‘He was just trying to earn a few kopecks’: how newly translated stories reveal Chekhov’s silly side

Few writers are as universally admired as Chekhov. As Booker winner George Saunders puts it, “Chekhov – shall I be blunt? – is the greatest short story writer who ever lived.” Novelists from Ann Patchett to Zadie Smith cite him as an inspiration. His plays The Seagull, Three Sisters, Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard still pack out theatres internationally. In the past year alone, Andrew Scott wowed audiences in his one-man Vanya for London’s National Theatre and Cate Blanchett took on the role of Arkadina in The Seagull at the Barbican. But how much did you know about his silly side? Anton Chekhov: Earliest Stories offers the first comprehensive translation in English of the stories, novellas and humoresques that the Russian author wrote in the early 1880s. And it is supremely juvenile in the best way. The reason many of these stories are now appearing in translation for the first time is because, explains editor Rosamund Bartlett, they have never been regarded by commercial publishers as “worthy” of Chekhov’s reputation. They are too childishly comical. During the translation process, she says, “we would just collapse in fits of giggles”. Bartlett, the author of acclaimed biographies of Chekhov and Tolstoy, and her co-editor Elena Michajlowska, a UK-based Russian film-maker, run the Anton Chekhov Foundation, a charity whose starry patrons include Ralph Fiennes, Tom Stoppard and Kenneth Branagh. The foundation was originally set up to preserve Chekhov’s White Dacha in Yalta. When Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 this work was no longer possible, so instead they came up with the “crazy, idealistic idea” of sourcing 80 volunteer translators across the globe – from school students to retired academics – to translate these previously unseen stories. He told his editor that he doubted any of his stories would ‘survive in people’s memory for even a decade Written by Chekhov between the ages of 20 and 22, they are full of experimental wordplay, nonsense names and onomatopoeiac idiocy, from the village of Eaten-Pancakes (“Bliny-S’edeny”) in the opening story, Letter to a Learned Neighbour, to railway stations called Crash, Bang, Wallop, Run for Your Life and Swindler Town in On the Train, and a character called Second Lieutenant Zyumbumbunchikov in Before the Wedding (it means nothing, but say it aloud and it’s genius). These 58 stories, written under numerous pseudonyms, are little known, even among experts, says Bartlett. “Chekhov is better known as a writer of stories in Russia than of plays, and these stories remind us that he began as a humorist,” she says. “Not all of them are funny, or even intended to make us laugh, but a great many are totally frivolous – as one would expect from a 20-year-old medical student just trying to earn a few kopecks writing for comic journals.” Chekhov’s father had recently been declared bankrupt, so he was paying for his own education while also supporting the rest of his family. He wanted to conserve his real name for publication in respected scientific journals. Within a few years, however, it had become evident that – whether he liked it or not – he was a writer and his writing was worth taking seriously. By the mid 1880s, he had formulated the now legendary idea that medicine would be his “lawful wedded wife” and writing his mistress. (“When I’ve had enough of one, I can go and spend the night with the other.”) Chekhov was never a fan of his own work, whether prose or plays. He was modest about even his most famous and beloved short stories The Lady With the Dog (about a love affair in Yalta), Ward No 6 (about a doctor who is sick of his profession) and The Darling (about a woman who is ludicrously co-dependent, long before the term was invented). After a disastrous first outing of The Seagull in 1896 he was so mortified that he fled the theatre: “I shall never either write plays or have them acted.” (The play was staged by Konstantin Stanislavski in 1898 to great acclaim.) In 1888, he wrote to his editor that he doubted any of his stories would “survive in people’s memory for even a decade”. His doubts never made him less prolific. In 1884 alone – the year he graduated as a doctor – he published more than 100 stories. By the time he died in 1904 of tuberculosis at the age of 44, that number had climbed to more than 500. This collection is published at a fragile cultural moment. Ukrainian writers including Oksana Zabuzhko, Olesya Khromeychuk and Oleksandr Mykhed have argued for a critical re-evaluation of Russian literature – and for more space for Ukrainian voices and culture. “The revulsion many Ukrainians feel now for Russian literature due to the war is understandable,” says Bartlett. “But even those who repudiate it often make an exception for Chekhov, for good reason.” The young Chekhov and his brothers would stage amateur productions of plays in Ukrainian – the language was part of his birthright Crucially, Chekhov does not belong to Putin’s Russia, she says. “He was never an imperialist, he couldn’t stand the jingoism of a writer like Dostoevsky, and the country is not littered with statues of him. Chekhov was a quarter Ukrainian himself, and grew up in Taganrog, a town historically part of Ukraine. During his childhood he and his brothers used to stage amateur productions of plays in Ukrainian – the language was part of his birthright. Chekhov occasionally used Ukrainian sayings, and we have highlighted them and explained their meaning in the annotations.” Bartlett suggests that it shouldn’t be a case of reading “either/or”: “Increasing our familiarity with Ukrainian writers should not have to exclude the possibility of discovering new works by Chekhov. We need to keep reading, and read more.” Zyumbumbunchikov can’t be a bad place to start. • Anton Chekhov: Earliest Stories: Stories, Novellas, Humoresques, 1880–1882, edited by Rosamund Bartlett and Elena Michajlowska, is published by Cherry Orchard.