Talk to translators, and they’ll tell you that it’s an art, not a science. Translation is always a dicey proposition. In the original Russian, it was the same word, but it was transformed into English in these four different ways.
What I found was that other translators identified this piece of furniture differently - variously, as an open bureau, as an open wardrobe, and as an open chiffonier. That’s how one translation has it, but, while researching a story about translations for the Chicago Tribune, I had occasion to compare this scene in six English language versions of the masterpiece. On one of the first pages of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Dolly Oblonsky is packing to leave her womanizing husband and is described as taking something out of an open chest of drawers.
