A Night in the Cemetery

by Anton Chekhov

Overview

Anton Chekhov’s only collection of crime and mystery stories.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781639360055
Publisher:	Pegasus Books
Publication date:	08/31/2021
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	500 KB

About the Author

Anton Chekhov was born on January 29, 1860 in Taganrog, Russia. He graduated from the University of Moscow in 1884. Chekhov died of tuberculosis in Germany on July 14, 1904, shortly after his marriage to actress Olga Knipper, and was buried in Moscow.

Table of Contents

Preface     ix
A Night at the Cementery     1
What You Usually Find in Novels     6
The Swedish Match     8
A Night of Horror     35
Willow     45
A Thief     51
The Only Way Out     57
An Expensive Dog     61
Curved Mirror     65
A Court Case     69
The Brother: A Slice of Life     73
A Confession     76
In the Darkness of the Night     81
The Intentional Deception     83
On the Sea: A Sailor's Story     88
Ivan the Cabman     93
Perpetual Mobile     97
Evildoer     107
Death of an Office Worker     113
75 Grand     117
At the Cemetery     124
The Conversation of a Man with a Dog     128
The Wallet     132
A Dead Body     136
Too Much Talking!     142
Conversation of a Drunken Man with a Sober Devil     148
Psychopaths     151
Assignment     158
Fire in the Steppe: An Evil Night     167
Ignoramus     175
Task     181
Dreams     190
A Crime: A Double Murder Case     201
Drama     208
An Ambulance     216
Bad Business     223
Misfortune     230
The Man Who Wanted Revenge     239
Thieves     246
Murder     266
Criminal Investigator     278
The Drama at the Hunt     285

Editorial Reviews

Best known today as a playwright, Chekhov (1860-1904) was also a prolific and accomplished writer of short fiction, as shown by this collection of 42 stories, most of which have previously been unavailable in English translation. As Sekirin notes in the preface, these stories appeared in a variety of periodicals "and until now have managed to escape the notice of contemporary editors and translators." Though billed as featuring crime and suspense, the volume has a broad range, including morality tales and stories of both dark and puckish humor. In the amusingly macabre "A Night of Horror," a man finds a coffin in his apartment. "Task," about a college student and bad checks, has a thoroughly modern ring. "A Crime: A Double Murder Case" is classic noir. Not all the selections shine, but enough do that the collection should appeal to more than just Chekhov fanatics. (Aug.)

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Publishers Weekly

Forty-two stories, many new to English-language readers, that reveal not only the range of the Russian master (1860-1904) but what crime stories were like before they became their own genre. As the brilliant sketch "What You Usually Find in Novels" points out, the 19th-century novel was encrusted with cliches. Not so the crime story, whose rules had yet to be set in stone. So Chekhov is free to explore the frontiers among persons, events and tones not yet established as generic types. The comically, often disastrously unprepossessing heroes of these tales can awaken from a night at the cemetery or a night of horror to realize how vacuous were the bogeymen that frightened them; virtuous souls can take unspeakable actions without quite noticing what they're up to, and end up dragging even more innocent passersby to their doom; compulsive confessors can bare their darkest secrets without realizing how anticlimactic they are; and the author can repeatedly lay the groundwork for dramatic courtroom scenes and then cut away from them, thumbing his nose at any assumptions about suspense. Chekhov's lifelong habit of throwing away scenes he's portentously built up to is nowhere more obvious than in the three longest stories here. "The Swedish Match" and "The Drama at the Hunt," for example, begin like well-behaved whodunits before tailing off mischievously into regions the writers' manuals warn you away from. And in the third, "Thieves," an ordinary man who falls among seducers and robbers shows in the end that he's even more ordinary than he knows. The translation, by turns stately (the patronymics remain intact) and colloquial, takes some getting used to, but it certainly frees the author fromany Victorian overlay. A splendidly lightweight collection whose satiric touch is so deft that it seems to be sending up a genre yet unborn. Agent: Carolyn French/Fifi Oscard Agency

Kirkus Reviews