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  • Verochka, and Ionych
  • Anton Chekhov (bio)
    —translated from the Russian by Rosamund Bartlett

Translator's Note:

The revealing juxtaposition of these translations of stories by Anton Chekhov, both—somewhat unusually—first completed to be read aloud to an audience, came about serendipitously. “Verochka” was the story British author William Fiennes chose to speak about when I invited him to contribute to a series of evenings exploring Chekhov’s prose at London’s Pushkin House, where it was read, with considerable brio, by his third cousin, the actor Ralph Fiennes. “Ionych” was the story Dame Eileen Atkins chose to read during the week-long celebration of Chekhov’s 150th birthday at the Hampstead Theatre in London, held to raise funds to save the writer’s threatened house in Yalta. The two stories, with their characteristically laconic titles, were conceived at very different stages of Chekhov’s life, at either end of a crucial decade during which the young Moscow doctor emerged for the first time into the literary limelight, and then effortlessly moved into the first rank of Russian writers; but they share important common themes of futility and loss which lie at the heart of both his prose and his drama. Placing the stories together enables us to observe at close hand the evolution of Chekhov’s literary technique.

Both “Verochka” and “Ionych” feature a classic Chekhovian non-event, [End Page 100] in which very little outwardly happens and conventional romantic expectations are not met, with attention focused instead on psychological consequences. Vera Kuznetsova (the Verochka of the story’s title, an affectionate diminutive) boldly confesses her love for Ivan Ognev before he leaves their country village to return to the city, but he is unable to respond. Dmitry Startsev (the Ionych of the other story’s title—his patronymic, also sometimes used as a nickname, although not always affectionately) is rebuffed when he confesses his love for Ekaterina Turkina but then proves unable to respond himself when she later seeks to revive his feelings. Both stories thus deal with romantic failure and its ramifications, and portray male heroes—if that is the right word—who lose their idealism. That they are idealists we know from the fact they are both employed by the zemstvo, a unit of progressive local self-government introduced in the liberal 1860s. In both stories we encounter a potentially life-changing moment which is irretrievably lost: the passing of time is central.

Of the two stories, “Ionych,” a parable about the gradual spiritual death of a provincial zemstvo doctor, is by far the better known. A superlative example of Chekhov’s deceptively simple art published in 1898, it was written when he was at the height of his creative powers and seriously ill with tuberculosis. By this time his prose output was very small, and he would write only twelve more stories before his untimely death in 1904. “Verochka,” in contrast, is an example of a Chekhov story that deserves to be much better known, not least for the sophistication of its narration and its manipulation of different levels of recollection and the time-space continuum. It was published in 1887, when Chekhov was on the verge of establishing his reputation as a major new writer. He had been publishing stories under his own name for a year by this stage, having previously deployed a variety of pseudonyms in order to retain some gravitas as a potential medical author, but he was still publishing his stories in newspapers, and had not yet received the imprimatur of the literary establishment. That would come the following year, with the publication of “The Steppe” in one of Russia’s famous “thick” journals.

That Chekhov published sixty-four stories in 1887 and only nine the following year shows how seriously he had begun to take his writing, as more lyrical and elegiac notes began to appear alongside the insouciant and irreverent comedy with which he had made his name. “Verochka” is representative in this regard, but it is also one of Chekhov’s most unusual and intriguing stories, by virtue of its central character, Ivan Ognev, who is a zemstvo statistician. When had a statistician ever been made the...

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