‘Dreams’ by Anton Chekhov

“Before them lie ten yards of dark-brown, muddy road, behind them lies as much; beyond that, wherever they turn, rises a dense wall of white fog. They walk and walk, but the ground they walk on is always the same; the wall comes no nearer; the spot remains a spot.”

This road is the location for the whole of ‘Dreams’. Two soldiers are escorting a vagrant with amnesia. In some ways, this is a scene of the grittiest naturalism, yet the weather and the past-less man give it a tint of the supernatural. The three working class men discuss their ambitions. They unearth the homeless man’s roots. But, in the end, after all their efforts to fill the future with particulars, it remains as blank as the fog.

I wish I hadn’t waited until I was in my fifties to read Chekhov. But I am glad that there are lots of stories by him which I have yet to read.

First published as Мечты in New Times No. 3849, November 15 1886. First collected in In the Dusk, 1887, St Petersburg. I read it in Selected Stories, translator unknown*, Introduction and Notes by Joe Andrew, Wordsworth Classics, 1996. It is available to read free online in a different translation here

* Wordsworth Classics publishers say on their site: “A note on the translation: our edition was first published in 1996 and no details of the translator were included. We have made a concerted effort to identify the source of the translation, but without success. The stories seem to have a continuity of style which suggests they are all the work of the same translator. Should anyone be able to cast any light on this, do please let us know.”

‘Grisha’ by Anton Chekhov, translated by Constance Garnett

‘Grisha’ is a story told from the point of view of a little boy who is less than three years old. The nurse takes Grisha, the boy of the title, out into the world for the first time. So far, his world had been limited to the safe four corners of the nursery, and the sudden encounter with the outdoors is for Grisha an explosion of light and new emotions. The boy is afraid at first, but also curious. His understanding of what happens around him is limited, but he quickly learns to observe and imitate. Grisha’s observations are vivid but fragmented, focused on immediate impressions rather than cohesive narratives. The nurse’s conversations with other people, the bustling streets, and the overwhelming sensations are all described as Grisha perceives them, without adult interpretation or analysis. When arriving home, Grisha tries to express what he had seen and felt. “He talks not so much with his tongue, as with his face and his hands. He shows how the sun shines, how the horses run, how the terrible stove looks, and how the cook drinks”. But the words which could reach the deadened ears of grown-ups elude him, and the wonders of what he now knows fall flat in his inability to speak them, and in the inability of grown-ups to hear them.

First published in Russian in 1886. Available in English in Ward no. 6 and Other Stories, ed. David Plante, Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003

‘Oysters’ by Anton Chekhov, variously translated

I first read this online at Bibliomania, a terrific resource, which also has dozens more of Chekhov’s great short stories, though no translator is credited. They are most likely all Constance Garnett’s translations. Here we are in a freezing street in St Petersburg with a father and his small son. The father is ashamed and has been reduced to asking passers-by for some money to buy food. They are standing outside a restaurant that serves oysters. The boy doesn’t know what oysters are and imagines the strange creatures and what it would be like to eat them. He thinks they are like frogs. The desperate poverty in this story hits home with the force of an arrow through the heart. The restaurant owner takes pity on them and invites them in and they get oysters. Then the turn, the owner is amazed, “The child is eating the shell.” The boy wakes up in a hospital bed. His father is pacing back and forth in the room. The concision in this story would leave not one comma even for a Gordon Lish to remove. It is perfect in every way. It might be called flash fiction these days. Apart from the most famous stories, Chekhov wrote hundreds of short pieces like this, often in a humorous vein

First published in Russian in Budilnik #486, 1884. First published in English in The Kiss and Other Stories, Duckworth, 1908. Available to read online here

‘Misery’ by Anton Chekhov

The thoughts and conversations of a cab driver as he works with his horse-drawn sleigh on a dreadfully cold evening. It happens that his son died just the week before. Amid the small talk he has with surly passengers, he tries to tell them about his sad news. But each time they cut him off, they don’t want to know, they will talk about their journey and destination. So by the end of his working day, he has not managed to tell anyone. But in one of the greatest endings ever, while he is unharnessing and putting things away in the stable, he tells his news to the horse. It makes me tearful just to think about it now.

First published in Russian in Peterburgskaya Gazeta, 1886, Variously collected, including in The Essential Tales of Chekhov, transl. Constance Garnett, ed, Richard Ford, Granta Books, 1999. Available to read online here

‘The Bet’ by Anton Chekhov, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

(a) Short story as premature existential challenge:

For years, I was convinced this story was by Guy de Maupassant. As it is, it’s the only Chekhov I’ve ever read, and it turns out I haven’t read any Maupassant at all.

A rich and arrogant banker bets an idealistic young lawyer a small fortune that he, the lawyer, can’t spend fifteen years in solitary confinement. This is at a party, you understand: there was rich food, plentiful alcohol, hijinks of manifold sorts, and a dangerously sloshed intellectual argument about whether capital punishment or life imprisonment was the more (or less) humane judicial sentence. We’ve all been to a party like that, right? The lawyer says that to “live somehow is better than not to live at all” and the banker says, basically, prove it mate, and here’s two million roubles on the table. “‘I accept!’ says the lawyer. ‘You stake your millions, and I stake my freedom!’” Which is a little rash of him, considering.

It doesn’t go well. The banker spends fifteen years losing enough of his fortune that paying out the two million will ruin him. The lawyer spends his time cut off from contemporary human contact, but has access to books, musical instruments, writing materials, and alcohol and tobacco. He drifts in and out of madness, learns half a dozen languages, alternately sates himself and goes on hunger strike; spends a year playing the piano constantly, another talking to himself, another in silence.

He reads everything.

The night before the final day, the banker is desperate. He only has one option. But, it turns out, so does the lawyer, who has made a final, modest testament:

“‘I know that I am more intelligent than all of you. [Okay, not that modest.] And I scorn your books, I scorn all the world’s blessings and its wisdom. It is all paltry, fleeting, illusory, and as deceptive as a mirage. You may be proud, wise, and beautiful, but death will wipe you from the face of the earth the same as cellar mice, and your descendants, history, the immortality of your geniuses will freeze or burn along with the terrestrial globe.’”

To a book-loving fifteen year old who’d just lost his father to a random heart attack, this came as a cosmically chilling revelation. I mean, it’s like positing Chekhov as precursor to Lovecraft. Be smart and read all the books, sure; just don’t read all the books or this existentially abyssal plain will open up and lose you in its heart forever. I felt so small reading that, and yet somehow so absolutely powerful.

It wasn’t till reading it again recently that I fully appreciated the subtle ironies that perfuse, or perhaps irradiate, ‘The Bet’s ending. Bankers are, after all, bankers. And yes, you short story purists who blanched at the first paragraph of this section, I am now reading more Chekhov.

First published in Russian as ‘Пари’ in Novoye Vremya, January, 1889. Collected in Fifty-Two Stories, Penguin Classics, 2020. Available to read on Project Gutenberg in an earlier translation

‘The Black Monk’ by Anton Chekhov

“Andrey Vasilich Kovrin, MA, was exhausted, his nerves were shattered. He did not take any medical treatment but mentioned his condition in passing to a doctor friend over a bottle of wine, and was advised to spend the spring and summer in the country.”

Is wellness the death of intellect? Is a degree of mental exhaustion necessary for happiness? Anton Chekhov’s thought-provoking story ‘The Black Monk’ centres on Kovrin, a passionate scholar of psychology and philosophy.

When we meet Kovrin, he’s headed towards the house of his former guardian and mentor, Pesotsky, a horticulturist famous throughout Russia. Kovrin is suffering from burnout, insomnia and megalomania. He’s overworked his mind in pursuit of posterity.

Pesotsky’s house includes a landscaped garden and a bountiful orchard of about eighty acres. Kovrin enjoys the garden’s splendours yet doesn’t cut back on his work. “In the country he continued to lead the same nervous, restless life as in town. He read and wrote a great deal, studied Italian, and on his strolls took pleasure in the thought that he would soon be back at work again.”

Everyone was amazed how little Kovrin slept, and how he emerged from a night of insomnia “vigorous and cheerful, as if nothing was wrong.” Even though Kovrin is happy, he begins having hallucinations of a black monk. The apparition doesn’t frighten him – on the contrary it helps to cement his intellectual destiny. “You’re one of the few who are rightly called God’s Chosen,” says the black monk. “Your ideas, intentions, your amazing erudition, your whole life – all bear the divine, heavenly stamp”.

I won’t say any more about how the story progresses, instead urging you to read this classic for yourself. Chekhov’s story asks questions about genius and madness. It’s a dizzying read – a whirlwind in the mind.

Re-reading ‘The Black Monk’ in our current age – where health has become wellness and work is often vilified – I was struck by the timelessness of Chekov’s story. Should we work less and rest more? Or does work give life meaning? For those, like Kovrin, who enjoy pursuits of the mind, does too much rest threaten to unravel us?

First published in Russian in The Artist, January 1894. First published in English in The Black Monk and Other Tales, 1903. Widely translated and collected, including in A Nervous Breakdown, Penguin Classics, 2016, and as a Penguin 60, 1984

Gooseberries by Anton Chekhov

* Picked by Peter Ahern

It’s that beautiful Russian summer landscape, a million miles from the sea, but the centre of the world, where you think every Chekhov story is set, certainly this one, with the central, but gratuitous, swim in the pond in the rain. Yes, that’s a nice touch: rain in the summer. So it must be one of those places, here in the unending summer countryside, where you cannot but be happy.

Somehow Chekhov stories always seem to be right here: you are surrounded by an infinite steppe, grasslands stretch away into the distance, trees glitter forever, and there are always sparkling streams and lakes. And though you’ve read this story a dozen times, and you know what happens, knowing all too well the grim and pathetic story within the story, to the point of being haunted by it, as the characters themselves will be, you still find yourself just where you want to be, so that what comes next, how things unfold, is both impossibly far away, as well as just around the corner. How could anybody not be happy here? Here of all places?

And now you remember, it was just such a Russian summer landscape that had captured the imagination of the story’s central character. How it had haunted him. And now you remember the plate of gooseberries. And you get the most awful, if subtle, shiver down your spine. Ah yes, this isn’t really a summer story. no, not at all. And isn’t it odd how you always forget the rain.

First published in Russian in Russkaya Mysl, 1898. Variously translated, including by Rosamund Bartlett in About Love and Other Stories, Oxford World’s Classics, 2004)

Peter Ahern is a teacher of great stories and other things. He blogs about the best novels and stories, as well as teaching them, at www.onehundredpages.wordpress.com

‘The Horse Stealers’ by Anton Chekhov, translated by Constance Garnett

The protagonist in this story is a weak, vainglorious and complaisant man who is nonetheless entrusted with an important package. Sheltering from a blizzard in a low inn, surrounded by brigands whom he feels the unaccountable urge to impress, it is obvious from the beginning that he is going to meet his downfall. But as a reader, my capacity to care was not reduced by the inevitability – in fact it was increased by it. The notion that character is fate is demonstrated beautifully; there’s this sense of clear-eyed empathy for human weakness – but also the sheer romance of folly, its allure and siren song, and the call of the void beneath it.

First published in 1890. Collected in The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories, Macmillan, 1921, latterly Ecco Press, 1986

‘The Lady with the Dog’ by Anton Chekhov, translated by Constance Garnett

Chekhov, like Chopin, is an artist who expresses an exquisite and open-ended vision of the sadness, hope, and folly of our lives. ‘The Lady with the Dog’ is one of my favorite Chekhov stories (tied neck-and-neck with his dog fable ‘Kashtanka’). The tale is one of petty adultery narrated in such a non-judgmental manner that you are drawn towards the characters and into the enduring mysteries of love. Gurov, a chauvinistic and womanizing Moscow banker, is on a summer vacation in Yalta, where he is attracted to Anna, the lady with a little dog, who is visiting from a provincial town. After a swift seduction and several weeks together, they return to their respective unhappily married lives. But the interlude is no summer fling, for each has been touched, for the first time, by love. Meeting in secret, the story ends with the lovers facing with grim resilience the troubles that must lie ahead. The writing is so compassionate towards the characters and their transformation, and to the arc of time itself, that it leaves you not only with a lump in the throat but a sense that so many of us are “birds of passage, caught and forced to live in different cages.”

First published in 1899. Included in The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories, trans. Constance Garnett, Penguin Classics, 2002. Available online here

‘The Kiss’ by Anton Chekhov, translated by Ronald Wilks

What would a class on the short story be without some Chekhov? I usually teach three favourites, ‘The Lady with the Little Dog,’ ‘The Darling,’ and the one I finally settled on for this list, ‘The Kiss.’ Coming as it does after Balzac’s ‘Sarrasine’ and Kipling’s ‘Mrs. Bathurst’ (wonderful stories I cut from this list with regret), ‘The Kiss’ is a lesson in how nothing much needs to happen in a story. Balzac and Kipling’s melodramatic plottiness contrasts with Chekhov’s lassitude, boredom, and melancholy.

My students and I spend a lot of time on a single passage, in which the protagonist, the hapless Staff-Captain Ryabovich, whose “lynx-like side whiskers and spectacles seemed to be saying ‘I’m the shyest, most modest, and most insignificant officer in the whole brigade!’”, has what the narrator calls “a little adventure.” Along with some other officers, Ryabovich has been invited to a party at a country house near the town where six battalions have put up for the evening. Too shy to dance, too clumsy to play billiards, Ryabovich wanders the house until he gets lost. Opening a door at random, he finds himself in a dark room, where he is astonished to hear a voice whisper “At last!” before he is embraced: “a burning cheek pressed against his and at the same time there was the sound of a kiss.”

We parse this unusual, almost synaesthetic description (why the sound of a kiss rather than a feeling?), and reflect on what follows it: the woman utters a cry, shrinks back in what Ryabovich is convinced is disgust, and rushes from the room. The rest of the story is an extended depiction of how a non-event, or, at best, near-event, can expand in fantasy, to the point of consuming a life. The story is full of people who can’t imagine that others don’t think the way they do, don’t fancy the same types of women or men they do, don’t tell the same sort of lies they do.

The ending offers a classically Chekhovian irony: Ryabovich is disabused of his fantasies, realizes what a fool he’s made of himself, resigns himself to the stupidity of the human experience, as endless and aimless as the water in a river purling against the piles of a hut. Or, at least, it seems he does. At the very end, though, he’s still telling himself stories of “how fate had accidentally caressed him.” The moral of the story is that we can’t help but make our lives into stories.

First published in Russian in New Times in 1887. Published in English in The Steppe and Other Stories, 1887 – 1891, Penguin 2001. Read the Constance Garnett translation here

‘The Student’ by Anton Chekhov

Chekhov is surely the most compassionate writer there is. His worldview allows for all kinds of failures and he fully accepts human weaknesses, able to see the beauty in even the most ugly behaviour. I can’t find my copy of this story but I remember its contrasts – of dark night and harsh weather against the warmth of the women’s fire, their lack of education compared with the eponymous student’s. What stayed with me, strongly enough to feel as if my brain chemistry might be altered by it, is the shape of the story and its movement from distance (the student’s observations of the “tall fat old woman in a man’s coat” and her daughter’s “stupid’ pock-marked face”) through emotion (the widow wipes her tears away with her sleeve), to catharsis (the student surveys his village from a hilltop and understands the meaning of life). The women are reminiscent of Macbeth’s witches as they wash up their cauldron and wipe away their tears and the student casts himself as St Peter as he warms himself by their fire. It isn’t lost on me that the women’s connection is human and small scale while the (male) student’s is epic, vast, historical, as he experiences connection with landscape and time. This is Chekhov’s point. I experience the catharsis he describes as I read his story, to such an extent that I feel physically transformed. This is also the effect of the Kafka and Welty stories I have chosen.

First published in Russian in Russkie Vedomosti, 1894. First translated by Constance Garnett in 1914. Available in various editions and translations since, including online here, no translator credited: boo!

‘An Anonymous Story’ by Anton Chekhov

Most of the stories here stand out as strange or memorable even within a body of work I love, but sometimes they’re the only story by a given writer I really remember or return to. If it’s the latter, and everyone does it, and every does it to the same story… it’s a pretty tricky dynamic. A short story writer can accidentally becomeone story. With a writer who is many things, like Chekhov, that’s a kind of death. Long ago, after a really grim, famous-writer-craft-talk on ‘Lady with Lapdog’ I promised myself I’d never teach that story and I’ve avoided rereading it: my life in Chekhov has been blissful and varied and surprising ever since.

This story, ‘An Anonymous Story’, is a long, long first-person tale, and a great departure from what we think we know about this Russian. In this, Chekhov is a smirking, slippery writer, who would likely be appalled by the decorum of craft that’s crept up around him.

(Another strange writer, the Russian-born Englishman, William Gerhardie, author of the first study of Chekhov in English, was puzzled that we so often read Chekhov’s humor only as sadness.)

‘An Anonymous Story’—also known as ‘The Story of an Unknown Man’—is a comic set-up played straight: a revolutionary operative, seeking to gain information on a high government official, takes a job as the high official’s son’s valet… and promptly falls in love with the son’s mistress. Everything goes awry, of course, and leads us to a beautiful, terrible ending where the absurdity of all that has gone before is reaffirmed and redeemed in the space of a page and a half, or even just a paragraph.

My chest tightens thinking about that ending, which recently came to mind as I read the close of Rachel Cusk’s Kudos, holding us in a moment that is much in the same register.

First published in Russian as ‘The Story of an Unknown Man’ in Russkaya Mysl, February and March 1893. Translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky included in The Complete Short Novels, Everyman’s Library, 2004

‘Gusev’ by Anton Chekhov

Chekhov writes about all life, but the two great forces pumping through his short stories are love and death. They often meet in the same story but there are stories that are primarily about one or the other. ‘Gusev’ is a death story. Its plot is ostensibly simple. A discharged soldier boards a ship, becomes sick, and dies. However, the texture Chekhov builds around this simple plot is symphonic. There are deep digressions on metaphor, the nature of boredom, the nature of play, human prejudice, and God knows what else. That’s all part and parcel of Chekhov, though. There is something else that makes ‘Gusev’ special to me. I guess Chekhov was in his late style when he wrote it and was pulling off different formal tricks in each story, the way Cezanne, say, does in every painting of his mature period. He pulls off this formal trick at the end, which stops me every time I read it. The character, whose mind the text inhabits, dies, but the text continues, as life does. The text pans out from the ship. We see the dead character, wrapped in cloth, slide overboard and drift slowly, weirdly, down through a mile of sea, as sharks and pilot fish nuzzle it. We then pan out further, and into the best ending of all the short stories I’ve read. We are left hovering somewhere between the sky and the sea, which are both huge, empty, persisting, and assuming “the sweet, joyous, passionate colours for which there are scarcely any names in the tongue of man.”

First published in the Christmas 1890 edition of the newspaper Novoye Vremya. First published in English in The Witch and Other Stories, translated by Constance Garnett, in 1918. Currently collected in Forty Stories, translated by Robert Payne, Penguin Random House, 1991 and About Love and Other Stories, translated by Rosamund Bartlett, Oxford World’s Classics, 2008. Read Garnett’s translation online here

‘Verochka’ by Anton Chekhov

What can I say about Chekhov that hasn’t been said before? Probably not a lot other than to reiterate his genius as a master of the short story form. In ‘Verochka’, a twenty-one-year-old country girl by the name of Vera declares her love for Ivan Ognev, a somewhat naïve statistician who has been visiting Vera’s father on business. When Ognev leaves the country to return to the city, Vera accompanies him to the outskirts of her village where she makes her feelings as clear as decently possible. It’s a story of missed chances, pain and regret as Ognev struggles to respond to Vera’s advances. There is a sense here of individuals’ lives turning on the tiniest of moments as the choices they make set the direction for their future.

First published in New Times. Collected in In the Twilight, 1887, available in a new translation by Hugh Aplin from Alma Classics 2014. Available online in Constance Garnett’s earlier translation here