Unfinished [Schulz]
Неоконченное шульц
Headnote
1 This file preserves two separate, unrelated pieces of unfinished draft material found among Chekhov’s papers and printed together, under the heading "Неоконченное" ("Unfinished [pieces]"), in the standard Complete Collected Works. Neither piece was published in Chekhov’s lifetime, and neither has a title of Chekhov’s own choosing that is known with certainty: the corpus id and file title follow the standard edition’s own shorthand label, "Шульц" ("Schulz"), taken from the name of the boy in the first fragment.
2 The first fragment (section 2 of this file) is a single paragraph, the apparent opening of an abandoned story about a first-form gymnasium pupil named Kostya Schulz, trudging to school on a wet, joyless October morning, dreading a Russian-literature teacher he has failed to prepare for and regretting a petty act of spite against his nanny that has left him without his lunch. It breaks off after one paragraph with no further text; nothing is known to have survived to indicate where the story was meant to go, or why Chekhov set it aside.
3 The second, much longer fragment (sections 3-21) is textually distinct and internally marked as separate: it opens with the editorial bracket "[МУЖИКИ]" ("[PEASANTS]") and is numbered as chapters "X" and "XI" in Roman numerals, continuing a chapter sequence rather than starting one. The standard edition’s own apparatus identifies this material as draft/discarded chapters connected to Chekhov’s story "Мужики" ("Peasants," 1897): the characters here – Olga, her daughter Sasha, her late husband Nikolai, and Nikolai’s brother Kiryak, who appears both as a photograph in a Moscow lodger’s room and, later, drunk and shouting for money – are the same family at the center of the published "Peasants," here shown in an alternate or expanded Moscow setting (at Olga’s sister Klavdia Abramovna’s lodgings near the Patriarch’s Ponds) that does not appear in the finished, published text. The material breaks off after section 21, in the middle of a scene, with no resolution; as with the Schulz fragment, no note from Chekhov explaining the abandonment is known to survive. Sections 22-23 are not part of either fragment: they reproduce the closing attribution and edition citation ("Chekhov, A. P." and the volume/imprint line) as they appear in the standard printed edition’s apparatus, carried over here as part of the source file rather than as narrative text, consistent with how this corpus treats similarly sourced "unfinished/unpublished" fragments (compare, e.g., ).
4 Because both fragments are genuine drafts rather than finished stories, neither offers the shaped arc typical of Chekhov’s published work; their interest is bibliographic and comparative – the Schulz fragment as a glimpse of Chekhov beginning (and not continuing) a schoolboy story in the vein of his early sketches, and the "Peasants" chapters as evidence of material Chekhov drafted and then cut or reworked before publishing the story in its final, tighter form. Read against the finished "Peasants," the cut chapters given here develop Olga’s Moscow relations (Klavdia Abramovna, a small-scale kept woman living off occasional male visitors, and Sasha’s evenings watching the servants’ dancing at Ivan Makarych’s place of employment) at a length and level of incidental social detail – the boarders at the "Lisbon," the neighbor woman visited by a hieromonk, Klavdia Abramovna’s photographs and toilette – that the published story does not carry.
5 the Schulz fragment’s fable title, "Мартышка и очки" ("The Monkey and the Spectacles"), is Ivan Krylov’s well-known verse fable and is given here by its standard English title rather than translated literally, since it names a specific, identifiable text a Russian schoolchild would have had to memorize. "Первого класса" (section 2) is rendered "first-form," following this corpus’s convention for the Russian gymnasium’s grade terms. In the "Peasants" chapters, "Малая Бронная" and "Тверская" (section 8) are the Moscow streets Malaya Bronnaya and Tverskaya, left transliterated as proper names; "Патриаршие пруды" (section 5) is the Patriarch’s Ponds, a real Moscow locale. "Меблированные комнаты «Лиссабон»" (section 17) – furnished rooms let by the room or by the month, a common lodging arrangement for working people of modest means – is rendered "furnished rooms," with the house’s name, the "Lisbon," kept as given. "Иеромонах" (section 5) is rendered "hieromonk," an Orthodox monk who has also been ordained a priest; the detail that the neighbor dresses up for his visits is left exactly as ambiguous in translation as it is in the source. "Панихида" (section 19) is rendered "memorial service," the Orthodox rite for the dead. No English-language published translation of this material was consulted; both fragments were translated directly from the Russian source text.