Anton Chekhov's Short Stories: A Norton Critical Edition – Edited by Ralph E. Matlaw, 1979 ★★★½

34 Stories, Many More Conclusions

Stuck in a baseball frame of mind with the playoffs underway and my team eliminated, I find myself pondering literary figures the way I do baseball stars. Some are known for home runs. Others are less spectacular but more consistent singles hitters.

After reading this old Norton collection containing 34 of Anton Chekhov’s short stories, I’m inclined to push against any Ruthian comparisons and place the famous Russian author with other great singles hitters; Eddie Collins, Rod Carew, Ichiro Suzuki, and Ben Jonson. Solid swing, but you expect the ball to stay in the park.

Chekhov is no question a famous name; he’s mainly famous for his plays. A singularly pungent college memory was a lonely Sunday spent reading his best-know play, The Seagull. Billed a comedy, I was unprepared for its morose characters and themes. “I am in mourning for my life,” one character kept saying. After four acts of dead air and bathos inside the Homer Babbidge Library on an overcast afternoon, I was starting to mourn mine.

Chekhov is critically regarded for more than his plays. He was also a short-story writer, and a very highly rated one. Here, editor Ralph E. Matlaw makes the case for Chekhov as a principal developer of the short story in both its form and content, who “insisted on honesty and truth, on depicting what existed rather than what one hoped to see because one saw in automatic, ordinary, and unthinking ways.”

The short stories present quick takes on various aspects of Russian life as it was from 1884 to 1903, as Russia lived under a burdensome and sclerotic imperial order. The stories are by no means lighter material than the plays – they often feature murder, starvation, disease, prostitution, or other miseries. But Chekhov’s vivid and immediate scene-setting, his forward momentum, his crisp and sturdy constructions all feel somehow right. In short, he manages to engage at least one reader here in a way his plays do not.

“God created man to be alive, and to have joy and grief and sorrow, but you want nothing, so you are not alive, you are stone, clay.”

This is the voice of one of the people we meet in this collection, a Tatar inmate of a Siberian prison camp with no known name in “In Exile.” He may be divinely inspired, or just mad from hopeless deprivation. Chekhov played with ambiguity a lot in these stories, which can be comical or tragic depending on how one takes them.

Other characters speak more from straight-out despair. In “A Journey By Cart,” a missed connection between a lonely spinster and an object of her desire become grist for rumination: “And, at bottom, all human relationships and all life were so incomprehensible that if you thought about them at all dread would overwhelm you and your heart would stop beating.”

In his most famous story here, “The Lady With the Dog,” we watch a jaded husband as he fools around with another man’s wife. It becomes clear after a while the story is not about the affair but rather the differing attitudes of the two participants, both initially and over time.

He goes from being attracted by her to becoming so disillusioned that, in a memorably pungent description, he compares the frills of her undergarments to fish scales. Then he undergoes another transformation, and becomes besotted by her. There is action going on in the story, mostly regarding his pursuit, but it is secondary to the complexities he is feeling inside, something Chekhov lays out quite well. (As to what she is feeling, Chekhov is vaguer but no less interesting.)

Chekhov wrote other famous short stories, some of which stretch out quite a ways without exactly connecting to anything. The second-to-last story he wrote, “The Bishop,” also part of this collection and one which generates special praise from many of the commentaries included in the back of this book, follows the title character as he conducts Easter services and struggles to re-establish a relationship with his frail mother. It is one of the longest stories, and a fairly plodding one at that, ending in a defiantly unresolved way with sudden death and a lonely mourner. Many of the other stories here follow a similar path. You want O. Henry? Go read O. Henry. Anton Chekhov was the No Henry.

Anton Chekhov in his younger days, in a familiar pose. An accomplished doctor, he described literature as his "mistress." Image from http://www.lettersofnote.com/2013/07/every-hour-is-precious.html

There are exceptions. “Sleepy” follows the sad life of an overworked young girl who longs for rest but is kept awake by her many chores, chief among them looking after the infant boy whose crabby parents make her life a hell. The last paragraph offers as cold a capper as any story you’ll ever read.

Other stories kind of drift along. “The Grasshopper” is a long account of a newlywed couple, he a boring but devoted doctor, she a social butterfly content to play at being an artist with her circle of cool friends, which she insists on keeping exclusively male. She starts an affair with one of these shallow men, then is rejected and returns to her husband. Eventually, too late, she realizes the error of her ways. Chekhov here may have been having a dig at the pretentious bohemian types he came to know, but the result is at best a diverting plod.

His more comedic pieces here are similarly one-note. “Chameleon,” the first story in this collection, is basically about a dog biting a peasant, with the hypocrisy of a police inspector revealed in the way he handles the matter when he discovers the dog has a noble master. “The Siren’s Song” allows us to eavesdrop as a law clerk’s description of a bounteous feast drives a court session into chaos. It’s thin stuff.

The pieces that stick out most are the sad ones. Chekhov couldn’t seem to help himself. In “Vanka,” a little boy far from home on Christmas Eve writes a letter to his only surviving relative begging to be allowed back. Chekhov puts you in the head of the child recalling vividly and nostalgically a grandfather whom, the more you read, the more you can’t help but suspect is nothing like the rosy image Vanka carries. It concludes in a strikingly cold manner, a masterpiece of misplaced hope.

The protagonist in “The House With The Mansard” is also left to a sad end, pursuing an aristocratic young woman with a disapproving sister. Here a question pops up: Was this fellow a sincere suitor, or more of a jerk?  In addition to that Chekhov ambiguity, there’s a faint hint of Evelyn Waugh’s later Brideshead Revisited, of lost aspirations of nobility that were perhaps never well-grounded.

You can feel the Czarist society falling away at the edges of Chekhov’s stories; sometimes he has someone call attention to that very fact. “The strong must hinder the weak from living – such was the law of Nature, but only in a newspaper article or in a schoolbook was that intelligible and easily accepted.” Such is the prescription of the title character in “A Doctor’s Visit,” which details a visit to a decaying mansion where the remains of a wealthy factory-owning family idle away their days and nights. Chekhov’s sympathies in his stories are always with the poor, yet he avoids being didactic in the way his pal (and future Stalin pet) Maxim Gorky was. (Gorky's Boswellian reminiscences of his friendship with Chekhov are included in this volume.)

The numerous critical essays in the back of the book lay out just how Chekhov mastered the form of the short story. He wrote them tightly, often establishing the characters or setting with a sentence or two and letting the reader pick up the rest (or not). Most importantly, Chekhov was a dogmatic champion of ambiguity, leaving lessons for others to determine. Amusingly, my 1979 edition includes two learned critical analyses with opposing takes on the same story, “The Darling,” one in which the protagonist is redeemed by love, the other in which she is victimized by it.

Having read enough Chekhov, I have little doubt myself which he would have thought the correct response: Both of them! He's not exactly a pleasure to read, but he's usually fascinating. Chekhov's Short Stories give you deeper appreciation for the short story as an art form.