`A Wall of Glass'

Between 1983 and 1987, Ecco Press published in paperback The Tales of Chekhov in 13 volumes. They contain the 201 stories Constance Garnett translated and published between 1916 and 1922. As a bonus, Ecco added Notebooks of Anton Chekhov and The Unknown Chekhov in the same uniform design. All were priced at $8.50 or $9.50, so one could own the essential core of Chekhov’s work (the set is not complete) for less than $150, though I remember Steven Millhauser saying he found the full set in a used bookstore in Cincinnati for a fraction of that.

I accumulated the Ecco edition incrementally. Many I found in The Golden Notebook, a bookstore in Woodstock, N.Y. The volumes are showing their age. A few are sun-bleached and the spines are glued not stitched so they creak when opened. No pages have yet fallen out. The books are particularly precious because each comes with a blurb on the back cover written by a contemporary writer: Nadine Gordimer, Elizabeth Hardwick, Leonard Michaels, Robert Stone, Cynthia Ozick, Susan Sontag, John Barth, Richard Howard , Robert Hass, William Maxwell, Harold Brodkey, Russell Banks, William Trevor, Eudora Welty and Raymond Carver.

Most of these writers are of little literary significance and the appearance of some (Hardwick, Michaels, Stone, Sontag, Brodkey, Banks, Carver) is embarrassing, but it’s good to have the testimonials of Ozick, Maxwell and Welty, especially as the latter two have subsequently died. Maxwell’s, not surprisingly, is the briefest and most rapturous. Here’s what he wrote for the back of Volume 10, The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories. He might be writing about himself:

“It seems to be part of the human condition that a wall of glass separates one life from another. For Chekhov it did not exist. Though no Church has seen fit to canonize him, he was nevertheless a saint. The greatest of his stories are, no matter how many times reread, always an experience that strikes deep into the soul and produces an alteration there. The reader who has lived through `Ward No. 6’ knows forever after that his own sanity is only provisional. As for those masterpieces, `The Lady with the Dog,’ `The Horse-Stealers,’ `Sleepy,’ `Gooseberries,’ `Above Love,’ `In the Ravine,’ – where else do you see so clearly the difference between light and dark, or how dark darkness can be?”