ANTON PAVLOVICH CHEKHOV (1860–1904), the son of a grocer and a former serf, worked as a physician and ran an open clinic for the poor, while also writing the plays and short stories that have established him as one of the greatest figures in Russian literature.
EDMUND WILSON (1895–1972) is widely regarded as the preeminent American man of letters of the twentieth century. Over his long career, he wrote for Vanity Fair, helped edit The New Republic, served as chief book critic for The New Yorker, and was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. Wilson was the author of over twenty books, including To the Finland Station, Patriotic Gore, and a work of fiction, Memoirs of Hecate County.
PEASANTS AND OTHER STORIES
ANTON CHEKHOV
Selected and with an Introduction by
EDMUND WILSON
Translated from the Russian by
CONSTANCE GARNETT
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
Introduction Copyright © 1956 by Edmund Wilson; copyright renewed © 1984 by Helen Miranda Wilson.
Published by arrangement with Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, Inc., on behalf of the Estate of Edmund Wilson All rights reserved.
First published by Doubleday Anchor Books 1956
Cover design: Katy Homans
Cover illustration: Isaac Levitan, Haystacks at Dusk, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
Scala/Art Resource, NY.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich, 1860–1904.
[Short stories. English. Selections]
Peasants and other stories / Anton Chekhov; selected and with a preface by Edmund Wilson.
p. cm.
Originally published: Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956.
Contents: A woman’s kingdom — Three years — The murder — My life — Peasants — The new villa — In the ravine — The bishop — Betrothed.
ISBN 0-940322-14-5 (alk. paper)
1. Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich, 1860–1904 Translations into English. 2. Russia — Social life and customs Fiction. I. Wilson, Edmund, 1895–1972. II. Title.
PG3456.A15W53 1999
891.73'3—dc 21
99-14551
ISBN 978-1-59017-944-4
v1.0
For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to: Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.
CONTENTS
Biographical Notes
Title Page
Copyright and More Information
Introduction
PEASANTS AND OTHER STORIES
A Woman’s Kingdom
Three Years
The Murder
My Life
Peasants
The New Villa
In the Ravine
The Bishop
Betrothed
INTRODUCTION
IT HAS ALWAYS been a serious obstacle to the understanding of Chekhov on the part of English-speaking readers that the volumes of translations of his stories made by Constance Garnett and others do not, as a rule, present his work in its chronological sequence. You get humorous sketches from his earliest phase, when he was writing for the comic papers, side by side with his most serious stories; and the various periods of this serious work are themselves all jumbled together: the terse ironical anecdote, which began by being funny and then turned pathetic; the more rounded-out drama of character and situation; the product of what Chekhov’s English biographer, Mr. Ronald Hingley, calls his Tolstoyan period, when new moral preoccupations and a new psychological interest appear; and the more complex social study with which we are concerned in this volume. This garbling of Chekhov’s development is one of the causes for the frequent complaints on the part of English-speaking critics that they cannot make out what he is driving at. What could one make of Mark Twain if one found The Mysterious Stranger followed immediately by The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, or of Joyce if a story from Dubliners were followed by a passage from Finnegans Wake.
In the later years of Chekhov’s life—1894–1903—he was occupied mainly with a series of works, plays as well as stories, that were evidently intended to constitute a kind of analysis of Russian society, a miniature Comédie Humaine. The stories often run to greater length than is usual with his earlier pieces, and they differ from the longer of these, such as The Steppe, The Duel, and Ward Number 6, in that the latter deal with individuals, whereas the larger-scale stories of this latest period—though they sometimes, as in The Bishop, center about an individual—tend to be studies of milieux. The method here is like that of the full-scale plays, from The Sea Gull to The Cherry Orchard, which were written within these years, 1896–1904. In going through Chekhov in the Soviet edition, where his stories are printed in their proper sequence, one becomes aware that this final series begins with the story called A Woman’s Kingdom. This follows immediately The Black Monk, a tale of the supernatural, rather suggestive of Hawthorne, which is also an inside presentation of a psychiatric case; but we find ourselves, with A Woman’s Kingdom, definitely in a new domain. Up to now, we have had usually in Chekhov a certain vein of the grotesque or satiric, an exaggeration, comic or bitter, that is not always made quite plausible; but we are now in a provincial household of which the domestic incidents are soberly and solidly presented. The subject is a social phenomenon: the difficult readjustments of a new industrial middle class. And in each of the long stories that follows, you have a household or a local community which is intended to be significant of the life of some social group: the new factory owners in A Woman’s Kingdom; the old Moscow merchant class in Three Years; in The Murder, the half-literate countrymen, fundamentalist and independent (“raskolniki or something of the sort”—raskolniki are dissident sectarians—Chekhov says in one of his letters); the Tolstoyan intelligentsia in My Life; the lowest stratum of the peasantry in Peasants; the new class of engineers in The New Villa; the kulaks, in In the Ravine, on their way to the commercial middle class; the professional churchmen in The Bishop; and in Betrothed, the old-fashioned provincial household and the revolt against it of the new generation. I have here brought these stories together, in the order in which they were written, omitting the more anecdotal ones with which they are interspersed. * That Chekhov was quite conscious that these interspersed pieces belonged to a different category from the more elaborate social studies would seem to be shown by his writing to his publisher (in a letter to A. S. Suvorin, June 21, 1897) that he did not want An Artist’s Story brought out in the same volume with Peasants, on the ground that it had “nothing in common” with the more ambitious story. (Actually, Peasants and My Life were first published together in a volume by themselves.) It will be noticed that the life of the gentry is not treated at length in this series, but The Sea Gull, Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard make up for this omission. It is probable that Chekhov preferred to deal with the land-owning class in the theater, because they could be made more amusing as well as more attractive than his peasant and commercial and industrial groups. One does not find in any of his stories the same sort of atmosphere and tone that is characteristic of these three plays; and, conversely, one cannot imagine the incidents of Peasants or In the Ravine so effectively presented in a play.