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):
What aristocratic writers take from nature gratis, the less privileged must pay for with their youth. Try and write a story about a young man—the son of a serf, a former grocer, choirboy, schoolboy and university student, raised on respect for rank, kissing priests’ hands, worshipping the ideas of others, and giving thanks for every piece of bread, receiving frequent whippings, making the rounds as a tutor without galoshes, brawling, torturing animals, enjoying dinners at the houses of rich relatives, needlessly hypocritical before God and man merely to acknowledge his own insignificance— write about how this young man squeezes the slave out of himself drop by drop and how, on waking up one fine morning, he finds that the blood coursing through his veins is no longer the blood of a slave, but that of a real human being.
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 splendidly 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:
I do infinitely love people like Przhevalsky. Their personality is a living document which shows society that beside the people who argue about optimism and pessimism, who, out of boredom, write trivial stories, unnecessary projects, and cheap dissertations, who lead a depraved existence in the name of denial of life, and who lie for the sake of a hunk of bread—beside the skeptics, mystics, psychopaths, Jesuits, philosophers, liberals, and conservatives—there are still people of another order, people of heroic action, of faith and a clear, conscious goal.*
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 only 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 believed 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 an
d 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 scientific 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 scenes 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.
Andrei Yefimych, the doctor-protagonist of “Ward No. 6,” meditating one night on the “life cycle,” the naturalists’ final solution to the question of human immortality, thinks to himself: “Only a coward whose fear of death is greater than his dignity can comfort himself with the thought that in time his body will live in grass, a stone, a toad … To see one’s own immortality in the life cycle is as strange as to prophesy a brilliant future to the case after the costly violin has been broken and made useless.” In a letter of April 16, 1897, Chekhov rejected Tolstoy’s idealist notion of immortality in almost the same terms: “He recognizes immortality in its Kantian form, assuming that all of us (men and animals) will live on in some principle (such as reason or love), the essence of which is a mystery. But I can only imagine such a principle or force as a shapeless, gelatinous mass; my I, my individuality, my consciousness would merge with this mass—and I feel no need for this kind of immortality …”
Here we touch on the paradox that Lev Shestov finds at the heart of Chekhov’s work:
Idealism of every kind, whether open or concealed, roused feelings of intolerable bitterness in Chekhov. He found it more pleasant to listen to the merciless menaces of a downright materialist than to accept the dry-as-dust consolations of humanising idealism. An invincible power is in the world, crushing and crippling man—this is clear and even palpable. The least indiscretion, and the mightiest and the most insignificant alike fall victims to it. One can only deceive oneself about it as long as one knows of it only by hearsay But the man who has once been in the iron claws of necessity loses forever his taste for idealistic self-delusion.
And thus, says Shestov, “the only philosophy which Chekhov took seriously, and therefore seriously fought, was positivist materialism,” which says that “man, brought face to face with the laws of nature, must always adapt himself and give way, give way, give way” The human spirit can only submit. And yet in Chekhov “the submission is but an outward show; under it lies concealed a hard, malignant hatred of the unknown enemy.”
It is worth pursuing Shestov’s argument, because it is easy to mistake his meaning. He calls Chekhov “the poet of hopelessness.” This sounds like the same old accusation of pessimism and resignation that is so often leveled at Chekhov. But Shestov means something very different.
Thus the real, the only hero of Chekhov, is the hopeless man. He has absolutely no action left for him in life, save to beat his head against the stones … He has nothing, he must create everything for himself. And this “creation out of the void,” or more truly the possibility of this creation, is the only problem which can occupy and inspire Chekhov. When he has stripped his hero of the last shred, when nothing is left for him but to beat his head against the wall, Chekhov begins to feel something like satisfaction, a strange fire lights in his burnt-out eyes, a fire which Mikhailovsky did not call “evil” in vain.
Shestov is right to state the paradox in the most extreme terms. Chekhov, who admired men of action, has no action left except to beat his head against the wall. It is hardly a scientific way to proceed. But then, readily as he acknowledged his debt to science, it is precisely science that has “robbed him of everything.” His only hope lies in utter hopelessness. Anything else would be a lie or a form of violence, a general idea or a utopia at gunpoint. And it is here, in this “void,” that Chekhov begins “seeking new paths.”
Like Hamlet, he would dig beneath his opponent a mine one yard deeper, so that he may at one moment blow engineer and engine into the air. His patience and fortitude in this hard, underground toil are amazing and to many intolerable. Everywhere is darkness, not a ray, not a spark, but Chekhov goes forward, slowly, hardly, hardly moving … An inexperienced or impatient eye will perhaps observe no movement at all. It may be Chekhov himself does not know for certain whether he is moving forward or marking time.
That is how Chekhov formulates the question. In a conversation with Ivan Bunin, he mentioned that his own favorite among his stories was “The Student,” and wondered how people could call him a pessimist after that. The story is one of his shortest. It interweaves the student’s grim thoughts about poverty and hunger and the surrounding emptiness and darkness—“all these horrors had been, and were, and would be, and when another thousand years had passed, life would be no better”—with his sudden recollection of Peter’s denial of Christ. He tells the story to an old widow and her daughter, and they both begin to “weep bitterly,” as Peter wept after his betrayal. The student goes on his way. “A cruel wind was blowing, and winter was indeed coming back, and it did not seem that in two days it would be Easter.” He begins thinking about the widow: “If she wept, it meant that everything that had happened with Peter on that dreadful night had some relation to her …” And joy suddenly stirs in his soul: “The past, he thought, is connected with the present in an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of the other. And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of the chain: he touched one end, and the other moved.” The student’s thoughts are given only the slightest shade of irony, just enough to call his youthful “anticipation of happiness, an unknown, mysterious happiness” into question without demolishing it. That happiness remains, along with the tears of Peter and of the two women, along with the cold wind, the surrounding darkness, and the promise of Easter. “In his revelation of those evangelical elements,” writes Leonid Grossman, “the atheist Ch
ekhov is unquestionably one of the most Christian poets of world literature.”
The old professor of “A Boring Story,” who knows that he has only six months to live, finds something strange happening to him, despite his faith in science and indifference to “questions about the darkness beyond the grave.”
In the midst of a lecture, tears suddenly choke me, my eyes begin to itch, and I feel a passionate, hysterical desire to stretch my arms out and complain loudly I want to cry in a loud voice that fate has sentenced me, a famous man, to capital punishment, and that in six months or so another man will be master of this auditorium. I want to cry out that I’ve been poisoned; new thoughts such as I have never known before have poisoned the last days of my life and go on stinging my brain like mosquitoes. And at such times my situation seems so terrible that I want all my listeners to be horrified, to jump up from their seats and, in panic fear, rush for the exit with a desperate cry.
His stifled protest and hysteria have little in common with the dignity with which the bishop dies in almost the last story Chekhov wrote. But are the two men not essentially alike? The one belongs to the hierarchy of science, the other to the hierarchy of the Church, but life, which is given to us only once (how often Chekhov repeats that trite phrase!), is being taken from both of them, senselessly and ineluctably Each of them is isolated from his family and friends in this incommunicable and incomprehensible experience. The bishop “goes to the Lord’s Passion,” to read the Gospel accounts of the crucifixion on Good Friday, and dies on Holy Saturday, before the bells joyfully announce the resurrection. What happens to him is the same as what happens to the old professor. By very different means, with opposite tonalities, both stories reveal the infinite value of what is perishing. Through the forms Chekhov finds to express this living contradiction, the world begins to show itself in a new way.