Anton

Aleksandr Chudakov (1938–2005) was an internationally renowned scholar of Russian literature. He taught at the Institute of World Literature and Moscow State University, as well as universities in Germany, the US, and South Korea. Anton, his only novel, was awarded a special Russian Booker Prize for Best Russian Novel of the 2000s.Timothy D. Sergay is a translator and emeritus associate professor of Russian at the University at Albany.

• Translator’s Introduction and Acknowledgments Glossary of Terms and Names Arm-Wrestling in Chebachinsk Claimants to the Inheritance A Graduate of the Institute for Noble Young Ladies The Fourth Siberian Wave Klava and Valya Could You Reel in the Leviathan With a Fishing Rod? A Cavalier of the Great Gold Medal of the Grand Duke Vaska Eighty-Five, the Spelling Genius At the Bathhouse and Thereabouts Malchik the Coop Horse, Or Napoleon’s Tortoise Stubborn Oxen Twentieth-Century Subsistence Agriculture The Man Who Doesn’t Eat Diggers and Sailors The Widow’s Corner The UN The National Anthem of the Soviet Union The FiancÉe of Count Stroganov Two Mining Engineers Gastello the Fearless Pilot “Those Evening Bells” The Lake Other Songs The Wreck of the Titanic Ilyich’s Pelmeni Acquired Traits Are Inherited Wolf Messing, Count SheremÉtyev, Baron Ungern et al. The Sublime Is Revolution Dogs In Moscow Reunion With Friends Federau the Confectioner and Professor Riesenkampf the Oven- Setter Wear ’Em Forever Kazheka the Glazier Carp from the Bishop’s Pond Mama Father And Now They’ve All Died Translator’s Notes Sources and Further Reading

"Aleksandr Chudakov is unique among the prominent critics of Anton Chekhov: he has a great deal of Chekhov's artistic creativity in his semi-fictional, semi-autobiographical recall of an unusual, almost exotic childhood and, like Chekhov, a gift for subtly enthralling the reader." —Donald Rayfield, Queen Mary University of London"Aleksandr Chudakov's Anton, which was published in 2000, stands as perhaps the last great novel of the Soviet experience, though it is much more than that. With a scholar's precision and an artist's lightness of touch, Chudakov manages to resurrect not only the vanished world of his childhood in North Kazakhstan, but also a manner of writing—lucid yet nuanced, polyphonic yet harmonious—that also seemed lost to time when the novel first appeared. Timothy Sergay demonstrates the same precision and the same lightness of touch in his magnificent translation of an unforgettable book." —Boris Dralyuk, The University of Tulsa