‘The Letter’, which was published in April 1887 (this time under his own name), is one of Chekhov’s many stories about the clergy. Having grown up in a typically devout merchant family, Chekhov knew the rites of the Russian Orthodox Church backwards. He was made to sing in church choirs when a boy and also came into close contact with priests through his pious father, whose idea of happiness was attending every possible religious service. Chekhov largely lost his faith as an adult, but his depictions of religious figures are almost unfailingly sympathetic, as in this story. It was ‘The Letter’ which first drew Tchaikovsky’s attention to Chekhov—he had it read aloud to him twice, because it made such an impression. The composer wrote an admiring letter to the author soon afterwards, and later came to visit Chekhov at home in Moscow, leaving his cigarette case behind. Chekhov’s admiration for Tchaikovsky was reflected in his dedication of his next short story collection to the composer.
‘Fortune’ was the first story Chekhov wrote after returning from his travels in the south of Russia in 1887. He had been invited to write a story for one of the Petersburg ‘thick journals’, and he immediately knew that he wanted to make his literary debut with a story about the steppe, the landscape that had entranced him from the time when he was a small boy growing up on its edges. Chekhov undertook the journey in the spring of 1887 in order not to ‘dry out’; he wanted to resurrect in his memory things grown dim, so that his writing might become more vivid. Before he summoned up the courage to start writing ‘The Steppe’ for the prestigious literary journal the Northern Messenger, he experimented with ‘Fortune’. As he explained to a friend, the story was about ‘the steppe: the plain, night-time, a pale dawn in the east, a flock of sheep and three human figures talking about treasure’. Chekhov was not one for false modesty, and he proclaimed ‘Fortune’ to be the best story he had written at that time; it was to remain one of his favourite pieces of prose. The story certainly scored an immediate success with his readers: his brother in St Petersburg told him that issues of the newspaper it had been published in were still being passed from hand to hand in the city’s cafés a week after publication, and were getting very worn.
‘Gusev’ was written on board the steamer carrying Chekhov home from the Siberian island of Sakhalin in 1890, and completed in Ceylon (Sri Lanka). No other story by Chekhov has such an exotic location or such a surreal ending: witnessed by a shoal of pilot fish, the corpse of the deceased peasant soldier Gusev is depicted sinking to the seabed, about to be consumed by a shark.
The euphoria which Chekhov felt at the purchase of his first property, a small country estate outside Moscow, led him to give in to the demands of his former editor Nikolay Leikin for some more comic stories. ‘Fish Love’, published in Fragments in the summer of 1892, was one of the results. Set in a pond outside a dacha, it was clearly inspired by Chekhov’s own acquisition of a pond which, as a keen angler, he immediately filled with fish. The sophistication of his comic writing in the 1890s when compared to his work of the 1880s is immediately apparent. Particularly amusing—in the light of the criticism that his own work attracted—is the attitude to literary pessimism demonstrated in this story.
‘The Black Monk’ (1894) is another story which reflects Chekhov’s life at his country estate in Melikhovo. But although he was a keen gardener, readers should be wary of identifying the author with the character of the horticulturalist Pesotsky in the story. This is one of his most ambiguous works, in which Chekhov seems to subvert the reader’s expectations at every turn. None of the three main characters seems to fit the images projected onto them by the others.
Chekhov filled his writing with characters from all walks of Russian life. ‘Rothschild’s Violin’ (1894) features a Jew, and is a sensitive exploration of Russian anti-Semitism. With its main character a coffin-maker who calculates that being dead will be more profitable than being alive, it is also one of Chekhov’s most darkly humorous stories.
‘The Student’ (1894) is set in a provincial Russian landscape, but was written in the Crimea. This story, about a seminary student who suffers a temporary lapse of faith on Good Friday, the bleakest day in the Russian Orthodox year, was regarded by Chekhov as one of his most polished works, and also his favourite story. A parable about the power of art, it ends on a note of epiphany, its final, deliberately long sentence of exaltation definitively proving, in Chekhov’s opinion, that he was not the cold-blooded pessimist his critics made him out to be.
Chekhov wrote ‘The House with the Mezzanine’ (1896) under the inspiration of visits to numerous dilapidated country estates, which were a source of continual poetic inspiration for him. It is an example of a story in which he pits opposing points of view: that of an indolent landscape artist and of a serious young woman who has dedicated her life to educating the peasantry. Chekhov was sympathetic to both. He valued time and leisure as vital to human happiness, aware that absorption in work can obscure one’s ability to see, but he also highly respected the commitment of idealistic young people, and himself built three schools in the area where he lived.
‘In the Cart’ (1897) was written during Chekhov’s nostalgic months in Nice, where he had gone in an attempt to preserve his deteriorating health. He knew only too well the miserable conditions provincial schoolteachers had to work under. Not only was he well acquainted with several local teachers in Melikhovo (one came to help in the decorating of Chekhov’s house, in order to supplement his meagre income), but he worked variously as a school trustee, examiner, and inspector in the Melikhovo area.
‘The Man in a Case’ (1898), ‘Gooseberries’ (1898), and ‘About Love’ (1898) are a trilogy of stories linked by the figures of two men out on a summer hunting trip. All three have to do with limitations, imposed from within and without, and the theme of freedom. The trilogy becomes gradually more lyrical and elegiac in tone, with the satirical story that Burkin tells about the man in the case providing a sharp contrast with the lyrical night-time scene which frames it. Chekhov also includes a very subtle visual joke in ‘The Man in a Case’. At the beginning of the story Ivan Ivanych, the vet, is described as tall and thin with a long moustache, while at the very end we learn that the teacher Burkin is short, fat, and bald, with a beard that reaches to his waist. Chekhov leaves it up to the readers who notice these small details to conjure up the humorous image of the two friends strolling through the countryside together with their hunting dogs.
Chekhov’s most famous story, ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ (1899), was completed just after he had moved into his new house in Yalta, where it is set. It is a classic example of a story in which there is an open ending, raising questions about love and marriage to which there are no easy answers. Like ‘About Love’ this story also provides an oblique commentary on the moral ideas preached by Tolstoy in Anna Karenina.
With the touching story ‘At Christmas Time’ (1900), Chekhov returned to the style of his earlier writing. It was written at the request of the editor of the Petersburg Newspaper (for which Chekhov had last written in 1887), and so the language, word-length, and topic were adjusted accordingly. The story is much shorter and straightforward than a typical story in a literary journal, and was written with a much less highbrow readership in mind. Its Christmas theme coincided with its publication on New Year’s Day. It has been suggested that one of the Chekhov family’s servant girls at his country estate in Melikhovo provided the inspiration for this story about the peasant Yefimya, who ends up unhappily married to someone who never posts her letters home to parents in the village.
Like many of the stories in this collection, ‘The Bishop’ (1902) is about death. Chekhov had mulled over the subject of a bishop dying at Easter-time for fifteen years before he finally sat down to write the story. When he did so, his own impending death was very much in his mind. Although this is a story about a member of the Russian Orthodox clergy, Chekhov’s attention is focused (as in the early story ‘The Letter’) more on his character as a human being and less on him
as a bishop. It is one of Chekhov’s most autobiographical pieces of writing, reflecting aspects of his own relationship with his mother, his love of the Easter service and the sound of church bells, the long periods abroad when he was homesick for Russia, and the alienation he felt when people treated him as a famous writer rather than as a human being.
The Literary Context
Giving an overview of Chekhov’s career as a fiction writer is relatively straightforward. Defining his work in literary terms is an altogether trickier task, however, as the Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky made clear in a typically provocative article (laced with the odd neologism), which he wrote in opposition to the many eulogies published to mark the tenth anniversary of Chekhov’s death:
Of course, you will be offended if I say:
‘You don’t know Chekhov!’
‘I don’t know Chekhov?’
And you will immediately pull out a stock phrase from some dusty newspaper.
‘Chekhov is a deeply committed poet-haired lyric-reporter–he is a singer of the twilight.’
‘He’s a devastating satirist.’
‘He’s a comic writer.’
And a bard in a Russian shirt will rhyme:
He loved people with such a tender love
Like a woman loves, like only a mother can love.5
While Mayakovsky advanced the cause of Chekhov as a sober-minded artist-craftsman, there were critics who firmly anchored him as the successor of great Russian realists such as Tolstoy, and others who claimed him for the Symbolist camp. And after Chekhov was first introduced to the English-speaking world by Constance Garnett, he was seen as a pioneer of modernism. The ambiguity surrounding the question of how we interpret Chekhov has led to the word ‘elusive’ becoming a cliché in criticism of his writing.
From the very beginning, Chekhov’s stories disconcerted readers. One of the very first English-language assessments of Chekhov’s prose came from the pen of an erudite journalist and adventurer who later became Professor of Comparative Philology at Kharkov University. In 1891 Émile Dillon characterized Chekhov in a London literary journal as a ‘miniaturist who courageously dives into the mysterious depths of the ocean of human life, and brings up–shreds and seaweed’.6 Several decades later an even less flattering marine analogy occurred to the poet Anna Akhmatova, who condemned Chekhov’s universe as ‘uniformly drab’–a ‘sea of mud with wretched human creatures caught in it helplessly’.7 Dillon was writing when Chekhov was still at the start of his career as a major writer. Sensing that the young physician had most of his greatest works ahead of him, he was nevertheless already impressed by Chekhov’s ‘considerable insight’, and by his ‘unruffled calm and artistic objectivity’. As he rightly observed, it was a quality in which his colleagues were ‘sadly deficient’. This was a shrewd appraisal. Akhmatova’s views about Chekhov crystallized in the darkest years of Stalinist Russia; even with the full panoply of his works to choose from, Chekhov’s tragicomic stories about unhappy lives were not always favoured reading in Russia in the bleak period of the purges. Akhmatova may have chosen the small-scale lyrical form as the preferred medium for her own writing in the past, but when it came to reading, she clearly felt a need for something more heroic in those troubled times.
Akhmatova was not alone in her impatience with the malaise which seems to pervade Chekhov’s stories. During his lifetime Chekhov had grown used to people criticizing him for writing in a predominantly minor key, and for dwelling on pessimistic subjects. He was seen as a ‘sick talent’, a creator of ‘autumnal moods’, a destroyer of human hopes. Chekhov’s younger contemporary Vladimir Nabokov perhaps presented the most eloquent articulation of this view when he came to prepare his undergraduate lectures on Russian literature in the early 1940s. As an aristocrat from a distinguished family in St Petersburg, and a master of linguistic inventiveness, Nabokov was in many respects Chekhov’s antipode. He was a strong admirer of Chekhov’s writing, but nevertheless, what sprang first into his mind when he thought about it were the ‘bleak landscapes, the withered sallows along dismally muddy roads, the grey crows flapping across grey skies, the sudden whiff of some amazing recollection at a most ordinary corner’. Magnanimously, he conceded that ‘all this pathetic dimness, all this lovely weakness, all this Chekhovian dove-grey world’ was ‘worth treasuring’.8
There is, of course, an elegiac mood to most of Chekhov’s writing: nearly all of the stories in this collection exhibit it. Chekhov himself confessed that he was prone to feeling elegiac when his house guests played the piano all day in the room next to his study while he was trying to write. The wistful Russian landscapes most people find depressing inspired him, and he was also unusual in seeing beauty in the monotonous expanses of the steppe. Above all, he spent most of his short adult life knowing he was going to die prematurely, having developed the symptoms of tuberculosis when he was 24. No matter how much he bravely suppressed the evidence, the impact this realization had on the general mood of his writing is incalculable; the serious note in his work begins at precisely this point. But after his death astute readers began noticing that there was more to Chekhov than elegy. As he is supposed to have once said to Maxim Gorky, ‘to live in order to die is not all that funny, but to live knowing you are going to die prematurely is just totally stupid’. His constant awareness of the absurdities of the human condition ensured that there was at least one level of irony in his writing. To categorize it as ‘pessimistic’, therefore, is both reductive and redundant, as the English critic William Gerhardie observed in his 1923 critical study of Chekhov (one of the earliest in any language): life for Chekhov ‘is neither horrible nor happy, but unique, strange, fleeting, beautiful and awful’.9
To surrender to the familiar clichés about Chekhov’s short stories is, in effect, also to miss their point–which is that there perhaps is no point, or at least not the point one might expect. Coming from a culture in which writers were seen also as teachers and moral guides, early Russian readers in particular were frustrated that Chekhov’s stories asked questions, but gave no answers. But if there is any point to Chekhov’s stories, it is that readers should themselves seek answers, as he repeatedly made clear in his letters. It was his duty as an artist to hold up a mirror to the world, but it was up to his readers to reflect on what they saw. ‘Man will only become better when you make him see what he is like’, Chekhov once jotted down in one of his notebooks. Reading a Chekhov story should not be akin to the sensation of drowning in mud, or even scouring the seabed and finding only seaweed and shreds; ideally, the experience should be like taking a bracing dip in the sea, or perhaps jumping into the snow after a Russian steam bath.
Chekhov the Modernist
The stories of Chekhov’s mature period seem straightforward at first glance, but as Virginia Woolf pointed out in her first review of his writing in 1918, there is invariably another view reflected in some mirror in the background.10 It is for this reason untenable to see Chekhov wholly as a ‘realist’ writer in the great tradition of his predecessors Tolstoy and Turgenev, which has been the traditional view. While the distinguished critic Prince Dmitri Sviatopolk-Mirsky was arguing that the work of Chekhov marked ‘the crest of a second wave in the history of Russian realism’ in the 1920s,11 writers such as Woolf were at the same time locating in it absurdity, random pathos, and irony–qualities we associate with modernism. Chekhov ‘is not heroic’, she writes; ‘he is aware that modern life is full of nondescript melancholy, of discomfort, of queer relationships which beget emotions that are half-ludicrous and yet painful and that an inconclusive ending for all these impulses is much more usual than anything extreme’. Katherine Mansfield was another writer who championed Chekhov precisely because he had no answers to the existential questions he poses. In a letter she sent to Woolf about Chekhov in 1919, she writes: ‘What the writer does is not so much solve the question but . . . put the question. There must be the question put. That seems to me a very nice dividing line between the true
and the false writer.’12 From our twenty-first-century vantage point it is difficult to appreciate just how revolutionary Chekhov’s stories were when they were first published, but John Middleton Murry was quite explicit about this in an article of 1922: ‘Tchehov’s breach with the classical tradition is the most significant event in modern literature . . . Tchehov wanted to prove nothing, because he profoundly believed there was nothing to be proved. Life was neither good nor bad; it was simply Life, given, unique, irreducible.’13
As the twentieth century proceeded, a different view of Chekhov began to emerge alongside the strangely persistent but hackneyed image of the writer whose works exuded the atmosphere of the fin de siècle, and who was even identified with his hopeless, struggling characters. This new view placed Chekhov firmly as the founder of the modern short story–the contemporary (in artistic terms) of Joyce, Conrad, and James. This subtle author became a ‘writer’s writer’ furthermore, as can be attested by the steady stream of major names in English, Irish, and American fiction over the course of the last century who have come under his influence. As well as those already mentioned, Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Somerset Maugham, Frank O’Connor, and more recently Elizabeth Bowen, Eudora Welty, John Cheever, Raymond Carver, Andre Dubus, V. S. Pritchett, Sean O’Faolain, William Trevor, Richard Ford, and Tobias Wolff have all recognized him as a master. Raymond Carver, in fact, whose own late story ‘Errand’ (1987) is about Chekhov’s last hours, unequivocally called him the ‘greatest short story writer who has ever lived’.14