Ward No. 6 and Other Stories, 1892-1895 (Penguin Classics)

Excellent

I'd long heard that Russian writer Anton Chekhov had written short stories, but like most people it was on the strength of his plays, those intense little mood pieces, that I knew him best. Granted, I thought the plays uniformly strong, and considered him of a stature near that of a Tennessee Williams or George Bernard Shaw. So revered for decades, was Chekhov, for his dramatic works, that he even had an apothegm called Chekhov's Gun named after him. It stated that if in the First Act that there is a gun presented, by Third Act it must be shot, lest its import as symbolism, and effect as a dramatic tool be nil and unjustifiable. Yet, as I've gotten more into reading short stories I discovered that far more people admired his short stories than his plays, or, at least, to a greater degree. Having now read a full collection of twenty-three of his tales, in a Barnes & Noble Classics Edition titled Ward No. 6 And Other Stories, translated by Constance Garnett, I have to say I'm inclined to agree with those who declaim him a superior short fictionist to dramatist. What I do not agree with, though, are those critics who would place him in a direct line from the French Guy de Maupassant, and a confrere of the American O. Henry. The reason is that even in the earliest tales- and they span a range from 1885's The Cook's Wedding to 1902's The Bishop- Chekhov's tales are imbued with an intellectual probing wholly absent from Maupassant or O. Henry. He goes off into soliloquies, rivaling and surpassing the best of Shakespeare, that are far deeper than anything the plot-driven Frenchman or American achieved. Whereas their tales are one dimensional and dependent upon twists at the end, Chekhov's tales are almost devoid of `boom' endings. They just sort of go on in the mind, dependent upon mood and the situations described. The characters' outer actions are almost always mirrors of their inner states of being. That this was achieved in the mid-1880s is truly an accomplishment of great note, for he was, to beg the cliché, truly far ahead of his time.

Yet, he is not a sullen realist. Some critics have disparaged his bleak view of life, but this is not so. Yes, Russian 19th century peasantry was hard, but such is only the milieu in which the tales play out. Many tales are small triumphs of the volitional spirit against the larger burdens of life. And, as the tales in the collection progressed mathematically their psychological complexity seemed to increase geometrically. Having recently read collections of short fiction by modern American writers like TC Boyle, David Foster Wallace, and Rick Moody, I can say unequivocally that Chekhov is not only much better a writer- to the point that I would argue he is practicing a wholly different art form from these poseurs, but his art is far more modern and gripping, as well as, at times, far more funny. Compared to a TC Boyle, Chekhov's humor flows naturally out of the tales and the reader laughs along with the experience, however humiliated the character feels. In a tale by a `humorist' like Boyle a character is set up for ridicule by being shown as a fool with no redeeming qualities, yet it never verges into pure satire for Boyle has never learned that satire and parody work best once you've created a full-bodied character. Then, the humor resonates within and without. Chekhov's characters cause gutbusters that rumble the diaphragm. Boyle's characters result in an, `Oh, wait, he was trying to be comic here. Oh, yeah....I get it. Really, I do.' Boyle and his ilk self-consciously preen their supposed superiority above characters they largely revile, while Chekhov puts a reader `in the moment' with someone they have come to either care or be intrigued with. The best example is probably the uproarious tale The Dependents, in which a sad and sadistic old man basically disowns his dog and horse. He sells both off to be slaughtered after they refuse to leave him after banishment. After their deaths, the old man, either in stupor or grief, offers himself up for slaughter, too. The end image after it's plain he was not slaughtered, is poignant, yet also humorous. TC Boyle, in a dozen lifetimes, could never write a tale like this. The difference in quality and personal maturity is very telling....He is still vibrant and relevant. By contrast, I recently read a David Foster Wallace book of short stories that, a mere decade and a half after their appearance, are as dated as a John Dryden courtly poem. This is because Chekhov possesses an immediacy in his description that rips a reader back into his world, and lets you not focus away to bring in many assumptions or presumptions of the world outside the story, nor what comes after it, in the narrative line, nor the real world. The Russian Masters- Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev- are often criticized, rightly, for their lack of subtlety, and hammering home points too often, too long, and too stridently. In a sense their art is akin to the Big Box retail stores of today: Wal-Mart, Home Depot, K-Mart. If so, then Chekhov is a fleet newcomer- someone with innovations the others lack, while having all their introspection, yet none of their literary bloat. He is concise, with no pointless nor wasteful digressions. And this is what makes him- even just taking his prose fiction alone- the greatest of the 19th Century Russian Literary Masters. The essential dilemma he presents is a cosmos of its own demarcation, seemingly banal, but highly intimate, for Chekhov rarely imposes more than the basics, and allows imbuement to flower again and again in the minds of every individual reader. This philosophy is best summed up in a quote that reflects Chekhov's approach to art, life, and meaning: `Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.' In such moonshine are masterworks reflected.