Well, the first sign things were amiss is that whenever a lower class character would pop up, they'd adopt a cockney British accent. Then I compared one short passage with the Pevear and Volokhonsky translations: you get the sense that things are bit too cleaned up, a bit too smoothed out, some of the oddball magic seems to have been sucked out. Basically, and I'm not 100% certain, I think this Wilks translation might be really bad—I've seen "angular Russian enthusiasm" translated through "logical British reserve" before and along the way something gets severely corrupted. I picked this one up because it contains two stories that are difficult to find elsewhere, but it's a shame that due to the branding (Penguin Books) this is probably one of the more popular Chekhov translations out there. And I was wondering how people could mistake him for being a strict, hardcore realist when it's clear to me that Chekhov is very much an impressionist author. Find the Pevear and Volokhonsky versions. They get the nuances right. Chekhov's artistry is all in the nuances. One star.
"Three Sisters - A Drama in Four Acts" by Anton Chekhov, Translated by Peter Carson (1900, 2004)
If you were to sum all of this up as "a heavily existential soap opera" it feels tautly apt, if a tad bit flippant. There's a 1966 televised version. And I was a little shocked when I thought: This isn't just the best interpretation of a Chekhov play I've seen, this might actually be some of the best theater I've ever seen. Turns out it was by the Actors Studio, who have a direct line to Stanislavski, who originated Chekhov's plays in Russia. For such an extremely busy, centerless play, a somewhat lengthy play that I would describe as having a "constantly swirling" structure, you're almost grateful that such talented theater people bothered to grapple with the material. Because there were so many things I didn't catch by reading the play alone, and I could easily imagine all this being utterly unbearable in lesser hands. I guess the question I have is, does this odd, swirling structure serve the theme? The theme seemingly being: No amount of education, intelligence, faith, or virtue can prepare you for the unpredictable vicissitudes of life, exponential, ever-evolving, incomprehensible vicissitudes that are idly set in motion simply when one human being collides into another. If you wanted to illustrate such existential confusion, then perhaps it does. But was reaching that point worth all the effort? I'm not sure. I almost want the point to be even more out-there, even more ambitious, even more soul-shaking. As it stands, I ended the play thinking: Well, yes, I find life confusing, and yes, my beliefs probably are delusions, and no, I suppose I don't really know anything about anything. Good on you, Chekhov: you nailed me. Now, why exactly did you feel the need to point this out? Because I kind of already knew that—that's what my delusions are for! But perhaps I'm again being flippant: it's really a remarkably written play, short of extraordinary, even. Where the rub is, is you feel like there's something holding it back from really blowing your brain wide open, and here I offer my best guess as to what that brain-blowing dampener might actually be. Three stars.
"The Complete Short Novels" by Anton Chekhov, Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (2004)
So Chekhov only wrote one full-length novel, which I've never heard anyone talk about. The rest were short stories and novellas. This contains all five of his 100-page-long-or-so novellas: The Steppe, The Duel, The Story of an Unknown Man, Three Years, and My Life: A Provincial's Story. And the most noteworthy thing about Chekhov's writing is that his depiction of human behavior is so well observed very little of it feels dated, even over a hundred years on, traversing language, country, and several political revolutions (comparatively, Tao Lin's 2000s output feels HELLA DATED.) Story (1) is a loosely plotted coming-of-age story; (2) is inspired by the concept of natural selection; (3) involves a revolutionary assassin; (4) is a fucked-up romance; and (5) is a hive of volatile twentysomethings. (1) and (5) are oddly plotted, and therefore, somewhat tedious. (2), (3), and (4) are riveting reads from beginning to end. All of them feature characters so objectively true to life, it kind of makes the people you see on TV (and even most of the characters you come across in books, and also many of the people you meet in New York City) look crassly, offensively, two-dimensional. None of them, however, can smack you in the face like some of his 6-page-long short stories can. Is that something to hold against him and his longer works? No, I guess not—judging by how rarely you see dramatically strong stories where no one quite knows what they're doing, where nobody's right and nobody's wrong, where winning may not mean progress and where losing may not mean defeat, even after decades of successive, ever-accumulating stories, Chekhov's writings remain stunningly singular works. Four stars.
"The Seagull - A Comedy in Four Acts" by Anton Chekhov, Translated by Peter Carson (1896, 2004)
Here's where Chekhov's obtuse idea of theater actually starts to cohere, nearly ten years after "Ivanov". Still, I left this with largely the same feeling I had when I read it the first time, with much less exposure to Chekhov's "I hate everything that came before me" sensibility. And that feeling is: What the fuck is this?—the exposition is laid out much too plainly as exposition to be accidental, everybody's hopelessly in love with everyone else, the play parodies plays, the writer character wants to create new and different forms of theater (in a piece that bucks traditional form,) the seagull symbolism is recognized by the characters themselves as a symbol they find difficult to understand, I mean, what the fuck? I'm gonna try to watch the play. I'll say it definitely reads better than Ivanov, but for now, gosh, I'm nonplussed! Two stars.
Found a 1975 PBS staging. It works, and the play makes a little more sense, but I can't explain to you how it works and how it makes sense. I really really can't. I don't know where to begin. It's kinda good, but I don't know why. Gosh, I'm nonplussed! It's hard to believe Frank Langella hadn't been born an old man! Three stars.
"The Cherry Orchard - A Comedy in Four Acts" by Anton Chekhov, Translated by Peter Carson (1904, 2004)
Ah, the last of Chekhov's plays. Presumably, this is the one where he figured it out, the final attempt at his then-unusual, and now EXTREMELY unusual, swirling, "centrifugal" form, where the story elements chaotically spin away from the center, interweaving, colliding, stuttering, rather than neatly converging straightaways towards clarity. A lot has been made about how the theme concerns people being comically inactive, too mired in the past, to confront their own looming demise, but that seems to me to be too facile to be the point—if someone you loved were dying I doubt you would kill them prematurely and move on just because it was decisive and made perfect financial and logical sense; in fact you're much more likely to behave foolhardily just for the sake of holding onto something, anything. To me, it's more noteworthy that the characters can't seem to understand each other, due to selfishness or impatience or lack of life experience or insecurity or status or what have you, while at the same time desperately demanding that their own peculiar selves be understood. In fact, whenever the characters are flat-out offered clarity and resolution, they refuse it, as if they found more comfort in not knowing. If we know for certain everything is coming to an end, maybe we'd rather be lost, and foolish, and deluded, telling people who try to shake us out of our ruts to SHUTUP, because at least being lost in our own way is something we already understand. That seems like a bit of a soul-shaking point. In a sort of similar way, I liked his more ambitious, messier attempts better than this fairly well polished one, even if they weren't totally successful (it's the same reason I like "Billy Madison" more than "Happy Gilmore.") The feeling of "God, Chekhov, what the hell are you doing?" is far more thrilling than "Okay, Chekhov, I see what you're up to: perhaps the reason people don't seem to advance and evolve as sentient beings is simply because we don't want to. Also, Chekhov, remind me never to invite you to any parties. You're kind of a bummer." Three stars.
"Letters on the Short Story, the Drama, and Other Literary Topics" by Anton Chekhov, Selected and Edited by Louis S. Friedland (1924)
I picked this up because I assumed it would be filled with insights into his writing process, a distillation of his much larger collection of letters into select, juicy nuggets of creative wisdom. It's not. The vast majority of it, actually, reads like gossip. In fact, you get the sense that Chekhov wrote these letters believing that there was no way in hell his survivors would ever approve the commercial publication of his private correspondence,* which can be characterized by their emotional erraticism, the sense that he found the state of modern culture entirely stupid, and his hatred of seemingly every other human being on earth (I laughed out loud at the harshness he doled out on this female writer for saying, "The aim of life is life itself," calling it bafflingly insincere, and then ending his tirade by basically saying, "Ah, she's a good lady"; there's also a very memorable exchange where he tells the head of a young writer's association that, no, he won't join their young writer's association because young writer's associations are stupid.) There's a much more recent collection of his "writings for writers" which edits things to give you only a spiritually uplifting picture of an esteemed, moral thinker, which is pretty much wholly anti-Chekhov, and which seems to me a book to cherish only if you happen to be dumb. As for this one, there are perhaps loads of grand statements (he really hated grand statements) to be made connecting his realistic fiction with the stunning emotional range of what is said here (in turns: wise, scared, demanding, childlike, mean, kind, horny, ascetic, probably drunk.) Though, for the purposes of writing instruction, maybe this should simply be considered an endorsement for the energizing, even inspiring, power of creative hatred. Three stars.
*I’ve read Flannery O'Connor's letters and in comparison, in hindsight, they now feel very, very, very carefully controlled.
"Ivanov - A Drama in Four Acts" by Anton Chekhov, Translated by Peter Carson (1887, 2004)
The very first thing you see is someone pointing a gun at Ivanov's face. The very last thing you see (hear, actually) is Ivanov shooting himself. It's "Chekhov's Act I gun" in plain sight. But the rest of the play is kind of bad. Like it's overstuffed and rushed at the same time. Maybe it's okay if you see it in action, but I doubt it—his plays tend to assume obtuse forms, and this feels like an embryonic version of what he'd later refine. It's just funny that the epitome of his famous mantra, its literal manifestation, espoused as sacred gospel by generations of writing teachers, guarded as untouchable formula by generations of writing students, really kind of stinks. Two stars.
"Fifty-Two Stories" by Anton Chekhov, Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (2021)
I think of all the fiction I've absorbed over my life—books, TV, movies—and I find it stunning that I can read Chekhov and think that I've never seen humanity depicted so accurately before. The all-confused whole of humanity is so acutely depicted, in classes grand and wanting, I actually find it difficult to explain to you just what he did (in one story, Chekhov repeatedly mocks a novelist for writing stories about people that could never happen in reality.) What does that say about us now? That a guy in 19th-century Russia could look at another person and see a wealth of contradictory motivations, whims, desires, behaviors, and inner thoughts and we just look at people and attach to them the comfort of familiar archetypes and little much else? It's really quite remarkable what he did, simply and economically. And it's also quite remarkable if you consider where we all eventually ended up. I really hope you get to read "The Name Day Party" some day. Five stars.