Chekhov’s Motley Tales of Joy, Love and Sorrow

A winter’s night, a traveler, a story: a classic combination, as the great Italian storyteller Italo Calvino reminded us. For untold centuries, long before the Internet, the television or the shopping mall, people have gathered round the fire on long dark nights and exchanged the gift of stories. Tales of awe and wonder, of course, are appropriate to the holiday season. But even more so, perhaps, are the poignant, profoundly touching stories of the man who practically invented the realistic short story, Anton Chekhov.

Trained as a doctor, Chekhov (1860-1904) was the last of the great 19th century Russian writers to emerge on the literary scene: after Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. He was already writing short stories while still at medical school and, by 1886, had gained wide recognition for his second collection, “Motley Tales.” A modest man, gentle, ironic and compassionate, Chekhov was to become one of the most pervasive influences on the modern short story, particularly the impressionistic, slice-of-life stories of authors as otherwise unalike as Maxim Gorky, Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Mansfield and Somerset Maugham.

Surprisingly perhaps, for a writer so free of histrionics, Chekhov married an actress and also became one of the world’s most admired playwrights, author of “Ivanov,” “The Seagull,” “Uncle Vanya,” “The Three Sisters” and “The Cherry Orchard.”

Unlike his great Russian predecessors, who came from upper-class families, Chekhov was the son of a grocer and grandson of a serf. Although he was chided by politically minded critics for lacking a clear social message, his stories provide heart-rending portraits of the ordinary existence of people in every walk of life, from the unjustly condemned convict and the deserted peasant girl to the querulous idle rich.

In “Vanka,” a 9-year-old village boy sent as an apprentice to a Moscow shoemaker begs to be released from his frightening new life of beatings and humiliation in a letter he trustingly addresses “To Grandpa in the Village.”

“Anyuta,” a poor girl who poses for art students, has come to know the real nature of la vie boheme: “Now they had all finished their studies, had made their way in life, and, of course, being decent people, had long forgotten her.”

Chekhov was not yet 30 when he wrote one of his masterpieces, “A Boring Story: From an Old Man’s Notes.” (Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translate it thus; previously, it had been rendered as “A Dreary Story.”) Narrated by an aging professor and scientist, it is an astonishingly subtle portrait of a complex, self-aware man who still prides himself on his accomplishments yet is perceptive enough to recognize some disturbing changes in his character and personality.

Three years later, Chekhov published another masterpiece, “Ward No. 6,” the story of a doctor in charge of an asylum who ends up as a patient. Neither a mad scientist nor a sadistic bully, the doctor was “fond of intelligence and honesty, but lack[ed] character and faith in his right to organize an intelligent and honest life around him.” When patients complained of mistreatment, he felt bad but did nothing. When faced with incompetence or corruption, he looked the other way. There is poetic justice in his fate, of course, but beyond that, Chekhov imbues his story with a sense of boundless pity for all of flawed humanity.

Although Chekhov was a man of science, unable to adhere to the simple faith of his childhood, he retained a tender reverence for religious belief, which can be seen in such stories as “The Bishop,” “Easter Night” and his personal favorite, “The Student.” Moments of intense joy, love and hope are depicted as intrinsically valuable, even when it seems they lack any solid foundation in reality.

The editors of this collection have selected 30 luminous stories, including many--though not all--of the most famous ones. Making a special effort to show the arc of Chekhov’s development, they have chosen stories from early, middle and late in his career and arranged them chronologically. Helpful notes explain everything from literary allusions to the hierarchy of the Russian civil service and the rituals of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Chekhov may not have been a fiery-eyed social prophet, but he certainly did not lack a social conscience. A character in his story “Gooseberries” expresses one of his recurrent themes, that the comforts of the few are purchased at the expense of the many: “. . . the happy man feels good only because the unhappy bear their burden silently. . . . At the door of every contented, happy man somebody should stand with a little hammer, constantly tapping, to remind him that unhappy people exist.” This could serve as an emblem of Chekhov’s own endeavor, except that there is so much more to his art.