Little Apples

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Of the nearly six hundred stories collected in The Complete Works of Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, more than half stem from Chekhov’s early twenties (1880–85), well before he had been embraced by the literary establishment or acclaimed by critics as a great writer.

These were impecunious years for the young Chekhov, who, unlike his illustrious predecessors Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and Pushkin, emphatically did not hail from aristocracy. The grandson of a serf and the son of a merchant—a bankrupt one at that—the teenage Chekhov had been left behind in his native Taganrog to finish high school and fend off disgruntled creditors while his family fled in the dead of night. When Chekhov arrived in Moscow to matriculate at the university in 1879, he was reunited with parents and five siblings and assumed primary responsibility for the family’s keep; a good many of his early stories were written chiefly to keep the Chekhovs housed, clothed, and fed. Studying medicine by day and poring over the popular press after hours, Chekhov published humorous stories and sketches in the comic papers under dozens of pseudonyms; these pieces tended to be short, subject as they were to strict journalistic line limits, and calculated for quick laughs—as well as prompt payment.

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