September 24, 2020 63
Chekhov’s Laughter
Adam Kirsch
Fifty- Two Stories: 1883–1898
by Anton Chekhov, translated from
the Russian by Richard Pevear
and Larissa Volokhonsky.
Knopf, 508 pp., $35.00
“With love to lead the way/I found more
skies of gray/Than any Russian play/
Could guarantee,” Ira Gershwin wrote
in the 1930 song “But Not for Me.” Of
course he was thinking of Anton Che-
khov. Almost a century later, it is still
those gray plays that define Chekhov in
the English- speaking world: a review
of a recent London production of Uncle
Va nya in The Independent managed to
include the words “depressing,” “pessi-
m ism,” “m isanth ropy,” and “su f focat-
ing,” all in the first paragraph.
Yet Chekhov insisted that his plays
were comedies: The Seagull is subtitled
“a comedy in four acts,” and while writ-
ing The Cherry Orchard he described
it as “in places even a farce.” Certainly
his first readers would have been sur-
prised to learn that he would be re-
membered as a great poet of sadness
and stasis. When he made his debut
in the early 1880s, under the byline
“A. Chekhonte,” it was as a humor-
ist—a prolific writer of jokes and
sketches for popular magazines with
names like Splinters and Alarm Clock.
The key to success in this corner of
the literary world, he advised a friend
who was trying to break into print, was
speed and volume: “Write as much as
you possibly can! Write, write, write...
until your fingers break under the
strain.... Let’s have a stream of sto-
ries, trifles, jokes, witticisms, puns, and
so on and so forth.”
Fifty- Two Stories, a new collection
of Chekhov’s short fiction translated
by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volo-
khon sky, includes several pieces from
this period, most of them just two or
three pages long. They may no longer
raise a laugh, but they are clever and
original enough to make clear why ed-
itors snapped up Chekhov’s wares. In
“A Slip- Up,” a girl’s parents scheme
to entrap a suitor into marrying her
by surprising them in an embrace, but
instead of the icon that they mean to
use to solemnize the engagement, they
accidentally grab from the wall an old
portrait, allowing the unwilling fiancé
to escape in the confusion. In “Read-
ing,” a government bureaucrat tries to
get his thickheaded employees to start
reading books, only to find that the un-
accustomed mental effort makes them
lose their wits.
In this phase of his career, writ-
ing wasn’t a calling for Chekhov but
what we’d now call a side hustle. He
was paid by the line and needed to
make money fast, to help support his
parents and siblings while he studied
medicine. Having grown up poor, he
took a frankly mercenary delight in
being able to conjure money out of his
own brain: “Would you like a few nice
little subjects? I’ve written stacks!
Twenty rubles’ worth! More, even,”
he wrote in 1883 to his older brother
Alexander, who had introduced him to
journalism.
In the same year, when he was
twenty- three years old, Chekhov wrote
to Nikolai Leikin, an editor he often
worked with, apologizing for the qual-
ity of his submissions and explaining
the conditions in which he worked:A visiting relation’s baby scream-
ing in the next room, while in an-
other room my father is reading
aloud to my mother.... Someone
has got the music box going.... It
would be hard to imagine a worse
situation for someone who wants
to be a writer.You can hear a more serious literary
ambition beginning to stir. It surfaces
again in his complaint to Leikin about
his strict one-hundred- line limit for
contributions: “I’m sure if I had been
able to write it at twice the length it
would have been twice as good,” he
grumbles.The turning point in Chekhov’s lit-
erary career came in 1886, when he
published his first book, a collection of
his “A. Chekhonte” sketches. His let-
ters show him trying hard to treat the
whole thing as a joke: “A title like Buy
This Book or Get a Sock in the Jaw!,
or possibly May I Help You, Sir? would
be all right by me,” he wrote to a friend
before the book appeared (under the
title Motley Tales—not much better).
But his true feelings emerged when he
received a letter from Dmitri Grigor-
ovich, an eminent writer and onetime
roommate of Dostoevsky, who praised
Chekhov’s talent to the skies while
deploring his carelessness and over-
production. “Stop trying to meet dead-
lines. I do not know what your income
is; if it is small, then starve,” the older
writer advised.
Chekhov responded with effusive
thanks (“Your letter, my dear, beloved
bearer of good news, struck me like a
bolt of lightning. I almost burst into
tears”), before unburdening his liter-
ary conscience:Until now I have approached my
writing in a most frivolous, irre-sponsible and meaningless way.
I cannot recall a single story on
which I spent more than a day....
I’ve been writing my stories like
reporters churn out pieces about
fires: mechanically, half- asleep,
caring as little for the reader as for
myself.But he promised to reform: “I am still
only twenty- six. It may be that one day
I shall manage to achieve something,
although time is rushing by quickly.”
Two years later, in 1888, Chekhov
published his first long story, “The
Steppe,” in a prestigious literary jour-
nal. It made him famous, and over
the next decade he would produce
his most substantial and ambitious
fiction: “A Dreary Story,” “Ward
No. 6,” “The Duel,” “The Story of a
Nobody,” “Three Years,” “My Life.” In
the same period, he wrote his first great
plays, The Seagull and Uncle Vanya;
made an arduous transcontinental
journey to the Russian penal colony of
Sakhalin in order to report on condi-
tions there; and worked tirelessly as a
doctor in Melikhovo, where he built a
dacha. The grandson of a serf was now
the owner of a country estate; the hack
was one of the most respected writers
in Russia. His pace slowed only in 1898,
when tuberculosis forced him to retire
to the warmer climate of Yalta. Even so,
in the six years that remained to him,
Chekhov managed to write Three Sis-
ters and The Cherry Orchard, as well as
some of his best stories, including “The
Lady with the Dog” and “The Bishop.”
Many of those classic tales were
translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky
in their Selected Stories of Anton Che-
khov, published by Modern Library in- Returning to Chekhov two de-
cades later, the prolific pair have filled
Fifty- Two Stories with a combination
of famous and lesser- known short tales.
Pevear and Volokhonsky’s translations
of virtually the entire modern Russian
canon have been celebrated by some
critics as accurate and freshly revealing
and reviled by others (including Janet
Malcolm in these pages*) as awkward,
flat, and charmless. A reader who
doesn’t know Russian, of course, has
no way of judging if Pevear and Volo-
khon sky accurately capture the tone
of the original. But their direct, plain-
spoken approach feels particularly ap-
propriate for Chekhov, who once wrote
that “a writer must be as objective as a
chemist.”
In the preface to Fifty- Two Stories,
Pevear writes that their “intention...
has been to represent the extraordi-
nary variety of Chekhov’s stories...
in terms of characters, events, social
classes, settings, voicing and formal
inventiveness.” There is certainly va-
riety in these stories, as well as some
familiar Russian types—a neurotic stu-
dent (“The Breakdown”), superstitious
peasants (“Luck”), a spoiled aristocrat
(“The Princess”). But while Chekhov
clearly relished the challenge of mov-
ing between ages and classes, the va-
riety of his settings only highlights the
continuities in his work—above all,
his increasingly profound interest in
comedy. Because Fifty- Two Stories is
arranged chronologically—from those
early sketches to “The New Dacha,”
written in 1898, which belongs to the
world of The Cherry Orchard—it re-
veals this development with fascinating
clarityIn Chekhov’s first efforts, comedy
simply means jokes, sometimes with
bawdy punchlines. At a party, a man
opens a musical instrument case and
finds a naked woman inside: that’s the
last scene of “Romance with a Double
Bass,” and the story itself—a farrago
about a musician who loses his clothes
while swimming and encounters a
woman in the same straits—is just a
way of getting there. Other stories de-
pend on the comedy of exaggeration
and the slow burn. In “The Siren,” a
clerk’s monologue about his favorite
foods grows more and more tempting
until his colleagues run home for din-
ner; in “The Exclamation Point,” a gov-
ernment clerk is haunted by visions of
punctuation. The biter bit is another
reliable formula: in “Corporal Whom-
pov,” a village busybody keeps trying
to get his neighbors thrown in jail for
minor infractions, so they put him in
jail instead.
But soon enough (in Chekhov’s com-
pressed career, which lasted barely
twenty years, every development comes
quickly) the comedy becomes more
technically ambitious. In “Kashtanka,”
the plot is irresistible fun—a lost dog
joins an animal circus and learns how
to do tricks, like forming a pyramid
with a cat and a goose—and the story
is made up of short episodes, perfect
for holding the attention of children.
Apparently it worked: when Chekhov
visited the family of Alexei Suvorin,
the newspaper publisher who was his
most important friend and supporter,
he noted that “the children never take
their eyes off me because they are wait-
ing for me to say something incrediblyAnton Chekhov*See “Socks,” The New York Review,
June 23, 2016.