Essays on Anton P. Chekhov: Close Readings

This long awaited collection brings together in one volume the definitive essays on Anton Chekhov by renowned Chekhov scholar Robert Louis Jackson, including work that has never appeared in English as well as brand new essays published here for the first time. The volume offers a series of “slow” readings that yield insight after exquisite insight. They also model fruitful ways...

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This long awaited collection brings together in one volume the definitive essays on Anton Chekhov by renowned Chekhov scholar Robert Louis Jackson, including work that has never appeared in English as well as brand new essays published here for the first time. The volume offers a series of “slow” readings that yield insight after exquisite insight. They also model fruitful ways of discerning the rich complexity of Chekhov’s deceptively simple work. The volume’s introduction by Robin Feuer Miller captures beautifully what Jackson undertakes in his careful scrutiny of Chekhov’s text. The editor’s afterword by Cathy Popkin includes passages from the editorial correspondence in which Jackson reflects on his work and articulates his aspirations; the authorial voice thus resounds in the section Jackson expected to write himself. The editor also outlines the arguments and insights of Jackson’s remarkable unfinished essays. Finally, an appendix provides the full text of his virtually complete but still open-ended treatment of “On Official Business,” the story Jackson returned to repeatedly for decades, the previously unpublished culmination of his life’s work on Chekhov. Essays on Anton P. Chekhov: Close Readings is fully accessible to readers without knowledge of Russian while also providing complete documentation for scholars in the field.

Robert Louis Jackson was B. E. Bensinger Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale, where he taught from 1954 until his retirement in 2002. Author of six monographs, seven edited volumes, and over a hundred articles, Jackson is best known for his groundbreaking work on the art of Dostoevsky; he is likewise renowned for his extraordinary readings of Chekhov’...

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Robert Louis Jackson was B. E. Bensinger Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale, where he taught from 1954 until his retirement in 2002. Author of six monographs, seven edited volumes, and over a hundred articles, Jackson is best known for his groundbreaking work on the art of Dostoevsky; he is likewise renowned for his extraordinary readings of Chekhov’s work. Jackson wrote extensively on Turgenev and Tolstoy as well, exploring in all his scholarship the moral, religious, and philosophical questions he sensed at the very heart of Russian literature and culture. As one of the architects of the Yale Slavic Department; as creator and convener of the Annual Yale Slavic Conference; as founder, then president, of both the International Dostoevsky Society and the International Chekhov Society, Jackson contributed palpably to the development of Slavic Languages and Literatures—both the Department and the field that gave him the freedom to work on what mattered to him most, in a way that felt entirely his own.

Cathy Popkin is Jesse and George Siegel Professor Emerita in the Humanities at Columbia University. She is the author of The Pragmatics of Insignificance: Chekhov, Zoshchenko, Gogol, editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Anton Chekhov’s Selected Stories, and co-editor of Teaching Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature: Essays in Honor of Robert L. Belknap. She has also published a range of influential articles on Chekhov’s prose.

Introduction
Robin Feuer Miller
Editor’s Note
Cathy Popkin
On Chekhov’s Art
Chekhov’s Seagull: The Empty Well, the Dry Lake, and the Cold Cave
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Introduction
Robin Feuer Miller
Editor’s Note
Cathy Popkin
On Chekhov’s Art
Chekhov’s Seagull: The Empty Well, the Dry Lake, and the Cold Cave
“If I Forget Thee, O Jerusalem”: An Essay on Chekhov’s “Rothschild’s Fiddle”
Dostoevsky in Chekhov’s Garden of Eden: “Because of Little Apples”
“The Betrothed”: Chekhov’s Last Testament
Chekhov and Proust: A Posing of the Problem
“The Steppe”: Space and the Journey. A Metaphor for All Times
“The Enemies”: A Story at War with Itself
Chekhov’s “The Student”
The Ethics of Vision: The Punishment of the Tramp Prokhorov in The Island of Sakhalin
Dantesque and Dostoevskian Elements in Chekhov’s “In Exile”
Biblical and Literary Allusions in Chekhov’s “Gusev”
Russian Man at the Rendezvous: The Narrator in Chekhov’s “A Little Joke”
“Small Fry”: A Nice Little Easter Story
Chekhov’s “Rothschild’s Fiddle”: “By the Waters of Babylon” in Eastern Orthodox Liturgy
Three Deaths: A Boy, A Goose, and an Infant
A Fragment from the Aggregate: Sinai and Sakhalin in Chekhov’s Letters to Suvorin
“Grief”: Once Again about the Ending of the Story
Dogs: Text and Subtext in “Lady with a Pet Dog”
Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” and Gurov’s Oreanda Meditations in Chekhov’s “Lady with a Pet Dog”
Afterword
Cathy Popkin
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