It is in several of the most ambitious stories of 1886 and 1887 that the lyrical qualities of The Huntsman are perpetuated. Atmosphere and the spirit of place are evoked particularly hauntingly in Easter Night (1886), and in Verochka, The Reed-Pipe and The Kiss (1887). Themes begin to emerge that are personal to Chekhov. There is the concern with unfulfilled lives, as in The Witch (1886), with its claustrophobic sense of thwarted emotional and sexual potency. In Dreams (1886) there is the pathetic discrepancy between what men dream of and aspire to, and what life allows them to achieve. In The Reed-Pipe (1887) a theme is touched on that we recognise later in Dr Astrov's maps in Uncle Vanya — the degeneration of the natural environment. Then there is the mysterious way in which life 'feels' so different at different times. Which is the 'truer' experience: the exultation of the believers on Easter Night or the grey dawn that follows, the exultation that Ryabovich feels after he receives the accidental kiss, or the sense of futility so powerfully conveyed in the story's closing passages?
Chekhov's early stories have long held a secure place in the hearts of Russian readers. His Motley Tales of May 1886 ran through fourteen editions in as many years, and today any three-volume Russian selection ofhis works is bound to devote at least one volume to the pre-1888 period. 'Antosha Chekhonte', the pseudonym by which the young Chekhov has come to be known, is a far more familiar and accessible figure to most Russians than Anton Chekhov the playwright. These well-read and well-loved early works have led an irrepressible life of their own, untouched by the earnest censure of Chekhov's Populist contemporaries, who accused him of wasting his talent and being unprincipled because they could not find an ideolog- ical message in his writing; or by the equally earnest praise of more recent criticswho have no difficulty at all in seeing him as the scourge of Russia's pre-Revolutionary regime. The Chekhov who wrote The Complaints Book, Romance for Double-Bass, The Orator and Notes from the Journal of a Quick-Tempered Man remains an 'unprincipled' comic artist; the Chekhov who wrote Fat and Thin, The Chameleon and Sergeant Prishibeyev is a deeply subversive writer for all seasons and societies.
Translations of Chekhov into English have been numerous but, as
Ronald Hingley points out, 'in general, highly unsystematic and unscholarly'. With the completion in 1980 of the nine-volume Oxford Chekhov, Hingley has himself solved the major part of this problem: Vols. 1-3 contain all the drama, and Vols. 4-9 all the fiction from 1888-1904. Among translations of the 528 stories of the earlier period, however, a state of unsystematic and unscholarly chaos still prevails. Chekhov's most prolific translator into English, Constance Garnett, translated 147 ofthem, and did so, on the whole, very competently, although she was never at ease with dialogue, especially the racier peasant variety. It was she who was largely responsible for introducing Chekhov to English readers, and whose translations were read by, and in some ways influenced, such writers as Arnold Bennett, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf. Where she performed something of a disservice to Chekhov and his English readership, however, was in failing to present the stories in any kind of chronological order, with the result that no picture could emerge of how Chekhov evolved as a writer, or of the distinctive qualities ofhis early fiction. ln any case, Garnett's thirteen volumes, published between 1916 and 1922, have long been out of print, as are the two-volume Select Tales (containing eighteen early stories), last re-issued in 1967 and 1968 respectively.
Thus the basic aim of the present volume is to offer a larger and more representative selection of Chekhov's early stories than has ever been available in English in one volume before. Our selection ends where The Oxford Chekhov begins. The last story, Let Me Sleep, was written inJanuary 1888 to earn Chekhov some quick cash while he was busy on The Steppe, the hundred-page narrative pub- lished in March which marked his debut in the serious literary periodicals.
Implicit in this aim, though, is a belief in the stories themselves. We hope to persuade the English reader that these works would still be worth reading today even if Chekhov had not gone on to write A Lady with a Dog or Three Sisters. The young Chekhov, we believe, deserves better than to be represented by one or two items at the start of the Chekhov anthologies: he deserves a volume to himself.
It also seemed important to enable the English reader to see Chekhov's early work in the process of developing. The stories are therefore grouped by year, but have been slightly rearranged within each year to achieve a better balance.
Finally, we wanted to give due prominence to the purely comic side ofChekhov's early writing. This passed most of his first English admirers by completely and has been little better appreciated since; regrettably, for that sense of fun and sublime ridiculousness was something that Chekho» never lost. Whether one regards The Cherry Orchard, for instance, as tragedy, comedy, history or pas- toral, no critic should attempt to comment on that play who is not thoroughly steeped in the comic writing of Antosha Chekhonte.
The thirty-five stories included here still represent only a fraction of the total output. How were they 1:hosen?
Chekhov himself passed judgment on his early writing when he selected the stories for his Collected Works in 1899. Of the 528 items, he included 186. All fifty or so stories published between 1880 and 1882 were excluded, and all but twenty of the hundred-odd stories of 1883. These proportions are steadily reversed until fifty of the sixty-four stories of 1887 are included.
We have respected Chekhov's exclusions, with one exception: An Incident at Law (1883) has been resurrected. Our distribution of stories over different years isalso roughly commensurate with his. If we include relatively few stories from 1887, this is because the average length of Chekhov's stories has increased considerably by then. It would have been impossible, for example, to exclude The Kiss, widely regarded as Chekhov's finest work before The Steppe, even though it consumes the space of about four earlier items. In general our policy was to look for what seemed best in a particular vein, thereby avoiding duplication. The Huntsman, for example, was chosen in preference to the almost equally powerful, but rather similar, Agafya. Some hard decisions had to be taken in the choice of longer stories, but it seemed to us far more important not to sacrifice the shorter stories of 1883-1885 than to find room for one more long story from 1886 or 1887 - even though, as we learned from bitter experience, the shorter the story the more difficult to translate!