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

FFew writers are as universally admired as Chekhov. In the words of Booker Prize winner George Saunders: “Chekhov – should I be frank? – is the greatest short story writer who ever lived.” Novelists from Ann Patchett to Zadie Smith consider him an inspiration. His plays The Seagull, Three Sisters, Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard are still being shown internationally. Last year alone, Andrew Scott wowed audiences in his solo film Vanya for the National Theater in London, and Cate Blanchett took on the role of Arkadina in The Seagull at the Barbican. But how much do you know about his silly side?

Anton Chekhov: Early Stories presents the first comprehensive English translation of stories, novels, and skits written by the Russian author in the early 1880s. It is very juvenile in the best way. The reason that many of these stories now appear in translation for the first time is that, as editor Rosamund Bartlett explains, they were not seen by commercial publishers as “worthy” of Chekhov’s reputation. They are very childishly comedic. During the translation process, she says, “We would collapse into fits of laughter.”

Bartlett, author of acclaimed biographies of Chekhov and Tolstoy, and her co-editor Elena Mikaelowska, a Russian film director based in the UK, run the Anton Chekhov Foundation, a charity whose patrons include stars Ralph Fiennes, Tom Stoppard and Kenneth Branagh. The foundation was originally created to preserve Chekhov’s White House in Yalta. When Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, this work was no longer possible, so they instead came up with the “crazy utopian idea” of enlisting 80 volunteer translators from around the world – from schoolchildren to retired academics – to translate these previously unseen stories.

Written by Chekhov between the ages of 20 and 22, it is full of experimental wordplay, meaningless names and onomatopoeic idiocy, from the village of Eaten-Pancakes (“Bliny-S’edeny”) in the opening story, Letter to a Learned Neighbor, to the railway stations named Crash, Bang, Wallop, Run for Your Life and Swindler Town in On the Train, and a character called the Second Lieutenant. Zyumbumbunchikov in “Before the Wedding” (it doesn’t mean anything, but say it out loud and it’s genius).

Bartlett says these 58 stories, written under numerous pseudonyms, are little known, even among experts. She says: “Chekhov is better known as a writer of stories in Russia than plays, and these stories remind us that he began as a humorist.” “Not all of them are funny, or even intended to make us laugh, but many of them are completely inane – as one would expect from a 20-year-old medical student just trying to earn a few kopecks writing for comic magazines.”

Chekhov’s father had recently been declared bankrupt, so he was paying for his education while also supporting the rest of his family. He wanted to keep his real name in order to publish in respected scientific journals. However, within a few years, it became clear that – whether he liked it or not – he was a writer and his writings deserved to be taken seriously. By the mid-1880s, he had formulated the mythical idea that medicine would be his “lawful 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 works, both prose and plays. He was modest even about his most famous and beloved short stories, “The Lady with the Dog” (about a Yalta romance), “Ward No. 6” (about a doctor fed up with his profession), and “The Beloved” (about a ridiculously dependent woman, long before that term was invented). After the disastrous debut of The Seagull in 1896, he was so frightened that he fled the theater: “I’ll do it.” never You either write plays or act them. (Konstantin Stanislavsky presented the play in 1898 to great acclaim.) In 1888, he wrote to his editor that he doubted that any of his stories “would remain in people’s memory even for a decade.” His doubts didn’t make him any less productive. In 1884 alone – the year he graduated as a doctor – he published more than 100 stories. By the time he died of tuberculosis in 1904 at the age of 44, that number had risen to more than 500.

This collection is published at a fragile cultural moment. Ukrainian writers, including Oksana Zaposhko, Olesya Khromychuk, and Oleksandr Maked, have argued for a critical reevaluation of Russian literature—and for greater space for Ukrainian voices and culture. “The aversion that many Ukrainians now feel toward Russian literature because of the war is understandable,” Bartlett says. “But even those who disavow it often make an exception for Chekhov, and with good reason.”

She says that the most important thing is that Chekhov does not belong to Putin’s Russia. “Chekhov was never an imperialist, and he could not stand the chauvinism of a writer like Dostoyevsky, and the country is not full of statues of him. Chekhov was a quarter Ukrainian, and grew up in Taganrog, a town that was a historical part of Ukraine. During his childhood, he and his brothers used to put on amateur productions of plays in the Ukrainian language – the language was part of his birthright. Chekhov sometimes used Ukrainian sayings, and we highlighted them and explained their meaning in the annotations.”

Bartlett suggests that it should not be just an “either/or” reading: “Increasing our knowledge of Ukrainian writers should not rule out the possibility of discovering new works by Chekhov. We need to keep reading, and read more.” Zyumbumbunchikov couldn’t be a bad place to start.