'Caged Birds Surveying High Summer'

A young reader asked me to name Chekhov’s “best” stories, which feels like having to pick my favorite among my sons. This kid hasn’t read the Russian before so I made an utterly conventional list, with an emphasis on post-1889 stories – “My Life,” “Gooseberries,” “In the Ravine,” “The Lady with the Dog,” and so on, including “Gusev,” probably the first Chekhov story I read. As a kid I found it in a library copy of Randall Jarrell’s Book of Stories: An Anthology (1958). 

Jarrell adored Chekhov. He translated The Three Sisters. Peter Taylor remembered him as the tennis coach at Kenyon College, sitting with his players “about the soda shop reading Auden and Chekhov and Proust.” In a lecture he delivered at Harvard, Jarrell told his audience that “Proust and Chekhov, Hardy and Yeats and Rilke . . . demand to be shared.” Jarrell is remembered for his pans (and they are delicious) but his enthusiasms are unforgettable and even life changing.

 

In 1920, Walter de la Mare reviewed Constance Garnett’s translation of “Tchekov’s” letters (I’m amused by the various transliterations of his surname.) Between 1916 and 1922, Garnett translated thirteen collections of his stories. The impact on English and American fiction was immediate and lasting. De la Mare the Englishman attempts to domesticate the Russian exotic, at the same time hoping Chekhov will open English letters to the world:

 

“We sigh: but is it in envy or astonishment or in self-gratulation? It brings home to us a rather restricted insularity, even in our literature, that narrowly verges on the parochial. We may mope a little like caged birds surveying high summer in the woodlands.”

 

De la Mare, like so many of us, was smitten by the romance of the Russian soul. Garnett translated some 80 volumes from the Russian, including much of the work of Tolstoy, Turgenev and Dostoevsky. Our debt to her is enormous.

 

Chekhov married Olga Knipper in May 1901. Six months later, on November 6, he writes to her:

 

“Well my dearest love, yesterday I went to see Tolstoy. I found him in bed. He’s bruised himself and has had to lie down. His health is better than it was, but this is just because of the warm days we had at the end of October, and winter will be upon us all too soon! As far as I could tell he was glad to see me, and for some reason I was particularly glad to see him. His expression is kind and genial, but he looks like an old man, verging on the senile. He listens eagerly to what you have to say and is more than ready to talk. He still likes being in the Crimea.”

 

Chekhov would be dead in less than three years, at age forty-four. Tolstoy outlived him, dying in 1910 at age eighty-two.  

 

[De la Mare’s review, “Tchekov’s Letters,” is collected in Private View (Faber and Faber, 1953). The Chekhov letter is in A Life in Letters (trans. Rosamund Bartlett and Anthony Phillips, 2004).]