About Love and Other Stories

"There has to be something by the founder of the modern short story in this list, but “Gusev” is probably not the work which immediately springs to mind for most people. “The Lady with the Little Dog”, “Ward No 6” and “The Bishop” would all be strong contenders for Chekhov’s best story. “Gusev”, however, is a favourite with poets and probably his most lyrical story. It’s also a very unusual work as it is set on a ship at sea in the tropical Far East. This is not what one expects from a writer who usually uses a humdrum provincial Russian town as a backdrop. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Chekhov wrote “Gusev” when he was himself travelling home by sea from Siberia in 1890. He had just completed an epic overland journey to study the notorious penal colony on the island of Sakhalin, in the days before there was a train. “Gusev” was the only piece of fiction which came out of this voyage, and he finished it during a port call in Ceylon, where he later boasted of having an encounter with a dusky maiden under a palm tree. Gusev is the name of the story’s central character. He is a peasant conscript returning from a brutal period of service in the Far East, and is already dying of tuberculosis when put on board the ship. What is surprising about this story is the extraordinary flight of imagination which brings it to an end. Gusev’s body is sewn up into a bag and thrown overboard, and Chekhov describes the corpse descending to the seabed and its close encounter with a shark. When you read this story you cannot help remembering how much Chekhov owed to [Mikhail] Lermontov, and in particular his exquisite story “Taman” which forms part of his novel A Hero of Our Time . I’m not surprised that this is the story which Shostakovich wanted his wife to read to him on the night that he died. He said it was the most musical prose in all of Russian literature, and I’m inclined to agree. The translator needs to listen out for the rhythms of the story, which gently rise and fall like Gusev’s bunk in the sick bay of the ship. Chekhov evokes Gusev’s delirious state by creating a dream-like atmosphere in which sentences often trail off into nothingness, indicated by his trademark ellipses. It is not a coincidence that Chekhov uses this musical form of punctuation an astonishing 75 times during the course of this brief story. That’s more than he uses it in any other story, and is similar to the way he inserts pauses into his plays. Chekhov was a very deliberate writer – detail was paramount for him – so the translator needs to understand what he was doing with his punctuation as much as with the way he constructed his sentences. The dream-like atmosphere is all the more effective when Chekhov contrasts it with Gusev’s moments of consciousness, when he talks to his cabin mate, an embittered and equally deranged intellectual."