Letters of Anton Chekhov

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To our knowledge there have been four previous publications of Anton Chekhov's letters in English. Constance Garnett's two volumes (Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends and Letters of Anton Chekhov to Olga Knipper), Louis S. Friedland's Anton Chekhov's Letters on the Short Story, the Drama and Other Literary Topics, and The Life and Letters of Anton Tchekhov, translated and edited by S. S. Koteliansky and Philip Tomlinson, all appeared in the early twenties. They were fol­lowed thirty years later by The Selected Letters of Anton Chekhov, edited by Lillian Hellman and translated by Sidonie Lederer, which is now, in paperback, the most readily available source of Chekhov's letters for the general reader.

A comparison of these editions with Chekhov's Russian originals has left us with a lasting sense of admiration for Constance Garnett's talent as a translator. Despite occasional misreadings she manages to convey both the tone and spirit of the letters with a resourcefulness and fidelity no one else has matched. Unfortunately, she did her translations at a time when fewer than half the letters presently available in Russian had been pub­lished; moreover, her prunings and abridgments frequently reduced the text to a mere skeleton of the original. In contrast to Garnett, the Kotelian- sky-Tomlinson translation often misses the mark stylistically; its excessive adherence to the letter of the original makes many of its passages needlessly ambiguous or simply incomprehensible. Louis Friedland's 1924 volume, recently reissued with a new introduction by Ernest J.

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