These stories, which span the full arc of the great Russian writer's career, reveal the extraordinary variety and unexpectedness of his work, from the farcically comic to the darkly complex, showing that there is no one type of "Chekhov story."
In reading the new masterful translations by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky nothing seems lost or Anglicized for effect. Reading these stories, a century later one thinks how prescient Chekhov was: arch, provocative, sardonic, cryptic, and a master of the short-story form ... Chekhov’s miniature prose dramas and comedies present a gallery of unforgettable characters. Many are stylistically Russian fables with scabrous morals about the follies and failures of humans. His often-cryptic endings to his stories or plot red herrings that were an excuse to get to some humanistic and universal truths leave readers to scratch their heads, but still trying to figure out the literary puzzle.
What we have...is a compilation of B-sides. Mr. Pevear says nothing of this in his rather cagey preface ... the value of Fifty-Two Stories is that it humanizes Chekhov himself, reminding us that this often deified figure wrote a great deal of stuff that is decidedly mortal ... On the other hand, a few of Chekhov’s most brilliant and moving profiles in disenchantment appear ... most interesting are the first-rate stories that are less commonly anthologized.
Pevear and Volokhonsky, who have long lived in Paris, seem to have gone tone-deaf to a natural English; at times the language seems unpolished, with evidence of Russian phrasing seeming to override normal English syntax ... Chekhov is so great, however, that even uninspired translations can’t ruin him ... But if you have never read Chekhov and you start from the beginning of this volume, I wouldn’t blame you for wondering what all the fuss is about. Either read any other translator’s collection first...or skip to about the middle of this book, to 'The Kiss,' and read on from there.
