Reading Chekhov in a Pandemic
I spent the last two years immersed, with varying degrees of obsessiveness, in Anton Chekhov’s stories and, to a lesser extent, his plays. I know I am in illustrious company – Tennessee Williams, for example, though he recognized their differences (Chekhov was, he said, “quiet and delicate” where he was loud and explosive), claimed that Chekhov’s plays had the greatest influence on him. For Salman Rushdie, Chekhov the storyteller, “master of loneliness and melancholy,” was a lifelong reference point; when ordered to go into hiding, he chose Chekhov’s first name as his last and had Joseph Conrad (a made-up name, too) supply the rest: “Joseph Anton.” My own infatuation with Chekhov is neither professional nor strategic. It began accidentally, as many of my most intense experiences do, triggered by a chance reference in Andrea Barrett’s exquisite novel, The Air We Breathe (2007), set in a sanatorium for patients suffering from tuberculosis, Mann’s Magic Mountain transferred to the Adirondacks. In conversation, one of these patients recommends Chekhov – he was a fellow sufferer, she points out, dying of tuberculosis in his forties, and the beauty of his work, she explains, is hard to pin down, a product of “the particular arrangement of sentences.”
I found that observation to be true, although often it wasn’t the construction of sentences so much as some little detail entirely on its own that would reel me in and jolt me into awareness, such as when Gurov, the protagonist of one of Chekhov’s best-known stories, “The Lady with the Pet Dog” (1899), suddenly feels his love for Anna Sergeyevna welling up in him — and a ridiculous, late-middle-age love it is, different from his previous affairs, one that will force him to make a commitment out of adultery — as he touches her shoulders, “warm and trembling,” which is also when he knows, right then and there, that he’ll never stop loving her. Or the splendid white teeth of the woman Lieutenant Klimov sees in a restaurant at the train station — infected with typhus, though he doesn’t know this yet, he thinks her smile is just about the most revolting thing he’s ever seen: “He could not understand how it was that the officer in the red cap could endure to be sitting beside her” (“Typhus,” 1887). Or the unforgettable descriptions of his beloved ward by the dying narrator of “A Boring Story” (1889) — Katya the eccentric ex-actress who laughs with her nostrils, not with her mouth, inhaling and exhaling with such unerring regularity that she sounds “as if she were playing the harmonica.” Or that devastating moment in Chekhov’s “Three Years” (1896) when Yulia Sergeyevna, recoiling from the caresses of a husband she never loved, draws the foot he has just covered with his kisses back “under her like a bird.”
As the weeks went by, my interest in Chekhov only grew. I graduated from Robert Payne’s translation, Forty Stories, to Fifty-Two Stories, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, and from there to whatever else I could obtain, including the appropriately titled Small Fry, newly translated by Stephen Pimenoff, a collection of the humorous sketches Chekhov wrote, conveyor-belt style, mostly for Nikolay Leykin’s weekly magazine Fragments, when he was in his 20s and kept busy by his medical practice. Two marvelous collections of Chekhov’s sparkling letters, now both out of print, became my constant companions — Simon Karlinksy’s delightfully opinionated Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought (1973), in which the notes are at times longer than the letters themselves, and the more staid, usefully comprehensive Penguin selection Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters (2004). I kept up my Chekhov regime for a variety of reasons — the tedium of the pandemic, of course, when the days of the week began to look like each other, as they also do for so many of Chekhov’s frustrated characters; disgust with the general state of the world; leaden weariness from teaching my classes, and meeting my students, mostly via Zoom.
Even now that some believe we have reached the tail end of the pandemic, I am still reading Chekhov. My most recent acquisition is Sakhalin Island (1895), Chekhov’s mesmerizing account of his three-month visit to Russia’s grimmest penal colony in the Pacific, where culture didn’t matter and one’s ability to write, as Chekhov drily observes, was “of absolutely no use to anybody.” Chekhov’s description of a world in which people had lost “all sense of warmth they did once have” struck me as so insistently real, so urgent that my own environment suddenly seemed fantastical by comparison. As I am writing these lines, cheery emails from my university pop up in my inbox advertising the “new tradition” of “Gear-up Fridays,” which would have us show our pride in our university by donning a cream-and-crimson baseball cap and matching sweatshirt.
Vladimir Nabokov once said that the dominant color in Chekhov’s world was grey, “a tint between the door of an old fence and that of a low cloud.” I think Chekhov would have agreed with that assessment: “Everything is grey,” he observed, on September 29, 1886, in a letter to Maria Kiselyova, one of the aspiring writers he had taken under his wing. He was trying to get through a depressing Moscow fall, made so much worse by having to watch his brother, Nikolay, a fellow sufferer from tuberculosis, spit up blood: “Life exclusively consists of horrors, squabbles, and banalities, sometimes all at once.” The poet Anna Akhmatova later used a similar adjective, “mud-colored,” for Chekhov’s fiction, acknowledging the soggy setting of many of his stories, in which the landscape seems poised between a winter that isn’t fully gone and a spring that won’t come.
[Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, soviet postcard, undated (collection of Christoph Irmscher)]
There is, of course, violent, unambivalent suffering in Chekhov’s stories, too, a form of despair that is black rather than grey, but even that often collides with and is rendered moot by the blank indifference or obliviousness of others. Think of the poor district doctor in “Enemies” (1887), who has just lost his only son to diphtheria and is called out in the middle of the night to listen to a rich man whine about his cheating wife. Or the freezing cabdriver in “Anguish” (1886) who must, for the sake of a meager fare, endure the drunken taunts of his passengers (“Are you cracked or something …?”) even as he is also mourning his son. Only his horse listens to him, her breath warming his hands. Hell is other people, as Sartre would say a few decades later.
But Chekhov doesn’t let us off the hook that easily. In many of his stories his characters live in a kind of everyday hell they have created by themselves, for themselves. Happiness, when it occurs, often means that you aren’t unhappy yet or that you have forgotten about the many others in the world who are currently unhappy: “Every happy man,” muses Ivan Ivanovich in Chekhov’s 1898 story “Gooseberries,” recalling his brother who became a farmer so that he could enjoy his own gooseberries, “should have someone with a little hammer at his door to knock and remind him that there are unhappy people, and that, however happy he may be, life will sooner or later show its claws, and some misfortune will befall him.”
Disconcertingly, misfortune will, for no reason, sometimes befall someone even after death, turning tragedy into posthumous comedy. In “Gusev” (1890), for example, the titular hero, Pavel Ivanich Gusev, a discharged soldier returning from Sakhalin Island, dies mid-ocean. Sewn up in a sack, weighed down by metal bars, his body is thrown into the water. (With some degree of alarm, Chekhov himself witnessed that way of discarding the dead when he sailed from Sakhalin for Ceylon in late 1890.) “He plunged rapidly to the bottom. Did he reach it? The sea, they say, is three miles deep at this point. Falling sixty or seventy feet, he started to fall more slowly, swaying rhythmically, as though hesitating, at the mercy of the currents, sliding sideways more quickly than he sank down.” Who is speaking here? Imagining the corpse’s descent as if some remnants of willpower were continuing to do their work even after death, Chekhov’s narrator appears to plunge into the ocean, too. Note the wildly funny description of the weird dance Gusev’s corpse performs, joined first by some astounded pilot-fish and then — the ultimate answer to the question as to where Gusev is headed — by the “dark body” of a shark. Gusev, unlucky in life, remains so even after death. In its stark simplicity, the explanation supplemented by the narrator (“This was a shark”) sounds as if he were reading from a primary school textbook. But even the shark, so scarily efficient in ripping the body bag “from head to foot,” doesn’t escape Chekhov’s ridicule: one of the metal bars falls out and hits the beast in the ribs before spiraling down to the ocean floor where now we know Gusev will never land, a failure even beyond death.
Chekhov spent most of his adult life in terrible health, rocked by a litany of physical problems, from chest pains that kept him up at night to inflamed hemorrhoids that made it difficult for him to sit. He was, he worried in a letter to Maria Kiselyova (September 21, 1886), gradually turning into a dried dragonfly, dying while still alive. But he carried on — indeed, his principal theme isn’t death, but, in Nabokov’s brilliant phrase, the “survival of the weakest.” His early stories, written for Leykin’s Fragments, offer wry insights into the world of low-level clerks or bureaucrats, myopic men and, sometimes, women, reined in by the limited sphere of their little lives: a postal clerk hoping for a promotion, a sexually deprived pharmacist’s wife, a helplessly intoxicated provincial secretary. A story like “The Decoration” (published in January 1884) could have been written by O. Henry, except that it’s less overtly sentimental, better conceived, more tightly timed, and funnier overall than anything I know of in O. Henry’s work. Lev Pustyakov, a teacher at a military high school, borrows a medal of the Imperial Order of St. Stanislav from his neighbor to impress the women at a formal dinner. To his horror, he finds seated among the guests his colleague, the French teacher Tremblant, who, of course, would know that Pustyakov had never received such a medal. Afraid to be exposed and fired, Pustyakov keeps his hand over the unearned medal, which also means that he can’t partake of the food (but oh, how appealing that soup smells!). It is only close to the end of the dinner that Lev realizes that Tremblant has been doing the exact same thing, too — there, on his colleague’s chest, revealed accidentally when Tremblant grabs a bottle of wine, gleams another false medal, the Order of St. Anna (an even greater fraud than Pustyakov’s, maybe, since it’s higher in importance than the St. Stanislav).
Chekhov’s heart breaks for such stunted lives, for those who, intellectually, emotionally, professionally, physically, always fall short. One of my favorite stories, “Neighbors” (1892), perfectly epitomizes the sympathy he felt for those not cut out to be heroes in life. It’s a deceptively simple tale. The situation is this: the beautiful, vivacious Zinaida, “Zina,” for short, a feminist, has run away from home to live with the much older Grigory Vlasich, a self-declared freethinker who comes with considerable baggage (he is separated, though not divorced, from his wife). Zina’s unexpected departure leaves her family — her brother, Pyotr Mikhailych Ivashin, and her mother, Anna Nikolaevna Ivashina — bereft and struggling to find meaning in life. Anna declines all food and takes to bed; Pyotr wanders around aimlessly, vaguely conscious that he’s expected to do something.
But that’s not easy for him. Overweight, short of breath though he’s only 27, Pyotr is trapped in a life of exceeding dullness. When a messenger delivers a letter from Zina, Anna refuses to read it and Pyotr rips it to pieces — capable of bold action when there’s nothing at stake — and yells at the poor messenger: “Say there’ll be no reply!” When Pyotr steps outside, even the land he owns seems to be holding its breath: “In the fields it was hot and still, as before rain.” A brilliant, characteristically spare Chekhovian sentence that makes the outside a mirror of a character’s indecisive inside. As he explained in his letters to Maxim Gorky (January 3 and September 3, 1899), Chekhov hated excessive personification (“the sea breathes” or “the steppe basks” rather than “the sun set” or “it grew dark”) or sentences weighed down by superfluous modifiers and irrelevant details (“A tall, narrow-chested, red bearded man of medium height sat down noiselessly” instead of “A man sat down on the grass”). By contrast, to say that the fields were “hot and still, as before rain” doesn’t dictate the emotion as much guide the reader toward it, or toward something that’s still to come.
Yet Pyotr Ivashin, to be sure, is no Anton Chekhov. He lets his overactive mind run riot. Plagued by visions of what Zina and Vlasich might be doing with each other (“two self-satisfied liberals, kissing”), he pushes himself to ride over to Vlasich’s estate, imagining how he’ll slap him, insult him, challenge him to a duel, whip him. As he gets closer, the downpour finally comes: “Big raindrops splash on the birches and the grass … there was a smell of wet soil and poplars.” (Scents — of grass, soil, hay, flowers, trees — are always of paramount importance in a Chekhov story). Once he’s there, Pyotr finds that, confusingly, he likes Vlasich perhaps just as much as he hates him — a fitting detail in a story in which all feelings are complicated and nothing ever gets more than half-done: Zina’s so-called elopement takes her only as far as a neighbor’s house; Vlasich’s radicalism consists in putting copies of Origin of Species on his guests’ nightstands and writing long, pointless letters; and Pyotr’s selfless concern for his sister’s welfare might not be unrelated to the fact that he, too, is attracted to her. In the end, what else is there for Pyotr to do but sit down and eat, not gooseberries, but a bowl of strawberries offered by his sister? After which he rides home, thunder rumbling in the distance, knowing that he has done nothing about the situation or, for that matter, life in general. “It seemed to him it could not be set right.”
Keeping such stories in mind, translator Robert Payne lamented the “endless difficulties” in making Chekhov come alive in English today. “It is not only that he speaks in the manner of his time; he is continually describing a way of life which has vanished from the earth.” But is this really true? It’s certainly possible, as Edmund Wilson did in his strangely anodyne preface to the Doubleday edition of Chekhov’s Peasants and Other Stories (1956), to reduce the world of Chekhov’s stories to a specific historical moment, that of a “feudal society attempting to modernize itself” at the time when no one’s ready yet for such a transition. But are our lives today, in which a million different things regularly interpose themselves between our plans and our actions, so vastly different from those of Pyotr or Vlasich or Zina? Especially during the first year when COVID kept us inside our houses, it was all too easy to find reasons not to do something, to stay at home, since clearly that was the safest, wisest thing to do.
Payne reminds us — as does Janet Malcolm in her touching little book on Reading Chekhov (2001) — that Chekhov was no revolutionary. The descendant of serfs, himself just one generation away from slavery, peasant blood still flowing in his veins, he showed no obvious interest in fixing social problems. He was neither liberal nor conservative, he told his editor Suvorin; the only ideology that mattered to him was being a “free artist” — if, as he added with characteristic irony, God (whom he didn’t actually believe in) had “given me the strength to be one” (to Alexey Pleshsheyev, October 4, 1888). Yet the more you learn about Chekhov — and his letters are an impeccable guide to his life — the more impressed you are by his basic decency and kindness. He was an unreliable, restless lover but wouldn’t hesitate to berate his problematic brother Alexander for his “shocking, completely unprecedented treatment” of his common-law wife (January 2, 1889). At Melikhovo, his family’s residence in the country outside of Moscow, he bought horses from famine-stricken farmers so that they wouldn’t have to slaughter them, but he also saved the lives of countless mice, plucking them from their traps and carrying them back to the woods (to Suvorin, May 28, 1892). Perennially short of cash (even his pockets had consumption, he liked to joke), his letters to his editors awash with request for loans, he nevertheless treated thousands of sick peasants for free, funded the construction of local schools and hospitals, and bought a large number of books for libraries, including the one in Taganrog, the remote port town on the Sea of Azov where he was born. “Help the poor,” ended a letter to his family, written a few years before his death, in which he left instructions on how to distribute his property (to Maria Chekhova, August 3, 1901).
Chekhov was a capable physician, equipped, since his medical school days, with a remarkable ability to ferret out the most intimate details about other people’s lives, as his classmate Grigory Rossolimo recalled. His patients adored him, even the little ones. There’s an account of him arriving for a rehearsal of his play Ivanov with his pockets filled with mechanical toys, gifts from children he had treated. But the center of his life remained his writing, an emotional necessity for him even as he rushed to meet the deadlines set by his editors. In his play The Seagull (1898), one of his alter egos (they are never perfect ones, always flawed in one way or another), the writer Boris Trigorin drifts through life notebook in hand, always looking for new material. Like his creator, Trigorin is not aiming to change the world; he’s racing to keep up with it: “I get left further and further behind like a peasant who’s missed his train.”
If Chekhov wasn’t an overtly political writer, if he rarely forgot that he needed to get his works past the Tsar’s censor, he was still confident that his readers would understand the messages he had tucked away between the lines. If not, he told Alexey Pleshcheyev, “I can’t bite any harder than a flea” (October 10 or 11, 1888). The authorities certainly felt Chekhov’s bite right from the beginning of his career; what would have been his very first book, a collection of satirical sketches titled The Prank, was barred from publication in 1882, even though the stories had individually survived scrutiny when they first came out in Moscow and St. Petersburg journals. Wrote Chekhov, “According to Moscow’s notions, all my best stories uproot the foundations” (to Leykin, April 1, 1885). But Chekhov certainly was no Marxist — or a Marxist only in the sense that his last publisher was called Alfred Marx (he made that deliciously bad joke in a letter to Ivan Orlov, February 22, 1899). For him, life didn’t willingly surrender to the rules we might want to impose on it. Consider those famously frustrating open endings that leave us wondering if, for example, Gurov and Anna will stay together or if, as the last page of “Three Years” hints, Yulia will eventually end up with the handsome, dark-haired Yartsev rather than her dull husband Laptev: “What,” the latter wonders, along with the reader, “is in store for us in the future?”
Happy endings are for the bourgeoisie, Chekhov observed — the perfect reassurance to the capitalist, who, comforted by the fact that one can “be a beast and yet be happy” (to Suvorin, April 13, 1895), can, with a good conscience, go on hoarding money. But Chekhov also eschews the fully tragic ending, with its searing sense of finality. Whatever sense of doom you get in his stories is mitigated by the awareness that most everyone else is experiencing, or will soon, experience, something similar — perfect wisdom for pandemic times. Left alone in his room, Chekhov might have often felt like a “frail little boat on a great ocean” (to Suvorin, June 9, 1889), subject to terrifying nightmares “of huge, slippery stones” and ice-cold rivers (to Dmitry Grigorovich, February 12, 1887). But during the day his stories, each of them a small, new universe, allowed him to keep company with an ever-expanding cast of characters of his own invention. That’s why he could assure his readers that he wasn’t a gloomy person at all, that, in fact, as a writer, he was “always in a good mood when I’m writing” (to Lidia Avilova, October 6, 1897).
We know that, as a child, Chekhov loved disguises and pranks; as an adult, he would never exempt even himself from his wicked sense of humor, as his letters, sparkling with wit and self-irony, prove. A suitable title for his first collection of stories? Here you go: “Buy this Book or You’ll Get a Punch in the Mouth!” (to Viktor Bilibin, February 1, 1886). A novel by the popular Polish writer Henryk Sienkiewicz? “Cloying and uncomfortable, like a slobbery kiss” (to Suvorin, April 13, 1895). When Suvorin mocked him for his multiple affairs, he shot back, invoking the famously desirous Russian Empress: “I’m about as much like Catherine the Great as a hazelnut is like a battleship” (January 21, 1895). No wonder that at parties, as Natalia Gubareva, Maria Kiselyova’s sister, reported, Chekhov always made the funniest jokes — always, as only the most gifted comedians can, without cracking a smile himself.
Even as his health worsened, Chekhov continued to live his life to the fullest. In his last story, “The Bride” (also known as “The Fiancée,” 1903), that zest asserts itself in unexpected ways — and in a manner that takes us beyond the passivity that freezes everyone in “Neighbors” and other stories. In some provincial Russian town, the members of the Shumin family – an intimidating grandmother, her intimidated daughter-in-law, and her restless granddaughter Nadya – subsist in a prolonged state of paralysis. Nadya’s mother turns to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, finding vicarious fulfillment in reading about the tragic lives of others, while Nadya has difficulty sleeping through the night. Engaged to Andrey Andreyich, a good man of limited intelligence and talents, Nadya has a fully furnished house waiting for her, her nuptial nest, in which a portrait of a nude woman clutching a broken vase disconcertingly beckons from one of the walls.
But the consumptive Alexander “Sasha” Timofeyich, back in town for a visit, awakens Nadya from her lethargy. Adopted into the family when he was little, with the understanding that he had artistic promise, Sasha is an unlikely mentor. Disheveled, dark-skinned, with long, bony fingers, he is as physically unprepossessing as he is professionally unsuccessful (his artistic aspirations having ended in the Moscow lithography shop where he now toils). But his words have a seductive effect on Nadya. Appalled by her family’s torpidity (“no one ever does anything,” in Sasha’s description), she proves receptive to his poetically enhanced visions of a better world, in which there will be no serfs and no masters and everyone has to work for a living: “not one stone will be left standing, in this town of yours everything will be shaken to its foundations, and everything will be changed.” Choking back her tears, Nadya joins Sasha when he departs, and she begins a new life in St. Petersburg.
[Chekhov, fair copy of “The Bride,” 1902-1903. V. I. Lenin State Library (now Russian State Library). Soviet postcard, 1975 (Collection of Christoph Irmscher)]
Sasha is yet another one of Chekhov’s imperfect fictional doubles — terminally ill like his author, he is outspoken the way Chekhov never was. His influence lingers even as, close to the end of the story, homesick Nadya returns to the Shumins. (Life, for Chekhov, is never without its depressing twists and turns.) It is here, wandering past identical-looking houses and grey fences, that Nadya hears that, far away on the banks of the Volga, where he had gone to seek relief from his coughing, Sasha has died: an amazing instance of an ailing author, at the end of his career, saying goodbye to himself, killing off the character he had created to represent him. (I do think that to Chekhov this was a serious matter, that he hadn’t created Sasha to mock himself, as V.S. Pritchett and others have asserted.)
The news of Sasha’s death is enough to make Nadya pack her bags again. She is no one’s bride, just as Chekhov for most of his life — until he met Olga Knipper and consented to marry her in a wedding to which no one was invited — wasn’t anyone’s groom. Nadya reminds us why Chekhov is the perfect writer for our current moment: aware and tolerant of life’s ingrained inertia, he pushes us to at least challenge it. True, when we reach the end of “The Bride,” the revolution Sasha predicted hasn’t happened. But Nadya’s irrepressible hunger for life, the first step toward any action of significance, her wish to experience a world beyond the limits of her confinement, ensures that things won’t remain the way they were. For stretching out before Nadya’s inner eye is “a new, vast, infinitely spacious life,” a life which the dying Chekhov knew would no longer be his, even as, in his last story, he allowed his character to glimpse it, just as he now allows us, having reached almost the end of the pandemic’s dark tunnel, to glimpse it: a future that, despite inevitable setbacks, will be full of opportunities, finally, yes, to set things right.
[Translations are by Rosamund Bartlett and Anthony Phillips, Constance Garrett, Michael Henry Heim, Robert Payne, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, and Brian Reeve.]