The Bishop (short story)

"The Bishop" (Russian: Архиерей, translit. Arkhiyerei) is a 1902 short story by Anton Chekhov, first published in the April 1902 issue of Zhurnal Dlya Vsekh.

Publication

Chekhov promised to Viktor Mirolyubov to write a story for Zhurnal Dlya Vsekh in a December 1899 letter. But he set to work upon it much later, judging by his 16 March 1901 letter to Olga Knipper, in which he wrote: "Now I am writing a story called 'The Bishop', based upon a plotline that had been sitting in my head for some fifteen years." In July of that Mirolyubov reminded Chekhov about his old promise to the journal's subscribers. Chekhov in a 3 August letter assured him that the piece was in the pipeline, but in October had to apologise for some further delays. He sent the story to the magazine only on 20 February 1902 with apologies, explaining the delay with his deteriorating health, and with a kind of warning, that he'd be "challenging the censors for every single word" and won't let the badly mangled text published. There were indeed severe censorial cuts, not to mention gaping proofreader's blunders, which took Chekhov another month to fix. Finally, "The Bishop" was published in the No.4, April 1902 issue of Zhurnal Dlya Vsekh.

In a slightly revised version, it was included into Volume 12 of the 1903, second edition the Collected Works by A.P. Chekhov, published by Adolf Marks. It then appeared in Volume 11 of the posthumous, 1906 third edition.^[1]

Background

According to Mikhail Chekhov, the prototype for the story's main hero was Stepan Alexeyevich Petrov, who lived on the Sadovo-Kudrinskaya street in Moscow. Once a Moscow University philology faculty student, he suddenly became a monk and soon made quite a career in theology. Father Sergiy, as he became known, often visited Chekhov in Yalta, mainly at the latter's dacha, in Yautka.^[2]

Reception

The story garnered generally positive reviews in the contemporary Russian press. A Birzhevye Vedomosti reviewer (signed A.I., in the 14 May 1902, No.129 issue) called the story "one of the most beautiful and graceful" in the Chekov collection. Several critics (including A.Elf in Vostochnoye Obozreniye) praised the story both for its artistic merits and the way it provided a detailed, insightful picture of a Russian clergyman's life. On 14 October Mirolyubov wrote to Chekhov: "I've been to Yasnaya Polyana, the Old Man [[[Leo Tolstoy]]] expressed delight with The Bishop, and asked after your health."^[1]

Ivan Bunin wrote that the story was "written wonderfully. Only somebody who deals in writing and knows there hellish torture can understand all the beauty of this thing."^[3]

References

External links

• Архиерей, the original Russian text
• The Bishop, the English translation