Have I mentioned that I love Chekhov? Yes, I have--here, for instance. In the last couple of weeks I've read Three Sisters, Cherry Orchard, and most of the stories collected in The Essential Tales of Chekhov, which is edited by Richard Ford, meaning that he decided which ones are "essential." The choices are half-eccentric: Ford includes several stories that are familiar to anyone with any interest in Chekhov, or even just the short story ("The Kiss," "Gooseberries," "About Love," "The Darling," "On Official Duty," and, of course, "The Lady with the Dog"), a couple of others that are great but less known on account of being too long for inclusion in anthologies and such collections as The Portable Chekhov ("Ward No. 6" and "An Anonymous Story"), and others still that are not very well known at all--these are mostly by the younger, less grave Chekhov, about whom Ford thinks the world is under-informed.
Personally, I think the wide world is under-informed, in a general sort of way, about Chekhov, who, besides being a major figure in world literature, was an exemplary human being. Now that I've said that, some Ph.D. candidate will probably reveal that he (Chekhov) pursued a sexual interest in marsupials--in which case I think I shall take a second look at the kangaroo.
So you see that Chekhov strikes a chord in me. I think it is largely the thoroughgoing rejection of the heroic mode. In the post linked to above, I noted how the story "Anna on the Neck" invites comparison with another Russian Anna who steps out on her husband. The biblical epigraphs are missing in Chekhov, and tragic consequences fail to develop. It sometimes seems to me that Chekhov had read all of Tolstoy and made notes on every false enthusiasm. You know how Tolstoy sometimes idealizes the Russian peasants, whose simple purity is a rebuke to the dissipated aristocrats? The Chekhov story "Peasants," which I read a few days ago in Ford's collection, will have none of that sentimental nonsense. From the opening:
In his memories of childhood he had pictured his home as bright, snug, comfortable. Now, going into the hut, he was positively frightened; it was so dark, so crowded, so unclean. His wife Olga and his daughter Sasha, who had come with him, kept looking in bewilderment at the big untidy stove, which filled up almost half the hut and was black with soot and flies. What lots of flies! The stove was on one side, the beams lay slanting on the walls, and it looked as though the hut were just going to fall to pieces. In the corner, facing the door, under the holy images, bottle labels and newspaper cuttings were stuck on the walls instead of pictures. The poverty, the poverty! Of the grown-up people there were none at home; all were at work at the harvest. On the stove was sitting a white-haired girl of eight, unwashed and apathetic; she did not even glance at them as they came in. On the floor a white cat was rubbing itself against the oven fork.
"Puss, puss!" Sasha called to her. "Puss!"
"She can't hear," said the little girl; "she has gone deaf."
"How is that?"
"Oh, she was beaten."
By the way, Ford includes "Kashtanka," told from the perspective of a lost dog who is taken in, then trained, by a circus clown whose act includes performing animals. Chekhov was plainly fond of animals. Showing someone mistreating a dog or a horse is in his fiction a kind of shorthand for "a-hole."
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