Anton Chekhov's Selected Stories

"Chekhov was a later passion. I always liked the plays. I remember writing about a film version of The Cherry Orchard in the early 1980s when I was a TV critic at The New Statesman . That production really made me look at Chekhov again and re-read the short stories, which I had read but not with the attention they should have had. I now regard the short stories as far superior to the plays. Funnily enough, that’s the same point of view that exists in Russia. They see Chekhov as a giant of the short story form who happened to write a few plays, whereas in the West, we see him as a playwright who happened to write short stories. The Russian point of view seems to me to be completely valid, and the minute you have read all the mature short stories you can see he has lifted the plays right out of them. His stories are extraordinary and mould breaking in the sense that nobody wrote short stories like Chekhov and now everybody writes short stories like Chekhov. As I have said before, we’re all Chekhovian now. He’s a very modern spirit who happened to write his great work at the end of the 19th century. But it’s completely 21st century thinking, it seems to me. The one I really like is his longest short story, called My Life . It’s almost a novella. In it I think you’ll find every Chekhovian element. If you go to other short stories such as The House with a Mezzanine or The Steppe , you find bits of Chekhov. But in My Life , which is not remotely autobiographical, you find the whole of Chekhov. It’s a long rambling story about an idealistic young man in a provincial town. If somebody asks “What is Chekhov about?”, tell them to read My Life and they will get everything. Well, the other thing you have to remember is that he knew he was going to die very young. By his mid-twenties he knew he had tuberculosis. One of his brothers had died of it, and he was a doctor so he knew exactly what the course of the disease would be. He died at the age of 44. Being a doctor was a way of earning money and was something he did gladly and with zeal, but he wanted to write and his greatest ambition, he said, was to be a free artist. His doctoring, of course, brought him into contact with every kind of individual in society, but my feeling is that it was the knowledge of his impending death that shaped his view of the world and that went into his art – which has been a massive influence on 20th century literature in the Western world. Not just in England and America but also in France, Germany, Italy and Spain. Chekhov’s world view is hugely, almost pervasively influential. So pervasive that you can hardly identify it with the original author."