Russian Fun & Futility

THE WOMAN IN THE CASE AND OTHER STORIES (189 pp.) -- Anton Chekhov --British Book Centre ($2.75).

THE UNKNOWN CHEKHOV: STORIES AND OTHER WRITINGS HITHERTO UNTRANSLATED (316 pp.) -- Anton Chekhov -- Noonday ($4.50).

Short-story fans and admirers of Anton Chekhov should be as happy these days as a muzhik over a bowl of borsch. Since the end of the war Chekhov's complete works have been published in Russia, and translators have had their choice of some 200 stories (out of Chekhov's 600) that were unknown in English. In The Woman in the Case and The Unknown Chekhov, 37 of these stories and a handful of articles and sketches are published in the U.S. for the first time. They include some first-rate Chekhov.

The better stories are in the familiar Chekhov mood, i.e., irresolute characters grope toward unresolved climaxes in an atmosphere of mixed irony and despair. In "The Lodger," a lawyer sells his youth, career and principles to marry for money, only to learn that everyone despises him. In "A Visit to Friends," a Moscow lawyer visits the ancestral estate of childhood friends and learns, in conversations reminiscent of The Cherry Orchard, that they are doomed to lose the estate as they dribble away their days in futility, hoping vainly for a miracle.

This kind of fare is varied with pure farce. In "The Woman in the Case," a double-bass player and an aristocratic beauty get acquainted after both have gone swimming and have had their clothes stolen. Chekhov's Russian undressing achieves its full flavor after the gallant musician, clad only in a top hat, starts to take the beauty home in his double-bass case and loses her. Eventually, the encased beauty is released in the midst of a musical soiree. In "Boa Constrictor and Rabbit," an expert tells how to seduce a married woman with patience, distance, praise and the inadvertent complicity of the husband. Czarist censors banned this story as immoral, which drove Chekhov to retort: "I have formed ... a Society for the Promotion of Cuckoldry, [and] have been elected president."

All the stories are not of equal quality, but even at his secondbest, Chekhov is better than his imitators.

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