Customer Reviews

Peasants and Other Stories (New York Review Books Classics)

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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.