It’s not hard to spot the documentary forms lurking in the stories of the present volume; they include such verbal specimens as the typology (“The Temperaments—According to the Latest Science”), the feuilleton (“Salon des Variétés”), government regulations (“Persons Entitled to Travel Free of Charge on the Imperial Russian Railways”), down to the minutes of a professional meeting (“The Philadelphia Conference of Natural Scientists”). Some stories actually wear their genres on their sleeves: “An Idyll—But Alas!”; “The Turnip: A Folktale”; “Twenty-six (Excerpts from a Diary)”; “A Brief Anatomy of a Man”; “A Children’s Primer”; “On the Characteristics of Nations (From the Notebook of a Naïve Member of the Russian Geographic Society)”; “A Modern Guide to Letter Writing”; “Visiting Cards”; “Letters to the Editor”; “Man (A Few Philosophical Musings)”; and so on.
In many cases, what makes these renditions entertaining is the incompetence with which the paradigm in question is deployed: “Dirty Tragedians and Leprous Playwrights: A Dreadful, Terrible, and Scandalously Foolhardy Tragedy” is self-evidently a script, but one that contains largely words that are not meant to be spoken onstage. In other instances the content is grotesquely incongruent with the form that purveys it. When a high-ranking official in “The Eclipse” orders that the street lanterns remain lit throughout the night so that the eclipse of the moon will be visible, and cautions his interlocutors about the subversive potential of such planetary misbehavior, we are amused by his inexorable logic. But what makes the exchange most absurd is the form it takes: a sequence of documents in an official correspondence—Memorandum No. 1032 and its serial responses (Re: Memorandum No. 1032, etc., etc.)—with inflated rhetoric to match and witness signatures to provide authentication.
By exemplifying a recognizable genre or form but violating its norms, lampoons like these confirm in the breach the potency of a culture’s forms of writing. Still, we hardly need to know the specifics of nineteenth-century Russian bureaucratic culture to chuckle at Memorandum No. 1032 (etc.); neither is the overexposure of Chekhov’s single white male in his 1880 send-up of a personal ad (“À l’américaine”) lost on readers familiar with online dating. And the grammatical infelicities in student writing haven’t gotten any less impressive since Chekhov’s day (“Nadia N.’s Vacation Homework”). These stories are still funny.
But Chekhov’s interests go beyond poking fun at his contemporaries (and ours!), or even capitalizing on comedy when the cupboards were bare. Moreover, not all of his early stories are humorous, any more than the later ones are uniformly dark.
Perhaps the least funny of this lot is the title tale, “Because of Little Apples”—certainly the characters who do find humor in the state of affairs are the story’s most depraved. This latter-day incarnation of the Garden of Eden is already a fallen world, one whose denizens are deeply flawed and whose temptations are legion. There, beneath the tree of knowledge, different forms of cultural literacy are put to the test. Readers of the tale must rise to the epistemological challenges of several fields—religion, history, and literature—if they are to make sense of the setting, at once so mythically broad and so historically specific as well as symbolically rich; meanwhile, the boy and girl in the story are being judged on their knowledge of specific genres—stories, commandments, and prayers. For the vulnerable pair within the story, the penalty for inadequate mastery will be irrevocable loss.
In his singular attentiveness to fields and forms—the structures of knowledge and modes of communication—Chekhov explores how people attempt to construct meaning, how they make recourse to the categories of their culture, how they harness them and not infrequently become entrapped by them, misappropriating and misapplying such discursive frameworks in botched attempts to make sense of their lives or to communicate their plight. If, as we’ve noted, the discrepancy between actual situations and the clichéd, overblown, or otherwise inappropriate formulations used to represent them serves as a rich source of humor in Chekhov’s tales, this stubborn attachment to narratives or other forms of accounting that simply do not fit the context also has the potential to unleash great suffering. At base, Chekhov is interested in how people understand their predicaments, how they shape their responses and frame their behaviors, how people attempt and all too often fail to comprehend their own pain and, more frequently still, to tap into the pain of others.
In this respect, anyway, Chekhov’s capacity to “think medically” never deserted him, even when he was composing fiction. In fact, what aligns the two practices Chekhov was honing in the early 1880s (and what also amply justifies his professional “two-timing”) is their common goal of access—clinical and imaginative—to somebody else’s pain. Insofar as the stories in this volume illustrate vividly (and often hilariously) the frustrations and failures born of the wide gulf between life and our misguided constructions of it, they do serve a diagnostic function. These stories also have a certain palliative potentiaclass="underline" if they don’t fully deliver us from evil, they do divert us and lighten thereby our postlapsarian load. And if by chance we should be edified and thus raised by them, then Chekhov’s early comedic tales will have proved therapeutic as well.6
1 Both in the forty stories collected here and in Constantine’s earlier collection, The Undiscovered Chekhov, published first with thirty-eight new translations and shortly thereafter, in paperback, with forty-three (Seven Stories Press, 1998; 1999).
2 To Alexei Suvorin, May 15, 1889.
3 The punch line of Chekhov’s oft-cited quip, “Medicine is my lawfully wedded wife, literature is my mistress” (to Suvorin, September 11, 1888).
4 Bleak island in the Sea of Japan, to which Russia exiled thousands of prisoners in the nineteenth century.
5 Special canticle with a complicated and highly specified structure.
6 I am indebted to Paul Reardon for this line of thought (“From Case Study to Comedy: Representation in Chekhov’s Early Stories,” unpublished).
Translator’s Note
Anton Chekhov’s short and remarkably productive writing career spanned the last two decades of the nineteenth century. He was forty-four years old when he died in 1904, a man about to reach his prime (though the most lasting image of him has been a photograph from his final years: frail, wizened, and with a walking stick, an elder of Russian literature). From his two decades as a writer, Chekhov’s greatest output was when he was in his twenties. It is in this period, the 1880s, that he published some of his best-known comic and tragicomic stories—“Oysters,” “The Swedish Match,” “The Kiss,” “The Steppe”—and his first play, Ivanov.
One of the pleasures of translating the Chekhov stories in this edition, works from the first half of his literary career that are lesser-known and even unknown in the English-reading world, is his ever-changing range of styles and story formats, his innovative and unexpected approach. The reader is struck by the creative energy and by Chekhov’s take on the absurd: one has to remind oneself that these pieces were written in the 1880s, some thirty years before Futurism, Dada, and other avant-garde writing. Chekhov’s comic and tragic timing is masterful, whatever the story’s format, whether in the guise of a traditional narrative or the zany forms of a medical prescription, or an administrative directive from the Russian railroads stating that horses, donkeys, and oxen in the service of the railroads are permitted to travel free of charge in second-class compartments. Chekhov’s words are arranged for the best theatrical effect. This mastery of timing is part of the dramatic skill that comes to the fore in his plays.