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Title: Anton Chekhov: Later Short Stories 1888-1903 (Modern Library) by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Shelby Foote, Constance Black Garnett ISBN: 0-679-60316-6 Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: January, 1999 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.8
Rating: 5
Summary: The master of realistic short fiction
Comment: In the waning years of the 19th Century, Anton Chekhov wrote stories about the Russian middle class, with themes revolving around men and women who let their lives go astray, particularly with regard to love and marriage. Chronologically and artistically, his fiction is a sort of literary bridge between Tchaikovsky-era romanticism and Stravinsky-era chaos. Unlike Dostoevsky, he did not delve deeply into man's problems in dealing with society; he did not have any overt political or religious agenda; hot-button issues like socialism and anti-semitism are barely given a nod. A physician himself, he often used doctors as characters, marveling at their ability to mend bodies but not souls.
In Chekhov's stories, marriage is hardly a bed of roses, usually resulting in discontentment, depression, and adultery; nowhere is this more perfectly executed than in "The Lady with the Dog," which ends with the two transgressors not contrite over their sins, but resolving to carry on their affair in the face of uncertainty. In "The Party," a young married couple's disharmony culminates in a tragedy that underscores their need to love each other. Chekhov's characters tend to marry for the wrong reasons, like societal pressure, false hopes of marital bliss ("The Helpmate," "Betrothed"), and convenience and mutual benefit ("Anna on the Neck"). His characters usually are people who mean well but do the wrong things: In "At a Country House," a cultural elitist has a habit of scaring off the very men he wants his daughters to marry.
Chekhov also touches on themes of pure, often unrequited, love. "The Beauties" is a plaintive tale of infatuation, of a boy's enthralling first discovery of intangible feminine beauty. His lonely characters, such as in "The Schoolmistress," "A Doctor's Visit," and "The Darling," are often prisoners of their own inhibitions, obsessions, and self-obligations.
Other topics are covered, often exhibiting a world-weary cynicism. In the amusing fable "The Shoemaker and the Devil," the protagonist's conclusion is not the cliched lesson to be thankful for the few things he has in life, but rather that there is nothing in life worth selling his soul to the devil for. "Rothschild's Fiddle" is like a Marc Chagall painting set to prose, portraying the futility and bitterness of life offset by the beauty of art, while "Whitebrow" is a fuzzy parable. Chekhov also displays a talent for drawing comical characters, such as the talkative blowhard in "The Petchenyeg" and the prudish protagonist of "The Man in a Case." A mark of Chekhov's style is that these people often are oblivious to their own idiosyncrasies, a touch that injects as much comedy as tragedy into the stories.
These stories might leave one with the impression that Chekhov was pessimistic about love and marriage, and even life, but in my opinion they emphasize a fundamental truism about fiction -- much as in comedy, where failure is funnier than success, even though "good" love is what makes the world go around, "bad" love is more interesting to write about.
Rating: 5
Summary: Chekhov: The Great Humanist
Comment: Style, style, style. While it's all well and good that the reviewers below emphasize the stylistic impact Chekhov's writings have had on practically EVERY modern short story, it is important to note that his stories combine to form one of the greatest humanistic manifestos in all of literature. Throughout his life as a doctor and a writer, Chekhov's deceptively laconic artistic sensibility was constantly focused on human interests and values. Human beings, in all their messy, hurtful, tragic glory, puzzled the good doctor, but he accepted them for what they were. His writing reflects his wide embrace of all that we are. Chekhov was a great lover of mankind, and arguably its finest chronicler. His stories are clear-eyed, unsentimental reports from the front lines of human existence. Given attention, they will surely instruct and broaden any heart. We should be eternally grateful.
Rating: 5
Summary: Bloodied but unbowed
Comment:
Chekhov is a master, but I almost wish he'd never existed. His prose is so deceptively simple that it will make everyone reading him, be they caterers, kids, or Senate whips, think "I can do that!" Needless to say, they can't.
This doesn't mean anyone will ever stop trying. Chekhov fans the flames of megalomania in what Sartre called the "Sunday writer", dilettantes like Mathieu in The Age of Reason. Almost every short story written now is in either the style of Raymond Carver or Chekhov, and Carver was just the first to graft Chekhov's style onto American subjects. What is that style? It's not as instantly recognizable as Kafka's or Joyce's -- two terminal figures who can't be imitated -- but if you want an example of it, grab any New Yorker that might be lying around the house and flip to the short story. Got one? Okay, now notice how it doesn't end with a swordfight or an orgy. Instead, it will most likely hinge on a simple misunderstanding, such as a man making an offhand comment that causes his wife to lose all respect for him, or else some kind of sudden revelation; like an interior monologue where, after seeing two schoolgirls share a bologna sandwich, a professional woman realizes her entire life is corrupt and shallow. Shocks of recognition, mundane realism, and a muted climax ( this last is especially crucial; the professional woman above wouldn't throw off her worldly chattels and move to India, but would simply go back to her office, maybe even with a little excitement to get to work on a new ad campaign ) -- these are the hallmarks of Chekhovian writing.
The bad news is that we can look forward to an eternity of these pale imitations. Because the times are always changing, Chekhov's journalistic style -- remember he started out as a newspaperman -- ALWAYS APPLIES. It's a nightmare. But that's no reason to keep you, as it kept me for so long, from the original. All of Chekhov's best stories are here, or in the other two volumes of the Modern Library series ( where the nitpicker below can find the other stories whose absence he laments, except "Gusev," which is in this one. )
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Title: Anton Chekhov: Early Short Stories 1883-1888 by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Shelby Foote, Constance Garnett ISBN: 0679603174 Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: January, 1999 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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Title: Longer Stories: Last Decade by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Shelby Foote, Constance Garnett ISBN: 0679606637 Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: 07 March, 2000 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Three Plays: The Sea-Gull, Three Sisters & the Cherry Orchard (Modern Library) by Constance Black Garnett, Kenneth Rexroth, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov ISBN: 0679642358 Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: 06 November, 2001 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Anton Chekhov's Short Stories by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Ralph E. Matlaw, Constance Garnett ISBN: 0393090027 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: August, 1979 List Price(USD): $11.40 |
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Title: Within a Budding Grove (In Search of Lost Time, Vol 2) by Marcel Proust, C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Richard Howard ISBN: 0375752196 Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: November, 1998 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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