THE LADY WITH THE LITTLE DOG AND OTHER STORIES
ANTON PAVLOVICH CHEKHOV, the son of a former serf, was born in 1860 in Taganrog, a port on the Sea of Azov. He received a classical education at the Taganrog Gymnasium, then in 1879 he went to Moscow, where he entered the medical faculty of the university, graduating in 1884. During his university years he supported his family by contributing humorous stories and sketches to magazines. He published his first volume of stories, Motley Tales, in 1886 and a year later his second volume, In the Twilight, for which he was awarded the Pushkin Prize. His most famous stories were written after his return from the convict island of Sakhalin, which he visited in 1890. For five years he lived on his small country estate near Moscow, but when his health began to fail he moved to the Crimea. After 1900, the rest of his life was spent at Yalta, where he met Tolstoy and Gorky. He wrote very few stories during the last years of his life, devoting most of his time to a thorough revision of his stories, of which the first comprehensive edition was published in 1899–1901, and to the writing of his great plays. In 1901 Chekhov married Olga Knipper, an actress of the Moscow Art Theatre. He died of consumption in 1904.
RONALD WILKS studied Russian language and literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, after training as a Naval interpreter, and later Russian literature at London University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1972. Among his translations for Penguin Classics are My Childhood, My Apprenticeship and My Universities by Gorky, Diary of a Madman by Gogol, filmed for Irish Television, The Golovlyov Family by Saltykov-Shchedrin, How Much Land Does a Man Need? by Tolstoy, Tales of Belkin and Other Prose Writings by Pushkin, and six other volumes of stories by Chekhov: The Party and Other Stories, The Kiss and Other Stories, The Fiancée and Other Stories, The Duel and Other Stories, The Steppe and Other Stories and Ward No.6 and Other Stories. He has also translated The Little Demon by Sologub for Penguin.
PAUL DEBRECZENY is Emeritus Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina. He has translated the complete prose fiction of Alexander Pushkin and is the author of The Other Pushkin: A Study of Alexander Pushkin’s Prose Fiction (1983) and Social Functions of Literature: Alexander Pushkin and Russian Culture (1997); and a volume of co-edited essays, Russian Narrative and Visual Art: Varieties of Seeing (1994). He also co-edited Chekhov’s Art of Writing: A Collection of Critical Essays (1977).
ANTON CHEKHOV
The Lady with the Little Dog and Other Stories
Translated with Notes by RONALD WILKS
With an Introduction by PAUL DEBRECZENY
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published 2002
1
Translation, Chronology and Publishing History and Notes © Ronald Wilks, 2002
Introduction © Paul Debreczeny, 2002
‘The House with the Mezzanine’, ‘Ionych’, ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ and
‘Disturbing the Balance’ newly translated 2002. ‘Peasants’, ‘Man in a Case’,
‘Gooseberries’, ‘About Love’, ‘In the Ravine’ and ‘The Bishop’ first published 1982,
pre-existing translations © Ronald Wilks, 1982. ‘My Life’ first published 1985,
pre-existing translation © Ronald Wilks, 1985. ‘A Visit to Friends’ and ‘The Bride’
first published 1986, pre-existing translations © Ronald Wilks, 1986
All rights reserved
The moral right of the editors has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
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EISBN: 978–0–141–90685–0
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
FURTHER READING
CHRONOLOGY
NOTE ON TEXT
PATRONYMICS
The House with the Mezzanine
Peasants
Man in a Case
Gooseberries
About Love
A Visit to Friends
Ionych
My Life
The Lady with the Little Dog
In the Ravine
Disturbing the Balance
The Bishop
The Bride
PUBLISHING HISTORY AND NOTES
INTRODUCTION
Anton Chekhov’s fictional output in the last period of his life was relatively small, for several reasons. Most of his creative energy went into writing his four great plays, discussing them with directors of the Moscow Art Theatre, participating in some of the rehearsals, and, incidentally, marrying one of the actresses. Much of his time was also taken up by selecting and revising his earlier stories for a collected edition for which he had signed a contract with a publisher. Living mostly on his estate, Melikhovo, he was heavily involved with the life of the surrounding villages, building schools, restoring a church, and, as a doctor, receiving an endless stream of the impoverished sick, whom he treated free of charge. These experiences are reflected in the stories he wrote about peasant life. His own advancing tuberculosis forced him, in 1898–9, to sell his estate and move to the warmer climate of Yalta, where he stayed, off and on, until his last trip to Germany in June 1904. Although the number of stories he wrote in this period is relatively small, those he did write are among his great masterpieces.
The last decade of Chekhov’s life coincided with the emergence and rapid growth of Russian Modernism. Its literary variety, first labelled Decadence, then Symbolism, was intertwined with a vigorous new transcendental philosophical movement. Chekhov, personally acquainted with some of its representatives, responded to the movement as early as 1894 in his ‘Black Monk’, whose visionary hero he surrounded with an aura of poetry, while subjecting his condition to a cool medical diagnosis. Similarly, in his drama The Seagull, written in 1895, Treplev’s play within the play, which Arkadina promptly designates ‘decadent’, is a gentle parody of the new movement, not without lyrical overtones. Since Chekhov the agnostic had little use for the symbol as a glimpse of higher reality, he kept apart from the symbolists, but this does not mean that he shunned symbols as literary devices. Indeed, his stories are teeming with symbols, but they convey meanings within a human frame of reference.