One for the fans. A mixed bag of beautifully written prose. A good place to start if you are interest in Chekov. ( )

This is the second selection of Chekhov short stories Pevear and Volokhonsky have translated: in 2000, they published a first batch of thirty of the best-known stories as well as a collection of the short novels. This new batch includes a lot of short sketches, many of them only two or three pages long, as well as a dozen or so more substantial stories.

Most are set in small towns or on country estates, usually with characters who are small landowners or minor officials — teachers, priests, civil servants, junior officers, and of course doctors. Servants and peasants are rarely at the centre of the stories: when they appear it is often in order to demonstrate how blind even the most enlightened of the educated characters are to the lives their social inferiors lead. But the stories in this selection at least are rarely overtly political: they sometimes illustrate things that are wrong with the world, but they don't offer to solve them, and they often make fun of idealists with theoretical political programmes.

The short sketches are often little more than anecdotes, with a situation — touching, comic or absurd — summed up with amazing economy, and a punchline that somehow subverts what we've just read. In the longer stories, characters struggle with financial problems, romantic entanglements, or the many kinds of rural pettiness, and it's interesting to see how often Chekhov is more interested in setting up the problem and confronting his characters with it than he is in solving it. Often the ending is left to the reader to imagine.

Chekhov was clearly an absolute master of the form, and hugely influential: that is actually a large part of the problem with stories like this, because the chances are that we've read half a dozen later stories "inspired by" before we see the original that inspired them...

Pevear and Volokhonsky get a lot of stick from critics, possibly mostly inspired by the massive, production-line scale of their attack on the classics of Russian literature, almost all of which they have translated by now. Their language is often said to be flat, uninspired, unliterary (etc.). Obviously you can't really judge a translation unless you are in the happy position of not needing one, but I put a few passages from these translations side-by-side with the Constance Garnett translations available from Project Gutenberg, and failed to see any huge differences. Sometimes Garnett uses a British word where Pevear and Volokhonsky use an American one, sometimes they use a less colourful adjective than she does, and occasionally there is a weird difference of interpretation ("fifty acres" instead of "sixty acres") that probably comes down to one or other side being better informed about 1890s Russia. Pevear and Volokhonsky do make a point of translating the jokey names Chekhov gives to some of his characters, which you might or might not like. But there's no obvious systematic difference in syntax or sentence structure: I suspect that Chekhov must be writing in such a plain, straightforward way that he doesn't give his translators enough scope to allow them to go off the rails at all.

You probably wouldn't buy this for the translations: its main selling point seems to be the way it gives a broad cross-section of Chekhov's writing. There are also some reasonably useful notes, filling us in on details of Russian life and culture relevant to the background of the stories, and a short introduction by Pevear that gives an outline of their reasons for picking the stories they have (but without mentioning that all the most famous stories are in their earlier book!). ( )