Selected Stories from Anton Chekhov ( Translated by Richard Pevear and Larrisa Volokhonsky )

"His characters are not monumental personalities dramatically portrayed, like heroes of Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, they are sharply  observed types." ( From the Introduction)

"Thus the real, the only hero of Chekhov, is the hopeless man. He has absolutely no action left for him in life, save to beat his head against the stones..... He has nothing, he must create everything for himself. And this 'creation out of the void,' or more truly the possibility of this creation, is the only problem which can occupy and inspire Chekhov." This is a quote from Shestov, which Pervear has included in the introduction. The moment I read this I couldn't help remembering, possibly my favourite author (alongside Dostoevsky), Albert Camus. It is a point to ponder as to what influence Camus may have had from Chekov.

Then we turn to what Chekov thought was the writer's job ( in a letter to Alexei Suvorin in 1888);
"An artist must pass judgment only on what he understands; his range is limited as that of any other specialist... Anyone who says that the artist's field is all answers and no questions has neither done any writing or had any dealings with imagery. The artist observes, selects, guesses and synthesizes... two concepts: answering the questions and formulating them correctly. Only the latter is required of an author." ( This too is from the long introduction by Richard Pevear)

This introduction by itself makes this book worth having. And it has thirty short stories  They have intentionally left out the "novelized stories" of 80-100 pages. The stories are from a very early period in which the brevity of his creations was a characteristic. The earliest short story we have is from 1883 and the first few short stories are from that period 1883 - 1886. Some are so heart rendering that you feel like as if your heart is weighted down with a kilo or two of iron. There is no point in trying to summarise or write short introductions about a master like Chekhov. Anyone who calls himself or herself has read Chekhov at some point. Hence I will limit this to a a small portion of a short story called "Vanka" - Vanka is an orphan who has been packed off to a shoemaker, He finds life so unbearable that he finally writes to his grandfather.

"'Come, dear grandpa,' Vanka went on with his letter. 'by Christ God I  beg you, take me awayfrom here. Have pity on me, a wretched orphan, because everybody beats me, and I'm so hungry, and it's so dreary I can't tell you, I just cry all the time. And the other day the master hit me on the head with a last, so that I fell down and barely recoverd. My life is going bad, worse than any dog's... And I also send greetings to Alyona, to one-eyed Yegorka, and to the coachman, and don't give my harmonica away to anybody. I remain, your grandson, Ivan Zhukov. Dear grandpa come.'

Vanka folded the  written sheet in four, and put it into an envelope he had bought the day before for a kopeck. . . . After thinking a little, he dipped his pen and wrote the address:


To grandpa in the village."

Then there are parts that hit you like a hammer right between your eyes:
"At the door of every contented, happy man somebody should stand with a little hammer, constantly tapping , to remind him that unhappy people exist, that however happy he may be, sooner or later life will show him its claws, some calamity will befall him - illness, poverty, loss - an nobody will hear or see, just as he doesn't hear or see others now" ( from "Gooseberries" )

I will not even try to implore others to read this, for the obviousness in that statement borders on an absurd suggestion. Am just sorry that I had to wait till now to read as comprehensive a collection as this ( my previous Chekhov "experiences" are limited to a short story picked from here and there).