First Vintage Classics Edition, March 1991
Copyright © 1963 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published under the title The Image of Chekhov in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1963.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich, 1860–1904.
[Short stories. English. Selections]
Forty stories / by Anton Chekhov; translated and with an
introduction by Robert Payne.—1st Vintage classics ed.
p. cm.—(Vintage classics)
Originally published: The image of Chekhov, New York:
Knopf, 1963.
eISBN: 978-0-307-77853-6
1. Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich. 1860–1904—
Translations, English.
1. Payne, Robert, 1911– . II. Title. III. Series.
PG3456.A13P39 1991
891.73’3—dc20 90-50473
v3.1
FOR
Patricia
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction by Robert Payne
Translator’s Note
1880 The Little Apples
1881 St. Peter’s Day
1882 Green Scythe
1883 Joy
The Ninny
The Highest Heights
Death of a Government Clerk
At the Post Office
1884 Surgery
In the Cemetery
Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way
1885 A Report
The Threat
The Huntsman
The Malefactor
A Dead Body
Sergeant Prishibeyev
1886 A Blunder
Heartache
Anyuta
The Proposal
Vanka
Who Is to Blame?
1887 Typhus
1888 Sleepyhead
1889 The Princess
1890 Gusev
1891 The Peasant Women
1892 After the Theater
A Fragment
In Exile
1893 Big Volodya and Little Volodya
1894 The Student
1895 Anna Round the Neck
1896 The House with the Mezzanine
1897 In the Horsecart
1898 On Love
1899 The Lady with the Pet Dog
1902 The Bishop
1903 The Bride
About the Author
Introduction
I
WE KNOW this image well, for it is usually reproduced as a frontispiece to his works or stamped on the bindings—the image of a solemn, elderly man with lines of weariness deeply etched on his thin face, which is very pale. The accusing eyes are nearly hidden by pince-nez, the beard is limp, the lips pursed in pain. It is the image of an old scholar or the forbidding family doctor who has brought too many children into the world.
We know him well, but what we know bears little resemblance to the real Chekhov. This portrait of Chekhov is based on a painting made by an obscure artist called Joseph Braz in 1898, when Chekhov was already suffering from consumption. He was restless while sitting for his portrait, and had little confidence in the artist’s gifts, and the best he could say of the portrait was that the tie and the general configuration of the features were perhaps accurate, but the whole was deadly wrong. “It smells of horse-radish,” he said. Five years later, when the portrait was solemnly hung on the walls of the Moscow Art Theater, he wrote to his wife that he would have done everything in his power to prevent the painting from being hung there. He would have preferred to have a photograph hanging in the Moscow Art Theater—anything but that abomination. “There is something in it which is not me, and something that is me is missing,” he wrote, but that was one of his milder criticisms. His rage against the portrait increased as time went on. It became “that ghastly picture,” and he would lie awake thinking about the harm it would do. The painting has a fairly academic quality: he may have guessed that posterity would take it to its heart.
Chekhov had good reason to hate the picture, for he knew himself well and possessed a perfectly normal vanity. In his youth and middle age he was quite astonishingly handsome. The writer Vladimir Korolenko, who met Chekhov in 1887, speaks of his clean-cut regular features which had not lost their characteristically youthful contours. His eyes were brilliant and deep-set, thoughtful and artless by turns, and his whole expression suggested a man filled with the joy of life. His face was never still, and he was always joking. Even in his later years, when he was afflicted with blindness and hemorrhoids and consumption, and perhaps half a dozen other diseases, he continued to crack jokes like a schoolboy. There are still a few people living who can remember the sound of his infectious laughter.
Let us imagine Chekhov entering a room about the year 1889, when he was nearly thirty and had already written most of the stories he would ever write. “A Dead Body,” “Heartache,” “Anyuta,” “Vanka,” “Sleepyhead,” and countless others are already behind him, and he is at the height of his fame. He has received the Pushkin Prize from the Imperial Academy of Sciences, and he has been elected a member of the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature. He is already aware that he is a great writer with a certain place in Russian literature, and he is dressed accordingly in a silk shirt with a necktie made of colored strings and a fawn-colored coat which offsets the ruddy color of his face. He is over six feet tall, but the narrow shoulders make him seem even taller. He wears a thin beard pointed in the Elizabethan manner, and there is something of the Elizabethan in his calm assumption of power, in his elegance and the nervous quickness of his movements. His thick brown hair is brushed straight back from a clear forehead. He has thick brown eyebrows, and his eyes too are brown, though they grow darker or brighter according to his mood, and the iris of one eye is always a little lighter than the other, giving him sometimes an expression of absent-mindedness when he is in fact all attention. His eyelids are a little too heavy, and sometimes they droop in a fashionable artistocratic manner, but the real explanation is that he works through the night and sleeps little. He is nearly always smiling or breaking out into huge peals of laughter. Only his hands trouble him: they are the hands of a peasant, large, dry and hot, and he does not always know what to do with them. Excessively handsome, slender and elegant, he knew his power over people and drew them to him like a magnet.