In The Duel, Chekhov’s art becomes ‘‘polyphonic,’’ though not in the Dostoevskian sense. It does not maintain the independence of conflicting ‘‘idea-images’’ or ‘‘idea-voices’’ in ‘‘a dialogic communion between consciousnesses,’’ to use Mikhail Bakhtin’s terms in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. As Bakhtin writes:
The idea [in Dostoevsky] lives not in one person’s isolated individual consciousness – if it remains there only, it degenerates and dies. The idea begins to live, that is, to take shape, to develop, to find and renew its verbal expression, to give birth to new ideas, only when it enters into genuine dialogic relationships with other ideas, with the ideas of others. Human thought becomes genuine thought, that is, an idea, only under conditions of living contact with another and alien thought, a thought embodied in someone else’s voice, that is, in someone else’s consciousness expressed in discourse. At that point of contact between voice-consciousnesses the idea is born and lives. In Chekhov it is exactly the opposite: the idea enters into no relationship with the ideas of others; each consciousness is isolated and impenetrable; there is a polyphony of voices but no dialogue; there is compassion but no communion. Chekhov became the master of this protean, quizzical form of narrative, with its radical undercutting of all intellectual positions. The Duel begins and ends at sea.
The Story of an Unknown Man is one of the less well-known of Chekhov’s works. The title has been mistranslated into English as An Anonymous Story . In fact, the first-person narrator, far from being anonymous, has not just one name but two. But though he began with commitment to a revolutionary cause, and ends saying: ‘‘One would like to play a prominent, independent, noble role; one would like to make history,’’ he knows he is fated to do nothing, to pass from this world without leaving a trace, to remain ‘‘unknown.’’ Chekhov began work on the story in 1888, at the same time as The Steppe, but gave it up as too political. In the version he finished four years later, the politics have thinned out to almost nothing. The narrator, based on an actual person, is a former naval officer turned radical, who gets himself hired as a servant in the house of a rich young man named Orlov in order to spy on his father, a well-known elder statesman. At one point he even has a chance to assassinate the old man, but nothing comes of it. The result of all his spying is not action but total inaction. The ideas and ideals that are mentioned never get defined and play no part in the story. There is talk of freedom, of Turgenev’s heroes, but it all borders on absurdity, as do Orlov’s feasts of irony with his cronies. What interested Chekhov was the ambiguous position of the ‘‘servant,’’ who lives as if invisibly with Orlov and his mistress, is there but not there, overhears their most intimate conversations and quarrels, becomes involved in their lives to the point of falling in love with the rejected lady, and all the while is not what he seems.
Central to the story is the passionate and transgressive letter in which the ‘‘servant’’ exposes himself to Orlov, denouncing his own life as well as his unsuspecting master’s. He knows that he himself is terminally ill, and this ineluctable fact has altered his radical ideas or simply done away with them. His letter ends as a plea for life:
Why are we worn out? Why do we, who start out so passionate, brave, noble, believing, become totally bankrupt by the age of thirty or thirty-five? Why is it that one is extinguished by consumption, another puts a bullet in his head, a third seeks oblivion in vodka, cards, a fourth, in order to stifle fear and anguish, cynically tramples underfoot the portrait of his pure, beautiful youth? Why is it that, once fallen, we do not try to rise, and, having lost one thing, we do not seek another? Why?
Chekhov’s depiction of the dissolution of society goes beyond and even against the political: it is an exploration of human deception and betrayal, of human insubstantiality. The dying man cries out: ‘‘I want terribly to live, I want our life to be holy, high, and solemn, like the heavenly vault.’’ But his life turns out to be tawdry, mean, empty. In his final conversation with Orlov, he poses an unanswerable question: ‘‘I do believe in the purposefulness and necessity of what happens around us, but what does that necessity have to do with me? Why should my ‘I’ perish?’’ At which point the unhearing Orlov shows him to the door.
Though he denied it, Chekhov constantly drew on his own life for his fiction. That is especially true in his portraits of women. They were sometimes quite vindictive and brought pained or angry protests from their real-life counterparts. Others are more complex and compassionate, as in the last two short novels in this collection, which, like so many of his briefer works, are love stories, or stories about the failure to love. The two heroines of Three Years, the young beauty Yulia Sergeevna and the edgy, unattractive intellectual ‘‘new woman’’ Rassudina (her name comes from the Russian rassudok, ‘‘reason’’), were drawn in part from two women, Lika Mizinova and Olga Kundasova, who loved Chekhov all their lives. There are other autobiographical elements in the story. The mercantile milieu of the hero’s childhood, the strictly religious father, the beatings, the gloom of the warehouse, are Chekhov’s experience. Minor characters and incidents also come from Chekhov’s circle and his life in Moscow.
The hero, Alexei Laptev, thirty-five years old like his author, a merchant’s son declassed by university education but, as certain scenes make clear, not educated enough, is caught between worlds. His story is a variation on the theme of Beauty and the Beast, as Vladimir Kataev has said. It begins with the lovelorn Laptev recalling
long Moscow conversations in which he himself had taken part still so recently – conversations about how it was possible to live without love, how passionate love was a psychosis, how there was finally no such thing as love, but only physical attraction between the sexes – all in the same vein; he remembered and thought sadly that if he were now asked what love was, he would be at a loss to answer.
Other definitions of nonlove are given as the story unfolds: the brother-in-law Panaurov’s (‘‘In every person’s skin sit microscopic iron strips which contain currents. If you meet an individual whose currents are parallel to your own, there’s love for you’’); Yulia Sergeevna’s (‘‘You know, I didn’t marry Alexei for love. Before, I used to be stupid, I suffered, I kept thinking I’d ruined his life and mine, but now I see there’s no need for any love, it’s all nonsense’’); Yartsev’s (‘‘Of course, we’re not in love with each other, but I think that . . . that makes no difference. I’m glad I can give her shelter and peace and the possibility of not working, in case she gets sick, and it seems to her that if she lives with me, there will be more order in my life, and that under her influence, I’ll become a great scholar’’). But Laptev finds that he has simply fallen in love, passionately and absurdly, sitting all night in ecstasy under a forgotten parasol.
The decay of the Moscow merchant class, which some critics take to be the real subject of the story, is a secondary theme, sketched in broad strokes; extensive sociological documentary in the manner of Zola was not Chekhov’s way. At the center of the story is Yulia Sergeevna. She is a provincial girl, she rarely speaks, she has no fashionable ideas, and she can hardly even explain why she accepted Laptev’s proposal without loving him. Chekhov follows this exchange of love and nonlove and its surprising reversals over the three years of the story.
Three Years is filled with striking details, a complex interweaving of impressions, including visionary moments such as Yartsev’s dream of a barbarian invasion and an all-engulfing fire (Russia’s past or her future?), and Laptev’s meditations in the lunar solitude of the garden, when he recalls his far-off, cheerless boyhood in that same garden, hears lovers whispering and kissing in the next yard, and is strangely stirred:
He went out to the middle of the yard and, unbuttoning his shirt on his chest, looked at the moon, and he fancied that he would now order the gate to be opened, go out and never come back there again; his heart was sweetly wrung by the foretaste of freedom, he laughed joyfully and imagined what a wonderful, poetic, and
maybe even holy life it could be . . .
But the final moment of near-revelation is not an imaginary one. It is the last image Chekhov grants us of Yulia Sergeevna, as Laptev watches her walking by herself: ‘‘She was thinking about something, and on her face there was a sad, charming expression, and tears glistened in her eyes. She was no longer the slender, fragile, pale-faced girl she once had been, but a mature, beautiful, strong woman.’’ This image of all that eludes possession hangs suspended without commentary at the end of the story.
During 1896, which was to be his last full year at Melikhovo, Chekhov wrote only two works of fiction: ‘‘The House with the Mezzanine: An Artist’s Story’’ and My Life: A Provincial’s Story. The provisional titles he gave them – ‘‘My Fiancée’’ and ‘‘My Marriage’’ – suggest the closeness of their themes in his mind. Both are ironic. My Life is the most saturated of these five short novels in the realia of Chekhov’s life, from his childhood in Taganrog and from his four years on the estate. Taganrog gave him the provincial town, the business of snaring songbirds, the housepainter Radish, the butcher Prokofy, and the nickname ‘‘Small Profit,’’ which had been pinned on his brother Alexander. Melikhovo gave him the derelict estate of Dubechnya, the incursion of the railways, the thousand details of the building trades, the trials of farming and village life, a close knowledge of peasants, the construction and consecration of the schoolhouse. And life gave him the three women, three variations on failed love, who are central to the narrator’s story. It is a summa of Chekhov’s world.
He described My Life as a portrayal of the provincial intelligentsia. The social ideas it embodies had been in the air for two decades in Russia: the Populists’ idea of going to the land, and the Tolstoyan ideas of radical simplification, the virtues of honest labor, and the rejection of class distinctions. Misail Poloznev, the narrator, is a young man who rebels against the deadly dullness of provincial life by putting some of those ideas into practice. His story tests them against the complexities of human reality: the uprooting force of modernization embodied in the successful railway constructor Dolzhikov; the collapsing aristocracy represented by Mrs. Cheprakov and her degenerate son; the actualities of the peasants’ life and their relations with the ‘‘masters,’’ which are far from Populist and Tolstoyan idealization.
Chekhov had been ‘‘deeply moved’’ and ‘‘possessed’’ by Tolstoy’s ideas in the 1880s, as he wrote to Suvorin in 1894. But after his trip to Sakhalin, he gradually abandoned them. He told Suvorin:
Maybe it’s because I’ve given up smoking, but Tolstoy’s moral philosophy has ceased to move me; down deep I’m hostile to it, which is of course unfair. I have peasant blood flowing in my veins, and I’m not the one to be impressed with peasant virtues . . . War is an evil and the court system is an evil, but it doesn’t follow that I should wear bast shoes and sleep on a stove alongside the hired hand and his wife . . .
My Life has been seen as both an advocacy and a send-up of Tolstoyan ‘‘simplification.’’ It is neither. ‘‘Chekhov does not debunk Tolstoy,’’ writes Donald Rayfield, ‘‘but strips his ideas of sanctimony.’’ Misail, who is the instrument of that process, is an unlikely hero – slow, passive, not very articulate, tolerant except in his revolt against philistine deadness and his search for an alternative way of life. He persists, but in solitude, not in some ‘‘rural Eden’’ of saved humanity. He accepts the consequences of his choice, which Count Tolstoy never had to consider.
The story is symmetrically structured, ending with a final confrontation between Misail and his father that matches the opening scene. It is preceded by another of those uncanny moments in Chekhov. The housepainter Radish has just told Misail’s friend, the young Dr. Blagovo (his name means ‘‘goodness’’), that he will not find the Kingdom of Heaven. ‘‘No help for it,’’ the doctor jokes, ‘‘somebody has to be in hell as well.’’ At those words, something suddenly happens to the consciousness of Misail, who has been listening; he has a waking dream, the recapitulation of an earlier episode, but this time verging on the recognition that hell is exactly where they are.
In 1899, Chekhov wrote to his friend Dr. Orlov, a colleague from the district of Melikhovo: ‘‘I have no faith in our intelligentsia . . . I have faith in individuals, I see salvation in individuals scattered here and there, all over Russia, be they intellectuals or peasants, for they’re the ones who really matter, though they are few.’’ Misail’s victory is personal and solitary. The ambiguity of his nickname, ‘‘Small Profit’’ – is it ironic or not? – is characteristic of Chekhov’s mature vision. In his refusal to force the contradictions of his stories to a resolution, Chekhov seems to come to an impasse. Interestingly, of these five short novels, the last three end with a man left with an orphaned girl on his hands, a being who, beyond all intellectual disputes and human betrayals, simply needs to be cared for. And we may remember the moment in The Duel when the deacon, in a comical reverie, imagines himself as a bishop, intoning the bishop’s liturgical prayer: ‘‘Look down from heaven, O God, and behold and visit this vineyard which Thy right hand hath planted.’’ The quality of Chekhov’s attention is akin to prayer. Though he was often accused of being indifferent, and sometimes claimed it himself, that is the last thing he was.
Richard Pevear
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
PHILLIP CALLOW, Chekhov: The Hidden Ground: A Biography, Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 1998.
JULIE W. DE SHERBININ, Chekhov and Russian Religious Culture, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 1997. An excellent study of an essential and often ignored aspect of Chekhov’s artistic vision.
MICHAEL FINKE, Metapoesis: The Russian Tradition from Pushkin to Chekhov, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 1995.
VERA GOTTLIEB and PAUL ALLEN, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Chekhov , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2000. Essays by various hands on Chekhov’s fiction and plays.
ROBERT LOUIS JACKSON, ed., Reading Chekhov’s Text, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 1993. An interesting collection of recent critical studies.
SIMON KARLINSKY, ed., Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary, translated by Michael Henry Heim, commentary by Simon Karlinsky, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 1997.
VLADIMIR KATAEV, If Only We Could Know: An Interpretation of Chekhov , translated by Harvey Pitcher, Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 2002. An important new work by a leading Russian Chekhov scholar.
AILEEN M. KELLY, Views from the Other Shore: Essays on Herzen, Chekhov, and Bakhtin, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1999. Studies by a reputed intellectual historian.
CATHY POPKIN, The Pragmatics of Insignificance, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 1993.
V. S. PRITCHETT, Chekhov: A Spirit Set Free, Random House, New York, 1988. A critical biography by an English master of the short story and longtime admirer of Chekhov.
DONALD RAYFIELD, Chekhov: A Life, Henry Holt, New York, 1997.
The most complete and detailed biography of Chekhov in English to date.
———, Understanding Chekhov, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI, 1999. An update of Rayfield’s Chekhov: The Evolution of His Art, Elek Books Ltd., London, 1975.
SAVELY SENDEROVICH and MUNIR SENDICH, eds., Anton Chekhov Rediscovered , Russian Language Journal, East Lansing, MI, 1988. A collection including some fine recent studies and a comprehensive bibliography.
LEV SHESTOV, Chekhov and Other Essays, translation anonymous, new introduction by Sidney Monas, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI, 1966. Essays by a major Russian thinker of the twentieth century, including ‘‘Creation from the Void,’’ written on the occasion of Chekhov’s death in 1904 and still one of the most penetrating interpretations of his art.
CHRONOLOGY
HISTORICAL EVENTS
Alexander II (tsar since 1855) following a reformist policy, in complete opposition to his predecessor, the reactionary Nicholas I. Port of Vladivo
stok founded to serve Russia’s recent annexations (from China). Huge investment in railway building begins.
Emancipation of the serfs (February), the climax of the tsar’s program of reform. While his achievement had great moral and symbolic significance, many peasants felt themselves cheated by the terms of the complex emancipation statute. Outbreak of American Civil War. Unification of Italy. Bismarck prime minister of Prussia. 1860s and 1870s: ‘‘Nihilism’’ – rationalist philosophy skeptical of all forms of established authority – becomes widespread among young radical intelligentsia in Russia.
Polish rebellion. Poland incorporated into Russia. Itinerant movement formed by young artists, led by Ivan Kramskoi and later joined by Ivan Shishkin: drawing inspiration from the Russian countryside and peasant life, they are also concerned with taking art to the people.
The first International. Establishment of the Zemstva, organs of self-government and a significant liberal influence in tsarist Russia. Legal reforms do much towards removing class bias from the administration of justice. Trial by jury instituted and a Russian bar established. Russian colonial expansion in Central Asia (to 1868).
Slavery formally abolished in U.S.A.
Young nobleman Dmitry Karakozov tries to assassinate the tsar. Radical journals The Contemporary and The Russian Word suppressed. Austro-Prussian war.
St. Petersburg section of Moscow Slavonic Benevolent Committee founded (expansion of Pan-Slav movement). Rimsky-Korsakov’s symphonic poem Sadko .
HISTORICAL EVENTS
Chemist D. I. Mendeleyev wins international fame for his periodic table of chemical elements based on atomic weight.
The Complete Short Novels Page 2