Peasants and Other Stories (New York Review Books Classics) [Paperback]

Anton Chekhov (Author), Constance Garnett (Translator), Edmund Wilson (Introduction)

Book Description

Series: New York Review Books Classics | Publication Date: September 30, 1999

The ever maturing art and ever more ambitious imaginative reach of Anton Chekhov, one of the world's greatest masters of the short story, led him in his last years to an increasingly profound exploration of the troubled depths of Russian society and life. This powerful and revealing selection from Chekhov's final works, made by the legendary American critic Edmund Wilson, offers stories of novelistic richness and complexity, published in the only formatp edition to present them in chronological order.

Table of Contents
A Woman's Kingdom
Three Years
The Murder
My Life
Peasants
The New Villa
In the Ravine
The Bishop
Betrothed

Editorial Reviews

Review

No one understood as clearly and finely as Anton Chekhov the tragedy of life’s trivialities, no one before him showed men with such merciless truth the terrible and shameful picture of their life in the dim chaos of bourgeois everyday existence.
— Maxim Gorky

This is Chekhov with his eye on the big social picture….Longer than his earlier stories, these late works have more in common with The Sea Gull and The Cherry Orchard than with, say,The Doctor; depending on your taste, these stories may be most filling from a social observer’s point of view….Subtlety isn’t exactly the driving aim here.
— Washington Post Book World

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Russian

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Product Details

• Paperback: 496 pages
• Publisher: NYRB Classics (September 30, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0940322145
• ISBN-13: 978-0940322141
• Product Dimensions: 5 x 1.1 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #783,228 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Coherent Collection from the Master, December 13, 1999

By 

David Rothgeb - See all my reviews

This review is from: Peasants and Other Stories (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

There are innumerable, many incoherent collections of Chekhov's short fiction: such is the bane of an author being in the public domain. What makes this collection superior is that Edmund Wilson, the greatest critic of the 20th Century, assembled it, and there is at last a logic applied to its assemblage beyond the crude dictates of chronology.

Wilson realized that Chekhov seems spotty if not incomprehensible when his short caricatures and romances are interleaved with brooding tales of peasant lives. Think of a Twain compilation where "The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg" and "Punch Brothers Punch" are sandwiched together.

So Wilson's collection takes the best of Chekhov's "social" tales of his last decade, stories that focus on groups of Russians, whether it be the bourgeois, the peasants, the workers, or the decaying aristocracy. In these stories, Chekhov is on Tolstoyean grounds, and holds his own remarkably.

However, this strategy means sacrifice: the beautiful, sparkling "Lady with the Dog" would not sit well in this grim company, so it is excluded.