The dog in “The Teacher of Literature” (1894) does not simply bark his “grrr. Chekhov also persisted in his transcribing of noises. Its charge is the unconditional and honest truth.”Īfter 1886, Chekhov stopped using such overtly comical names, but in later stories we still find characters like Zhmukhin in “The Pecheneg” (1897), whose name, while credible enough, also suggests pushing, squeezing, oppression. “What makes literature art is precisely its depiction of life as it really is. They were mainly jokes, often satirical, but he also played with words in them, for instance in naming his characters.
But his true artistic gift-innate, intuitive-showed itself even in the most exaggerated, absurd, and playful of these early jottings. In 1879 he graduated and moved to Moscow himself, where he entered medical school, and where his writing, still pseudonymous, became virtually the sole support of the family-mother, father, four brothers, and a sister.Ĭhekhov paid no attention to the artistic quality of his sketches he simply tossed them off, sometimes several a day, and sent them to various daily or weekly humor sheets, whose editors gladly printed them. Chekhov, who was sixteen at the time, stayed behind to finish high school, supporting himself in various ways, one of them being the publication of humorous sketches in local papers, signed with various pseudonyms. His father’s grocery business, in their native Taganrog, on the Sea of Azov, had gone bankrupt in 1876, and to avoid debtor’s prison the family had fled to Moscow, where Chekhov’s two older brothers were already studying at the university. When Chekhov began to write humorous stories and sketches, he thought he was doing it simply for money. By chance the selection came to 52 stories-a full deck! But, as Chekhov once wrote, “in art, as in life, there is nothing accidental.” Our intention in making this collection has been to represent the extraordinary variety of Anton Chekhov’s stories, from earliest to latest, in terms of characters, events, social classes, settings, voicing, and formal inventiveness.
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