The Complete Plays

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Complete is a weasel word. No sooner does a complete edition of anything appear than it is trumped by new discoveries. However, if one may modify an absolute, this edition is the most “complete” collection of Anton Chekhov’s plays in English. It contains all the plays performed during his lifetime and posthumous works, performed or not. The former include the first version of Ivanov, never before translated into English, and the latter the farce by Ivan Shcheglov cobbled together from his collaboration with Chekhov, which has never been published in any language since 1911.

I have also included a number of dialogue pieces that Chekhov wrote for comic journals in the 1880s. Throughout that decade, Chekhov published stories which are virtually one-act plays or monologues and which he often called “scenelets” (stsenki). They were frequently adapted for the stage. The Moscow Art Theatre, for instance, played “Surgery,” a dialogue between a country doctor and a sexton, as one of its recital pieces; and other stories, such as “The Witch” and “Robbers,” were produced by the Art Theatre studios and amateur groups. I have chosen not to list these stories among his plays, because they were not typographically distinguishable as such, and because they are readily available in collections of Chekhov’s prose. Similarly, I have not included the dialogue captions he wrote to cartoons, since these make little sense without their drawings. On the other hand, I have included every journalistic squib that he did write in the form of a play, including his parodies of popular drama.

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