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Olenka, 'the darling', is a gentle, loving woman who cannot live without someone to love and who takes on all the opinions of whoever she loves: first a…
Olenka, 'the darling', is a gentle, loving woman who cannot live without someone to love and who takes on all the opinions of whoever she loves: first a theatre manager, then a timber merchant, then a veterinary surgeon, and at last a little schoolboy. Tolstoy loved the story and read it aloud again and again. This first volume of Constance Garnett's translations of Anton Chekhov's tales also includes 'Ariadne', 'Anyuta', 'The Two Volodyas', 'An Artist's Story' and the short novel 'Three Years'.
Context and significance
Chekhov (1860–1904), a doctor who wrote hundreds of stories as well as plays such as The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard, changed the short story for ever with his quiet, open endings and his refusal to judge his characters. Constance Garnett (1861–1946) brought him and the other great Russian writers to English readers. Readers who enjoy it often go on to Turgenev's First Love.
About the author
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) was the grandson of a serf who bought his family's freedom. He studied medicine in Moscow and paid for his studies and his family's keep by writing hundreds of humorous sketches for magazines. 'Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress,' he once wrote, and he practised both all his life.
In 1890 he crossed Siberia to study the prison island of Sakhalin. His short stories, like The Lady with the Dog, and his plays for the Moscow Art Theatre, like Uncle Vanya, transformed both forms with their quiet, open endings. He died of tuberculosis in Germany at forty-four.