Peasants and Other Stories

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IT HAS ALWAYS been a serious obstacle to the understanding of Chekhov on the part of English-speaking readers that the volumes of translations of his stories made by Constance Garnett and others do not, as a rule, present his work in its chronological sequence. You get humorous sketches from his earliest phase, when he was writing for the comic papers, side by side with his most serious stories; and the various periods of this serious work are themselves all jumbled together: the terse ironical anecdote, which began by being funny and then turned pathetic; the more rounded-out drama of character and situation; the product of what Chekhov’s English biographer, Mr. Ronald Hingley, calls his Tolstoyan period, when new moral preoccupations and a new psychological interest appear; and the more complex social study with which we are concerned in this volume. This garbling of Chekhov’s development is one of the causes for the frequent complaints on the part of English-speaking critics that they cannot make out what he is driving at. What could one make of Mark Twain if one found The Mysterious Stranger followed immediately by The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, or of Joyce if a story from Dubliners were followed by a passage from Finnegans Wake.

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