In “Intrigues,” Chekhov anticipates modernism. He builds up, element by element, a psychological portrait of an eccentric physician who is about to face his colleagues at the Medical Association after a string of scandals that could mean the end of his career. Chekhov uses his medical training in an analytic tour-de-force, showing the doctor going through a series of mental gyrations as he prepares to leave his house for the fateful meeting.
Almost a century has passed since Chekhov’s death, and it is surprising that so many of these early masterpieces have not been translated into English. As Chekhov specialist Julie de Sherbinin points out in a letter to Harper’s Magazine (February 1998), “The gaps in English translation of his early work can be attributed to various factors: these stories were long considered products of an ‘immature writer, they are rich in colloquialisms and wordplay and thus are hard to translate, and they often depend on cultural context for their humor.”
Since Chekhov’s death in 1904 there have been many translations of his other prose pieces. During the Bloomsbury years, Constance Garnett established his position as an international literary figure by publishing seventeen volumes of her Chekhov translations—201 stories. The quantity of Chekhov’s work was so great that Garnett had to make a selection, and her selections have subsequently remained largely uncontested. Consecutive generations of Chekhov translators have not veered far from her choice of stories, only occasionally introducing new, untranslated material.
In many of his letters throughout his life Chekhov down-played his stories, calling them “little trifles,” even “literary excrements” that were written “half-consciously.” He playfully confided that he wrote things off the cuff, as if he were eating bliny. “I don’t love money sufficiently for medicine, and I don’t have enough passion, that is, talent, for literature.” Chekhov’s natural self-irony in talking about his work misled many people who knew him, and later most of his biographers; but there is evidence that behind closed doors he was always a painstakingly careful writer. His friend Nikolai Yozhov, for instance, was both shocked and amazed at catching him one day transcribing a story by Tolstoy. Chekhov told him that he often did this, that it was just an exercise—he was rewriting the story, editing it down. (Yozhov was outraged.) Chekhov wrote in an earnest letter of advice to his older brother Alexander, also a writer, “Most important of alclass="underline" keep watch, observe, huff and puff, rewrite everything five times, condensing and so on, always remembering that all of Petersburg follows the work of the Chekhov brothers!”
It is a widely accepted myth that Chekhov initially saw writing as the road to a quick ruble, that he spent the first part of his career as a hack writer for the gutter press, and that it was only in midlife that he miraculously found literature. A closer look at the quality of his early work refutes this.
Thomas Mann, in an essay published in Sinn und Form in 1954 commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Chekhov’s death, was one of the first to point out that Chekhov’s diffident public attitude toward his writing had misled subsequent generations into a distorted view of his work. “In my eyes,” Mann wrote,
the reason Chekhov has to a large extent been undervalued in Europe and even in Russia is due to his extremely sober, critical, and skeptical stance towards himself, and the dissatisfaction with which he regarded his accomplishments—in short, his modesty. This modesty was an extremely appealing trait, but it was not designed to exact respect from the world and, one could say that it set the world a bad example. For, the view we have of ourselves is not without influence on the image that people have of us, and can taint that image and possibly adulterate it. Chekhov the short-story writer was convinced for far too long of his artistic unworthiness and the insignificance of his capabilities. It was only slowly and with great difficulty that he gained a modicum of belief in himself—the belief that cannot be absent if others are to believe in us. To the end of his life he showed no trace of the literary grand seigneur, and even less of the sage and prophet.*
Another important factor that led earlier generations of scholars to deprecate Chekhov’s early work was his own selection of stories for the ten-volume Sobranie Sochinenii (Collected Works, 1899-1902). It was felt that the pieces Chekhov chose not to include were in his eyes not up to par. And until quite recently the general scholarly trend of thought has been to agree with him. Stories told in minimalist telegrams? Absurdist vignettes opening with “I was chased by 30 dogs, 7 of which were white”? How could one compare these wild pieces with the multilayered style of The Cherry Orchard or “The Lady with the Lap Dog,” a style that has served as a model for many writers of the twentieth century?
Scholars today are taking a broader view in assessing the scope of Chekhov’s early work. Pieces such as “Questions Posed by a Mad Mathematician,” until recently dismissed as “scurrilous sketches” and “impenetrably vacuous balderdash,” are now viewed as important experimental works. Thomas Venclova, for instance, discusses Chekhov’s early prose as a major precursor of the Russian absurdist writers of the late 1920s and Eugène Ionesco.
My work on this book began two years ago in the Slavic and Baltic Division of the New York Public Library. I was looking through a heavy bound volume of Budilnik issues from 1880. The magazines had a very progressive, almost late Edwardian look, much like early issues of the British magazine Punch. The drawings were colored, which surprised me, and after the middle of 1880 the lettering on the tide pages was flushed with gold. Just as I was wondering how a fin-de-siècle printer could have managed that, I noticed a short story signed “A. Chekhov”—Alexander Chekhov, Anton’s older brother. In the next few issues there were more “A. Chekhov” signatures, and quite a few “Arteopod,” an alias Alexander often used.
And then came the first stories by Antosha Chekhonte—Anton Chekhov.
To my surprise, the New York Public Library has all the Moscow and St. Petersburg magazines in which Chekhov was first published: Budilnik, Strekoza (Dragonfly), Oskolki. As I began reading Chekhov’s early stories in context, a very different image of him jumped off the page. The initial picture in my mind of the sedate literary elder with monocle and cane (the picture of Chekhov on most book covers) disappeared, and a younger, livelier, more energetic image of the writer took its place. I soon found that the New York Public Library has one of the best collections of turn-of-the-century and earlier Russian material in the world. Some of its rare books are not even available in the Russian State Library. It houses almost 400,000 books, manuscripts, and periodicals, including volumes from the libraries of twenty-six members of the Romanov dynasty—some items dating back to the fourteenth century. Avrahm Yarmolinsky, a Chekhov scholar and translator, who served as chief of the Slavic and Baltic Division, had traveled to Russia during the 1920s and 1930s, buying up the libraries of the Romanovs and the former aristocracy. It was quite an experience working on this book surrounded by such Imperial Russian treasures.
The Undiscovered Chekhov brings to English-speaking readers a new body of Chekhov’s work that deserves a wider audience. I chose these stories as representative pieces out of the large body of Chekhov’s writing spanning the period from 1880 to 1887. His work from that time is largely unknown outside Russia. Without it, one cannot have a full picture of Chekhov as a writer.