Lady with Lapdog And Other Stories: Grief;Agafya;Misfortune;a Boring Story;the Grasshopper;Ward 6;Ariadne;the House with an Attic;Ionych;the Darling;Lady with Lapdog

292 Pages·1964·17.844 MB·English

by  Anton Chekhov

Chekhov
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Lady with Lapdog
AND OTHER STORIES
WITHDRAWN
No longer the property of the .
Boston Public Library. \
Sale of this material benefits the Library*
PENGUIN CLASSICS
LADY WITH LAPDOG
AND OTHER STORIES
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, the son of a former serf, was bom in
i860 in Taganrog, a port on the sea of Azov. He received a classical
education at dfid. Taganrog Secondary School, then in 1879 he went to
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Moscow, where /he. entered the medical faculty dfi the university,
graduating in 1884. Dpring his university years he supported his family
by contributing humorous stories and sketches to magazines. He pub-
lished his first volume of stories, Motley Stories-^in *886 and a year later
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his second volume, In '.the Twilight, for which he' was awarded the
Pushkin prize by the Russian Academy. His most famous stories were
written after his return from the convict island of Sakhalin, which he
visited in 1890. For five years he lived on his small country estate near
Moscow, but when his health began to fail he moved to the Crimea.
After 1900, the rest of his life was spent at Yalta, where he met Tolstoy
and Gorky. He wrote very few stories during the last years of his fife,
devoting most of his time to a thorough revision of his stories for a
collected edition of his works, published in 1901, and to the writing of
his great plays. In 1901 Chekhov married Olga Knipper, an actress of the
Moscow Art Theatre. He died of consumption in 1904.
David Magarshack was bom in Riga, Russia, and educated at a
Russian secondary school. He came to England in 1920 and was natural¬
ized in 1931. After graduating in English literature and language at
University College, London, he worked in Fleet Street and published a
number of novels. For the Penguin Classics he translated Dostoyevsky’s
Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Devils, and The Brothers Karamazov;
Dead Souls by Gogol; and Oblomov by Goncharov. He also wrote bio¬
graphies of Chekov, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Pushkin, Turgenev and Stan¬
islavsky, and he is the author of Chekov the Dramatist, a critical study of
Chekhov’s plays, and a study of Stanislavsky’s system of acting. His last
books to be published before his death were The Real Chekhov and a
translation of Chekhov’s Four Plays.
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ANTON CHEKHOV
LADY WITH LAPDOG
AND OTHER STORIES
Translated with an Introduction
by David Magarshack
PENGUIN BOOKS
fiONNOLLY
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England
This translation first published 1964
27 29 30 28
Copyright © David Magarshack, 1964
All rights reserved
Printed in England by Clays Ltd, St Ives pic
Set in Linotype Estienne
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
CN BR
CHEKHOV
A
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Contents
Introduction
7
Grief
*5
Agafya 21
Misfortune
32
A Boring Story 46
The Grasshopper
io5
Ward 6
*3*
Ariadne 187
The House with an Attic 213
Ionych 232
The Darling 251
Lady with Lapdog 264
Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2017 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation
https://archive.org/details/ladywithlapdogotOOanto
Introduction
Anton Chekhov, born at Taganrog, a port on the Sea of Azov,
on 29 January i860, began writing his short stories as a medical
student in Moscow. His first story was published in a Petersburg
humorous magazine in January 1880. The stories he published dur¬
ing the next three years in the Moscow and Petersburg humorous
magazines all appeared under his pseudonym of Antosha Chek-
honte. Already in those ‘thoughtless and frivolous tales’, as he
subsequently described them, his characteristic quality of exposing
the hidden motives of his characters and revealing the influence
of their environment upon them was clearly discernible. His real
chance as a writer came at the end of 1882, when he became a
regular contributor to Fragments, a Petersburg weekly magazine
of some literary standing, for which he wrote about 300 stories
during the next three years. These stories, however, had to be very
short, and it was not until Chekhov became a contributor to the
big Petersburg dailies, the Petersburg Gazette and the New
Times, that he was freed from the constraint of limiting his stories
to a few hundred words. Gradually his stories began to appear in
some of the most important monthly periodicals, and it was
in these that the greatest stories of his mature period were pub¬
lished. The eleven stories in this volume were written between
1883 and 1899, that is during Chekhov’s most productive
period as a short story writer, and reading them one gets the im¬
pression of holding life itself, like a fluttering bird, in one’s cupped
hands.
Grief, the first story in this volume, was published in the Peters¬
burg Gazette on 23 November 1885, still under Chekhov’s pseu¬
donym of Antosha Chekhonte. It immediately impressed the
critics by its mixture of comedy and tragedy, a feature that was
to become characteristic of Chekhov’s art as a whole.
Agafya, one of the first stories to lie signed by Chekhov’s full
7
INTRODUCTION
name, was published in the New Times on 15 March 1886, and
so impressed the veteran novelist Dmitry Grigorovich, whose first
stories, too, had dealt with the life of Russian peasants, that in an
excited letter to Chekhov he hailed him as a writer of genius and
warned him against frittering away his talent on writing trifles.
Referring specifically to Agafya, Grigorovich declared that ‘judging
by the different qualities of your undoubted talent, your true feel¬
ing of inner analysis, your masterly descriptive passages, the way
in which you give a complete picture of a cloud at sunset in a few
words, etc., you are destined, I am quite sure, to become the author
of many excellent and truly artistic works/ Grigorovich was even
more outspoken two years later, when he again referred to Agafya
in a letter to Chekhov: ‘Only a true artist,’ he wrote, ‘could have
written a story like Agafya. Its two characters are only lightly
sketched and yet nothing more could have been added to make
them more alive or get the figures and characters of each into
sharper relief: not in a single word or movement does one feel that
the story has been “made up” — everything in it is true, everything
in it is just as it could have happened in real life. The same is true
of the descriptive passages. .. . Such a masterly way of conveying
one’s observations of life can be found only in Turgenev and
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It was Grigorovich’s letters that finally decided Chekhov to take
his literary work more seriously, and subsequently to devote all his
time to literature. The reference to Turgenev and Tolstoy, how¬
ever, is much more pertinent than Grigorovich suspected, for both
Grief and Agafya are largely derivative, Agafya in particular bear¬
ing a close resemblance to Rendez-Vous, one of Turgenev’s last
additions to his Sportsman s Sketches, though certainly treated in
quite a different and much less sentimental way.
Misfortune, published in the New Times on 16 August 1886, is
also largely derivative, showing quite clearly the influence of Anna
Karenina (Chekhov was at the time quite obsessed with Tolstoy’s
great novel). But though derivative, these stories reveal an origin¬
ality of mind and attitude that is largely due to the different social
background in which these three great writers grew up, Turgenev
and Tolstoy never really being able to shake off the influence of
their aristocratic environment, while Chekhov, the son of a freed