**From the celebrated, award-winning translators of *Anna Karenina* and *War and Peace* : a lavish, masterfully rendered volume of stories by one of the most influential short fiction writers of all time.** Chekhov's genius left an indelible impact on every literary form in which he wrote, but none more so than short fiction. Now, renowned translators and longtime house authors Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky give us their peerless renderings of fifty-two Chekhov stories--a full deck! These stories, which span the full arc of his career, reveal the extraordinary variety and unexpectedness of his work, from the farcically comic to the darkly complex, showing that there is no one type of "Chekhov story." They are populated by a remarkable range of characters who came from all parts of Russia, all walks of life, and who, taken together, democratized the short story. Included here are a number never-before-translated stories, including "Reading" and "An...
ALSO TRANSLATED BY RICHARD PEVEAR AND ARISSA VOLOKHONSKY
Mikhail Bulgakov
Anton Chekhov
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Nikolai Gogol
Nikolai Leskov
Boris Pasternak
Alexander Pushkin
Leo Tolstoy
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2020 by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
Preface copyright © 2020 by Richard Pevear
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich, 1860–1904, author. | Pevear, Richard, [date] translator. | Volokhonsky, Larissa, translator.
Title: Fifty-two stories (1883–1898) / Anton Chekhov ; a new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.
Description: New York : Alfred A. Knopf, [2020] | Translated from the Russian.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019022613 (print) | LCCN 2019022614 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525520818 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525520825 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich, 1860–1904—Translations into English.
Classification: LCC PG3456.A13 P484 2020 (print) | LCC PG3456.A13 (ebook) | DDC 891.73/3—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019022613
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019022614
Ebook ISBN 9780525520825
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover design by John Gall
ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0
CONTENTS
J
OY
F
AT
AND
S
KINNY
A
T
THE
P
OST
O
FFICE
R
EADING
T
HE
C
OOK
G
ETS
M
ARRIED
I
N A
F
OREIGN
L
AND
C
ORPORAL
W
HOMPOV
G
RIEF
T
HE
E
XCLAMATION
P
OINT
A
N
E
DUCATED
B
LOCKHEAD
A S
LIP
-U
P
A
NGUISH
A C
OMMOTION
T
HE
W
ITCH
A L
ITTLE
J
OKE
A
GAFYA
S
PRING
A N
IGHTMARE
G
RISHA
L
ADIES
R
OMANCE
WITH A
D
OUBLE
B
ASS
T
HE
C
HORUS
G
IRL
T
HE
F
IRST
-C
LASS
P
ASSENGER
D
IFFICULT
P
EOPLE
O
N
THE
R
OAD
T
HE
B
EGGAR
E
NEMIES
T
HE
L
ETTER
V
OLODYA
L
UCK
T
HE
S
IREN
T
HE
S
HEPHERD’S
P
IPE
C
OSTLY
L
ESSONS
T
HE
K
ISS
B
OYS
K
ASHTANKA
T
HE
N
AME-
D
AY
P
ARTY
A B
REAKDOWN
T
HE
B
ET
T
HE
P
RINCESS
A
FTER
THE
T
HEATER
H
ISTORY
OF A
B
USINESS
E
NTERPRISE
N
EIGHBORS
F
EAR
B
IG
V
OLODYA
AND
L
ITTLE
V
OLODYA
T
HE
T
EACHER
OF
L
ITERATURE
I
N A
C
OUNTRY
H
OUSE
T
HE
P
ECHENEG
I
N
THE
C
ART
A
BOUT
L
OVE
I
ONYCH
T
HE
N
EW
D
ACHA
PREFACE
Our intention in making this collection has been to represent the extraordinary variety of Chekhov’s stories, from earliest to latest, in terms of characters, events, social classes, settings, voicing, and formal inventiveness. By chance the selection came to fifty-two stories—a full deck! But, as Chekhov once wrote, “in art, as in life, there is nothing accidental.”
When Chekhov began to write humorous stories and sketches, he thought he was doing it simply for money. And so he was. His father’s grocery business, in their native Taganrog, on the Sea of Azov, had gone bankrupt in 1876, and to avoid debtor’s prison the family had fled to Moscow, where Chekhov’s two older brothers were already studying at the university. Chekhov, who was sixteen at the time, stayed behind to finish high school, supporting himself in various ways, one of them being the publication of humorous sketches in local papers, signed with various pseudonyms. In 1879 he graduated and moved to Moscow himself, where he entered medical school, and where his writing, still pseudonymous, became virtually the sole support of the family—mother, father, four brothers, and a sister.
