r/RussianLiterature • u/QuickCoconut2640 • Apr 09 '26

Open Discussion Thoughts on Chekhov and Translators

I started reading Anton Chekhov over the last few weeks with the older Garnett translations. Old english be blasted I do like her. It's energetic. But I want to find what Chekhov really does, not just pick the most fun to read always. The two Garnett anthologies I got off Gutenberg.org were very good. The Dual and Other Stories and The Lady With the Dog and Other Stories.

Next, with some overlap with the second Garnett anthology, I read the Penguin Classics Wilkes translation of The Lady With The Little Dog and Other Stories, 1896-1904.

I read the title story the Lady With the Dog in both Garnett and Wilkes. Garnett adds some feeling to the main male character that the Wilkes doesn't. Gemini told me Wilkes omits stuff. ChatGTP says Wilkes gives a terser more real to the Russian Chekhov.  What I could tell was so far I preferred the Garnett to the Wilkes.

So I decided to try a third and another modern translator reading the Volokhonsky & Pevairs Selected Stories(covered about 60% skipping stories in earlier penguin).  They are said to be faithful to the Russian.  I thought it read really smooth. It was fun to read, but it didn’t have all the victorian British.  

What's everyone’s favorite Chekhov translator? Do you care if it’s "faithful" or is it enough to say you like it? I also have the fifty-two stories translated by Volokhonsky & Pevair, but  I can see reading more Garnett as convenient, for example for The Steppe which would require buying yet another Pevair book if I want it in Pevair. 

Before March of this year the only Chekhov i'd read was the malefactor, and now after reading 49 of the stories I got to say, Wow. My top three is probably Ward No. 6, the Black Monk, and finally the closest thing we have to a dramatic full length novel, The Duel.

9 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

4 comments sorted by

6

u/FarGrape1953 Apr 09 '26

The Paul Schmidt translations of the plays from around 1997 are my favorite. But any time I've directed Chekhov we've used the old public domain translations and then just updated any words and phrases to a more modern word when needed. It's not sacrilegious considering how many translations there are.

2

u/centaurquestions Apr 09 '26

I find the Schmidt translations to be very dusty and Victorian-sounding. In Russian, Chekhov's language is spare and to-the-point, the opposite of dusty. My favorite by a long shot are Jean-Claude Van Itallie's.

4

u/FlatsMcAnally Apr 09 '26

I like the translations of Ann Dunnigan. She has three: The Major Plays (including Ivanov, The Sea Gull, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard), Selected Stories, and Ward Six and Other Stories. The last one is unfortunately out of print, though easily found used.

Still, you may find yourself going back to Constance Garnett, if only because she translated so many of them—enough to fill 13 volumes as against, say, Wilks (three, I think). Only Hingley may have translated more but, other than the three Oxford paperbacks (plus one of the same five plays as Dunnigan), they are not easily found.

1

u/No-Tower-5159 Apr 10 '26

Recently I came across a book named Earliest Stories, the works in it had been translated by 83 translators