The Prank

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CHEKHOV assembled the stories in The Prank in 1882. He was twenty-two years old and hoped the book would launch him on a literary career. As it happened, it didn’t come out that year or during his lifetime. It appears here, more than 130 years later, for the first time, and in English translation to boot. Chekhov, who declared that he would be read for at most a year after his death and who told a translator that his works could be of no possible interest to the English-reading public,1 would surely have been pleasantly surprised.

Chekhov was in medical school in Moscow when, in 1880, he began to write and publish humorous stories and satirical sketches in popular magazines and weekly journals.2 He wrote to support himself and his impoverished family, and he was extraordinarily prolific. He had to be. He was paid five kopecks a line—not too shabby, considering that a loaf of bread cost three kopecks—but then his entire family (father, mother, and five siblings) also depended on the extra money. The family’s home was a musty cellar in Moscow’s red-light district and they wanted out; there was also the question of his younger siblings’ education.

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