Anton Tchekhoff, the writer of the stories and sketches here
translated, although hardly known in this country, and but little
better known on the western continent of Europe, has during the last
fifteen years been regarded as the most talented of the younger
generation of Russian writers. Even the remarkable popularity attained
during the last few years by Maxim Gorky has not eclipsed his fame,
though it has probably done much to prevent the recognition of his
talents abroad. Tchekhoff's stories lack the striking incidents and
lurid colouring of the younger writer's, and thus, while they appeal
more strongly to the cultivated Russian, they are devoid of the more
obvious qualities that attract the translator and the public which
read translations. Though they have gone into numberless editions in
Russia, they are almost unknown abroad, being, in fact, represented
only by a few scattered translations and small volumes published in
France and Germany, and by a few critical articles in the reviews of
those countries. In England, Tchekhoff is only a name to most of those
interested in Eastern literature, and not even a name to the general
public.
Anton Pavlovitch Tchekhoff was born in 1860, spent his infancy in South
Russia, and was educated in the Medical Faculty of Moscow University.
Although a doctor by profession, and actually practising for some years
as a municipal medical officer, he began his literary career as a story
writer before completing his professional education, contributing, when
a student, sketches to the weekly comic journals, and _feuilletons_ to
the St. Petersburg newspapers. Tchekhoff's early stories turn largely
upon domestic misunderstandings; they are brief, avowedly humorous, and
even farcical. They attracted early attention by their irresponsible
gaiety, seldom untinged with a certain bitterness. _The Steppe_, a
panorama of travel through the great plains of South Russia, published
serially in the now extinct _Sieverni Viestnik_, was the first of his
productions of sustained merit. It was followed by a series of stories
and sketches and one volume of dramas, which have, in the opinion
of Russian critics, established the writer on a level with the best
native fiction writers, and on a much higher level than any of his
contemporaries.
Tchekhoff in his manner of thought is essentially a Russian; as an
artist essentially Western, having perhaps only one thing in common
with the writers of his own country. Russian novelists, with few
exceptions--Turgenieff, a man of Western training and sympathies,
was one--have commonly lacked the instinct of coherency, the lack of
which in fiction is redeemed only by genius. The novels of Dostoyeffsky
and Tolstoy are notoriously defective in this respect. Tchekhoff and
Gorky suffer from the same deficiency. Unlike Gorky, Tchekhoff has
never essayed the long novel; and even his longer short stories, one
of which is included in this volume, are redeemed from failure chiefly
by their humour and close observation of Russian life. With this
exception, Tchekhoff has little in common with other Russian writers.
He is more objective, less diffuse, less inspiring, and less human. His
compatriots, Count Tolstoy among them, compare him with Maupassant His
method of treatment presents many parallels; he has the same brevity,
the same remorselessness, the same insistence upon the significantly
little.
But in his teaching, if teaching it can be called, Tchekhoff is
thoroughly Russian. A French critic[1] has lately reviewed his
stories in a chapter called _L'impuissance de vivre_, and this
phrase summarises admirably what Tchekhoff has to say. The political
condition of modern Russia involves the repression of all intellect
and initiative, or, at best, their diversion into unproductive
official channels; hence, the distaste for life and intellectual
stagnation which, represented here in "Ward No. 6," run through all
Tchekhoff's longer stories, and particularly through his dramas, most
of which end in disillusion and suicide. Russian life presents itself
to Tchekhoff as the unprofitable struggle of the exceptional few
against the trivial and insignificant many. His pages are peopled with
psychopaths, degenerates of genius and virtue, who succumb in feeble
revolt against the baseness and banality of life, and are quite unfit
to combat the healthy, rude, but unintelligent forces around them.
Kovrin, Likharyóff, and Doctor Andréi Yéfimitch, three heroes in this
collection, are characteristic of Tchekhoff's outlook. All aspiring
men, he says, are predestined martyrs; only the base achieve immunity
from ruin: and as martyrdom is the exception, not the rule, it results
that Tchekhoff's ordinary men, and the secondary characters in most
of his stories, are insignificant and mean. The life depicted is in
itself uninteresting; its colour is grey, its keynote tedium, its only
humour the humour of the satirist, not of the sympathiser, and its only
tragedy, failure. Tchekhoff is essentially an objective writer, and
this gives him an undue detachment from the life which he describes;
he never points a moral, delays over an explanation, or shrinks from
the incompleteness which, truthful to life, is often unsatisfactory
in art. But his attitude towards life is not the less unmistakable
because never openly expressed; pessimism, inspired by fatalism and
denial of the will, but tempered by humour and apathy, is its note.
That note appears perhaps less in this volume than it would in a more
representative collection of Tchekhoff's writings. But in choosing
these stories from among more than a hundred, I have been guided not
merely by what was best, but also by what seemed most likely to be
understood by a public unfamiliar with Russian manners and Russian
thought.
The stories "The Black Monk," "In Exile," "Rothschild's Fiddle," "A
Father," and "At the Manor," have been translated from the volume
_Poviesti i Razskazni_, St. Petersburg, 1898; "A Family Council," from
_Razskazni_, 12th edition, St. Petersburg, 1898; "Ward No. 6," from
_Palata No. Shestoi_, 6th edition, St. Petersburg, 1898; "On the Way,"
"At Home," "Two Tragedies," and "An Event," from _V Sumerkakh_, 13th
edition, St. Petersburg, 1899; and "Sleepyhead," from _Khmuriye Liudi_,
8th edition, St. Petersburg, 1898. "In Exile" was published in the
_Fortnightly Review_ in September, 1903, and is reprinted here with the
Editor's permission.