the advanced state of his tuberculosis forced him to return south to seek a milder climate, this time in Yalta on the Crimean peninsula, but even before that Crimean landscapes began to occur in his work (e.g. in the final episode of ‘The Black Monk’). The second region of Russia that figures largely in his work is Moscow, where he moved in 1879. His Muscovite experiences give rise to the many sketches of the country estates around that city and their denizens, the impoverished gentry, and also, of course, to the different areas in the city itself, as in ‘Three Years’. Chekhov did not speak any foreign language fluently, and only went abroad to Western Europe (Italy and France) for the first time in early 1891, so that foreign scenes are almost totally absent from his work. The story ‘Ariadna’ is an exception; evidently the scenes that take place in Italy and the Adriatic coast were based on experiences gained during his 1891 trip. Shamokhin’s comments on the Adriatic resorts no doubt reflect Chekhov’s own sentiments. The Russian film director Nikita Mikhalkov used material from ‘Ariadna’ for his film Dark Eyes (Ochi chornye), starring Marcello Mastroianni.

The story that the hero Shamokhin tells seems very much to conform to the view of women and sex reflected in Chekhov’s work in general. Chekhov once remarked of sex that it was either the vestige of something that was wonderful in the past, or else the beginning of something that might be wonderful one day. Shamokhin’s idealistic view of love comes up against several snags. First, there is the fact that Ariadna, far from appreciating his idealistic love, instead falls for the sheer animal sexuality of Lubkov. Lubkov’s technique might be described as ‘full frontal attack’, with no consideration of any abstraction such as love. His cynicism about women can be compared to that of Panaurov in ‘Three Years’ or Lysevich in ‘A Woman’s Kingdom’. Both Lubkov and Panaurov leave a trail of abandoned women and children behind them. It must be said, on the other hand, that the cold and narcissistic Ariadna, however beautiful she might be, hardly deserves the adulation that she harvests. Her seduction and abandonment is an appropriate response to her lack of redeeming qualities. She will presumably continue to drift from one dependent relationship to another. Shamokhin has chosen as an object for his infatuation a woman who conforms to and confirms his idea of women’s worthlessness.

Lubkov’s and Panaurov’s parasitical relationships to their friends are totally of a piece with their cynical approach to women. The reader cannot help but be astonished by the way in which such individuals take advantage of their friends’ unstinting and uncomplaining generosity with money (it being the Russian habit unashamedly to ask for a loan that clearly cannot be repaid). We read wide-eyed how Shamokhin again and again lends Lubkov money that he will clearly never see again. Shamokhin seems totally without willpower – to say no to either Ariadna or Lubkov, despite his critical attitude to both and disgust at their lifestyle, a lifestyle that he ends up sharing. His total disdain for money and willingness to incur endless debts to support first his wastrel friend and then Ariadna remind us that Russian attitudes to money and financial matters have historically been very different from those found in the West. The story that Shamokhin recounts of his relationship to Ariadna and Lubkov is subtly ironized by the device of the author/narrator to whom he tells his story and who finally is totally bored by it and falls asleep. We realize that Shamokhin’s ultimate need is to tell in as much embarrassing detail as he can the story of his own abasement.

Chekhov’s art is delicately poised between the achievements of nineteenth-century Russian realism and the abstraction and experimentation of the twentieth century. In his work we see a movement away from the large form, towards an increasingly poetic orientation towards the word and organization of the text. Such artistic movements as impressionism and the decorativeness of art nouveau find echoes in different stories. His world is not one in which there are easily discovered universal truths. Each grain of insight, each transcendental moment has to be earned at great cost, and the author unceasingly and mercilessly reminds us of its ephemeral nature. At the end of the day, there is a hard-hearted kindness in his work that refuses easy answers and comforting half-truths. To read his works with the insight they demand, and to learn to see the world with the courage with which he depicts it, is one of the most rewarding journeys literature has to offer.

FURTHER READING

Gordon McVay (tr.), Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters (London: Folio Society, 1994), the best selection and translation of letters.

Brian Reeves (tr.), The Island of Sakhalin (Cambridge: Ian Faulkner, 1993).

SECONDARY LITERATURE: GENERAL BOOKS

Toby W. Clyman, A Chekhov Companion (Westport/London: Greenwood Press, 1985), a very valuable if expensive collection of essays, with extensive bibliography.

P. Debreczeny and T. Eekman (eds), Chekhov’s Art of Writing: A Collection of Critical Essays (Columbus: Slavica, 1977).

Thomas Eekman (ed.), Critical Essays on Anton Chekhov (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989), 208 pp.

W. Gerhardie, Anton Chekhov: A Critical Study (London: Macdonald, 1974), ‘Bloomsbury’ Chekhov, but well-informed.

R. L. Jackson, Chekhov: A Collection of Essays: 20th-Century Views (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1967).

R. L. Jackson (ed.), Reading Chekhov’s Text (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993).

S. Koteliansky (tr., ed.), Anton Chekhov: Literary and Theatrical Reminiscences (New York: Blom, 1968).

Virginia Llewellyn-Smith, Chekhov and the Lady with the Little Dog (London: Oxford University Press, 1973).

V. S. Pritchett, Chekhov. A Spirit Set Free (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1988).

Donald Rayfield, Anton Chekhov: A Life (London: HarperCollins, 1997).

T. Winner, Chekhov and his Prose (New York: Holt, 1966).

WORKS ON INDIVIDUAL STORIES IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER

‘The Black Monk’

Paul Debreczeny, ‘“The Black Monk”: Chekhov’s Version of Symbolism’, in Robert Louis Jackson (ed.), Reading Chekhov’s Text (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993), pp. 179–88.

‘The Grasshopper’

George Pahomov, ‘Čexov’s “The Grasshopper”: A Secular Saint’s Life’, Slavic and East European Journal 37:1 (Spring 1993), pp. 33–45.

‘The Student’

Robert Louis Jackson, ‘Chekhov’s “The Student”’, in Robert Louis Jackson (ed.), Reading Chekhov’s Text (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993), pp. 127–33.

‘Ward No. 6’

Andrew R. Durkin, ‘Chekhov’s Response to Dostoevskii: The Case of “Ward Six” ’, Slavic Review 40:1 (1981), pp. 49–59.

‘A Woman’s Kingdom’

Carol A. Flath, ‘Delineating the Territory of Cechov’s “A Woman’s Kingdom” ’, Russian Literature 44:4 (1998), pp. 389–408.

Robert Louis Jackson, ‘Chekhov’s “A Woman’s Kingdom”: A Drama of Character and Fate’, in Thomas A. Eekman (ed.), Critical Essays on Anton Chekhov (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989), pp. 91–102.

CHRONOLOGY

1836 Gogol’s The Government Inspector

1852 Turgenev’s Sketches from a Hunter’s Album

1860 Dostoyevsky’s Notes From the House of the Dead (1860–61)

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov born on 17 January at Taganrog, a port on the Sea of Azov, the third son of Pavel Yegorovich Chekhov, a grocer, and Yevgeniya Yakovlevna, née Morozova

1861 Emancipation of the serfs by Alexander II. Formation of revolutionary Land and Liberty Movement

1862 Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons

1863–4 Polish revolt. Commencement of intensive industrialization; spread of the railways; banks established; factories built. Elective District Councils (zemstvos) set up; judicial reform Tolstoy’s The Cossacks (1863)

1865 Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1864) by Leskov, a writer much admired by Chekhov

1866 Attempted assassination of Alexander II by Karakozov Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment

1867 Emile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin

1868 Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot

1868 Chekhov begins to attend Taganrog Gymnasium after wasted year at a Greek school

1869 Tolstoy’s War and Peace

1870 Municipal government reform

1870–71 Franco-Prussian War

1873 Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1873–7)

Chekhov sees local productions of Hamlet and Gogol’s The Government Inspector

1875 Chekhov writes and produces humorous magazine for his brothers in Moscow, The Stammerer, containing sketches of life in Taganrog

1876 Chekhov’s father declared bankrupt and flees to Moscow, followed by family except Chekhov, who is left in Taganrog to complete schooling. Reads Buckle, Hugo and Schopenhauer

1877–8 War with Turkey

1877 Chekhov’s first visit to Moscow; his family living in great hardship

1878 Chekhov writes dramatic juvenilia: full-length drama Father-lessness (MS destroyed), comedy Diamond Cut Diamond and vaudeville Why Hens Cluck (none published)

1879 Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1879–80) Tolstoy’s Confession (1879–82)

Chekhov matriculates from Gymnasium with good grades. Wins scholarship to Moscow University to study medicine Makes regular contributions to humorous magazine Alarm Clock

1880 General Loris-Melikov organizes struggle against terrorism Guy de Maupassant’s Boule de Suif

Chekhov introduced by artist brother Nikolay to landscape painter Levitan with whom has lifelong friendship

First short story, ‘A Letter from the Don Landowner Vladimirovich N to His Learned Neighbour’, published in humorous magazine Dragonfly. More stories published in Dragonfly under pseudonyms, chiefly Antosha Chekhonte.

1881 Assassination of Alexander II; reactionary, stifling regime of Alexander III begins

Sarah Bernhardt visits Moscow (Chekhov calls her acting ‘superficial’)

Chekhov continues to write very large numbers of humorous sketches for weekly magazines (until 1883). Becomes regular contributor to Nikolay Leykin’s Fragments, a St Petersburg weekly humorous magazine. Writes (1881–2) play now usually known as Platonov (discovered 1923), rejected by Maly Theatre; tries to destroy manuscript

1882 Student riots at St Petersburg and Kazan universities. More discrimination against Jews

Chekhov is able to support the family with scholarship money and earnings from contributions to humorous weeklies

1883 Tolstoy’s What I Believe

Chekhov gains practical experience at Chikino Rural Hospital

1884 Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck. J.-K. Huysmans’ À Rebours Chekhov graduates and becomes practising physician at Chikino. First signs of his tuberculosis in December

Six stories about the theatre published as Fairy-Tales of Melpomene. His crime novel, The Shooting Party, serialized in Daily News

1885–6 Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilich (1886) On first visit to St Petersburg, Chekhov begins friendship with very influential Aleksey Suvorin (1834–1912), editor of the highly regarded daily newspaper New Times. Chekhov has love affairs with Dunya Efros and Natalya Golden (later his sister-in-law). His TB is now unmistakable

Publishes more than 100 short stories. ‘The Requiem’ is the first story to appear under own name and his first in New Times (February 1886). First collection, Motley Tales

1887 Five students hanged for attempted assassination of Tsar; one is Lenin’s brother

Tolstoy’s drama Power of Darkness (first performed in Paris), for which he was called nihilist and blasphemer by Alexander III

Chekhov elected member of Literary Fund. Makes trip to Taganrog and Don steppes

Second book of collected short stories In the Twilight. Ivanov produced – a disaster

1888 Chekhov meets Stanislavsky. Attends many performances at Maly and Korsh theatres and becomes widely acquainted with actors, stage managers, etc. Meets Tchaikovsky

Completes ‘The Steppe’, which marks his ‘entry’ into serious literature. Wins Pushkin Prize for ‘the best literary production distinguished by high artistic value’ for In the Twilight, presented by literary division of Academy of Sciences. His one-act farces The Bear (highly praised by Tolstoy) and The Proposal extremely successful. Begins work on The Wood Demon (later Uncle Vanya). Radically revises Ivanov for St Petersburg performance

1889 Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata (at first highly praised by Chekhov)

Chekhov meets Lidiya Avilova, who later claims love affair with him. Tolstoy begins to take an interest in Chekhov, who is elected to Society of Lovers of Russian Literature

‘A Dreary Story’. The Wood Demon a resounding failure

1890 World weary, Chekhov travels across Siberia by carriage and river boat to Sakhalin to investigate conditions at the penal colony (recorded in The Island of Sakhalin). After seven months returns to Moscow (via Hong Kong, Singapore and Ceylon (Sri Lanka))

Collection Gloomy People (dedicated to Tchaikovsky). Only two stories published – ‘Gusev’ and ‘Thieves’. Immense amount of preparatory reading for The Island of Sakhalin

1891 Severe famine in Volga basin (Chekhov organizes relief) Chekhov undertakes six-week tour of Western Europe with Suvorin. Intense affair with Lika Mizinova

Works on The Island of Sakhalin. ‘The Duel’ published serially. Works on ‘The Grasshopper’

1892 Chekhov buys small estate at Melikhovo, near Moscow; parents and sister live there with him. Gives free medical aid to peasants. Re-reads Turgenev; regards him as inferior to Tolstoy and very critical of his heroines

‘Ward No. 6’ and ‘An Anonymous Story’

1893 The Island of Sakhalin completed and published serially

1894 Death of Alexander III; accession of Nicholas II; 1,000 trampled to death at Khodynka Field during coronation celebrations. Strikes in St Petersburg

Chekhov makes another trip to Western Europe

‘The Student’, ‘Teacher of Literature’, ‘At a Country House’ and ‘The Black Monk’

1895 ‘Three Years’. Writes ‘Ariadna’, ‘Murder’ and ‘Anna Round the Neck’. First draft of The Seagull

1896 Chekhov agitates personally for projects in rural education and transport; helps in building of village school at Talezh; makes large donation of books to Taganrog Public Library ‘My Life’ published in instalments. The Seagull meets with hostile reception at Aleksandrinsky Theatre

1897 Chekhov works for national census; builds second rural school. Crisis in health with lung haemorrhage; convalesces in Nice ‘Peasants’ is strongly attacked by reactionary critics and mutilated by censors. Publishes Uncle Vanya, but refuses to allow performance (until 1899)

1898 Formation of Social Democrat Party. Dreyfus affair Stanislavsky founds Moscow Art Theatre with Nemirovich-Danchenko

Chekhov very indignant over Dreyfus affair and supports Zola; conflict with anti-Semitic Suvorin over this. His father dies. Moves to Yalta, where he buys land. Friendly with Gorky and Bunin (both of whom left interesting memoirs of Chekhov). Attracted to Olga Knipper at Moscow Art Theatre rehearsal of The Seagull, but leaves almost immediately for Yalta. Correspondence with Gorky

Trilogy ‘Man in a Case’, ‘Gooseberries’ and ‘About Love’. ‘Ionych’. The Seagull has first performance at Moscow Art Theatre and Chekhov is established as a playwright

1899 Widespread student riots

Tolstoy’s Resurrection serialized

Chekhov has rift with Suvorin over student riots. Olga Knipper visits Melikhovo. He sells Melikhovo in June and moves with mother and sister to Yalta. Awarded Order of St Stanislav for educational work

‘Darling’, ‘New Country Villa’ and ‘On Official Duty’. Signs highly unfavourable contract with A. F. Marks for complete edition of his works. Taxing and time-consuming work of compiling first two volumes. Moderate success of Uncle Vanya at Moscow Art Theatre. Publishes one of finest stories, ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’. Completes ‘In the Ravine’. Begins serious work on Three Sisters; goes to Nice to revise last two acts

1900 Chekhov settles in the house built by him in Yalta. Actors from the Moscow Art Theatre visit Sevastopol and Yalta at his request. Low opinion of Ibsen

Sees Uncle Vanya for first time

1901 Formation of Socialist Revolutionary Party. Tolstoy excommunicated by Russian Orthodox Church

Chekhov marries Olga Knipper

Première of Three Sisters at Moscow Art Theatre, with Olga Knipper as Masha. Works on ‘The Bishop’

1902 Sipyagin, Minister of Interior, assassinated. Gorky excluded from Academy of Sciences by Nicholas II

Gorky’s The Lower Depths produced at Moscow Art Theatre Chekhov resigns from Academy of Sciences together with Korolenko in protest at exclusion of Gorky. Awarded Griboyedov Prize by Society of Dramatic Writers and Opera Composers for Three Sisters

Completes ‘The Bishop’. Begins ‘The Bride’, his last story. Begins The Cherry Orchard

1903 Completion of Trans-Siberian Railway. Massacre of Jews at Kishinev pogrom

Chekhov elected provisional president of Society of Lovers of Russian Literature

Completes ‘The Bride’ and the first draft of The Cherry Orchard. Arrives in Moscow for Art Theatre rehearsal of The Cherry Orchard; strong disagreement with Stanislavsky over its interpretation

1904 Assassination of Pleve, Minister of Interior, by Socialist revolutionaries. War with Japan

Chekhov dies of TB on 15 July at Badenweiler in the Black Forest (Germany)

Première of The Cherry Orchard at Moscow Art Theatre

NOTE ON TEXT

Chekhov’s stories (like most of the literature of the time) were not first published as separate books, but appeared in magazines or newspapers such as New Times, or in the thick journals, chiefly Russian Thought. Some of the stories were subsequently published in separate selections, such as Tales and Stories (1894).

In 1899 Chekhov made over the copyright of all his work (with the exception of the plays) to the publisher A. F. Marks in return for 75,000 roubles. Although the terms seemed favourable at the time, many of Chekhov’s friends felt he had been highly imprudent in signing the contract (Gorky unsuccessfully tried to get him to break the contract) as they considered the terms grossly inadequate. In addition the need to collate all the stories that had so far appeared in magazines and newspapers, together with meticulous editing and improving the material, taxed Chekhov sorely and was very time-consuming. The Marks edition was published in 1899–1901, in ten volumes, and reprinted in 1903. However, the main drawback of this edition was that the stories were not printed chronologically. The first scholarly edition, with full notes and commentary, was published in Moscow, 1944–51.

Between 1973 and 1983, the definitive thirty-volume edition, Polnoye Sobraniye Sochineniy i Pisem (Complete Collected Works and Letters) was published in Moscow, with extensive commentaries by leading Soviet Chekhov scholars. It is on this edition that these translations are based.

PATRONYMICS

Russian names consist of first name, patronymic and surname, the patronymic or middle name being derived from the father’s first name. For example, Chekhov’s middle name, Pavlovich, derives from his father’s first name, Pavel. In formal speech first name and patronymic are usual: a servant addressing his master would use both first name and patronymic. But a master would use only a first name when talking to a servant. In ‘Murder’ (p. 171), reference is made to the use of name and patronymic.

However, Chekhov does now and then use the direct equivalent of the English ‘Mr’ and ‘Mrs’, as in ‘A Woman’s Kingdom’.