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Rating: 
Summary: Bloodied but unbowed
Review: Chekhov is a master, but I almost wish he'd never existed. His prose is so deceptively simple that it will make everyone reading him, be they caterers, kids, or Senate whips, think "I can do that!" Needless to say, they can't. This doesn't mean anyone will ever stop trying. Chekhov fans the flames of megalomania in what Sartre called the "Sunday writer", dilettantes like Mathieu in The Age of Reason. Almost every short story written now is in either the style of Raymond Carver or Chekhov, and Carver was just the first to graft Chekhov's style onto American subjects. What is that style? It's not as instantly recognizable as Kafka's or Joyce's -- two terminal figures who can't be imitated -- but if you want an example of it, grab any New Yorker that might be lying around the house and flip to the short story. Got one? Okay, now notice how it doesn't end with a swordfight or an orgy. Instead, it will most likely hinge on a simple misunderstanding, such as a man making an offhand comment that causes his wife to lose all respect for him, or else some kind of sudden revelation; like an interior monologue where, after seeing two schoolgirls share a bologna sandwich, a professional woman realizes her entire life is corrupt and shallow. Shocks of recognition, mundane realism, and a muted climax ( this last is especially crucial; the professional woman above wouldn't throw off her worldly chattels and move to India, but would simply go back to her office, maybe even with a little excitement to get to work on a new ad campaign ) -- these are the hallmarks of Chekhovian writing. The bad news is that we can look forward to an eternity of these pale imitations. Because the times are always changing, Chekhov's journalistic style -- remember he started out as a newspaperman -- ALWAYS APPLIES. It's a nightmare. But that's no reason to keep you, as it kept me for so long, from the original. All of Chekhov's best stories are here, or in the other two volumes of the Modern Library series ( where the nitpicker below can find the other stories whose absence he laments, except "Gusev," which is in this one. )
Rating:
Summary: Finally
Review: Coming up with a completely satisfactory compilation of Chekhov is impossible. There's too much material and, after a certain point, almost everything is worth reading. At this point, I have three small compilations that I've found in used bookstores, with around a third of the stories in each volume repeated in another volume. It's annoying. I found it hard to believe that (until now) a publisher hadn't published one big book, or at least a series of three or four books that would have the essential stories. One can occasionally find the thirteen volumes of Constance Garnett, but the print on those is huge and one barely gets a few stories a collection; it seemed like a ridiculous way to treat a great writer, especially when Chekhov's letters have already gotten such wonderful treatment in the compilation by Karlinsky. Well, I wish this book was a little thicker, but I'm happy with it. The only things left out are the stories that are almost novellas: The Duel, Ward 6, Peasant, and In the Ravine. The Steppe is in the first volume, I think. So, this collection isn't definitive, even when joined with the first book. If it's possible for publishing companies to put out big bound volumes of all of Jane Austen's novels, and every word that Wilde and Poe ever wrote, it should be possible to fit all the stories-even the longer ones-into a single book. Small print is fine: just give me everything. But until then, this is nice. I'll settle for reading the stories that aren't in any of my books on the Internet, where there are some lovely Chekhov sites. I think Eudora Welty said something like, reading Chekhov was like having the angels sing to me. The oblique style of modern realist stories is pretty much directly inspired by Chekhov, but you never see the machinery in his stories, like you do in the work of even the most talented modern writers: never feel the author struggling towards the epiphany, building up a character's personality piece by piece. And some of his late stories - The Bishop, especially - can't actually be imitated. It isn't clear what makes them beautiful: no plot, no revelations, nothing, just life. One is reduced to stammering about angels singing and that sort of thing. Karlinsky said something about how they tremble on the edge of music, which I suppose is the best anyone's going to do. The famous trilogy of stories has never been my favorite Chekhov-a little too didactic for my taste-but a passage in "Gooseberries" is worth quoting. I think it reflects at least part of the credo of this great writer, one of the few literary geniuses who also appears to also have been a nice guy: There is always, for some reason, an element of sadness mingled with my thoughts of human happiness, and, on this occasion, at the sight of a happy man I was overcome by an oppressive feeling that was close upon despair. It was particularly oppressive at night. A bed was made up for me in the room next to my brother's bedroom, and I could hear that he was awake, and that he kept getting up and going to the plate of gooseberries and taking one. I reflected how many satisfied, happy people there really are! 'What a suffocating force it is! You look at life: the insolence and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and brutishness of the weak, incredible poverty all about us, overcrowding, degeneration, drunkenness, hypocrisy, lying. . . . Yet all is calm and stillness in the houses and in the streets; of the fifty thousand living in a town, there is not one who would cry out, who would give vent to his indignation aloud. We see the people going to market for provisions, eating by day, sleeping by night, talking their silly nonsense, getting married, growing old, serenely escorting their dead to the cemetery; but we do not see and we do not hear those who suffer, and what is terrible in life goes on somewhere behind the scenes. . . . Everything is quiet and peaceful, and nothing protests but mute statistics: so many people gone out of their minds, so many gallons of vodka drunk, so many children dead from malnutrition. . . . And this order of things is evidently necessary; evidently the happy man only feels at ease because the unhappy bear their burdens in silence, and without that silence happiness would be impossible. It's a case of general hypnotism. There ought to be behind the door of every happy, contented man some one standing with a hammer continually reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people; that however happy he may be, life will show him her laws sooner or later, trouble will come for him -- disease, poverty, losses, and no one will see or hear, just as now he neither sees nor hears others. But there is no man with a hammer; the happy man lives at his ease, and trivial daily cares faintly agitate him like the wind in the aspen-tree -- and all goes well.
Rating:
Summary: Finally
Review: Coming up with a completely satisfactory compilation of Chekhov is impossible. There's too much material and, after a certain point, almost everything is worth reading. At this point, I have three small compilations that I've found in used bookstores, with around a third of the stories in each volume repeated in another volume. It's annoying. I found it hard to believe that (until now) a publisher hadn't published one big book, or at least a series of three or four books that would have the essential stories. One can occasionally find the thirteen volumes of Constance Garnett, but the print on those is huge and one barely gets a few stories a collection; it seemed like a ridiculous way to treat a great writer, especially when Chekhov's letters have already gotten such wonderful treatment in the compilation by Karlinsky. Well, I wish this book was a little thicker, but I'm happy with it. The only things left out are the stories that are almost novellas: The Duel, Ward 6, Peasant, and In the Ravine. The Steppe is in the first volume, I think. So, this collection isn't definitive, even when joined with the first book. If it's possible for publishing companies to put out big bound volumes of all of Jane Austen's novels, and every word that Wilde and Poe ever wrote, it should be possible to fit all the stories-even the longer ones-into a single book. Small print is fine: just give me everything. But until then, this is nice. I'll settle for reading the stories that aren't in any of my books on the Internet, where there are some lovely Chekhov sites. I think Eudora Welty said something like, reading Chekhov was like having the angels sing to me. The oblique style of modern realist stories is pretty much directly inspired by Chekhov, but you never see the machinery in his stories, like you do in the work of even the most talented modern writers: never feel the author struggling towards the epiphany, building up a character's personality piece by piece. And some of his late stories - The Bishop, especially - can't actually be imitated. It isn't clear what makes them beautiful: no plot, no revelations, nothing, just life. One is reduced to stammering about angels singing and that sort of thing. Karlinsky said something about how they tremble on the edge of music, which I suppose is the best anyone's going to do. The famous trilogy of stories has never been my favorite Chekhov-a little too didactic for my taste-but a passage in "Gooseberries" is worth quoting. I think it reflects at least part of the credo of this great writer, one of the few literary geniuses who also appears to also have been a nice guy: There is always, for some reason, an element of sadness mingled with my thoughts of human happiness, and, on this occasion, at the sight of a happy man I was overcome by an oppressive feeling that was close upon despair. It was particularly oppressive at night. A bed was made up for me in the room next to my brother's bedroom, and I could hear that he was awake, and that he kept getting up and going to the plate of gooseberries and taking one. I reflected how many satisfied, happy people there really are! 'What a suffocating force it is! You look at life: the insolence and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and brutishness of the weak, incredible poverty all about us, overcrowding, degeneration, drunkenness, hypocrisy, lying. . . . Yet all is calm and stillness in the houses and in the streets; of the fifty thousand living in a town, there is not one who would cry out, who would give vent to his indignation aloud. We see the people going to market for provisions, eating by day, sleeping by night, talking their silly nonsense, getting married, growing old, serenely escorting their dead to the cemetery; but we do not see and we do not hear those who suffer, and what is terrible in life goes on somewhere behind the scenes. . . . Everything is quiet and peaceful, and nothing protests but mute statistics: so many people gone out of their minds, so many gallons of vodka drunk, so many children dead from malnutrition. . . . And this order of things is evidently necessary; evidently the happy man only feels at ease because the unhappy bear their burdens in silence, and without that silence happiness would be impossible. It's a case of general hypnotism. There ought to be behind the door of every happy, contented man some one standing with a hammer continually reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people; that however happy he may be, life will show him her laws sooner or later, trouble will come for him -- disease, poverty, losses, and no one will see or hear, just as now he neither sees nor hears others. But there is no man with a hammer; the happy man lives at his ease, and trivial daily cares faintly agitate him like the wind in the aspen-tree -- and all goes well.
Rating: 
Summary: Not entirely the best selection of the uncannily modern C.
Review: I studied Russian literature for years and would ultimately rank the prose biggies as follows: Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev. I frankly prefer Chekhov, however, to the megalomaniac Tolstoy. Reading Chekhov is truly uncanny. He utterly refutes our common cliche'd notions about "Russianness." His is really the most modern voice of nineteenth century literature, without the "modernism" of our century that has so easily dated. I fell in love with Chekhov partly because his Russian is the simplest and most prosaic of any Russian writer and I was consequently able to read him without mediation. I would have included certain stories in an anthology in lieu of others, namely: "In the Ravine" (V ovragie) "Murder" (Ubiijstvo) "An Attack of Nerves" (Pripadok) "The Peasants" (Muzhiki) "Gusev" (Gusev) ...and many others....
Rating:
Summary: The master of realistic short fiction
Review: In the waning years of the 19th Century, Anton Chekhov wrote stories about the Russian middle class, with themes revolving around men and women who let their lives go astray, particularly with regard to love and marriage. Chronologically and artistically, his fiction is a sort of literary bridge between Tchaikovsky-era romanticism and Stravinsky-era chaos. Unlike Dostoevsky, he did not delve deeply into man's problems in dealing with society; he did not have any overt political or religious agenda; hot-button issues like socialism and anti-semitism are barely given a nod. A physician himself, he often used doctors as characters, marveling at their ability to mend bodies but not souls. In Chekhov's stories, marriage is hardly a bed of roses, usually resulting in discontentment, depression, and adultery; nowhere is this more perfectly executed than in "The Lady with the Dog," which ends with the two transgressors not contrite over their sins, but resolving to carry on their affair in the face of uncertainty. In "The Party," a young married couple's disharmony culminates in a tragedy that underscores their need to love each other. Chekhov's characters tend to marry for the wrong reasons, like societal pressure, false hopes of marital bliss ("The Helpmate," "Betrothed"), and convenience and mutual benefit ("Anna on the Neck"). His characters usually are people who mean well but do the wrong things: In "At a Country House," a cultural elitist has a habit of scaring off the very men he wants his daughters to marry. Chekhov also touches on themes of pure, often unrequited, love. "The Beauties" is a plaintive tale of infatuation, of a boy's enthralling first discovery of intangible feminine beauty. His lonely characters, such as in "The Schoolmistress," "A Doctor's Visit," and "The Darling," are often prisoners of their own inhibitions, obsessions, and self-obligations. Other topics are covered, often exhibiting a world-weary cynicism. In the amusing fable "The Shoemaker and the Devil," the protagonist's conclusion is not the cliched lesson to be thankful for the few things he has in life, but rather that there is nothing in life worth selling his soul to the devil for. "Rothschild's Fiddle" is like a Marc Chagall painting set to prose, portraying the futility and bitterness of life offset by the beauty of art, while "Whitebrow" is a fuzzy parable. Chekhov also displays a talent for drawing comical characters, such as the talkative blowhard in "The Petchenyeg" and the prudish protagonist of "The Man in a Case." A mark of Chekhov's style is that these people often are oblivious to their own idiosyncrasies, a touch that injects as much comedy as tragedy into the stories. These stories might leave one with the impression that Chekhov was pessimistic about love and marriage, and even life, but in my opinion they emphasize a fundamental truism about fiction -- much as in comedy, where failure is funnier than success, even though "good" love is what makes the world go around, "bad" love is more interesting to write about.
Rating:
Summary: Chekhov: The Great Humanist
Review: Style, style, style. While it's all well and good that the reviewers below emphasize the stylistic impact Chekhov's writings have had on practically EVERY modern short story, it is important to note that his stories combine to form one of the greatest humanistic manifestos in all of literature. Throughout his life as a doctor and a writer, Chekhov's deceptively laconic artistic sensibility was constantly focused on human interests and values. Human beings, in all their messy, hurtful, tragic glory, puzzled the good doctor, but he accepted them for what they were. His writing reflects his wide embrace of all that we are. Chekhov was a great lover of mankind, and arguably its finest chronicler. His stories are clear-eyed, unsentimental reports from the front lines of human existence. Given attention, they will surely instruct and broaden any heart. We should be eternally grateful.
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