Anton Chekhov’s selected stories

Abstract

Anton Chekhov's selected stories, edited by Cathy Popkin, A Norton Critical Edition, New York and London, W. W. Norton & Company, 2014, xxi + 694 pp., US$20.00 (pbk), ISBN 978-0-39-392530-2Norton Critical Editions help university professors to plan a course, because they include select critical sources alongside text(s). A main challenge in planning an undergraduate course on Anton Chekhov's short stories is determining how to assemble readings: one works with multiple small collections or a course pack, which might include texts of stories and critical sources, and a quantity of handouts. Anton Chekhov's Selected Stories, edited by Cathy Popkin, supplants all of these approaches. It is a veritable wish list for professor and a great entrance to Chekhov's universe for any reader.The edition includes 52 stories, more than any previous collection of stories in translation has included under one cover. stories are followed by sections Life and Letters and Criticism, latter combining general approaches and readings of individual stories, and there are also a chronology of Chekhov's life and a bibliography.The introduction prepares reader to be attentive to what is, famously, absent from Chekhov's story - meaningful details, life-changing events, endings, morals - and to what is present instead - deceptive simplicity, a radically new worldview, and modem and non-dogmatic art (xvii). Popkin makes a particular effort to keep readers keenly aware they are not reading in original. section Comparison Passages shows translation matters, and section The Translators and their Work provides detailed information on translators who contributed to volume. translations of stories in collection are veiy good. If they do not claim to be final word in translating (otherwise editors would have not placed so much emphasis on multiplicity of possible translations), they come close to satisfying everyone. Footnotes are extensive and very useful in pointing out and explaining references to literary and historical figures and events, geographical locales, significance of dates and church holidays, and difficulties and variants of translation.The section Life and Letters includes Aileen Kelly's essay Chekhov Subversive and a superb choice of letters. Kelly's observations on writer and man are followed, and fleshed out, by Chekhov's letters, creating a kind of biography where we learn of his money troubles, state of health, and famous explanations to his brother Nikolai on a civilized person's qualities (514) and to his brother Aleksandr on how to write (517). Readers receive oft-quoted letter to Aleksei Suvorin about young man who squeezes slave out of himself by drop (523); Chekhov's thoughts on Tolstoy, on Turgenev (532), and on the philosophizing of great men of this world (528); and letters to his wife, Olga Knipper-Chekhova and to his sister, Maria, which include his last letter, written a few days before his death.The Criticism section, which has two parts - Approaches and Interpretations - comprises classic pieces by Peter Bitsilli, Vladimir Kataev, and Robert Louis Jackson, as well as more recent scholarship, such as essays by Michel Finke and Cathy Popkin. Approaches gives readers access to work by Bitsilli on Chekhov's laconicism and by Alexander Chudakov on unnecessary detail accompanies rather than clarifies descriptions (555) and on event changes nothing (558). Then comes Kataev's seminal work on the story of discovery with its focus on epistemological perspective and incredibly useful dichotomy it seemed/it turned out that (kazalos'/okazalos*) (567). Radislav Lapushin explicates poetry in Chekhov's prose through close reading on level of paragraph, sentence, and sometimes word. …