Stories (2 page)

Chekhov’s “impressionism” was not simply a literary manner: it corresponded to something much deeper in his perception of the world. The fragmentation of the picture into “separate brushstrokes” and the vagueness of the general outline reflect an inner state, perhaps best described by the old professor in “A Boring Story” (1889). This famous doctor, teacher, and man of science discovers something of a disturbingly non-scientific sort at the end of his life:

The professor’s dilemma amounts to a commentary on Chekhov’s artistic method. Like his hero, Chekhov refused to substitute a false god for the absent “god of the living man.” In his revolt against general ideas, according to the philosopher Lev Shestov, he “finally frees himself from ideas of every kind, and loses even the notion of connection between the happenings of life. Herein lies the most important and original characteristic of his creation.” Shestov’s essay “Creation from the Void,” written in 1908 and still one of the most penetrating discussions of Chekhov’s art, contains the foll
owing description of the spiritual condition of that time:

This was the condition within which, and against which, Chekhov worked. He was more acutely aware of it t
han most of his contemporaries, which is why we still read him with a sense of immediacy.

Chekhov came to literature by an unlikely path. He was born in 1860, in the town of Taganrog on the Sea of Azov. His grandfather was a serf, but bought freedom for himself and his family even before the emancipation of 1861. His father was a grocer. The family— there were three more brothers and a sister—was a very close one, and Chekhov always had the greatest respect for his parents, who were simple people, pious and not very educated. When he was seventeen, he wrote to his younger brother Mikhail: “Our parents are the only
persons in the world for whom I will never stint in anything. I
f something becomes of me, it will be the work of their hands. The unlimited love they bear for their children is enough to put them beyond all praise and to cover up the faults provoked in them by a thankless life.” He never separated from them, supported them as soon as he could, and in 1892, when he bought the small estate of Melikhovo, south of Moscow, brought them there to live with him, together with his sister and younger brother. Such family closeness was rare (“extremely rare,” according to D. S. Mirsky) among the intelligentsia, but not among the peasants from whom Chekhov came.

From 1867 to 1879, he attended the Greek school in Taganrog, where he received an Orthodox religious education. His upbringing was also religious; he and his brothers sang in the church choir, conducted by their father; they read the Epistles and Psalms in church, served as altar boys and bell ringers. He looked back on the experience as rather gloomy, and later lost his faith, but his familiarity with church life shows in many of his stories, and his knowledge of the services and prayers was probably more precise than that of any other Russian writer. His work is also imbued with
a Christian understanding of suffering. The critic Leonid Grossman has described him as “a probing Darwinist with the love of St. Francis of Assisi for every living creature.”
*

In 1876 Chekhov’s father lost his business and to escape debtor’s prison had to flee to Moscow, where his eldest son, Alexander, was studying. The rest of the family went with him, leaving the sixteen-year-old Anton to finish high school alone in Taganrog. He gave lessons to support himself, lived very poorly, but completed his studies in 1879, after which he joined his family in Moscow and entered medical school. Ten years later he gave an oblique description of the change he went through during this period of his life in a letter to Suvorin (January 7, 1889):

To support his medical studies, and his family, Chekhov followed his brother Alexander’s example and began to contribute brief sketches and stories to popular magazines, signing his work in various camouflaged ways, most often with the nickname “Antosha Chekhonte,” bestowed on him by one of his teachers in Taganrog. He finished medical school in 1884, and though he never finally set up as a doctor, he always remained faithful to medicine and acknowledged that he owed a great deal to his study of the natural sciences and his acquaintance with the scientific method. “Both anatomy and belles
-lettres are of equally noble descent,” he once wrote to Suvorin, “they have identical goals and an identical enemy—the devil—and there is absolutely no reason for them to fight … Goethe the poet coexisted spl
endidly with Goethe the naturalist.” During his years in Melikhovo, he organized clinics and gave free treatment to hundreds of peasants from the district. He helped to fight the cholera epidemics of 1891 and 1892, and worked for famine relief during the same period. He also built a school in Melikhovo in 1892, which came out so well that he was asked to build two more in neighboring villages during the next three years. He also built a bell tower for the village church. He donated thousands of books to the library in Taganrog and helped to set up a marine biology station in Yalta, where he lived
after 1898. In practical matters, Chekhov was an enormously active man, and one can sense from his letters the relief he felt in taking up such work. Literature, his mistress, was a more ambiguous affair.

As early as 1888, he wrote to Suvorin expressing his admiration for men of action, in particular the explorer N. M. Przhevalsky:

It was in this same spirit that Chekhov decided, in 1890, to travel to Sakhalin Island, off the far eastern coast of Russia, to study conditions in this place that had been founded as a penal colony and to take a census of the population. “I owed a debt to medicine,” he explained. The trip took him across the whole of Russia. He spent several months on the island, interviewed hundreds of people, took voluminous notes, and returned by ship via Hong Kong, Singapore, and Ceylon—an experience reflected in the story “Gusev.”
**
The result of the trip was the documentary book
Sakhalin Island
(1893), which in turn resulted in certain
reforms in the treatment of prisoners and the administration of the colony. Later Chekhov also sent shipments of books to the island’s library.

Faithful to his family, to medicine, to the places that marked his life—Taganrog, Sakhalin, Melikhovo, Yalta—Chekhov was also faithful to his friends. A case in point is his resignation from the Russian Academy in quiet protest when the young Maxim Gorky was refused membership. His relations with Alexei Suvorin are another case in point, and a more telling one. The publisher of
New Time
became more and more conservative and pro-government as
he grew older. Chekhov was far from sharing Suvorin’s views and often wrote him caustic letters about them, but they remained friends. The on
ly real break between them came over the Dreyfus affair. Chekhov had suffered a severe hemorrhage of the lungs in March of 1897 and was living in Nice when the Dreyfus case was reopened. He became a staunch Dreyfusard, and even went to Paris in April of the next year to meet with Dreyfus’s brother and the journalist Bernard Lazare, whose articles had forced the reopening of the case, and offer them his support. Suvorin meanwhile took a strongly anti-Dreyfus and anti-Semitic position in his magazine, which so disgusted Chekhov that he stopped meeting and corresponding with him. But they made peace
again before too long. Chekhov even managed to remain on good terms with his chief ideological opponent, Nikolai Mikhailovsky, whom he referred to privately as “an important sociologist and failed literary critic.”

Chekhov was less faithful to the women who fell in love with him—and many did. There was Lika Mizinova, with whom he was “nearly” in love, but then failed to keep a rendezvous while traveling abroad in 1894. There was the novelist Lydia Avilova, whom he called to his bedside when he was hospitalized with consumption in 1897, and who left slightly deluded memoirs about their romance. There was also the mysterious “fiancée” he mentions in a letter, whose family nickname, “Missyus,” he gave to the younger sister in “The House with the Mezzanine.” It was
only in 1899 that he met the woman he would finally marry: Olga Knipper, a young actress in the Moscow Art Theater. It was there, in the theater of Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko, that his last plays were staged:
The Seagull,
which became the company’s “totem,” in 1898, followed by
Uncle Vanya
in 1899. In 1901, the year of their marriage, came the triumphant production of
Three Sisters,
and in 1904, just months before his death, the still greater triumph of
The Cherry Orchard.

Chekhov’s admiration for men of “heroic action” like Przhevalsky, and his own energetic activity as a doctor, a builder of schools and clinics, are oddly contradicted by the weakness, anguish, ineffectuality, and resignation of the protagonists in his stories and plays. In fact, contradiction runs deep in Chekhov’s nature. It is not hard to find examples. He was the most humane of writers, yet his stories are
as merciless as any ever written. He constantly portrayed himself in his work, and constantly denied it. His art has an air of impassivity, but is fueled by indignation and protest. He beli
eved in progress, yet he shows only the natural and human waste it has caused. He scorned the new Symbolist movement in literature, but the surface objectivity of his work gives way time and again to a visionary symbolism of his own (of which “The Black Monk” is the most obvious, and least successful, example). This well-known Chekhovian ambiguity is not a halfhearted mixture of contraries. Resignation and revolt are equally extreme in his work and are mysteriously held together, though they ought to tear his world apart.

We may find the source of these contradictions in Chekhov’s attitude toward science. “Goethe the poet coexisted splendidly with Goethe the naturalist,” he wrote to Suvorin, expressing his own ideal. He had no doubt that his scientific training had been of benefit to his artistic work. “It significantly broadened the scope of my observations and enriched me with knowledge whose value for me as a writer only a doctor can appreciate … My familiarity with the natural sciences and the scientific method has always kept me on my guard; I have tried wherever possible to take scientif
ic data into account, and where it has not been possible I have preferred not writing at all” (letter of October 11, 1899). But what sort of knowledge did he draw from science and the scientific worldview?

The chief thing it taught him was that the order of the world is implacable and indifferent to human suffering. He could observe its operation in the progress of his own illness, the first definite symptoms of which appeared in 1889, the year he wrote “A Boring Story,” which marked the beginning of his maturity. He could also observe it in his medical practice, which, as Leonid Grossman has written, “brought home to Chekhov with remarkable fullness the horror of life, the cruelty of nature, and the impotence of man.” Doctor-protagonists confront the same cruelty and impotence in s
cenes repeated throughout his work—with the brutality and indifference of human beings added to it, or simply making one with it.

Nikolai Stepanovich, the old professor in “A Boring Story,” likes reading the current French authors, because “not seldom one finds in them the main element of creative work—a sense of personal freedom, which Russian authors don’t have.” Chekhov also preferred Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant, who, along with Tolstoy, were his acknowledged masters. Zola’s notion of the writer-scientist and his
concept of the “experimental novel” interested him, but formally speaking it was Maupassant who influenced him most. He learned much from Maupassant’s handling of the short story, in which artistic
refinement is hidden behind an apparent casualness and superficiality As Leonid Grossman notes, Maupassant also “reinforced Chekhov’s convictions about the colorlessness of life, the horror of death, the animal nature of man. Life in its basic nature is much simpler, shallower, and more insignificant than we are accustomed to think it—here is the hard core of Maupassant’s work.” But the contradictions in Chekhov were more profound and more fruitful than in the French naturalists. He absorbed their “dark tenets,” but at the same time he rebelled against them with all his strength.