Far From Brooklyn

For Christmas, I was given a beautiful set of Chekhov’s tales, a collection of some 200 stories arranged in 13 volumes. I’ve always loved Chekhov’s stories but my reading of them was haphazard. This year, year three of the plague, I thought I might sit down and systematically read them all.

My edition is a 20-year-old set of used volumes based (literally photocopied, I believe) on the original Constance Garnett translations that appeared irregularly from 1916 to 1923. The arrangement is entirely Garnett’s–there’s no organizing principle for which story appears where. [Sic! I had read that this was the case, and the first volume or two don’t have an obvious organizing principle, but having read through Volume Seven now, I can say without a doubt that many of the stories are grouped by subject matter. Volume Six, for instance, is entirely about the rural poor of Russia. Volume Seven concerns religious life. I’m pretty sure that the people saying there is no organizational principal in these volumes have not read beyond the first couple books. But I know better!]

Meanwhile, this edition, stretching 13 volumes though it may, is not a truly complete collection of Chekhov’s shorter writing; Garnett omitted his earlier pieces, which I think were mainly very brief comic sketches.

Most of the Chekhov I have read has been, I think, translated by Garnett, and while her work has been criticized by Nabokov and Brodsky (and David Foster Wallace!), I’ve always thought her gentle, slightly archaic phrasings suited Chekhov’s gentle but clear-eyed observations. At this point, her translations are the only ones that feel “right” to me. I feel the same way about Mirra Ginsburg’s translation of “The Master and Margarita.”

The paperback volumes are wonderfully soft to the touch. Purchased used online (this Ecco edition is long out of print), the set was deaccessioned by a library somewhere; each of the 13 spines show a scar the size of a small Band-Aid, where an ID tag has been torn away. The pages are thick and vaguely yellow, and the type, because it is not actually typeset but reproduced from an earlier edition, is faintly blurred at the edges. It’s not enough to make the text difficult to read, but it is distinct to the point that you are constantly aware that you are interacting with something old, or old fashioned. It’s like settling into a couch at your grandmother’s house: It’s solid and comfortable and sturdy enough that you could jump on it if you wanted to, but out of respect you don’t, of course.

I’ve been reading one or two stories a day and making notes as I go. We’ll see how far I progress. I meant to log all the books I read in 2022 and failed miserably, so my expectations are modest.

(Update: See my site, “A Chekhov Circus,” for essays on all the stories, biographical essays, and a story-by-story ranking of all the stories and novellas.)