“A sultry and stifling
day. Not a cloud in the sky…The sun-scorched grass looks bleak, hopeless: there
may be rain, but it will never be green again…The forest stands silent, motionless,
as if its treetops were looking off somewhere or waiting for something.” —Playwright/short-story
writer Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), “The Huntsman” (originally
published July 1885), in Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, translated
by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (2000)
“The Huntsman” is not part of The Undiscovered Chekhov, a collection of 43 previously untranslated short stories, but
it falls within the same period of creation: 1880 to 1887. When Anton Chekhov came to write
this tale, he was already aiming for something more ambitious than the quick
pieces he dashed off for popular Moscow and St. Petersburg magazines when he
was not tending to his medical studies and, later, his patients.
“Write as much as you can! Write, write, write till
your fingers break!” the young author wrote in a letter a year after this short
story. By the time he was done, Chekhov had learned how to quietly break the
hearts of readers and playgoers around the world.
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