XVIII
THREE YEARS
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
MY LIFE - A Provincial’s Story
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
NOTES
ABOUT THE TRANSLATORS
TITLES IN EVERYMAN’S LIBRARY
Copyright Page
INTRODUCTION
God’s world is good. One thing is not good: us.
– Chekhov to Suvorin, 1891
A good man’s indifference is as good as any religion.
– Chekhov’s diary, 1897
Chekhov wrote his first and only novel when he was twenty-four. Its title is Drama na okhote, or Drama at the Hunt, known in English as A Shooting Party. It is 170 pages long, was serialized in thirty-two issues of the scandal sheet Daily News (which Chekhov renamed Daily Spews) from August 1884 to April 1885, and was never reprinted in his lifetime. It is by far his longest work of fiction. As Donald Rayfield wrote in Chekhov: The Evolution of His Art, ‘‘It reflects almost everything he had ever read, from The Sorrows of Young Werther to The Old Age of Lecoq. It also contains embryonically everything he was to write.’’ It is part detective story, part psychological study, and very cleverly plotted – a broad parody with a fine sense of the absurd, filled with stock Russian characters and situations, set on a decaying estate that would reappear time and again in Chekhov’s subsequent work. One of the characters is a naive and sympathetic doctor, not unlike Dr. Samoilenko in The Duel and some of the other doctors who inhabit Dr. Chekhov’s fictional
