Chekhov and Joyce

“The closest parallels to Joyce’s stories are Chekhov’s, but Joyce said he had not read Chekhov when he wrote them”: so says Richard Ellmann in the biography James Joyce, citing Herbert Gorman’s notes and papers for a Joyce biography. But try reading this passage from Chekhov without thinking of Joyce’s “Eveline.”

Anton Chekhov, Three Years, in “Peasants” and Other Stories, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: New York Review Books, 1999).

[Most of Chekhov was in English by 1903. Had this story been translated by then? Garnett’s translation was first published in 1916.]