Here was a story to shock anyone who believed in the redeeming qualities of the Russian peasant. Leo Tolstoy protested that ‘Peasants’ was a libel against the simple Russian people, whom Chekhov did not know. (A groundless accusation, as we have seen.) An opponent of populism gleefully remarked that the story demonstrated the absurdity of the narodniks’ sentimental illusions. Such a reading, however, assigns too simplistic motives to a complex narrative. If it were merely a polemical piece of writing, how could we interpret, for instance, the role of the holy icon, carried from village to village, that moves the peasants to rise above their stuck-in-the-mud physical misery to at least a momentary spiritual awakening and to a feeling, in the teeth of all evidence, that there is a higher power that will protect them? The lyrical force the narrator lends to such scenes runs counter to the general tonality of the story. Most strikingly incongruous is the description of Olga and Sasha returning to the city, after Nikolay’s death, in the best of moods, even though they have to beg for alms, and even though it should be clear to them what eventual fate will await the penniless young girl in the city. (Not only do the incomplete Chapters X and XI point towards that fate, but Chekhov actually jotted down in a notebook that Sasha would take up prostitution.) The paragraph depicting mother and daughter cheerfully marching forth is as jarring as the ending of ‘The House with the Mezzanine’.
Peasants get their share of scorn also in the longest novella of Chekhov’s late period, ‘My Life’ (1896), but here the main targets of the narrator’s censure are a provincial town’s gentry, bureaucrats and professionals. Corruption is rampant, people draw salaries for work of doubtful value or live off their family fortunes, relying on others to work for them; and the rising entrepreneurial class ruthlessly exploits cheap labour. For an honest man like the hero of the story, Misail, the only decent thing to do is to earn his living by the sweat of his brow. It has been remarked that Misail is one of the first drop-outs in modern literature; I might add that he is relevant to our own time, for who has not seen children of well-to-do families refusing to go to college or university, preparing instead to become craftsmen?
Misail’s first-person narration rises to rhetorical heights as he indicts his social environment, but when he recounts his personal affairs his voice shifts to a deliberately flat tone, with not a ripple of self-irony – a marked contrast to the artist’s diction in ‘The House with the Mezzanine’. This is just another way Chekhov makes his reader responsible for evaluating the hero’s actions, which, as we have seen, is a signature trait of his method.
We as readers wonder why a twenty-five-year-old big, strong man lets his father slap his face. We are inclined to argue with him that, surely, he could have fended off his father’s hand or could have simply brushed him aside and walked out. Similarly, it is hard to swallow the fact that Misail allows people to taunt him on the streets, splash water on him and throw sticks at him. There is no reason why he should put up with Moisey’s theft of supplies from the larders in the house he and his new bride, Mariya, have recently restored; and why he should let the peasants rob them and even steal the building materials Mariya has generously bought to build a village school. It is not only the reader who judges: Mariya, too, watches her husband’s meekness with bewilderment, gradually losing her respect for him. The first crack in their marital relations appears when he tells her how his father beat him. It could be argued, of course, that tilling the land with Misail was only a wealthy woman’s whim and Mariya would not have lasted long on the farm in any case; yet his lack of assertiveness is certainly a contributing factor.
It appears that Chekhov the doctor has diagnosed an emotional disorder, a fundamental lack of a sense of self in his character. It is a trait that harms not only Misail himself but also those dear to him. Had he had the mettle to confront Dr Blagovo, who had seduced both his sister, Cleopatra, and his wife, he could certainly have secured financial support for his sister’s child by the doctor: his own contempt for financial gain should not have been exercised on behalf of his niece. The question arises, what caused Misail’s emotional flaw? The oppressive social environment is not a sufficient explanation. His upbringing provides a certain clue, especially if we consider that his sister shares his meekness. Or perhaps it is a genetic trait in both of them. ‘How feeble!’ says Cleopatra referring to herself before her disastrous appearance in the amateur theatricals, but she could be referring to both of them. Earlier in the story, discussing what useful work could be done in his corrupt and stultifying town, Misail says that at one time he dreamt of becoming a teacher, doctor or writer, but all that has remained a dream because he took a dislike to the Greek language and could not finish grammar school. He appreciates products of the intellect, he says, but he is not sure he has the ability to pursue mental work. One could argue that some kind of constitutional feebleness prevents him from exerting, or asserting, himself, which makes the story akin to Chekhov’s earlier ‘physiological sketches’, such as ‘The Name-day Party’. Yet ‘My Life’ is more ambiguous than that.
As the narrative closes we see Misail working as a house-painter, no longer despised but accepted by the town for what he is. He is bringing up his orphaned niece. The Tolstoyan principle of ‘Resist not evil by force’ seems to have worked: despite the corrupt environment, his honesty has earned him respect and he is engaged in useful work. We get a foretaste of this denouement as early as chapter XV: much as the peasants had stolen and cheated, the village school has nevertheless been built and is ready to open for the school year. Misail has benefited the peasants not by force but by perseverance and moral example. The readers are left to puzzle out for themselves whether ‘My Life’ is a piece of ‘critical realism’, a study of a psychologically flawed character, a mockery of Tolstoyan principles, or indeed an endorsement of them.
A similar provincial town is the setting for the 1898 story ‘Ionych’. Its hero, Dmitry Ionych Startsev, could be a very useful member of society working as a physician, appointed by a zemstvo to a village. Why does he become, under our eyes, a greedy moneybags who largely neglects his duties in the village in order to look after the wealthy in the nearby town? Chekhov insinuates that the stifling environment is to blame. A town where the most educated, interesting family is that of the Turkins is no place for a man of intellect and sensitivity to fulfil his potential. Chekhov’s main device employed to convey the monotony of the town’s life is repetition. The Turkins’ at-home gatherings always begin with Vera Iosifovna’s interminable readings from her novel in progress, which she does not even attempt to publish; they continue with the daughter’s, Yekaterina’s, forceful banging away at the piano; their highlight is a lavish dinner, over which Ivan Petrovich tells the same anecdotes and tosses out the same witticisms; and they conclude with the lackey, Peacock, striking a pose at his master’s command and exclaiming, ‘Die, wretched woman!’ The only two people who undergo change against the backdrop of the inert town are Yekaterina and Ionych. Her midnight assignation with him in the cemetery, redolent of Gothic Romanticism even though it is only a prank, betrays that she is not above her environment; and her decision to go away to the Conservatoire to study the piano professionally is witness to her inflated ego. One is reminded of ‘The Grasshopper’, whose heroine seeks to brush shoulders with greatness through art, not realizing, until it is too late, that a physician’s prosaic work can be far more elevated. Yet she does go away, seeking change. The changes in her and Ionych are conveyed through repetition with slight modifications. We see him travelling back and forth between village and town at first on foot, then in a carriage and pair, and ultimately by carriage with ‘three horses abreast’, while he himself grows in size in proportion to his equipage. In Yekaterina’s case the modification is that, although she plays just as badly after four years at the Conservatoire, by now she is aware of it.
Several questions arise. Did Ionych lose his human worth because he had been thwarted in love? Would reciprocated love have steered him in the
right direction? If that is the case, was it personal misfortune, rather than the social environment, that crushed him? Or would he have become what he was, married or not? Should he as an individual be responsible for his behaviour regardless of his circumstances? Was Yekaterina’s decision to go to the Conservatoire motivated just by a silly girl’s vain ambition? Or was she genuinely seeking change, trying to escape her environment? Did the experience, leading her to the conclusion that her piano playing is as gifted as her mother’s writing, mature her enough to make her potentially a fit companion for an intelligent and useful man? Could Ionych be blamed for not responding to her belated offer of affection? As is usual with Chekhov, there are no clear answers; and a half-hidden poetic streak running through the texture disturbs the general mood. Peacock’s exclamation, ‘Die, wretched woman!’ which his melodramatic mistress must have taught him, turns out to be prophetic for Yekaterina, who will end up in the cemetery, the very place where she had jestingly sent Ionych.
One of the most persistent demands made on Chekhov by the populists was that he point at positive solutions to social problems or personal quests. His very last story, ‘The Bride’ (1903), has been interpreted by some as doing just that. Its heroine, Nadya, who might have remained stuck in the mire of stale provincial life with the slothful Andrey, makes a clear break, going away to study in St Petersburg. Perhaps she represents a new generation that will ring in change. Several troubling questions arise, however, in the course of the narrative. Her distant cousin Sasha, who incites her to tear herself away from home, has been to university himself, but is doing nothing worthwhile with his degree. For that matter, Andrey is a university graduate, too, but he does nothing except talk about how nice it would be to buy a small farm and work on it. Further, just as we were not told in ‘The House with the Mezzanine’ what Zhenya read so avidly, we are denied the information about what Nadya is studying and what she is planning to do with her education. It is as though ‘breaking away’ alone mattered, never mind what for. This impression is reinforced when we hear that Sasha is on his way to a cruise on the Volga with a friend and his wife, hoping to persuade her to take up studies and wanting ‘her life to be transformed’. Here the device of repetition with a slight modification diminishes in size the inspirational figure of Sasha, who, we thought, had been personally concerned with the future of his dear young relation. Perhaps his proselytizing was just a hobbyhorse. Nadya herself finds him grey and uninteresting when she visits him in Moscow on her way home after her first year away. Seeing how sick he is, she should insist on bringing him home for the summer and looking after him, but she lets him go with his friends, as though being less inspired by him also meant having less affection for him.
The final, most important ambiguity of the narrative, however, is Nadya’s narrated thought as she leaves her native town once more, this time, ‘for ever, so she thought’. The phrase could be interpreted as Nadya’s delusion about her future, which in fact held in store for her an eventual return to her town, defeated. One only needs to recall Yekaterina’s return to her parents’ house in ‘Ionych’. There are, however, other implications, too. At the beginning of the story it seems to Nadya that ‘somewhere else, beneath the sky, above the trees, far beyond the town, in the fields and forests, spring was unfolding its own secret life, so lovely, rich and sacred’. This refers to the impossibility of achieving personal happiness here and now. The same seems to apply to socially useful life, too: if Nadya is to make a contribution to the welfare of her nation, she has to do it somewhere else, not here. But if her provincial town is so backward, who should set it on the path of progress if not the native who has the capacity to come back and put her education to good use? Complaints about one’s milieu are almost always ironic in Chekhov, with the implication that the person who complains should get down to making improvements. It is characteristic that Sasha, waxing lyrical about the town’s bright future, does not propose to settle there and make a contribution to it.
There is something akin to Sasha’s preaching in the conclusion Ivan Ivanych draws from the tale of his brother’s paltry life in ‘Gooseberries’ (part of the 1898 ‘Little Trilogy’, together with ‘Man in a Case’ and ‘About Love’). Disgusted by the pettiness of Nikolay’s goal as well as achievement – the acquisition of a little estate with a gooseberry patch on it – Ivan goes around preaching that people should wake up and seek meaningful lives; but there is no indication that he has led one or helped anybody to achieve it. An important structural component of ‘Gooseberries’, also found in several other works, is the tension between ‘waiting’ (zhdat ’) and ‘living’ (zhit’). Nikolay postpones living – he scrapes and saves, marries out of calculation, missing personal happiness during his best years – until he comes into possession of a scrubby expanse of land on the banks of a river so polluted by a neighbouring brickworks and factory that its water is the colour of coffee. But Nikolay’s vociferous critic, Ivan himself, confesses that ‘I only feel sick at heart, irritable and exasperated’ – in other words, also postpones action, pleading the impotence of old age, and urges another man, Alyokhin, to engage in a meaningful life.
What about the doers, rather than preachers, who also appear in some of the stories? Nobody could be more useful than Lida of ‘The House with the Mezzanine’, yet, with her inability to soften enough to show affection, and with her tyranny over her mother and sister, she turns out to be a negative character. Varvara of ‘A Visit to Friends’ (1898) does enormous good working as a physician in a remote rustic region, but in the process she loses weight, feels exhausted, and talks of clairvoyance. One is reminded of Dr Astrov in Uncle Vanya (1899). (Indeed, many of the themes treated in the stories resurface in the plays.) Characteristically, the younger Nadezhda, as though not noticing Varvara’s fatigue, talks of wanting to work. Here the device for conveying incongruities is juxtaposition, with no comment by the narrator.
Apart from useful work, love might bring meaning to life, but happiness in love, like social progress, can only be achieved ‘somewhere else’. Anna Alekseyevna (Luganovich’s wife) of ‘About Love’ is the one bright colour in Alyokhin’s dreary life, but she is married to his friend, and although she clearly displays affection for him, he does not dare to reveal his love until the very last moment, when the Luganoviches are moving away, and Anna, very sick, is leaving for the Crimea. Adulterous love is consummated in ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ (1899), but despite the happy moments it brings to Gurov and Anna, they feel in the last scene like ‘two birds of passage, male and female, caught and forced to live in separate cages’. The less attainable happiness is, the more lyrical force is attached to the longing. One of the major stories of Chekhov’s late period, ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ is constructed with a full array of techniques characteristic of its author. Gurov’s prophetic thought, that ‘every affair, which at first adds spice and variety to life and seems such a charming, light-hearted adventure, inevitably develops into an enormous, extraordinarily complex problem… until finally the whole situation becomes a real nightmare’, appears to be fulfilled as the two lovers realize the depth of their feelings. But since this thought preceded Gurov’s acquaintance with Anna, the reader rightfully wonders whether their liaison, ‘an enormous, extraordinarily complex problem’ as it is, will eventually be dissolved, and the hero will be ready for a new adventure. When Gurov tries to tell an acquaintance of his what a charming woman he has met in Yalta, the response, ‘You were right the other day – the sturgeon was off!’, also puts Gurov’s love in the perspective of banal stories about amorous adventures that do not require much attention. When we finally realize – with the aid of devices such as the symbolic inkstand with a headless rider at the hotel and the grey fence across the street from von Diederitz’s house – that the lovers are suffering in earnest, the effect is all the more striking.
When there is the potential of a happy union between an unmarried man and an available woman, nothing transpires. Podgori
n’s failure to propose to Nadezhda in ‘A Visit to Friends’ introduces us to another Chekhovian technique. First Podgorin likes Nadezhda, but bristles at the thought that her family is expecting him to marry her. Then she asks him to help her find some work in Moscow. This request – evidence in his eyes that she is not just a provincial miss waiting to get married, but a woman seeking an independent life – touches him so much that he asks himself, ‘Well, why don’t I marry her then?’ He eventually decides not to marry her, at the same time forgetting her request for help.
The failure to respond to what another character says – so common in Chekhov’s plays – is also an essential device in ‘The Bishop’ (1902). When his mother tells the Most Reverend Pyotr that his brother-in-law Ivan has died, leaving behind four small children unprovided for, Pyotr responds by asking her about his brother, Nikanor. Further, tired of all the formal respect people – even his mother – show him, the bishop finds comfort only in talking with his eight-year-old niece, Katya, because she treats him in a natural way. Having told him once more about her father’s death and her mother’s desperate struggle to make ends meet, the sobbing child asks him for some money. As a bishop, he can certainly afford to be generous, and he agrees to help. Aware of his state of health, he could hand some money over or send for some there and then, but, even though he is sobbing along with the little girl, he postpones help till Easter Sunday. He dies, ironically, on the eve of Easter, and Katya will go home empty-handed.
One character’s inattention to another’s needs finds its analogy in the narrator’s neglect of what the reader expects of him. We have seen the reader’s frustration over the lack of explanation at the end of ‘The House with the Mezzanine’, and the narrator’s insensitive silence about Podgorin’s disregard of Nadezhda’s plea in ‘A Visit to Friends’. This technique is employed with particular force in one of Chekhov’s most carefully crafted stories of his last period, ‘In the Ravine’ (1900).