Five short novels containing a lot of commentary on society, marriage, and religion. They're a bit dry and slow going, but Chekhov is thought-provoking and his works are well-written.

One could read these stores a thousand times over and each time garner some new piece of knowledge or a new way of thinking and seeing the world. That's the mark of a "good read."

Really amazing translation. I don't speak Russian, but I know that translation means a lot in a language that, for example, doesn't have a distinction between 'a book' and 'the book.'

My Life: 2012/05/31
Three Years: 2012/05/29
The Story of an Unknown Man: 2012/05/28
The Duel: 2012/05/26
The Steppe: 2012/05/25

Fascinating author. I greatly enjoyed his thought-provoking descriptions of human life. However, I need to take a break from Chekhov as I find the male-female relationships in his stories gloomy and depressing. Maybe it's just this particular collection, though? I want to read more of his stories.

The Steppe- 4/5 stars (just straight vibes)

The Duel - 3/5

The Story of an Unknown Man- 5/5

Three Years - 1/5 (either this went way over my head or what is this actually about??? Seems to be basically focused on the fact life is miserable and a lot of that misery can happen in a relatively short space of time, like a span of 3 years)

My Life - 3.5/5

Anton Chekhov: The Complete Short Novels. English translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Everyman's Library. 2004.

[This review contains spoilers.]

I try to include at least one or two classics every year as part of my reading schedule. For this year's selection, I'm starting off with Chekhov. He is mostly known for his plays and short stories. A while back I picked up an Everyman's Library edition that collects five of his "short novels" (i.e. novellas). Too long to generally be considered short stories, yet too short to be considered novels.

The titles in this volume are:

The Steppe. 1888.
The Duel. 1891.
The Story of an Unknown Man. 1893.
Three Years. 1895.
My Life. 1896.

What follows are my initial impressions that I captured for each respective story after reading it.

The Steppe. 1888.

Chekhov's stories can be deceptively simple, about everyday life in Russia, often set in the 1800's. For example, this story is about a boy who is traveling to the city from a remote town with his uncle (who is a merchant) and an Orthodox Christian priest in a dilapidated horse-drawn carriage. His mother has sent him away from home to attend school so he can get an education and make something of himself. He and his uncle, the priest, and a driver are at first all traveling together. At one point, his uncle passes him off to a group of traveling peasants, where he continues his journey across the wide open steppe. It's written from the boy's perspective. The scenes he sees while traveling, the various people he encounters and what he thinks about them, sitting around a campfire cooking meals, birds and other animals he encounters, swimming in the sea, being caught in a thunderstorm, etc. On the surface, just mundane activities. Yet Chekhov writes in such a way that I could not stop reading, and before I knew it I was caught up in his rapturous prose, contemplating the vastness of the steppe while riding in a wagon train in the dark of night. I had to pause to take in the following passage when I first read this section. It was quite moving and contemplative in nature.

Broad shadows drift across the plain like clouds across the sky, and in the incomprehensible distance, if you look at it for a long time, misty, whimsical images loom and heap upon each other...It is a little eerie. And once you gaze at the pale green sky spangled with stars, with not a cloud, not a spot on it, you understand why the warm air is motionless, why nature is on the alert and afraid to stir: she feels eerie and sorry to lose even one moment of life. The boundless depth and infinity of the sky can be judged only on the sea or on the steppe at night, when the moon is shining. It is frightening, beautiful, and caressing, it looks at you languorously and beckons, and its caress makes your head spin.

You ride for an hour, or two hours...On the way you come upon a silent old barrow or a stone idol set up God knows when or by whom, a night bird noiselessly flies over the ground, and steppe legends gradually come to your mind, stories of passing strangers, tales of some old nanny of the steppe, and all that you yourself have managed to see and grasp with your soul. And then, in the chirring of the insects, in the suspicious figures and barrows, in the blue sky, in the moonlight, in the flight of a night bird, in everything you see and hear, you begin to perceive the triumph of beauty, youth, flourishing strength, and a passionate thirst for life; your soul responds to the beautiful, stern motherland, and you want to fly over the steppe with the night bird. And in the triumph of beauty, in the excess of happiness, you feel a tension and anguish, as if the steppe were aware that it is lonely, that its riches and inspiration go for naught in the world, unsung by anyone, unneeded by anyone, and through the joyful hum you hear its anguished, hopeless call: a singer! a singer!

When the story concludes, we are left with an ambiguous ending, but one that felt appropriate to capturing the uncertain perspective of the young protagonist facing the next stage of his life in a new environment, away from home, and being cared for by an, as yet, unknown to him, distant relative.

The Duel. 1891.

I loved how the personalities of the characters played off of one another in this story. One of the principle conflicts of the story is between Laevsky, an aristocratic libertine, and Von Koren, who is a cold, calculating Social Darwinist, and how these characters can't stand each other, which leads to the titular duel.

The relationship between Laevsky and Nadezhda also had plenty of drama built into it, leading to questions about desire, love, boredom, challenging social structures such as marriage while also capturing the experience of feeling trapped in a relationship where the fire has burnt out yet you are not sure how to properly end it. How desire can turn into repulsion, and how a frustrated escape can lead to mania. How facing your own mortality can change the course of your life, which in turn can change that repulsion back into desire, and perhaps even a matured experience of love. But is it, really? Or is it just guilt? The ambiguity kept me guessing even after the story's conclusion.

I also enjoyed the interactions of several of the side characters, especially Samoylenko and the deacon.

There is a lot of meat to this story, and as with real life, none of the characters are purely good or evil. They all show a mixture of qualities, moral and immoral, likable and unlikeable, to various degrees. Which made this feel quite authentic.

The Story of an Unknown Man. 1893.

The basic premise of this story is that a revolutionary (the specific cause he is dedicated to is never named) goes undercover and gets hired as a servant in the household of a minister's son (named Orlov) with the intention of assassinating him when the time is right. The setting is Saint Petersburg. The time period seems to be after the Edict of Emancipation (which abolished serfdom in the Russian Empire) yet before the First Russian Revolution (obviously, because this was written 12 years prior to the Revolution, which began n 1905). While working undercover in Orlov's household, the "unknown man" (the radical/assassin posing as a servant) begins to develop feelings for Orlov's mistress. This configuration of personalities sets off the main story arc, which explores themes of class, loyalty, meaning/meaninglessness of life, love, abandonment, and the conflict between individual desire and social change.

Three Years. 1895.

For me this story expresses a general malaise, a restless dissatisfaction with life. The main character, Laptev, is part of the merchant class. His family owns a haberdashery business in Moscow. His aging father runs the warehouse like an autocrat (yet fancies himself a great benefactor to his underlings). His brother is actively involved in the business, yet Laptev tries to avoid the place and in fact at the beginning of the story we learn he has moved away from Moscow and is living in a small rural town where he secretly falls in love with a beautiful young woman named Yulia, who has befriended herself to Laptev's terminally ill sister. After Yulia shows a small kindness to Laptev, he overcomes his trepidation and clumsily confesses his love to her and asks for her hand in marriage. At first she rebukes him sharply, then later, feeling embarrassed that she might have harshly offended him, and after some consideration about that lack of prospects she has for her future, decides to accept his proposal, though she feels no love for him. They get married and move to Moscow to be close to the family business after Laptev's sister dies.

The marriage is unsatisfactory for both of them. Yulia feels trapped and regrets her decision and Laptev is frustrated because he knows she has never loved him. It goes on like this for a while, through several events, including the birth and death of their first child, Laptev's father going blind and no longer being able to run the business, and Laptev's brother having a nervous breakdown. Laptev is eventually forced to take over the business out of necessity, yet has no desire to do so. Near the end of the story, it appears the roles have switched between Laptev and Yulia, where she begins to warm to him and wants to be around him, while he seems to be pushing away and reflecting on what life might have been if he had made different choices.

What I'm finding to be typical of Chekhov is that there is ultimately no resolution to the story. It ends ambiguously. Yet this by no means lessens the impact of the narrative. To the contrary, it gives the tale a strong sense of realism. Life rarely (if ever) matches a contrived ending where all the conflicts are resolved and everyone lives happily ever after. This sense of realism is one of the elements I appreciate in Chekhov's writing, and 19th century Russian literature in general.

My Life. 1896.

In My Life I feel Chekhov is pushing strongly against the idea of class, which is not an uncommon theme in many of his writings. Here, the main character, Misail Poloznev, rejects the expectations of his father to be engaged with intellectual work suitable to his class. Rather, Misail extols the virtues of physical labor. This infuriates his father, which leads to their estrangement when Misail leaves home after securing a recommendation from a mutual friend to work for an engineer who is in charge of a railway being built in a provincial town.

Misail meets the engineer and works for him for a time, but after noticing his disdain for the peasant laborers, he stops working for the railway and settles in as a painter. While on a job as a painter he meets Masha, the daughter of the engineer, who at first is enamored by Misail's idealism. They fall in love, get married, and take over managing a country estate. As time goes on, Masha begins to detest the peasants, which leads to complications in the marriage and she ultimately abandons Misail to pursue a career as a singer, first to St. Petersburg and then to America.

Distraught over the abandonment by his wife, and while caring for his sister who has has grown ill, Misail returns to his home town to visit his father. They confront each other and their relationship is left unreconciled. Misail continues his life as a painter, and while some of the townsfolk no longer mock him for living outside of his class, the many sufferings he has faced have left their marks on him.

One of the striking things to me about this story is that, while Chekhov critiques the noble class, showing through various characters tendencies toward hypocrisy, elitism, intellectualism, and even debauchery, the peasant class, while being portrayed as having qualities such as living a simple life and being hard workers, are not romanticized. They are shown at times to be cheats, liars, and brutish. In other words, neither the nobles nor the peasants are beyond reproach.

He's good at this writing thing.

I wasn't familiar with Chekhov, but had read that his short stories were among the best and bought this anthology based upon that. These (The Steppe, The Duel, The Story of an Unknown Man and My Life) aren't short stories; they're short novels. Short novels that as far as I could see were utterly pointless.

Chekhov is so full of contradictions and course changes that lead nowhere that, in the end, it seems that he writes about nothing, the Russian literature version of Seinfeld, but without the humor.

While reading this, I was also reading George Saunders' A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, which featured the Chekhov short stories "The Cart" and "The Darling." These stories were more interesting than anything in The Complete Short Novels. There are lots of Chekhov short story anthologies out there, and I'm open to exploring one of those. Maybe, some day. Just not soon.

Only 3 stars, WHY?

(Chekov) is the object for this "off-track review" & (Short stories) is the subject for this review.

He is the acclaimed master of short stories.
In one way, that is something unarguably true.
But that is somewhat based on the preconceived notion, (risk of non-objectivity here) that short-stories should encapsulate fractions of life, then analyze them with a vivid twist, and finally reach upon an enigmatic yet an aphoristic conclusion.
He does this well, so why would I then just give it 3 stars.

That is simply due to my subjective notion in regards to judging the value of short stories.

I truly indulge in and admire short stories and the virtuous value it brings about.

Now the value the short story gives to me (personally) is made up by a few different structural factors.
A short story must truly encapsulate something, anything profoundly human. But in its short form, profundity and observation with penetration, as in "to bring out some observation of some event or action, which spotlights the essence of mankind", in order to seal the awe-inspiring enlightenment, or just to cause fascination.
This is the basis for my subjective and personal "value-scale" of short-stories.

Now this is where Chekov to my surprise fails utterly.
He is not profound enough, not enlightening enough, simply he does not take this final step, that is needed in order to create sublime short-stories.
Some of his stories are really, really good, very observant and satirical towards certain social behavioral patterns as well as social structures in general. "So surely this master deserve to be referred to as a master, just not by me".

I must give a parallel to make this point clear, pardon me if this is insulting, but I would like to contrast Chekov with the supreme Borges.

Consume any of his short stories, and you will enter a new world. Because he is so skilled and superb that he does not only enlighten me, but he challenge my whole cognitive perception of the world.
This master said himself "that he preferred to write poems and short-stories, because to be profound implies to be succinct, however that being "non-exclusive" of course. So every idea, every line, every word was in essence a forceful idea, that fused into short-stories that will never leave your being.

Got through all except "My Life." I was too tired and depressed to keep reading at that point. Chehkov is brilliant but his short novels were emotionally exhausting! Of the ones I read, my vote goes to "The Duel." Funny at times, thought provoking, and, as always, ends sadly. "Three Years" was great as well but was probably the most draining to read. I both sympathized and was incredibly frustrated with every character.

THE HOUSE WITH THE MEZZANINE
The House With The Mezzanine is the story of a somewhat diffident young man, a painter, and his somewhat tenuous romance with two sisters during a vacation; the story is laden with the impressionistic images conjured up by its narrator and is one of Chekhov’s finest short stories.
The narrator, feeling bored during his holidays, decides to go for a walk and during his walk he comes across the grounds of an unfamiliar manor house; “The sun was already thinking and the evening shadows lay across the flower rye. Two rows of closely planted, towering fir trees, stood like solid, unbroken walls, forming a handsome, sombre avenue…It was quiet and dark, only high up in the trees a vivid golden light quivered here and there and transformed spiders webs into shimmering rainbows” Chekhov brilliantly renders the picture from the perspective of a talented impressionist, the narrators keen eye picking out the oscillations of the spiders web via the sinking son, a sombre atmosphere pervades the scene, a kind of ethereal beauty lingers as the ephemeral beauty of the sun lingers in the avenue; “I went past a white house with a terrace and a kind of mezzanine-and suddenly a vista opened: a courtyard, a large pond with a bathing place, a clump of green willows and a village on the far bank, with a slender tall tower whose cross glittered in the setting sun.” You feel as if you are drifting from one painting to another, the narrator comes across two young women, “One of them-the elder, who was slim, pale and very pretty with a mass of auburn hair and a stubborn mouth-wore a stern expression and hardly looked at me. But the other girl-still very young, no more than seventeen or eighteen-similarly slim and pale, with a large mouth and big eyes, looked at me in astonishment as I walked past.” Note the contrast between his description of the two women, he obviously finds the older attractive and is slightly piqued by her perceived indifferent of him, whereas the description of the younger is less sensuous. Notice also, the description of her ‘stubborn mouth’ and the girls ‘astonished’ gaze at the narrator, who is obviously somewhat unreliable as he is using his later relationship with them to colour his first meeting with them.
Not long after this, the older sister, whose name is Lida, pays a visit to the narrator’s friend’s house, where he is staying and, after giving a speech on various social projects she is leading and needs help with, invites him to visit as she and her mother are admirers of his work. (Was she therefore really as indifferent as the narrator makes her out to be when he first sees her?) The narrator is again piqued by her behaviour towards him when they visit; she feels he is misusing his talents by not representing the hardships of the poor and he feels her constant interference in their lives leads to more harm than good. His is treated more favourably, however, by her young sister, Zhenya, he describes her underdeveloped breasts and her child like habit of touching him with her shoulder, he finds her charming and inoffensive, somewhat indolent like him, irrepressibly childish, whereas Lida, whose views he claims he deplores he finds fascinating, “She was a vivacious, sincere young girl, with strong views. And it was fascinating listening to her, although she said a lot-and in a loud voice…”
He becomes a regular visitor to the house and his thoughts invariably turn to Lida, whose mouth now becomes ‘finely modelled’, he watches her distribute aid the poor, yet the two get along no better than before and he feels she holds him in contempt for his supposed indifference to the plight of the poor. The two indeed, stand in stark contrast to one another, her social causes cause him to become subconsciously aware of his own diffidence and lack of purpose, whereas his arguments maker her aware of the hypocrisy of her own attitude; after all by raising the peasants aspirations is she not setting them up to fail in a society in which they cannot progress and “it is easy enough to play the good Samaritan when one had five thousand acres of one’s own” Lida, who has established an autocratic power over family and friends, is not having her ideas questioned and responds badly to the narrator’s caustic criticisms, yet the two are irretrievably drawn to one another. On a conscious level at least, the narrator is more drawn to Missy, who obviously admires him as a person and an artist, no doubt stroking his bruised ego, though there is an obvious romantic element to this; “When I came she would bush slightly on seeing me, put down her book, look into my face with her big eyes and tell me enthusiastically what had been happening…” The narrator is aware of this but gently encourages it, they go for walks, go boating and pick cherries, but it is important to note that he does not reciprocate the feelings; only able to observe Missy through the lenses of adolescence, he sees her as a kindred spirit of sort and if he does encourage her affections it is merely to fan the flames of jealousy that Lida feels when she sees them two going for walks; “Lida had just returned from somewhere and she stood by the front porch, crop in hand, looking graceful and beautiful in the sunlight; she was giving orders to one of the workmen. Talking very loudly, she hurriedly spoke to one or two of the patients, and then, with a preoccupied and busy look, marched through the rooms, opened one cupboard after another, after which she went to the attic storey.”
The narrator’s revels in the reverence in which Missy and her mother hold him, he notes, with some trepidation, that they regard Lida as an enigma, a general of sorts, yet perhaps he is mixing his own feelings in with theirs? His friendship with the family makes him want to paint again, but also makes him question his lack of direction in life, despite the fact that it is this very idleness that attracts him Missy and her mother and divides him from Lida. He muses to his friend, “Lida could only fall in love with a council worker who is as devoted as she is to hospitals and schools. Oh, for a girl like her one would not only do welfare work but wear a pair of iron boots, like the girls in the fairy tale! And there’s Missy! Isn’t she charming, this Missy?” The narrator is extolling the ‘charms’ of Missy, in a language redolent with indifference, yet is perhaps perturbed that Lida would only fall for a council worker and not, perhaps, a landscape painter.
At their next meeting the two again begin a juvenile argument about politics; the narrator is obviously watching her closely as she enters the room as he mentions her removing her gloves (details he rarely gives Missy, who he finds so charming), the narrator argues that her changes to living standards of the poor are shallow and egocentric, she retorts that is better to do something than nothing at all and the most pathetic hospital is worth more than any landscape painting. The narrator leaves for home after the argument and meets Missy at the gates; “It was a sad August night-sad because there was already a breath of autumn of the air.” The narrator is obviously aware that the summer of his holiday and acquaintance with the Volchaninovs will soon be coming to an end. “The moon was rising, veiled by a crimson cloud and casting a dim light on the road and the dark fields of winter corn along its sides. There were many shooting stars. Zhenya walked along the road at my side, trying not to see the shooting stars, which frightened her for some reason.” The narrator realizes that he is in love with Missy-he loves because her because she admires him as an artist and reveres him as a person, he is astonished by the depth of her mind and somewhat fatuously “suspects she is very intelligent”, her beauty moves him, to what I am not too sure, except for an eloquent soliloquy about her appreciation of his art, one suspects why, after spending so much time with Missy he is still unsure about her intelligence, his declaration of love for her is somewhat vague and empty and completely egocentric, his still thinks bitterly about her pretty sister who has no appreciation of his artistic talents, despite the fact that Lida stated she admired his work, and criticised it for its lack of purpose. He kisses her and she, flushed with excitement, departs for home, where he follows her and watches the house. “I walked past the terrace and sat down on a bench on the darkness under the old elm by the tennis court. In the window of the attic storey where she slept, a bright light suddenly shone, turning soft green when the lamp was covered with a shade. I was full of tenderness, calm and contentment- because I had let myself get carried away and fallen in love. And at the same time I was troubled by the thought that a few steps away, Lida lived in one of the rooms of that house, Lida who disliked and possibly hated me.” Given that Lida retires to the attic after seeing the narrator and Missy returning from a walk and that he hears voices in the attic, Lida probably sleeps there with Missy, again although the narrator states he is in love with Missy, his thoughts stray back to and are dominated by Lida and her apparent dislike to him; he feels the attic window where she sleeps staring at him with comprehending eyes, unlike the sad, gentle looks which Missy gives him.
The narrator returns the next day, to be confronted by Lida, who tells her Missy and her mother left that morning, Later he is handed a letter from Missy, telling him that Lida disapproves of their relationship and so has sent her away. The narrator is despondent, on his way back home he notes; “Then came the dark fir avenue, the broken down fence.” The story has come full circles as the narrator departs the estate via the route he first entered, “On that same field where I first saw the flowering rye and hear the quails calling, cows and hobbled horses were grazing. Here and there on the hills were the bright green patches of winter corn. A sombre, humdrum mood came over me and I felt ashamed of all I had said at the Volchaninovs.” Perhaps he is ashamed of leading Missy on or being so acerbic and rude to Lida? He soon leaves for home and never sees them again, though he does learn that Lida has strengthened her political grip on the area, though he had no news on Missy, he sometimes harks back to the time and remembers the green lamp in the attic or his footstep as he walked home. The narrator is still, however, consumed by loneliness and diffidence.
The House With the Mezzanine is amongst Chekhov’s most beautiful short stories; it conjures up and idyllic picture of the youth of the narrator and of his falling in love-that he attributes this love to the wrong person is a symbol of not only by his naiveté but his egocentricity, although he is critical of Lida for the egocentric element of her charity he fails to recognise this element of his own personality and how it blinds him to his true emotions. Perhaps Lida and the narrator are more similar than they care to imagine; both are driven by immense passion, for entirely different causes, both are stubborn, arrogant and intelligent, both are attracted to each other but fail to acknowledge this attraction and the innocent, naïve Missy is dragged in between. Both are wrong in their assertions-firstly the narrator is his somewhat portentous political statements, after all, as Lida state, in nobody acts to redress the inequalities of society then there will never be any progress. As for Lida’s myopic statement that art has no aesthetic value and that it must have a social element, there is no greater irony that this being said in a work of Chekhov, whose work is ‘art-for-arts sake’ and yet did more to increase awareness of the plight of the poor than any social works and immortalized the lives of the Russian of the time more than any history book. After all, the emotional underplay of the novel and the beautiful descriptions of the environment are eternal, as is all great art, and so will resonate so long as humans feel love and appreciate beauty, whereas art concerned with political is ephemeral by its very nature.

I was sort of upset when I came upon the last page, and had to finish this book - this is the kind of book that could go on, and on, and on, and you wouldn’t get bored. This book is life, the fate of so many seemingly real people, and the perfect escape from your own subsistence.

Some quotes of my preference (very random):

“The Russian man likes to remember, but does not like to live.”

“To constantly go into raptures over nature is to show the paucity of your imagination. All these brooks and cliffs are nothing but trash compared to what my imagination can give me.”

“I’m sorry the man is not in military service. He’d make an excellent, brilliant general. He’d know how to drown his cavalry in the river and make bridges from the corpses, and such boldness is more necessary in war than any fortifications or tactics.”

“Prejudice and hatefulness. When soldiers see a girl of light behavior, they guffaw and whistle, but ask them what they are themselves.”

"It takes all kinds to make a world"
(Det finns fölk till allt.)

“When he lapsed into thought over supper, rolling little balls of bread and drinking a good deal of red wine, then, strangely enough, I was almost certain that there was something sitting in him which he probably sensed vaguely himself, but which, because of bustle and banalities, he never managed to understand and appreciate.”

“I look at love first of all as a need of my organism, low and hostile to my spirit; it should be satisfied reasonably or renounced entirely, otherwise it will introduce elements as impure as itself into your life.”

"The meaning of life is only in one thing—in struggle. To plant your heel on the vile serpent’s head so that it goes ‘crack!’ The meaning is in that. In that alone, or else there’s no meaning at all.”

".. they found the gray Moscow weather most pleasant and healthy. Days when cold rain raps at the windows, and dusk falls early, and the walls of houses and churches take on a brown, mournful color, and you do not know what to put on when you go outside—such days pleasantly excited them."

“I’m quite unable to adjust to life, to master it. Another man talks stupidly, or cheats, and does it so cheerfully, while it happens that I do good consciously and feel nothing but anxiety or total indifference.”

“Progress lies in works of love, in the fulfillment of the moral law. If you don’t enslave anyone, are not a burden to anyone, what more progress do you want?”

“If you don’t make your neighbors feed you, clothe you, drive you around, protect you from enemies, then isn’t that progress in a life that’s all built on slavery? In my opinion, that is the most genuine progress, and perhaps the only kind possible and necessary for man.”