by Sergio Pitol
Galdós anticipates a device that Franz Werfel will employ successfully in this century in Juarez and Maximilian, a play in which, from beginning to end, he was able to make the presence of the Mexican hero felt without his ever appearing on the scene. In each of the chapters of The Court of Carlos IV the name of the most powerful man in Spain is mentioned; he is damned and cursed forever; we know the places he visits, the comments he makes, when he arrives to the Palace, and even what he eats, but he never appears. He is an invisible man who for many years has pulled, at his discretion and pleasure, the strings of the kingdom only to become ensnared in the tangled web of his own making. His fate, like that of the King and Queen, like that of the Spain we visited, is sealed. The curtain is about to fall. Other dramas, comedies, and farces will be performed. Other characters will be the protagonists. Another chorus, riotous, monstrous and generous, naive and cunning, clueless, intuitive, manipulated, mean and tender, is about to enter the stage. Forever a giant. The Spanish people! In the Episodes that follow, their presence will be definitive.
Xalapa, September 1994
13Translated by Clara Bell
14Translated by Maria G. Tomsech
15Translated by Caryl Emerson
OUR CONTEMPORARY CHEKHOV
Cyril Connolly asserts that the writer must aspire to write a work of genius. Otherwise, he is lost. This preemptory requirement is, of course, stimulating, a crack of the whip to banish idleness, conformity, the temptation of easiness. But it must arrive when the time is right if he does not want to herd the sheep toward the wolf. Whosoever seeks his soul will lose it, say the Gospels. Did the young Joyce know as he was struggling with the Dubliners that Ulysses lay in his future? Were Mann and Kafka aware of what destiny held for them when they were writing their first stories? Did the young Cervantes, when writing his first lines of verse, which were presumably mediocre, imagine himself as the immortal author of the Spanish language? It occurs to me that one could interpret Connolly’s assertion in a less dramatic way: Every writer should from the beginning remain faithful to his potential and try to refine it; have the greatest respect for language, keep it alive, update it if possible; not make concessions to anyone, least of all to power or to trends; and contemplate in his work the boldest challenges it is possible to conceive. At least that was the way Chekhov came to be the great writer he is. He wrote at first, when he noticed his facility for inventing stories, to earn money to support his family; it took a few years to discover that being a writer required more than relating a funny anecdote or a dramatic episode. Daily practice made him aware of the possibilities of the craft. He was always faithful to his intuition, exceptionally demanding of himself, indifferent to the judgment of others, alien to any temptation of power, to all forms of excess or falsehood, and indefatigable in the pursuit of a personal narrative method. As a result, he bequeathed to humanity a handful of brilliant works.
The Seagull marks the transformation of the contemporary theater. This is a beautiful and moving work that no one was able to understand in its first performances. It breaks sharply with Russian tradition. And not just with Russian tradition; today’s theater, especially the Anglo-Saxon, is still in its debt. In the play, which is set at the end of the nineteenth century, there is a young poet, Treplieff, who does his utmost to create a new literary language; Treplieff belongs to the symbolist literary school. Chekhov makes use of the classical device of theater within theater, and includes in The Seagull the performance of a monologue by Treplieff, a verbal delirium, a distortion that is not a recreation but a parody of symbolist language. If Chekhov’s sympathy for the young poet and his plight are evident from the beginning to the end of the work, it is also true that his literary activity is treated with a slight disdain. A fragment of the monologue is included in the middle of the first act of The Seagull. A beautiful and aspiring actress, who embodies the “Spirit of the Universe,” delights in informing us that all living beings have been extinct for several thousand years and that the earth has not given birth to any new species. The Spirit of the Universe opens her mouth only every one hundred years to reveal the relentless struggle waged for centuries against the Devil, the King of Matter. She is convinced that the day will come when she will be able to defeat him. “After a fierce and obstinate battle,” the Spirit exclaims, “that could last many millennia, I will conquer the source of the Forces of Matter. Matter and Spirit will merge in glorious harmony, the earth will populate itself again, and the Kingdom of Universal Freedom will be born.” The monologue, as the reader has probably noticed, is tedious, naïve, and prosy. The constant use of abstractions, the contempt for real people and their trivial problems, the search for infinity, all correspond to Chekhov’s notion of symbolist literature. It is well known that he detested romanticism and distrusted the new school that was beginning to flourish in Russia. He saw symbolists as a new incarnation of the romantics. The symbolists never forgave Chekhov for that parody. He was considered an insignificant writer of local customs. He, however, considered himself a realist. Words like “realism” and “realist” are often discredited today; they are applied cautiously and rather derisively, and leave a sense of imprecision and exude an odor of vulgarity. In a conversation with Serena Vitale, Viktor Shklovsky declared shortly before he died: “The truth is I have never been able to understand what the term realism means, and I’m not talking just about socialist realism, just plain realism. It’s a useless designation that means nothing in literature!”
To be clear, when Chekhov defined himself as a realist writer, he did so with the same calm conviction with which Tolstoy and Dostoevsky accepted the term. For them and their contemporaries, the adjective had a precise meaning. Chekhov would undoubtedly be surprised to learn that there is not a single major essay today that does not linger on his work’s intense symbolic charge. The Seagull, where he parodied that current, is perhaps the most symbolist—from the very title!—of his dramas.
Even if Chekhov considered his literature to belong to the Russian realist tradition, he was aware of the fundamental differences between his work and that of his predecessors and contemporaries. His quests and intentions could not have been more dissimilar. The epic breath of Tolstoy, the spiritual exaltation of Dostoevsky, and the pathos of Andreyev were viscerally foreign to him. His work marks not only the end of a literary period; it also brings to a close a historic world. He is, as Vittorio Strada has accurately observed, a transitional writer situated between two worlds. Chekhov’s originality was disconcerting to his contemporaries and, during his early period, truly incomprehensible. “Even today,” the Italian critic adds, “he remains the most difficult writer in Russian literature, because under a maximum of apparent transparency lies hidden a core that resists all critical formulations.”
One of the modes of Chekhovian narrative is its fragmentation, sometimes its pulverization. This is not capricious, rather a formal response to one of his fundamental concerns. The world of Chekhov seems to turn on a single axis: lack of communication. The breakdown in communication occurs especially among the most sensitive and generous people, and affects the most delicate relationships: lovers, friends, parents, and children. Little by little, the characters lose their voice, they become frozen by their words, and when they are forced to speak they coagulate language, infect it, so what could be a celebration of reconciliation becomes a duel of enemies or, worse still, a contemptuous indifference.
In 1888, with “The Steppe,” Chekhov initiated a new form of writing whose originality seems to have gone unnoticed, at least at the time. For eight years he had written stories and novels. The world in “The Steppe” is seen through a child’s eyes, but the language is not the language of childhood, rather it struggles to reach other levels. The challenge was more demanding than it seemed at first sight. Chekhov was not content to follow the child’s gaze and translate in perfect language his discoveries, passions, fears; he proposed something more complex: to fuse his own view of the universe with the lim
ited perceptions of a child protagonist. Hence a new poetics was born. The perceptions of the child, Yegorushka, constitute the main body of the story, but the refined descriptions of nature, the digressions and reflections on it could scarcely be attributed to him. The story corresponds to a child’s gaze, but it is written in a style not always accessible to that gaze.
“Chekhov,” says Dmitry Merezhkovsky, “does not contemplate nature only from an aesthetic point of view, even if all of his works contain a multitude of tiny, elegant brushstrokes that document the subtlety of his powers of observation. Like every true poet, he feels a profound affection for nature, an instinctive understanding of his unconscious life. He not only admires it from a distance like a serene and observant artist, but he also absorbs it fully as a man and leaves his indelible mark on all his ideas and feelings.” In “The Steppe” the description of nature and the reflections on it are Chekhov’s; the perception of human events belong to the child protagonist.
It is the retelling of a child’s first steps through the world. As he travels across the steppe he comes to know the unpredictable world of adults and the no less disturbing world of nature. He confronts dangers from which, in the end, he will emerge invictus. His experience possesses all the features of an initiatory rite. For the author, it is a question of a journey as well as a challenge. It is a journey toward a new narrative form. Like the steppe, the story lacks fixed boundaries at the beginning and the end.
There appears in the story a character destined to grow in importance in the Chekhovian universe. He lacks any appealing quality. Neither Gogol nor Turgenev, Tolstoy nor Dostoevsky could portray him because he did not exist during their lifetime. He is an entrepreneur, the representative of the new capitalism that is beginning to take shape in Russia. That character’s name in “The Steppe” is Varlamov; Varlamov, not unlike the representatives of the new Russian intelligentsia—Stanislavsky, Diaghilev, and Chekhov himself—was probably the son or grandson of serfs. To Chekhov these energetic and active men who were beginning to lead the world were necessary but also deeply odious. Yegorushka hears about Varlamov from every character he encounters along his journey across the steppe. He is in charge. However, when he finally sees him more than halfway through the novel he is surprised by his appearance. He expected to see a kind of tsar but what he finds is an insignificant man in a white cap and plain corduroy suit. He’s the “short, gray, large-booted little man on the ugly nag who was talking to peasants at an hour when all decent people are still abed.”16 Twice he sees him use the whip: once to beat Jewish innkeepers; a second time to whip a character that was unable to give him accurate information. Such is his way of communicating with the world: his language. It does not escape Yegorushka that however insignificant he may look there was a sense of strength and control over his surroundings in everything about him, even in the way he held the whip.
Varlamov’s fists decide the fate of all those who inhabit or travel the steppe. He exists on the same level as, if not above, nature. During a march in a storm at night, Yegorushka, half-asleep, is able to see, through the flashes of lightning, his fellow travelers. The image transmitted to us is like that of Breughel’s blind men. The old men lean on each other, one’s face is deformed due to chronic swelling in his jaw, another drags his swollen feet; another, ahead of them, like a sleepwalker, a former cantor who has lost voice, trudges along. Covered in coarse straw mats, they crawl beside the wagons. These monstrous figures, nature’s castoffs, are the future portrait of what the handsome, strapping young men, newcomers to the trade, walking behind them, will become.
As a rule, the first paragraph of a Chekhov story gives us the essential data and tone of the story. We should not expect major surprises in the story, rather a mere germination of a seed that is already found in the overture. On the first page of “The Name-Day Party,” we learn that Olga Mikhailovna is pregnant, that she lives in a provincial mansion surrounded by vast gardens where, on that day, her husband’s Saint’s Day is being celebrated, and that the celebration has fatigued and irritated her. Everything suggests that the story will be told from her point of view. We also learn that she does not live in harmony with the world around her. She has just been served an eight-course meal, and the endless clamor that accompanied it has exhausted her to the point of fainting. We have the feeling that the society around her irritates her more than what could be considered natural. There appears in her reflections a tension that foreshadows hysteria and foretells a dramatic denouement. That tension is expressed within the dichotomy that always interested Chekhov: the confrontation between society and nature; the former represented by the behavior of the party guests, the latter by the son the woman carries in her womb. Olga Mikhailovna flees the party in the first paragraph to hide momentarily in a garden path where amid the smell of freshly cut hay and honey and the buzzing of bees she surrenders herself to the emotions of the tiny being she carries inside her womb so that they may take complete control over her. But this raptio in the middle of nature lasts only momentarily. Society prevails, and that place in her thoughts that was to be occupied by the child is invaded by a feeling of guilt for having abandoned her guests and by a marital quarrel, which is inevitable in all of Chekhov’s stories. Her husband has just railed against some recent reforms: trial by jury, freedom of the press, and the education of women—three victories won by liberal society over the autocracy. She disagrees with her husband’s position just to annoy him. And this fact brings us closer to the real source of her problems. The dilemma between nature and society finds a viable channel to express itself: the naked opposition between man and woman. Overcome by jealousy, the protagonist only notices her husband’s defects and surely magnifies them. Piotr Dmitrich’s affectation awakens a morbid hatred in her. But, is she as real a character as she seems? Does she truly live the enlightened ideas that she proclaims? Or does she merely take advantage of some abstract concepts, at moments such as this, in order to feel superior to her husband? Possibly. The fact is that we see something cold and possessive in her agitation, a blind desire to take control of men that renders her odious to us. Both are fed up with the party that began in the morning and will last until midnight. The drama unfolds throughout the seemingly never-ending hours that transpire during the festivities. The inability to speak, to communicate, begins to take control of her, until she can no longer withstand the pressure inside, and it spills out in a fit of near-madness. Resentment, spite, and rage triumph. The ending is tragic. Society prevails in the worst possible way over nature, the biological instinct. The couple, who during the party have played a complicated game of masquerade, end up destroying the unborn life. The original, the important, the essentially Chekhovian, is constituted by the construction of the story through a storm of details, almost all apparently trivial. A single act, two or three words spoken in passing, is enough to recreate an atmosphere and suggest a past. The trivial suddenly becomes important, significant.
When in “Peasants,” Nikolai Tchikildyeev, sick and despondent, arrives to his birthplace, he finds a dark, dirty, and miserable place that in no way corresponds to his nostalgia, where life in the village seemed radiant, beautiful, and tender. The initial silence is broken when his little daughter calls a cat and another girl, only eight years, the only human who receives them, exclaims:
“He can’t hear. He’s deaf. They gave him a beating.”
Everything has already been said! The blows that have burst the cat’s ear are sufficient to mark the space where Nikolai Tchikildyeev has arrived, and how bitter his days will be before death rescues him. The universe of cruelty is the same in a rustic peasant hut as in the opulent houses of the new bourgeoisie, like the one the protagonist inhabits in “A Woman’s Kingdom,” or the one belonging to the new rising class of merchants that appears in that extraordinary story, horror among horrors, titled “In the Ravine.” If a moral message can be inferred from the Chekhovian characters it is to resist succumbing to the mercilessness and vulgarity d
istilled by the domestic tyrants who populate the netherworlds where they are trapped. Confronting them is next to impossible. But we must resist, suffer, not yield, work, nor allow ourselves to be pulled under. If they achieve this, they will have won.
In a famous essay on Chekhov, written a few months before his death, Thomas Mann points out: “If references are to be made and praises bestowed, then I must certainly mention ‘A Tedious Tale,’ for it is my favorite among all Chekhov’s stories, an outstandingly fascinating work which for gentleness, sadness, and strangeness has no equal in the literary world.”17 This is a story that can be read from several perspectives, that remains open to interpretation by the reader, and that despite the warmth and pity that the author shows toward his creatures is but the agonizing portrait of a downfall. An old professor, the protagonist, discovers at the end of his days that no matter how noble his efforts to achieve something in life may have seemed, deep down his life has been meaningless; it differs in no way from that of Tolstoy’s insensitive Ivan Ilych. And as for the simplest question—“What is to be done?”—with which his young pupil, the only person in the world in whom he has taken any interest, confronts him, he cannot (or will not) but answer, “I don’t know, Katya. Upon my honor, I don’t know!”
As Chekhov’s health failed and the end was looming, his social ideas began to radicalize. He signed documents and protests, expressed solidarity with persecuted students; he distanced himself from Suvorin, his editor, his Maecenas, and until then his confidant and closest friend. In a particularly severe letter ending their relationship, he writes: “Indifference is a paralysis of the soul, a premature death.”
From a young age he was an admirer of Comte, a committed positivist. He once wrote, referring to the Gospel teachings of Tolstoy, that the peasant is turned into a compendium of all virtues: “Tolstoy’s morality no longer moves me. I don’t find it sympathetic deep inside my heart. Peasant blood runs in my veins. Don’t talk to me about the virtue of muzhiks! I have believed in progress since I was very young. Objective reflections and my sense of justice tell me that in electricity and in steam there is more love for man than in chastity, fasting, and denial of the flesh.”