Anton Chekhov
The Darling and Other Stories
1917 · 358 pages · Also in this volume: «Ariadne», «The Two Volodyas», «An Artist’s Story», «Three Years»
- Author
- Anton Chekhov
- Edition
- The Tales of Chekhov, Volume I; translated by Constance Garnett, with an introduction by Edward Garnett; reprint of September 1917
- Published
- New York, The Macmillan Company, 1917
- Pages
- 358
- File
- DjVu, 5.5 MB
- Text search
- yes
- Rights
- public domain
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About the book
The Darling, published in 1899, is one of Anton Chekhov’s most loved stories. Olenka is a kind, warm woman who cannot live without someone to love: with each new husband or companion she takes on his opinions, his work and his way of talking, and when she is alone she has no thoughts of her own. Chekhov tells it with gentle irony, and readers still argue over whether he is mocking her or admiring her. Tolstoy loved the story, and his short essay on it is printed here after the text.
The volume also gathers stories from the 1880s and 1890s: “Ariadne”, the portrait of a vain and selfish beauty; “The Two Volodyas”; the small sketches “Polinka”, “Anyuta” and “Talent”; “An Artist’s Story”, also known as “The House with the Mezzanine”; and the long story “Three Years” about a Moscow merchant’s unhappy marriage.
This was the first of the thirteen volumes of Constance Garnett’s Tales of Chekhov, the translation through which most English readers first came to know his stories.
Contents
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About this edition
First volume of The Tales of Chekhov in Constance Garnett’s translation, published in New York by The Macmillan Company; the title page is dated 1917, and the verso reads “Copyright, 1916”, “Published, October, 1916” and “Reprinted, September, 1917”. It opens with Edward Garnett’s introduction, “A Note on Chekhov’s Art”, and a contents list; each story has its own half-title. Publisher’s advertisements follow the text. The scan has a searchable text layer.
How to read it
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Source
A scan from the Wikimedia Foundation's open projects. The book is in the public domain: free to read, download and share.