The reader is struck by the creative energy and by Chekhov’s take on the absurd: one has to remind oneself that these pieces were written in the 1880s, some thirty years before Futurism, Dada, and other avant-garde writing. Chekhov’s comic and tragic timing is masterful, whatever the story’s format, whether in the guise of a traditional narrative or the zany forms of a medical prescription, or an administrative directive from the Russian railroads stating that horses, donkeys, and oxen in the service of the railroads are permitted to travel free of charge in second-class compartments. Chekhov’s words are arranged for the best theatrical effect. This mastery of timing is part of the dramatic skill that comes to the fore in his plays.

Chekhov has been an elusive author: for over a century people have been trying define what is “Chekhovian.” Nabokov’s unkind (or perhaps humorous) definition of the word is “dragging, hopelessly complicated.” Other definitions have been “bleakly Russian,” and “evocative of a mood of introspection and frustration.” The aim of this collection is to widen the horizons of what “Chekhovian” means.

I am grateful to the National Endowment of the Arts, the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and the Ellen Maria Gorrissen Berlin Prize of the American Academy of Berlin for their generous support of this project. I am also thankful to Burton Pike for his scholarly advice and encouragement.

Little Apples

and other early stories

BECAUSE OF LITTLE APPLES

Between the Black Sea and the White Sea, at a certain longitude and latitude, the landowner Trifon Semyonovich has resided since time out of mind. His family name is as long as the word “Overnumerousnesses,” and derives from a sonorous Latin word referring to one of the countless human virtues. He owns eight thousand acres of black earth. His estate—because it is an estate, and he is a landowner—is mortgaged to the hilt and has been foreclosed and put up for sale. The sale was initiated in the days before the first signs of Trifon Semyonovich’s bald spot, and has been drawn out all these years. As a result of the bank’s credulity and Trifon Semyonovich’s resourcefulness, things have been moving very slowly indeed. The bank will one day fail because Trifon Semyonovich and others like him, whose names are legion, have taken the bank’s rubles but refuse to pay the interest. In the rare cases that Trifon Semyonovich does make an interest payment, he does so with the piety of an upright man donating a kopeck for the souls of the dead or the building of a church. Were this world not this world, and were we to call things by their real names, Trifon Semyonovich would not be called Trifon Semyonovich but something else; he would be called what a horse or a cow might be called. To put it bluntly, Trifon Semyonovich is a swine. I invite him to challenge this. If my invitation reaches him (he sometimes reads this magazine), I doubt that he will be angry, as he is a man of intelligence. In fact, I’m sure he will agree with me completely, and in the autumn might even send me a dozen Antonov apples from his orchards as a thank-you for only having revealed his Christian name and patronymic, and hence not utterly ruining his lengthy family name. I shall not catalogue Trifon Semyonovich’s many virtues: the list is too long. For me to present him—arms, legs, and all—I would have to spend as much time at my desk as Eugène Sue did with his ten-volume Wandering Jew. I will not touch upon the tricks Trifon Semyonovich resorts to when playing cards, nor upon his wheeling and dealing, by dint of which he has avoided paying any debts or interest, nor will I list the pranks he plays on the priest and the sexton, nor how he rides through the village in a getup from the era of Cain and Abel. I shall limit myself to describing a single scene that characterizes his attitude toward mankind, an attitude beautifully summed up in the tongue twister he composed, prompted by his seventy-five-year experience of the human race: “Foolish fools fooled foolishly by foolish fools.”

One wonderful morning, wonderful in every sense (for the incident occurred in late summer), Trifon Semyonovich was strolling down the long paths and the short paths of his sumptuous orchard. Everything that might inspire a lofty poet lay scattered about in great abundance, and seemed to be saying and singing: “Partake, O man, partake in the bounty! Rejoice while the sweet days of summer last!” But Trifon Semyonovich did not rejoice, for he is not a poet, and that morning his soul, as Pushkin said, “did yearn so keenly for quenching sleep” (which it always did whenever that soul’s owner had had a particularly bad evening at cards). Behind Trifon Semyonovich marched his lackey Karpushka, a little man of about sixty, his eyes darting from side to side. Old Karpushka’s virtues almost surpass those of Trifon Semyonovich. He is a master at shining boots, even more of a master at hanging stray dogs, spying into other people’s business, and stealing anything that isn’t nailed down. The village clerk had dubbed him “the Oprichnik,”7 which is what the whole village now calls him. Hardly a day passes without the neighbors or the local peasantry complaining to Trifon Semyonovich about Karpushka, but the complaints fall on deaf ears since Karpushka is irreplaceable in his master’s household. When Trifon Semyonovich goes for a stroll he always takes faithful Karpushka with him: it is safer that way and much more fun.