Chekhov, Anton. The Complete Short Novels. circa1886-1902. Translation and collected by R Pevear and L Volokhonsky. Vintage, New York, 2005. F;10/25.

From time to time I run across a famous writer (or in nonfiction some important people or events in history) and decide I need to dig into that. Joyce’s Ulysses, Middlemarch, Adolf Hitler, War and Peace, particle physics, Infinite Jest. Chekhov is another household word I’d had no contact with, and his five short novels happened to have been collected and re-translated not long ago by the famous couple Pevear and Volokhonsky who are working their way through Russian fiction in a newly literal style.

As I read these five short novels at some point I started wondering what’s going on? So many of the narrative and psychological events were coming at me as though the people and places didn’t fully make artistic sense. It wasn’t just because the action is well over a century old. The translated writing is impressive but it’s as though the stories are being told “by the way”. I gradually began to figure out that this is intentional and it’s not “about” the things happening: love affairs, personal conflicts and strangely realistic characters.

Chekhov was a late 19^th century doctor gradually switching to writing. He loved women and had dozens of affairs. His politics were obscure but he let us know he hated hypocrisy. His father was an inept and dishonest retailer and a tyrant. Tuberculosis ended young Chekhov’s life in 1904 at age 44.

Here are very quick precis of the short novels’ Yeah I hear from them here we want to be a few hours will not estimate now because of his old video you you last 30 years with replaceable shelf life 30 years if this year is lots yeah well we now see if I can cost of one of the several thousand fiveplots:

The Steppe is about nine-year-old Vasya sent away from home to school and the adventures on his overland trip. He meets animals, a strangely random bunch of all male characters, and survives a monstrous thunderstorm. His point of view varies and is that of a credibly inconsistent nine-year-old. Women appear at the end.

The Duel sets up a multiple-sided structure of ambiguous romantic attraction and a vicious conflict between a rationalist scientist and a free-thinking scofflaw. Emotional and narrative hairpin turns keep us wondering what’s going to happen as the two of them prepare to shoot it out early one morning.

The Story of an Unknown Man sets a narrator spy in the home of the son of a political figure whose dark side the narrator seems to be trying to expose. Instead we hear of the son’s mistress who moves in with him but is abandoned and the narrator, attracted to her, tries unsuccessfully to take her under his wing. He has to admit that his spying mission has failed and his goals have radically changed.

Three Years I thought was the best of the five. A diffident wealthy young man proposes to a very pretty neighbour, and she accepts but is unsure of her decision. They travel to Moscow where the tyrant father has a successful retail business. The husband’s sister dies, her unfaithful husband abandons their two little daughters, and the original couple take the girls on as their own. We see the young man forced to come to grips with huge problems of the business, and his wife who has started to seek social and romantic satisfaction elsewhere gradually comes to see the marriage changing to become more than she had thought.

Finally, My Life is about a young man who scandalizes his father by deciding to be a labourer which he imagines will be earthy and honest. An artsy woman falls in love with him and they move to a small town where the labourers are crass, dishonest, and thoughtless. The girl loses interest in our idealistic labourer, he struggles through to become a tradesmen and is respected in the community, finally finding a partial satisfaction with another woman.

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I’m afraid I’ve pruned these stories pretty much to death in these banal summaries. So action and characters aside, what is going on? Somehow I knew as I recognized in a little bit vague fascination that what Chekhov is getting at has to exist someplace between the lines. The stories are full of things happening but events and surroundings often just seem not to completely make coherent narrative sense. But as I’ve said the events being subtly “by the way” seems intentional. The moods change suddenly and it’s a strange experience being drawn into fictional characters’ lives by beautiful and effective writing and then seeing how ordinary but at the same time how randomly bizarre they are, all going on at once.

As I’ve been before I’m reminded of other fiction I’ve read, like Lucy Ives’s Cosmogony. Life is like Chekhov’s fictional world: banal, almost predictable, but at the same time strange and hard to drag coherence out of. His language is archaic even with the modern translation, but there is a form of more modern deadpan going on. Here it is, he shows us sort of nonchalantly, and the picture I present is just real. I’m reminded too of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian where dreadful hideous and crazy things somehow through the author’s art emerge as another order of truth. And it’s that different order of seeing things that I take away as the main experience of reading the stories.

Hard to score these. You’d have to see for yourself if you have the same feeling I did that Chekhov is putting one over on us and making us think and feel in a bit of a different way.