The Huntsman

By: Anton Chekhov

Narrated by: Max Bollinger

Yegor the huntsman, walking down a country road, accidentally meets his estranged wife, Pelageya, whom he's been married to for 12 years but visited just several times, and even then, drunk and violent. She weeps and, fawning before him, implores him to visit her more often. He tries to explain why he, the best sportsman around, 'a pampered man', enjoying good tea and 'refined conversation', could not bear to live in a village.

Public Domain (P)2018 Sovereign

A Note on the Translation

I suspect this is the Constance Garnett translation, which, for 63 cents or whatever I paid for the “audiobook,” is fine. I wonder, however, whether the text may be slightly Bowdlerized. I look forward to seeing other translations.

The story itself is brilliant in the usual Chekhovian way. And the performance is an attempt to give the piece character.

The reader affects (or has?) a Russian accent, which is a departure from the seemingly standard approach. Often the reader gives upper class characters a stately, stuffy English accent and reads the peasant and poor people with a comic cockney or other “low” English accent. I’m not sure what the solution is.

In this case the Russian accent mostly works.