About Love and Other Stories
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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
ANTON CHEKHOV
About Love
and Other Stories
Translated with an Introduction and Notes by
ROSAMUND BARTLETT
OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
ABOUT LOVE
AND OTHER STORIES
ANTON PAVLOVICH CHEKHOV was born in 1860 in Taganrog, a port in southern Russia. His father was a former serf. In 1879, after receiving a classical education at the Taganrog Gymnasium, he moved to Moscow to study medicine. During his university years he helped support his family by writing stories and sketches for humorous magazines. By 1888 he was contributing to Russia’s most prestigious literary journals and regarded as a major writer. He also started writing plays: his first full-length play, Ivanov, was produced in 1887. After undertaking a journey to visit the penal colony on the Siberian island of Sakhalin in 1890, he settled on a country estate outside Moscow, where he continued to write and practise medicine. His failing health forced him to move to Yalta in 1898, where he wrote his most famous short story, ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ (1899), and two of his best-known plays: Three Sisters (1901) and The Cherry Orchard (1904), written with Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theatre in mind. In 1901 he married the company’s leading actress, Olga Knipper. He died from tuberculosis in Badenweiler, Germany, in July 1904 at the age of 44.
ROSAMUND BARTLETT lectures in Russian and music at the University of Durham. She has published Wagner and Russia (1995), Literary Russia: A Guide (with Anna Benn, 1997), Shostakovich in Context (2000), Chekhov: Scenes From a Life (2004), and Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters (2004).
CONTENTS
Introduction
Note on the Translation
Select Bibliography
A Chronology of Anton Chekhov
ABOUT LOVE AND OTHER STORIES
The Huntsman (1885)
On the Road (1886)
The Letter (1887)
Fortune (1887)
Gusev (1890)
Fish Love (1892)
The Black Monk (1894)
Rothschild’s Violin (1894)
The Student (1894)
The House with the Mezzanine (1896)
In the Cart (1897)
The Man in a Case (1898)
Gooseberries (1898)
About Love (1898)
The Lady with the Little Dog (1899)
At Christmas Time (1900)
The Bishop (1902)
Explanatory Notes
Evolution as a Writer
Chekhov became a writer at an inauspicious time in Russia’s history. Alexander II had initiated a series of long-overdue reforms at the beginning of his reign, the most important of which was the abolition of serfdom which took place in 1861, when Chekhov was 1 year old. By the time Chekhov published his first story in 1880, when he was 20, however, Alexander’s modernization programme had ground to a halt. Growing unrest at its slow progress had led the most radical of Russia’s young revolutionaries to resort to terrorism, and a year later the Tsar was assassinated. Contrary to their hopes, however, the assassination of Alexander II in fact brought an end to any possibility of further reform. It was also the end of an era in literary terms. The ‘age of the great novels’ was brought to a close by the deaths of Dostoevsky in 1881 (shortly after the publication of The Brothers Karamazov) and Turgenev two years later. Tolstoy, meanwhile, had decided to abandon fiction-writing in favour of fighting moral causes—such as vainly appealing for clemency to be granted to Alexander II’s assassins, who were all hanged.
Alexander II’s successor, his son Alexander III, reacted to the violent circumstances of his accession by increasing censorship and and introducing measures which actually attempted to undo some of the 1860s reforms. His highly reactionary policies caused widespread despondency amongst the educated population, who came to see Alexander’s reign as a sterile era of ‘small deeds’. The stultifying atmosphere of prohibitions and denunciations is well evoked in Chekhov’s satirical masterpiece ‘The Man in a Case’. It is no coincidence that the voluminous, soul-searching novels of the 1860s and 1870s gave way to less ambitious short stories after Alexander III became tsar. The government’s closure of the country’s leading literary journal in 1884 was a further blow to morale.
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