"Medicine is my wife; literature, my mistress."
Anton Chekhov, Russia's greatest dramatist and storyteller, was best known for the great plays written at the zenith of his career--"The Three Sisters," "The Seagull," "Uncle Vanya," and the world's favorite, "The Cherry Orchard." But long before he achieved fame for these works, Chekhov produced some of the finest short stories ever written, many of which have been neglected until now. Eminent translator Arnold Hinchliffe has combed the files of Chekhov's early work to produce this brilliant collection of stories, many of which appear in English for the first time and most of which have never before been published in book form.
In addition, Hinchliffe has unearthed and translated Chekhov's account of his travels to Sakhalin Island in Siberia in 1890 to report on the conditions of prisoners in the dread penal colonies.
"The Crooked Mirror" and its companion stories were written while the young Chekhov was a university student and then a practicing physician. Most appeared under the pseudonym Antosa Chekhonte; all foreshadow the great comic works of his later career. Each story in this fine collection is a fresh reminder that this prodigious dramatist and storyteller charted unexplored depths of the human heart. For, as the great Maxim Gorky said, "...no one understood so clearly as Anton Chekhov the tragic element in life's trivialities."
Translated and with an Introduction by Arnold Hinchliffe
About the Author
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in the provincial town of Taganrog, Ukraine, in 1860. In the mid-1880s, Chekhov became a physician, and shortly thereafter he began to write short stories. Chekhov started writing plays a few years later, mainly short comic sketches he called vaudvilles. The first collection of his humorous writings, Motley Stories, appeared in 1886, and his first play, Ivanov, was produced in Moscow the next year. In 1896, the Alexandrinsky Theater in St. Petersburg performed his first full- length drama, The Seagull. Some of Chekhov's most successful plays include The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya, and Three Sisters. Chekhov brought believable but complex personalizations to his characters, while exploring the conflict between the landed gentry and the oppressed peasant classes. Chekhov voiced a need for serious, even revolutionary, action, and the social stresses he described prefigured the Communist Revolution in Russia by twenty years. He is considered one of Russia's greatest playwrights. Chekhov contracted tuberculosis in 1884, and was certain he would die an early death. In 1901, he married Olga Knipper, an actress who had played leading roles in several of his plays. Chekhov died in 1904, spending his final years in Yalta.
![When this classic collection of stories first appeared—in 1962, on the author’s thirtieth birthday—Arthur Mizener wrote in The New York Times Book Review: “Updike is a romantic [and] like all American romantics, that is, he has an irresistible impulse to go in memory home again in order to find himself. . . . The precise recollection of his own family-love, parental and marital, is vital to him; it is the matter in which the saving truth is incarnate. . . . Pigeon Feathers is not just a book of very brilliant short stories; it is a demonstration of how the most gifted writer of his generation is coming to maturity; it shows us that Mr. Updike’s fine verbal talent is no longer pirouetting, however gracefully, out of a simple delight in motion, but is beginning to serve his deepest insight.”](https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-ezptpblrxu/images/stencil/500x659/products/1019/1658/PigeonsStories__64020.1660081010.jpg?c=2 "When this classic collection of stories first appeared—in 1962, on the author’s thirtieth birthday—Arthur Mizener wrote in The New York Times Book Review: “Updike is a romantic [and] like all American romantics, that is, he has an irresistible impulse to go in memory home again in order to find himself. . . . The precise recollection of his own family-love, parental and marital, is vital to him; it is the matter in which the saving truth is incarnate. . . . Pigeon Feathers is not just a book of very brilliant short stories; it is a demonstration of how the most gifted writer of his generation is coming to maturity; it shows us that Mr. Updike’s fine verbal talent is no longer pirouetting, however gracefully, out of a simple delight in motion, but is beginning to serve his deepest insight.”")
