Anton Chekhov’s short stories are staples of English literature degrees and creative writing courses alike, routinely held up as an example of “show, don’t tell.” Revered as a master of psychological realism, he demonstrates how to be morally serious without sermonising. A bridge between nineteenth-century realism and literary modernism, Chekhov made minimalism a staple of good literature; that of le non-dit, of what is withheld rather than declared. His open endings resist closure, his characters resist judgment and his vision is humanist rather than ideological.
Chekhov may stage his stories in a vanished world of princesses with fading titles, landowners clinging to estates, servants and serfs living in poverty, but behind the images lie stories about the effects of power: who has it, who claims to have it and who has internalised subordination to such an extent that they would happily die for their master.
His aristocrats are petty, bored, entitled and convinced of their moral superiority while casually inflicting cruelty. The poverty portrayed is all too real. Strip away the samovars and country houses and you’re left with social hierarchies underpinned by habit, fear and deceit. The choreography is familiar whether people are living under tsars, party bosses, or so-called strongmen in Moscow or Washington: authority cloaked as inevitability, dissent crushed as disrespect and cruelty normalised as being the way everything works.
Medicine, Literature and Survival: Young Chekhov at Work
Chekhov began to write as a twenty-year-old, when he was a first-year medical student at Moscow University. With a bankrupt father and mouths to feed he wrote to survive, as well as to entertain his readers. He kept going because it amused him. He wrote in letters about having ‘“A mistress — literature” in addition to his “lawful wedded wife of medicine,” and about how “having two trades” and chasing after two hares at once made him happier and more at ease with himself: “When I’ve had enough of one, I can go and spend the night with the other”.’
The earliest stories are pacey, brutal and mischievously satirical. He churned them out for comic magazines that paid promptly and asked few questions. But even at his most flippant, writing as ‘A. Chekhonte,’ Chekhov was already doing something greater than just providing caricatural entertainment. His pieces are unsentimental and unsparing in their sharp-eyed, discerning observations. They skewer vanity, stupidity, cruelty and petty tyranny with the accuracy of a well-thrown dart. He would outgrow this mode yet much of his future work as a dramatist is already present.
“Eight years after making his wholly unremarkable debut as a prose writer, Chekhov was elevated to the lofty heights of Russia’s literary magazines — the so-called “thick journals” where all the country’s greatest writers first published their work. After the constraints of filing copy for the “thin” illustrated weeklies and daily newspapers printed on cheap paper, it was a daunting prospect to be given free rein and write for a prestigious publication which appeared monthly received the imprimatur of the literary establishment. In a country whose elite writers historically emanated from the landowning nobility, and where there was little social mobility, this was a remarkable achievement for the son of a bankrupt shopkeeper who had been born a serf.” From the Introduction
The Extraordinary Cast of Chekhov’s Human Comedy
The stories feature an extraordinary cast of characters: pompous generals, henpecked husbands, drunken clerks, exhausted doctors, impoverished aristocrats, battered wives, grandstanding nitwits, men and women still living as serfs in all but name . . . all observed with cool, forensic detachment. Personality archetypes like a Russian version of the Commedia dell’arte parade past us: bullying masters, desperate servants, scheming lovers, bores, fantasists, martyrs, cowards.
The humour is dark and fierce. The future dramatist can be sensed in the way scenes hinge on awkward pauses, things not said, country-life ennui, wasted lives imbued with longing, aristocracy-in-decline, nostalgia as denial, the comic underside of genteel bankruptcy. He experimented, writing parody, lists, monologues, fake advertisements, epistolary farce and stories stretching into the novella form, to entertain a new, literate, lower-middle-class readership in a rapidly changing Russia. The result is a body of work that is wild, inventive and bleak yet vibrant with chutzpah. The seeds of the Chekhov he would become are clear to see.
This volume of Chekov’s Earliest Stories: Stories, Novellas, Humoresques, 1880–1882, edited by Rosamund Bartlett and Elena Michajlowska, published by Cherry Orchard Books, is a landmark publication. It provides the first comprehensive English translation of the fifty-eight pieces Chekhov wrote between the ages of twenty and twenty-two. It is the outcome of a remarkable international collaboration of eighty-three volunteer translators from nine countries. The project was launched in 2014 under the auspices of the Anton Chekhov Foundation, a UK-based charity founded in London in 2008 to support the restoration of Chekhov’s house in Yalta and to advance his literary and humanitarian legacy.
BUY Earliest Stories 1880-1882
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