1917 · Chatto & Windus, London · tr. Constance Garnett
Chekhov short stories online, in the 1917 translation most Americans first read him in
Nine stories, free to read online, from volume three of Constance Garnett’s thirteen-volume Tales of Chekhov. The title story runs 32 minutes. “The Black Monk” takes an evening. Group packs are quoted on request.
- Words
- about 84,000
- Whole book
- 353 min
- Stories
- 9
- Written
- 1887–1899
- Price
- Free to read; packs quoted on request
The nine stories
What is in the Garnett volume, and how long each takes
- The Lady with the DogGurov, Anna Sergeyevna, and a fortnight at Yalta that won’t end32 min
- A Doctor’s VisitA factory owner’s daughter who is not ill19 min
- An UpheavalA governess, a missing brooch, a house searched22 min
- IonitchA young doctor turns, year by year, into his own furniture37 min
- The Head of the FamilyA bad morning passed down the table to a child12 min
- The Black MonkAn orchard, a scholar, and a vision he likes too much63 min
- VolodyaSeventeen, a summer villa, the worst evening of his life24 min
- An Anonymous StoryA revolutionary disguised as a footman. Near novella length124 min
- The HusbandA provincial ball, and a man who ends it out of spite20 min
Read chapter one online
The opening of “The Lady with the Dog”
It was said that a new person had appeared on the sea-front: a lady with a little dog. Dmitri Dmitritch Gurov, who had by then been a fortnight at Yalta, and so was fairly at home there, had begun to take an interest in new arrivals. Sitting in Verney’s pavilion, he saw, walking on the sea-front, a fair-haired young lady of medium height, wearing a béret; a white Pomeranian dog was running behind her.
Anton Chekhov, tr. Constance Garnett, The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories, London: Chatto & Windus, 1917, p. 3.
Notes on the translator, and why Garnett
Constance Garnett translated around seventy Russian books between 1894 and 1934, mostly from a house in Surrey, with failing eyesight and a secretary reading the Russian aloud in the later years. Her Chekhov ran to thirteen volumes from 1916 to 1922. This is the third.
She has critics. Nabokov disliked her. Later translators, Pevear and Volokhonsky among them, catch jokes and roughness she smoothed over, and her Russians sometimes sound like Edwardian English gentry. Fair points. We still chose her, for two plain reasons. Her translation is in the US public domain, so we can put it online for nothing; a 1990s translation is not. And hers is the voice that Hemingway, Mansfield and Carver read Chekhov in. If you want to know what English-language writers learned from him, this is the text they learned from.
We don’t modernise her. “Dmitritch” stays “Dmitritch”, not “Dmitrich”. Russian names appear in full on first use with a margin note on patronymics, because the most common question we get about this book is why one woman has three names.
Chekhov wrote that when you describe misery you should be colder, not warmer. Garnett kept the cold.
Content notes
Adultery, without judgement from the narrator. Mental illness and hallucination in “The Black Monk”. A suicide in “Volodya”. A death in childbirth in “An Anonymous Story”. Period attitudes to servants and to women are left as written.
- 2024-02-14
beretbéret. Garnett’s accent restored; the scan source had stripped it. “The Lady with the Dog”, p. 3 - 2024-03-30Section numbers I to IV in the title story restored as centred Roman numerals. They had been run into the text. “The Lady with the Dog”, pp. 3–28
- 2024-07-22Split a paragraph where Kovrin and the monk speak in turn. Two voices had merged into one line. “The Black Monk”, p. 172
Questions groups ask about this one
Is this every Chekhov story?
No. He wrote several hundred. This is one Garnett volume of nine, kept whole in her order. We don’t assemble “best of” lists from across volumes, because then the book stops matching any printed edition you could check it against.
Will students find the translation dated?
Slightly. It reads like 1917 English because it is. Classes that compare it with a modern translation usually get their best discussion out of the differences. A custom pack can print a page of each side by side, provided the modern text is one you own.
Who shouldn’t pick it?
Groups that need a resolved ending. Chekhov stops, he doesn’t conclude. The Lady with the Dog closes with the hardest part “only just beginning”. If that will annoy your members, choose O. Henry.
Group packs · quoted on request
A Chekhov pack for your club or class
Nine stories split across your meetings, a one-page guide to Russian names, questions per story. Printed, large print or digital. Readers and dates are what the quote depends on.