The Exclamation Mark E-Book

Anton Chekhov

• Herausgeber: Hesperus Press Ltd.
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 193

Beschreibung

A civil servant stands accused of not understanding the rules of punctuation. He begins to go through the correct use of commas and semicolons, before arriving at the exclamation mark – which, he realizes, in forty years of writing he has never used. His uncertainty spirals into a bizarre and paranoid fantasy, as everyday objects transform themselves into malevolent exclamation marks... Written between 1885 and 1886, when Anton Chekhov was on the verge of becoming a literary celebrity, this endearing collection of early stories reveals the comic talents of Russia's most celebrated dramatist and short-story writer. .

Leseprobe

The Exclamation Mark

And Other Stories

Anton Chekhov

Translated byRosamund Bartlett

Foreword byLynne Truss

Introduction byRosamund Bartlett

Hesperus Classics

Published by Hesperides Press Limited

167-169 Great Portland Street, London W1W 5PF

www.hesperus.press

First published in Russian, 1885-6

First published by Hesperus Press Limited, 2008

Reprint edition, 2024

Introduction, selection and English language translation © Rosamund Bartlett

Foreword © Lynne Truss, 2008

eBook ISBN: 978-1-84391-343-6

Original paperback ISBN: 978-1-84391-174-6

Paperback 2nd edition: 978-1-84391-342-9

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

Contents

Foreword

Lynne Truss

Introduction

Rosamund Bartlett

The Exclamation Mark

and other stories

The Exclamation Mark

New Year Martyrs

Competition

A Failure

On the Telephone

Kids

Grief

Conversation Between a Drunkard and a Sober Devil

The Requiem

Bliny

A Little Joke

In Springtime

Nightmare

The Rook

Grisha

On Easter Night

A Tale

The Literary Table of Ranks

Romance with Double Bass

Superfluous People

1899 Revised Version of a Little Joke with a Different Ending

Notes

Biographical Note

About the Translator

Foreword

Lynne Truss

I first came to Chekhov’s stories by way of his great admirer (and early advocate), the New Zealand-born short story writer Katherine Mansfield. I was in my early twenties. I had studied Chekhov’s plays with a passionate intensity in my third year at university, and I remember with some embarrassment a very keen essay I wrote for my tutor, in which I rather magisterially picked out three instances of characters declaring, tearfully, ‘You look so old!’ and then floundered about hopelessly, trying to make something of it.

But Chekhov’s stories having no place in an English Literature degree at that time, it was only the publication of Katherine Mansfield’s Letters and Journals in 1977 that made me realise how important they were. What a brilliant critic Katherine Mansfield was. Looking back, I now realise that I’ve never had reason to quibble with a single one of her sharp – but usually affectionate – literary weighings-up. Of E.M. Forster, for example, Mansfield complains in her journal that he ‘never gets any further than warming the teapot. He’s a rare fine hand at that. Feel this teapot. Is it not beautifully warm? Yes, but there ain’t going to be no tea.’ George Gissing’s works are written ‘with cold wet feet under a wet umbrella.’ Meanwhile George Bernard Shaw is ‘the concierge in the house of literature – sits in a glass case, sees everything, knows everything, examines the letters, cleans the stairs, but has no part, no part in the life that is going on.’

But when she comes to Chekhov (or ‘T’ for Tchehov, as he appears in her writings), she has only admiration and awe. She finds it unbearable that he is not alive. In the ‘house of literature’, where George Bernard Shaw wields the mop and bucket, only three writers actually live, she says, and they are all Russian: ‘Dostoevsky, Tchehov and Tolstoy. I can’t think of anyone else.’ And she defends this position very convincingly. Helping her friend S.S. Koteliansky with an edition of Chekhov’s letters, in 1919 she re-reads his magnificent ‘The Steppe’ (1888) and writes: ‘One feels about this story not that it becomes immortal – it always was. It has no beginning or end. T. just touched one point with his pen, and then another point – enclosed something which had, as it were, been there for ever.’

What initially put me off his stories, I think, was that there were so damned many of them, and I didn’t know where to start. Also, the collections in paperback seemed completely random in their selection, which gave me a feeling of vertigo whenever I picked up a new one. True, I bought The Kiss and Other Stories, The Duel and Other Stories, Lady with Lapdog and Other Stories, The Russian Master and Other Stories – and I still have those books, but they have always made me a bit uneasy simply because the organising principle isn’t clear. ‘The ten stories in this collection were written between 1887 and 1902,’ the blurb might offer, and I’d think, ‘But that means they span virtually his whole career! What makes these ones go together, then?’ Each new collection just compounded the difficulty. ‘The eleven stories in this collection were written between 1885 and 1899’ another blurb would say, and I would start to roll my eyes in panic. Chronology might not mean a lot to some readers, but it means a lot to me. Given Chekhov’s tragically short but unbelievably fruitful and varied career, it’s arguable that a clear chronology is something to be clung to at all times.

So what a treat this collection is. As Rosamund Bartlett explains in the introduction, these stories were all written by Chekhov in a six-month period, and to anthologise them in this way, in order of composition, is to shine a light on a period in his writing (December 1885 to June 1886) that is generally considered to represent a turning point. It was in March 1886 that Chekhov received a momentous letter from the famous writer Dmitry Grigorovich, exhorting him to aim higher than the throwaway comic pieces he was writing for lightweight periodicals. He took it to heart. A month after the correspondence with Grigorovich comes the terrifically visual and moving ‘On Easter Night’ – a story which perfectly illustrates Katherine Mansfield’s point, actually. One feels that the genius of the writer here is to note a story that was always there (and always would be) and to enclose it with those wand-like touches of the pen.

What we see in this collection is Chekhov’s complex literary sensibility with all its facets sparkling (as it were) quite separately, in an incredibly useful way for anyone who wants to understand this most misunderstood of writers. Here we see him learning to control and combine a somewhat wild array of writerly instincts and skills, while still apparently churning out stories at the rate of one a day. ‘New Year Martyrs’ may be just a throwaway sketch, but it has great comic timing, and I laughed every time the policeman piped up, ‘Another civil servant has been brought in!’ This is a great comic playwright at work in the columns of a newspaper. ‘A Nightmare’ ends with a bathetic crash (‘So began and ended the genuine inclination to useful activity of one well-intentioned but thoroughly complacent and not terribly thoughtful person’), which shows authorial panache, I suppose, but is surely unworthy of the story that precedes it. But the exciting sense throughout is: Chekhov is deliberately mixing it up. He is in transition, but he is never not in control. He is making the world his own. And he is – easy to forget this – just 26 years old.

In her wonderful book Reading Chekhov (2003), Janet Malcolm offers an outstandingly helpful analysis of the effect of the great stories. She says that they may have a ‘straightforward, natural, rational, modern surface’ but that this ‘bark of the prosaic’ is used by Chekhov to encase the story’s ‘vital poetic core, as if such protection were necessary for its survival [my italics].’ I would recommend any reader of this collection to watch out for this encasing process taking place – but also, obviously, to enjoy the sheer variety of tone and effect Chekhov was engaged in over such a short period. His punctuation-as-apparition Christmas story ‘The Exclamation Mark’ has a special place in my heart, for obvious reasons, but I suggest you compare it with ‘On Easter Night’ and then ask yourself how much you’ve ever managed to move on in any six-month period of your own life.

Introduction

Rosamund Bartlett

This anthology differs from most other Chekhov collections in that it concentrates on relatively early stories, and on stories written over a short time-span, namely the six months between the end of December 1885 and the end of June 1886. Chekhov published sixty-two stories during this period, in five different publications: about a third of them are included here. Arranged in chronological order, they enable us to follow in some detail Chekhov’s creative evolution at a very interesting point in his career, when he was already popular, but not yet a literary celebrity. It was during this six-month period that Chekhov published a story under his own name for the first time, received a momentous letter from a celebrated contemporary author exhorting him to take his writing more seriously, and published his first major short story collection, which he called Motley Tales. This brought Chekhov to the attention of Russia’s most important literary journals, whose critics found his irony and moral neutrality immediately threatening. Their first reviews of Chekhov’s stories were almost uniformly negative. Nevertheless, it was clear also that here was a writer developing into a serious talent, and invitations to contribute to these august publications soon followed.

In the first half of 1886, Chekhov was still mostly writing ‘light-weight’ stories for the lowbrow comic journals with which he had made his name. Accordingly, the majority of the twenty stories included in this anthology are humorous, and thus counter the clichéd and strangely resilient view of Chekhov as an exclusively gloomy writer. The reason Chekhov first achieved literary success was because he made Russian readers laugh. ‘The Exclamation Mark’, for example, the story which opens this collection, is an insouciant piece which is entirely typical of Chekhov’s early period. At a Christmas Eve party, collegiate secretary Efim Fomich Perekladin, with forty years’ service as a government functionary behind him, is challenged on his educational background by one of the other guests. Since the young man’s father, as a collegiate counsellor, occupies a higher position in the all-important Table of Ranks, Perekladin can only bite his lip and smile meekly, but he is incensed at being criticised by someone so much younger than him. At home in bed later that night, he mentally gives vent to his feelings of indignation, but as soon as he falls asleep, the more deeply seated feelings of insecurity in his unconscious take over and he starts dreaming of punctuation marks... There was no possibility of Chekhov himself using punctuation marks unconsciously after he had written this story, which was included in Motley Tales (as was ‘Grief’, also anthologised here). Indeed, his idiosyncratic use of punctuation, whose importance he later compared to ‘notes in a musical score’, was to become a hallmark of his mature literary style. Its most notable feature is his increasingly lyrical use of ellipses, ‘...’, at the end of sentences and paragraphs, which amounts to the prose equivalent of the crucially important pauses inserted into his last plays. It is seen to best effect in this collection in the much longer ‘On Easter Night’, which is also artistically one of the most impressive stories Chekhov wrote in 1886.

Chekhov was not only adept at writing about civil servants and monks. The stories in this selection alone feature a large cast of characters of varying ages, backgrounds and occupations, including very small children, cab drivers, drunkards, writers, landowners, musicians, nubile girls, rooks and flies. The settings are also diverse, including toboggan runs, ferries, dachas, St Petersburg streets, dining room tables and newspaper pages. Chekhov gives his reader a pretty good cross-section of Russian life. One of the advantages of concentrating on one specific period in Chekhov’s career, moreover, is that we can see him deftly and sometimes quite abruptly changing his literary personality from story to story, depending on the publication he is writing for.

Half the stories in this collection were written for the St Petersburg-based Fragments (‘Oskolki’), which was Russia’s most popular comic weekly in the 1880s. Chekhov started writing for it in 1882, and, under a variety of pseudonyms, soon became its star author. He wrote initially because he needed the money to support his impecunious family (his father had gone bankrupt), and subsequently because he was under contract, with strict deadlines and word-counts, and an obligation to entertain. The Fragments stories and vignettes were often extremely witty, but not always. None of them were intended to be anything other than ephemeral, but sometimes they were frivolous to the point of being quite ridiculous. Into this category fall items such as ‘On the Telephone’, ‘The Rook’, ‘The Literary Table of Ranks’ and ‘A Tale’. It is indicative that Chekhov excluded over half of the Fragments stories in this collection when he came to edit his writings for his collected works at the end of his life, but they have been deliberately, and unusually, included here in order to give a full sense of the texture of his creative life as it evolved in early 1886. It is also partly for this reason that these ‘lesser’ works have been preferred to other better-known stories published during this six-month period, such as ‘Night at the Cemetery’, ‘Anyuta’, ‘The Witch’, ‘Agafya’ and ‘The Privy Counsellor’.

When he wrote his famous letter in March 1886, the writer Dmitry Grigorovich demanded that Chekhov honour the talent that had become noticeable in the stories he was commissioned to write for the Petersburg Newspaper from May 1885 onwards. In fact it is clear from the three Petersburg Newspaper stories included here (‘Kids’, ‘Grief ’ and ‘Spring Time’) that Chekhov had started taking greater care even before receiving the letter which he declared had struck him like a ‘bolt of lightning’. Chekhov sometimes signed his Fragments stories ‘The Brother of My Brother’ or ‘The Man Without a Spleen’, but for the Petersburg Newspaper he always used his best-known pseudonym ‘Antosha Chekhonte’. Quite apart from anything else, Chekhov did not want to harm his professional reputation as a doctor of medicine: he was still practising at this time, having only graduated in the summer of 1884.

Although he came from the provinces, Chekhov based himself happily in Moscow as an adult, along with his poverty-stricken family. His first visit to the Russian capital in December 1885 as an up-and-coming writer was a big event in his life, however, and was reflected immediately in two stories with St Petersburg settings: ‘New Year Martyrs’ and ‘Grief ’. It was during this visit that Chekhov was also commissioned to write for Russia’s most prominent daily newspaper, New Times (‘Novoe vremya’). ‘The Requiem’, published in February 1886, was the first story Chekhov published under his own name, and demonstrates to perfection his gift for mixing comedy with tragedy. Along with ‘A Nightmare’ and ‘On Easter Night’, the two other New Times stories included in this collection, it is also from an artistic point of view far more substantial than anything he had written to date.

Indeed it is instructive to juxtapose something as slight as ‘The Rook’, published on 29th March in Fragments, with the harrowing story ‘A Nightmare’, published on the same day in New Times.

If Chekhov changed his literary personality to suit the publication he was writing for, he was also sensitive to the rhythms of daily life in Russia, and his stories were often highly topical. A final reason for the decision to anthologise stories from the six-month period December 1886 to June 1886 is that it enables us to trace the path of the Russian seasons. Like Chekhov’s readers, we can live via his stories through the heavy snow of the long, harsh winter, and eventually experience the thaw, when the ice melts, the rivers swell, the rooks traditionally return to the cities, the sun shines once again, and the roads turn to thick mud. The long-awaited onset of spring is then rapidly followed by summer, which means dacha season. ‘Superfluous People’, one of Chekhov’s many stories about dacha life, was of course itself written at a dacha.

Chekhov’s early fiction was not only often closely tied to the season in which it was published, but to the customs associated with imperial Russia’s major festivals and holidays, such as Christmas and New Year, reflected in ‘The Exclamation Mark’, and ‘New Year Martyrs’, when government flunkeys had unfailingly to sign obsequious greetings cards to their superiors, and pay endless visits to their friends and colleagues. The most important festival, however, was always Easter, preceded by the revelries of Russian Shrovetide, with its ritual of pancake-eating, lovingly described by Chekhov in ‘Bliny’, and then the seven weeks of Great Lent. Easter in Russia begins on the stroke of midnight with the lighting of candles, the pealing of bells, singing and processions round the church. Chekhov’s story ‘Easter Night’ must rank as one of the most moving evocations of its celebration ever written.

Chekhov typically made very slight revisions to his stories when later preparing them for publication in his collected works. A rare exception is the tobogganing story ‘A Little Joke’, first published in March 1886. When revising it in 1899, Chekhov decided to turn the garrulous, self-confident narrator into a person who is far more sensitive and less assured. The narrative tone becomes accordingly more understated and elegiac, while the story’s ending is changed so drastically that the later version is appended here in its entirety. Comparing it with the less well-known earlier version which, like other stories in this collection, has never before been translated into English, gives us a bird’s-eye view of Chekhov’s path to creative maturity.

The Exclamation Mark

and other stories

The Exclamation Mark

Collegiate Secretary Efim Fomich Perekladin⁠1 went to bed on Christmas Eve feeling offended and even insulted.

‘Leave me alone, you old witch!’ he barked at his wife when she asked him why he was being so grumpy.

The fact is that he had just returned from a party where many things had been said which he found unpleasant and offensive. At first they had talked in general about the benefits of education, then imperceptibly they had switched to discussing the educational qualifications of government employees, and moreover had expressed many regrets and reproachs and even gibes about low standards. And then, as always happens in Russian social gatherings, from the general they had turned to the particular.

‘Well, let’s take you, for example, Efim Fomich,’ said one young man, turning to Perekladin. ‘You have a decent position... What education did you receive?’

‘None whatsoever. But you don’t need to have education in our department,’ said Perekladin meekly. ‘You just have to write correctly, and that’s all there is to it...’

‘But where did you learn to write correctly?’

‘Well, it’s practice, isn’t it?.. You get to become quite a dab hand when you have been on the payroll for forty years... It is true it was hard at the beginning, and I used to make mistakes, but then I learned the ropes and... it’s fine now...’

‘But what about punctuation marks?’

‘And punctuation marks aren’t a problem... I put them in the right places.’

‘Hmm!..’ said the young man, abashed. ‘All the same, practice is not the same as education. It’s all very well you putting punctuation marks in the right places. But that’s only half of it! You have to be aware of how you use them! When you insert a comma, you have to know why... Yes indeed! As for your unconscious, reflex-action spelling... well, it’s not even worth a kopeck. It’s just like being on a mechanical production line.’

Perekladin had held his tongue and even smiled submissively (the young man was the son of a State Councillor and was himself entitled to a 10th-Class rank), but now, as he was going to bed, he was overcome by anger and indignation.

‘I’ve been a civil servant for forty years,’ he thought, ‘and no one has ever called me a fool, and now look what kinds of critics have come out of the woodwork! ‘Unconscious!’.. Lefrex-action! Mechanical production’..! Damn and blast it! It could be that I understand a good deal more than you, even if I haven’t been to any of your universities!’

After mentally addressing his critic with all the curses he knew, and having warmed up under the blankets, Perekladin began to calm down. ‘I do know... and I do understand...’ he thought as he started to fall asleep. ‘I know you shouldn’t put a colon where a comma is needed, consequently I am aware, and I do understand what I am doing. Yes!.. So, young man... You need to live a little, and get some work experience, and then you can start judging your elders...’

A fiery comma flew like a meteor through the cluster of dark, smiling

clouds in front of Perekladin’s closed eyes as he dropped off to sleep. It was followed by a second and a third, and soon the endless dark background unfolding before his imagination was covered with dense clusters of flying commas...

‘Take these commas for instance...’ thought Perekladin, feeling the pleasurable sensation of his limbs going numb as sleep approached. ‘I understand them very well... If you want I can find a place for each one of them... and... and I use them consciously too, not just willy-nilly. Test me and you’ll see... Commas are placed in various places, where they are needed and where they are not needed. The more confusing a document turns out to be, the more commas you need. You place them in front of “in which case”, and in front of “so that”. And if you have to make a list of officials, then you need to separate each one with a comma... So I do know!’

The golden commas spun round and disappeared. Fiery full stops flew over to take their place...

‘But the full stop is what you put at the end of a document... You also put one where you need to have a big breathing space and look at your audience. And you need a full stop after all the long bits, so the secretary’s mouth won’t be too dry when he is reading. You don’t put a full stop anywhere else...’

The commas swooped down again... They mingled with the full stops, spun round and Perekladin now saw a whole host of semi-colons and colons...

‘And I know about them too...’ he thought. ‘Where there aren’t many commas and lots of full stops, that’s where you need a semi-colon. I always put a semi-colon in front of “but” and “consequently”... Well, and what about colons? Colons come after phrases like “the following was resolved”, “the following was decided”...’

The semi-colons and colons grew dim. A queue of question marks now lined up. They jumped out of the clouds and started doing the can-can...

‘The question mark – I can deal with that! Even if there are a thousand of them, I’ll find them all a place. You always use them when you need to make an enquiry, or if you have to inquire about a document... “Where has the remainder of the sum for such-and-such a year been transferred?”, for example, or “Would it not be possible for the police authorities with regard to the said Ivanov etcetera etcetera..?”’

The question marks nodded their hooks approvingly and instantly stretched out into exclamation marks as if under command...