Customer Reviews

Longer Stories from the Last Decade (Modern Library)

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Someone once asked Chekhov why he didn't write novels. He said that he did, but none of them was over 12,000 words long. These are some of those 'novels'. Each one of them has an intellectual and emotional heft that will blow away most full-size novels. They are like magic tricks, lots of very serious clowns climbing out of an impossibly small car. Chekhov was not the first modernist, but he was probably the greatest.

Anton Chekhov was one of the greatest writers the world has ever known. He broke the mould of his contemporaries by writing short stories and short novels that presented all the manners and social insight of late imperial Russia without the MOUNTAINS of paper. Tolstoy and Dostoevskii wrote pages into the thousands!

Chekhov's long stories, included in this book, are astonishing in their ability to present exceptionally subtle human interactions in profound, life-changing twists of dialog and introspective narrative. This book brings you most of his best long stories, and each of them will make you catch your breath.

Chekhov was a physician by trade, and his scientific background afforded him an economy with words unmatched in modern literature. While widely known as a playwright, his best work can be found in his prose. A champion of the mercantile and professional classes of imperial Russia, you will relate to his work in a way that brings him right up to modern times.

Not raging against Communism, nor raging against Tsarist elitism, Chekhov rages like a teenager against Victorian formality with depth and sensitivity that will leave you cheering or weeping with genuine human sympathy.

Many a tear has been brought to this stoic's eye with these words, beautifully rendered in English by world-renowned Russian-to-English translator Constance Garnett.

Truly, absolutely, magnificent.

Have to agree with the previous reviewer, this is Chekov at his best. It is interesting to see that he matured from writing serial comic stories to such sustained narratives full of compassion and sympathy for the human condition. A friend of mine once said a writer really needs to live in a place for a long time and observe people floating in and out of that context in order to be able to write good narrative. Well I feel these stories are the culmination of a lifetime of Chekov observing the people around him, their hopes and their disappointments, how their lives arc across the passing of years. And it feels true and straight from life, without mannerism or affectation or judgment, the various heartbreak and apathy and small joys of Chekov's characters, these are recognizable as fundamental and immediate to our lives.

I can't think of who can rival Chekov's characterization. A man in "An Anonymous Story", a somewhat spineless bureaucrat and hanger-on who makes fun of his wife and children while among his friends (but whom one can imagine being extremely tender to them in person), he often sits at a piano and fingers hackneyed tunes. But then there is a moment when everything we have known about him becomes transformed, and that glimpse carries the burden of years of disappointment and failure; and he is a minor character in the story!

In the last story of the collection, "The Ravine", a character says: "We can't know everything, how and wherefore...and so it is ordained for man not to know everything but only a half or a quarter. As much as he knows to live, so much he knows." Chekov states beautifully in these stories what it means to be human, our weakness, frailty, and blindness. I'm not sure what good it does us. Make us more cognizant of suffering and sadness (like the Japanese concept of mono no aware)? To what end? I don't know. His is a beautiful statement of it, at any rate.