ALSO TRANSLATED BY RICHARD PEVEAR AND ARISSA VOLOKHONSKY
Mikhail Bulgakov
The Master and Margarita
Anton Chekhov
The Complete Short Novels of Anton Chekhov
Selected Stories
Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Adolescent
The Brothers Karamazov
Crime and Punishment
Demons
The Double and The Gambler
The Eternal Husband and Other Stories
The Idiot
Notes from a Dead House
Notes from Underground
Nikolai Gogol
The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol
Dead Souls
Nikolai Leskov
The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories
Boris Pasternak
Doctor Zhivago
Alexander Pushkin
Novels, Tales, Journeys
Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina
The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories
War and Peace
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2020 by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
Preface copyright © 2020 by Richard Pevear
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich, 1860–1904, author. | Pevear, Richard, [date] translator. | Volokhonsky, Larissa, translator.
Title: Fifty-two stories (1883–1898) / Anton Chekhov ; a new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.
Description: New York : Alfred A. Knopf, [2020] | Translated from the Russian.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019022613 (print) | LCCN 2019022614 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525520818 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525520825 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich, 1860–1904—Translations into English.
Classification: LCC PG3456.A13 P484 2020 (print) | LCC PG3456.A13 (ebook) | DDC 891.73/3—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019022613
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019022614
Ebook ISBN 9780525520825
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover design by John Gall
ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0
CONTENTS
Cover
Also Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
J
OY
F
AT
AND
S
KINNY
A
T
THE
P
OST
O
FFICE
R
EADING
T
HE
C
OOK
G
ETS
M
ARRIED
I
N A
F
OREIGN
L
AND
C
ORPORAL
W
HOMPOV
G
RIEF
T
HE
E
XCLAMATION
P
OINT
A
N
E
DUCATED
B
LOCKHEAD
A S
LIP
-U
P
A
NGUISH
A C
OMMOTION
T
HE
W
ITCH
A L
ITTLE
J
OKE
A
GAFYA
S
PRING
A N
IGHTMARE
G
RISHA
L
ADIES
R
OMANCE
WITH A
D
OUBLE
B
ASS
T
HE
C
HORUS
G
IRL
T
HE
F
IRST
-C
LASS
P
ASSENGER
D
IFFICULT
P
EOPLE
O
N
THE
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B
EGGAR
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NEMIES
T
HE
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V
OLODYA
L
UCK
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HEPHERD’S
P
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C
OSTLY
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ESSONS
T
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ASHTANKA
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AME-
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AY
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ARTY
A B
REAKDOWN
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RINCESS
A
FTER
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HEATER
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ISTORY
OF A
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NTERPRISE
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Notes
A Note About the Author
PREFACE
Our intention in making this collection has been to represent the extraordinary variety of Chekhov’s stories, from earliest to latest, in terms of characters, events, social classes, settings, voicing, and formal inventiveness. By chance the selection came to fifty-two stories—a full deck! But, as Chekhov once wrote, “in art, as in life, there is nothing accidental.”
When Chekhov began to write humorous stories and sketches, he thought he was doing it simply for money. And so he was. His father’s grocery business, in their native Taganrog, on the Sea of Azov, had gone bankrupt in 1876, and to avoid debtor’s prison the family had fled to Moscow, where Chekhov’s two older brothers were already studying at the university. Chekhov, who was sixteen at the time, stayed behind to finish high school, supporting himself in various ways, one of them being the publication of humorous sketches in local papers, signed with various pseudonyms. In 1879 he graduated and moved to Moscow himself, where he entered medical school, and where his writing, still pseudonymous, became virtually the sole support of the family—mother, father, four brothers, and a sister.
Chekhov paid no attention to the artistic quality of his sketches; he simply tossed them off, sometimes several a day, and sent them to various daily or weekly humor sheets, whose editors gladly printed them. But his true artistic gift—innate, intuitive—showed itself even in the most exaggerated, absurd, and playful of these early jottings. They were mainly jokes, often satirical, but he also played with words in them, for instance in naming his characters. In “At the Post Office” (1883), the postmaster’s name is Sweetpepper and the police chief’s name is Swashbuckle. The French tutor in “In a Foreign Land” is Monsieur Shampooing, the French word for shampoo. Corporal Whompov is the heavy-handed officer in the story named for him. In “An Educated Blockhead” (1885), the name of the accused is Slopsov and the justice of the peace is Sixwingsky, suggestive of a seraph. In “Romance with a Double Bass” (1886), the main character, owner of the double bass, is named Bowsky, after the instrument’s articulator; we also run into such men as Buzzkin, Flunkeyich, and Flaskov. And there are others. These names have almost always been simply transliterated in English, giving no hint of their literal meaning in Russian.