Stories

* “Chekhov as Naturalist” (1914), in Chekhov, ed. R. L. Jackson.

* Trans. by Elizabeth Henderson, in Chekhov, ed. R. L. Jackson.

** According to the memoirs of his brother Mikhail, Chekhov sometimes swam off the ship with a towline and in that way once happened to observe the movements of a shark and a school of pilot fish. He also witnessed the burial of two men at sea: “When you see a dead man wrapped in sailcloth flying head over heels into the water … you grow frightened and somehow start thinking that you are going to die too and that you too will be thrown into the sea” (letter of Suvorin, December 9, 1890).

TRANSLATORS NOTE

No one who makes a one-volume selection of Anton Chekhov’s stories can help being painfully aware of what has been left out. Our selection represents all periods of Chekhov’s creative life, from his first sketches to his very last story We have included short pieces from different periods (it is interesting to see Chekhov return to the extreme brevity of his earliest work in “At Christmastime,” written in 1900), and the most important of the longer stories, those of thirty-five to fifty pages. We have not included any of the “novelized stories” of eighty to a hundred pages—“The Steppe,” “My Life,” “The Duel,” “Three Years”—thinking they would go better in a separate volume. As for the rest of the collection, it is meant to show the best of Chekhov’s work in all its diversity.

Chekhov’s prose does not confront the translator with the difficulties found in Gogol, Dostoevsky, or Leskov. “His temperament,” as Nabokov remarked, “is quite foreign to verbal inventiveness.” Words cannot be translated, but meanings can be, and rhythms can be. Every good writer has an innate rhythm, which “tells” the world in a certain way. Chekhov has a preference, especially in his later stories, for stringing clauses and sentences together with the conjunction “and”: “Far ahead the windmills of the village of Mironositskoe were barely visible, to the right a line of hills stretched away and then disappeared far beyond the village, and they both knew that this was the bank of the river, with meadows, green willows, country houses, and if you stood on one of the hills, from there you could see equally vast fields, telegraph poles, and the train, which in the distance looked like a caterpillar crawling, and in clear weather you could even see the town.” Often he begins sentences and even paragraphs with an “and,” as if events keep accumulating without quite integrating. A related feature, and one more difficult to maintain in English, is his use of the continuous tense, with sudden shifts to the simple present or past and back again. We have tried as far as possible to keep these stylistic qualities in our translation.

We would like to express our gratitude to two Chekhovians, Cathy Popkin of Columbia University and Michael Finke of Washington University, for their suggestions of stories to be included. Limitations of space have kept us from following all of them, but without them the collection would not be what it is.

R. P., L. V.

THE DEATH OF A CLERK

One fine evening the no less fine office manager Ivan Dmitrich Cherviakov¹ was sitting in the second row of the stalls, watching The Bells of Corneville² through opera glasses. He watched and felt himself at the height of bliss. But suddenly … This “but suddenly” occurs often in stories. The authors are right: life is so full of the unexpected! But suddenly his face wrinkled, his eyes rolled, his breath stopped … he put down the opera glasses, bent forward, and … ah-choo!!! As you see, he sneezed. Sneezing is not prohibited to anyone anywhere. Peasants sneeze, police chiefs sneeze, sometimes even privy councillors sneeze. Everybody sneezes. Cherviakov, not embarrassed in the least, wiped his nose with his handkerchief and, being a polite man, looked around to see whether his sneezing had disturbed anyone. And now he did become embarrassed. He saw that the little old man sitting in front of him in the first row of the stalls was carefully wiping his bald head and neck with his glove and muttering something. Cherviakov recognized the little old man as General Brizzhalov,³ who served in the Department of Transportation.

“I sprayed him!” thought Cherviakov. “He’s not my superior, he serves elsewhere, but still it’s awkward. I must apologize.”

Cherviakov coughed, leaned forward, and whispered in the general’s ear:

“Excuse me, Yr’xcellency, I sprayed you … I accidentally …”

“Never mind, never mind …”

“For God’s sake, excuse me. I … I didn’t mean it!”

“Ah, do sit down, please! Let me listen!”

Cherviakov became embarrassed, smiled stupidly, and began looking at the stage. He looked, but felt no more bliss. Anxiety began to torment him. In the intermission he went up to Brizzhalov, walked around him, and, overcoming his timidity, murmured:

“I sprayed you, Yr’xcellency … Forgive me … I … it’s not that I …”

“Ah, come now… I’ve already forgotten, and you keep at it!” said the general, impatiently twitching his lower lip.

“Forgotten, but there’s malice in his eyes,” thought Cherviakov, glancing suspiciously at the general. “He doesn’t even want to talk. I must explain to him that I really didn’t mean it … that it’s a law of nature, otherwise he’ll think I wanted to spit. If he doesn’t think so now, he will later! …”

On returning home, Cherviakov told his wife about his rudeness. His wife, it seemed to him, treated the incident much too lightly. She merely got frightened, but then, on learning that Brizzhalov served “elsewhere,” she calmed down.

“But all the same you should go and apologize,” she said. “He might think you don’t know how to behave in public!”

“That’s just it! I apologized, but he was somehow strange … Didn’t say a single sensible word. And then there was no time to talk.”

The next day Cherviakov put on a new uniform, had his hair cut, and went to Brizzhalov to explain … Going into the general’s reception room, he saw many petitioners there, and among them was the general himself, who had already begun to receive petitions. Having questioned several petitioners, the general raised his eyes to Cherviakov.