THE STEPPE 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 five 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 and Ward No. 6 and Other Stories. He has also translated The Little Demon by Sologub for Penguin.
DONALD RAYFIELD was born in 1942 and educated at Dulwich College, London, and Magdalene College, Cambridge. He is Professor of Russian and Georgian at Queen Mary College, University of London. He has written a number of monographs, notably Anton Chekhov: A Life and Understanding Chekhov, and is currently working on Stalin and the Hangmen and on a Georgian–English dictionary.
ANTON CHEKHOV
The Steppe and Other Stories
Translated with Notes by RONALD WILKS
With an introduction by DONALD RAYFIELD
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published 2001
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Translation, Chronology and Publishing History and Notes © Ronald Wilks, 2001
Introduction and Further Reading © Donald Rayfield, 2001
‘The Steppe’, ‘Panpipes’, ‘Verochka’, ‘A Dreary Story’ and ‘Gusev’ newly translated 2001. ‘The Kiss’ first published 1982, pre-existing translation © Ronald Wilks, 1982. ‘The Name-day Party’ first published 1985, pre-existing translation © Ronald Wilks, 1985. ‘The Duel’ first published 1984, pre-existing translation © Ronald Wilks 1984
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The moral rights of the editors have 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, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-191570-8
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
FURTHER READING
CHRONOLOGY
NOTE ON TEXT
PATRONYMICS
The Steppe
Panpipes
The Kiss
Verochka
The Name-day Party
A Dreary Story
Gusev
The Duel
PUBLISHING HISTORY AND NOTES
INTRODUCTION
An interesting game (invented by the drama specialist Harai Golomb) can be played with Chekhov’s plays: leave one minute, two minutes, three minutes, and so on, before the curtain falls on the last act and see how completely you change your understanding of the play with each exit. We can play the game with Chekhov’s work. Imagine that tuberculosis had killed him not in 1904, but in 1897, 1891 or 1884, and how differently we would view him. A Chekhov who had died in the Moscow clinic in April 1897, leaving no Three Sisters or Cherry Orchard, would not be seen as a dramatist (despite the existence of The Seagull and Uncle Vanya), but almost solely as the progenitor of the modern short story, a prose poet who relegates plot, characterization and moral argument to equal or even lesser status than atmospheric mood. A Chekhov who had stopped with this volume (after all, his journey across Siberia to Sakhalin might very well have killed him in 1890 or 1891), leaving no Ward No. 6, Black Monk or Ariadna, might appear as a gifted disciple of Russia’s elder generation of great novelists, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Leskov, refining, miniaturizing their techniques, but as yet unable to match their cosmic vision or moral authority, or to devise a narrative language of his own.
Had Chekhov died at the age of twenty-four, of the haemorrhage that he suffered in 1884, only a very perceptive critic would have been able to discern the embryonic genius in a dozen or so of the two hundred five-page stories he had published ever since he had started medical school in 1879. (And, three years later, if Chekhov had not taken down his doctor’s brass plate, his desertion of literature for medicine might still have passed unlamented.)
There are no sharp breaks or blinding lights in Chekhov’s development; nevertheless, it was a development. The works of this volume are in no way juvenilia – we have excluded from this collection, however interesting, anything written before the end of 1886, when Chekhov had qualified, both as a doctor and as a writer. But the stories in this volume represent a Chekhov who is more self-conscious and more conventional – more dependent on the opinions of editors, critics and readers – than in his later work. The level of genius in ‘A Dreary Story’ or ‘The Steppe’ is not demonstrably lower than in the late work, but we can hear the author thinking, we can see the ties to the texts of the masters – to Tolstoy or Gogol – and the view of the world that emerges is not yet as hauntingly ambiguous as it is to become. Good and evil, heroes and villains still loom large in Chekhov’s fiction; the author can still justify the ways of art, science, morality and logic to his reader.