The Beauties de Anton Chekhov

Date de parution : 10.2017
Format : Broché
Nombre de pages : 224
Résumé : New translations of the greatest stories by the Russian master of the formNew translations of the essential Chekhov short stories, in a stunning new Pushkin Collection editionThe Beauties I I remember, when I was a high school boy in the fifth or sixth class, driving with my grandfather from the village of Bolshaya Krepkaya in the Don Region to Rostov-on- Don. It was a wearisomely dreary, sultry August day. The heat and the burning dry wind blew clouds of dust in our faces, gummed up my eyes and dried out my mouth. I didn’t feel like looking around, or talking, or thinking; and when Karpo, our drowsy Ukrainian driver, caught my cap with his whip as he lashed his horse, I didn’t protest or utter a sound; I just woke from my doze and gazed meekly and dispiritedly into the distance to see if I could make out a village through the dust. We stopped to feed the horse at the house of a rich Armenian whom my grandfather knew, in the big Armenian village of Bakhchi-Salakh. Never in my life had I seen such a caricature of a man as this Armenian. Imagine a small, shaven head with thick beetling eyebrows, a beaky nose, a long grizzled moustache and a wide mouth with a long cherrywood chibouk poking out of it. The little head was clumsily attached to a skinny, hunchbacked body, dressed in fantastic attire – a short red tunic and wide, baggy, bright-blue trousers. This figure walked with his legs wide apart, shuffling along in slippers, talked without taking his chibouk out of his mouth, and carried himself with true Armenian dignity, neither smiling nor staring, but striving to pay his guests as little attention as pos...