‘A writer must be humane to his fingertips.’
— CHEKHOV
Chekhov left behind him many stories, most of them extremely short; a dozen or so one-act plays, or vaudevilles; one non-fiction book — an account of his 1890 journey to the half-Russian, half-Japanese island of Sakhalin off Siberia; the Russian sector was mostly a penal colony, and Chekhov’s account of his visit helped bring about some reforms of the atrocious conditions. He also left behind seven full-length plays, five of which, in new translations by Peter Carson, make up the present volume.
Chekhov had begun to write sketches while still a student in Taganrog, a Black Sea port, where his father ran a small grocery store; when his hard-pressed large family — Anton had three brothers and a sister — moved to Moscow in 1876 he stayed behind to go through high school, then joined them after his graduation in 1879. At sixteen he quickly became the chief — sometimes only — economic support of his beloved but improvident family (whose numbers were regularly swelled by relatives paying ‘visits’ that could last for months) by contributing sketches or stories to the popular journals of the day. At the same time he was earning a medical degree at Moscow University.
The little house on Sadovaya-Kudrinskaya Street in which he first practised medicine is now a museum where among other affecting objects one can see copies of some of the Punch-like magazines he first wrote for, often under a pseudonym — Antosha Chekhonte, for instance — his long, narrow bed with its plump comforters, a cane, a pair of pince-nez, and some early medical paraphernalia, including his worn black leather doctor’s bag. By all accounts he was a most generous physician, available at all hours to those in need, sometimes treating poor patients without charge and never dunning those who were late in paying him, throwing himself tirelessly, too, into the cause of public health and hygiene.
As good a man as we know him to have been, Chekhov wasn’t a saint, the way some of his contemporaries regarded him. After his death a well-meaning friend described him as having looked ‘Christ-like’, an epithet Chekhov could well have done without. But the chief figure in his near-canonization was most likely Maxim Gorky, who in his Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreyev wrote this encomium: ‘I think that in Anton Chekhov’s presence everyone involuntarily felt in himself or herself a desire to be simpler, more truthful, more one’s self.’
Gorky, a notorious flatterer (of Josef Stalin among others), compounded the myth-making by extending his sycophancy to Chekhov’s writing (some of which he didn’t quite get), thereby establishing a view of the stories and plays that has been extremely influential — and almost wholly wrong. Treating Chekhov’s work as though it were chiefly a sociological critique, Gorky wrote: ‘in front of that dreary grey crowd of helpless people there passed a great, wise and observant man; he looked at all those dreary inhabitants of his country and, with a sad smile, with a tone of gentle but deep reproach, in a beautiful and sincere voice, he said to them: “You live badly, my friends. It is shameful to live like that.”’ This burst of sombre invention is surely one of the origins of the widely held idea that Chekhov combined the roles of priest and judge, and that his main characters, especially in his great last plays, are, in his eyes and so necessarily in ours, weak, ineffectual, defeated and culpable.
The relation between the main activities of Chekhov’s life, doctoring and writing, was sometimes stressful, but he mostly handled it with characteristic humour: ‘Medicine is my lawful wife,’ he once wrote, ‘and literature is my mistress. When I get tired of one I go to the other.’ A variant of this concerning his writing is rather more effervescent: ‘narrative [fiction] is my legal wife and drama a flamboyant, rowdy, impudent, exhausting mistress.’
Yet in a letter of that period he spoke of the theatre in far less lively terms. ‘The atmosphere of the theatre in Russia,’ he wrote to a friend shortly before he himself began to help resuscitate it, ‘is leaden and oppressive. It is covered inches thick in dust and enveloped in fog and tedium.’
No better source exists for an understanding of Chekhov’s thought and character than his large correspondence. Two letters written within a three-month period in the autumn of 1888 and winter of ‘89, a time when his renown was growing, call particular attention to themselves. The first, to the poet-critic Aleksey Pleshcheyev, is so revelatory of Chekhov’s governing values and attitudes that it deserves extensive quotation: ‘The people I fear,’ Chekhov wrote, ‘are the ones who look for tendentiousness between the lines [alongside widespread admiration and esteem, throughout his career Chekhov underwent savage attacks on the political and ideological ‘neutrality’ of his writing, especially his plays, and on their artistic ‘inconclusiveness‘] and are determined to see me as either liberal or conservative. I am neither liberal nor conservative, nor gradualist, nor monk ... I would like to be a free artist and I regret God has not given me the strength to be one. I hate lies and violence in all their forms. Pharisaism, dull-wittedness and tyranny reign not only in merchants’ homes and police stations ... [but] in science, in literature, among the younger generation. That is why I cultivate no predilection for policemen ... scientists, writers, or the younger generation. I look upon tags and labels as prejudices. My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and the most absolute freedom from violence and lies.’
The second letter was to Aleksey Suvorin, his publisher and friend. After writing about the newly finished Ivanov Chekhov told Suvorin that he had recently gained ‘a sense of personal freedom’; then, out of nowhere, came a tiny, scarcely disguised autobiography. ‘Write a story ... ,’ he told Suvorin, ‘about a young man, the son of a serf, a former grocery clerk, a choirsinger, a high school pupil and university student, brought up to respect rank, to kiss the hands of priests, to truckle to the ideas of others — a young man who expressed thanks for every piece of bread, who was whipped many times, who went without galoshes to do his tutoring, who used his fists, tortured animals [probably the one untrue statement of the lot], was fond of dining with rich relatives [Anton had one wealthy, generous relative, his father’s brother Mitrofan], was a hypocrite in his dealings with God and men, needlessly, solely out of a realization of his own insignificance — write how this young man squeezes the slave out of himself, drop by drop, and how, on awaking one fine morning, he finds that the blood coursing through his veins is no longer that of a slave, but that of a real human being.’ (Chekhov was actually the grandson of a slave, or serf, his paternal grandfather having bought the family’s freedom in 1840, a generation before the serfs’ formal emancipation.)
‘The plot is unprecedented,’ Chekhov wrote to his brother Aleksandr in October 1887, soon after finishing an early draft of Ivanov. The assertion was doubly uncharacteristic of Chekhov: first, it was contrary to his innate modesty; and second, it went against his lifelong aversion to aesthetic discussions. The letter went on again in an uncharacteristic way.
‘I wanted to be original,’ he told his brother. ‘I did not portray a single villain or a single angel ... did not blame nor exculpate anyone.’ The subversive effects of this remark would continue to our own day.
Ordinarily Chekhov considered the quest for originality foolish and fruitless; originality was there or it wasn‘t, but you couldn’t pursue it. Yet in Ivanov’s case he felt on sure ground. The ‘plot’ was indeed original. As he’d told Aleksandr, the play had no villains or angels and this marked a drastic break with almost the entire history of drama, and fiction too, for that matter.
From the beginnings of literature, through classic drama, epic poetry, romance and, later, the novel, the literary imagination had been largely propelled by the pitting of good against evil, darkness against light, a Manichaean division from which rose our categories of heroes and villains; both pulp fiction and its various derivatives, and popular plays, which we might call pulp drama (successful lowbrow melodramas), as well as nearly all recent mainstream movies and TV dramas, are built around this tension and
struggle between ‘good guys’ (or gals) and bad, between the forces of light and darkness. Today when a work of drama or fiction or film tries to evade this cops-and-robbers structure it has usually, at best, been damned with the faint praise of ‘offbeat’.
The Moscow premiere of Ivanov, badly acted and under-rehearsed, was greeted largely with bafflement, rage, or scorn, with a smattering of praise for the play itself by a few astute critics and a handful of discerning audience members. The loudest complaints, ironically, were precisely that the ostensible hero and villain weren’t drawn sharply or accurately enough. How could one find heroic stature in a neurotic, weak figure like Ivanov? And Lvov? Why hadn’t Chekhov portrayed him more sympathetically? Even Chekhov’s brother Mikhail asked him to rewrite the two characters to bring them closer to the conventions of drama.
Chekhov naturally refused, as he did Suvorin’s plea to depict the character he rightly saw as the implicit villain of the piece, Lvov, even more broadly than Chekhov had drawn him. The public and the literati simply couldn’t cope with the absence of the poles of good and evil through which they had always manoeuvred their frail understanding.
Besides its moral-thematic originality, Ivanov presented some technical innovations, a few of which had tentatively shown themselves in Platonov: dialogue that sometimes wasn’t logical or consecutive, characters at times leaving speeches addressed to them unanswered or making irrelevant responses (German has a word for such dialogue, Aneinandervorbeisprechen, which can best be translated as ‘talking past one another’ and which seems to have first appeared on the stage in the 1830s with Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death and Woyzeck); actions that seemed to come from nowhere, and lead nowhere, such as two unnamed characters at the Lebedevs’ party crossing the stage in search of refreshments and another character, named Kosykh, mumbling to the empty air about a whist game. There was also some use of pauses, a Chekhov trademark that was really a kind of ‘silent speech’, a stretch of time during which any number of different mental actions could take place: the preceding speech or action might be tacitly refuted or the coming one undermined; or the characters and audience might simply be given time for reflection, intellectual organization of what has been said and done up to now and what might come. The famous pauses in Beckett or Harold Pinter owe much to Chekhov’s example.
Ivanov frustrated its first audiences by its lack of familiar moral structure and resolution. What were they supposed to make of Nikolay’s suicide? What, for that matter, were they supposed to think of Nikolay himself, that unprecedented protagonist? And Lvov? Didn’t he incarnate goodness, set against Nikolay’s evil? Then why do Shabelsky and Anna mock him?
For Chekhov, Ivanov seems to have begun as something of a polemic against several contemporary stereotypes, the so-called superfluous man, usually well-educated and well-intentioned, who, suffering from what we might now call an existential crisis, or burn-out, felt left out of society; and the Hamlet figure, a person marked by indecision and mysterious inner struggles. At century’s end Russian literature and table-talk were filled with superfluous men and Hamlet types, the two sometimes being combined as they are in Nikolay. They were joined in Ivanov by another stereotype, a narodnik, a kind of self-righteous, soi-disant saint devoted to abstract words and causes, like the ‘people’, ‘progress’ and ‘the peasantry’. Lvov is roughly such a figure, as Ivanov is a representative ‘superfluous man’.
The first step in grasping Nikolay is to accept that he doesn’t know what’s wrong with him; he simply doesn’t know. The abominable way he treats his wife, for example, is as mysterious to him as it is to everyone else. For before the onset of his malady, he was, and at bottom remains, a good, if bewildered man, as the following desperate, loving speech by Anna attests. In the evenings Nikolay wants to go to the Lebedevs’ for amusement and distraction, and Anna heartbreakingly pleads with him: ‘Do you know what, Kolya? Try and sing, laugh, get angry, as you once did ... You stay in, we’ll laugh and drink fruit liqueur and we’ll drive away your depression in a flash. I’ll sing if you like. Or else let’s go and sit in the dark in your study as we used to, and you’ll tell me about your depression ... You have such suffering eyes. I’ll look into them and cry, and we’ll both feel better ... [Laughs and cries.] How does it go, Kolya? The flowers come up again every spring, but joy there is none. Is that it? So go off, go ...’
For Lvov, the narodnik, everything is simple: Nikolay pins him down in his self-righteous cocksureness in an important late scene that widens the play’s scope from its local settings and parochial typologies towards more universal ones. Nikolay tells Lvov: ‘You think I’m the easiest thing in the world to understand. Right? ... Man is such a simple and uncomplicated machine,’ and goes on: ‘we all have too many wheels, screws and valves for us to be able to judge each other ...’ Ivanov can now be seen as a play about our destructive need for tags and labels: Mrs Lebedev and Borkin see Nikolay with their mercenary gazes, Sasha with her romantic one; Lvov with his pious superiority. If it is intelligently performed, Ivanov isn’t a narrow study of neurosis or perversity but much more a dramatic picture of the harm people do with their types and stereotypes.
In Chekhov’s dramaturgy, however, fragments of melodramatic procedure remained, the most blatant being Nikolay’s suicide (in an early version Chekhov had him drop dead of a heart attack after Lvov’s public tirade!). Almost as egregiously melodramatic is Anna’s discovery of Nikolay and Sasha in one another’s arms. But even with these disfigurements Ivanov still stands as Chekhov’s first full, convincing work of dramatic art.
He kept tinkering with it; performances, in St Petersburg now, improved; and, moved by an intelligent review or a discerning friend’s recommendation, audiences grew larger and friendlier, until Chekhov had something of a hit on his hands, though he continued to think the play was popular for the wrong reasons, audiences having seized on its melodramatic incidents rather than its intelligent vision; to an extent he was right.
Ivanov had set Chekhov on a course which he would stick to, after one setback, in the major plays that followed. This is a good place to mention Chekhov’s main subjects, and examine how he dramatized — which is to say, gave stage life to — these themes, or what I once called, in another context, ‘notional presences’, ideas adhering to bodies, spirit to corporeality.
Beyond question Chekhov’s central themes in these plays are love and work (Lieben und Arbeit — Freud’s terse reply when asked what was necessary for a complete life). Closely connected to them are time, with a special emphasis on the future, and art, more particularly what being an artist spiritually demands.
Many ways exist for getting Chekhov wrong, so herewith a short guide to avoiding them. Don’t look for ‘realism’ in these plays; don’t expect conventional endings, happy or otherwise; be aware of how Chekhov often has one character subvert another’s point of view, when it threatens to harden into ideology or melt into sentimentality; keep alert to the hints and nuances in speeches, along with the literal words; don’t look for answers, to your problems or life’s dilemmas; throw away any idea you might have that drama is always about ‘conflict’, or, rather, remember that in these plays conflict is more often internal — within characters — than between them; keep in mind that no single character in any play speaks wholly for Chekhov, the most unbiased and democratic of authors; don’t ever regard, admiringly or not, a Chekhov play as an exercise in ‘mood’ or ‘atmosphere’ — they’re solid works of imagination, not emotional vapours. Here is Virginia Woolf writing in 1920: ‘It is, as a rule, when a critic does not wish to commit himself, or to trouble himself, that he speaks of atmosphere.’ Don’t forget that Chekhov is often very funny, so feel free to laugh, aloud if the impulse strikes you.
The artistic setback I spoke of before was an attempt to write a classical comedy, the kind that ends with lovers united, marriages restored, and a sense of satisfaction, celebration, reigning over everything. Long, complicated, and crowded with incident,
The Wood Demon was close to being a disaster. Still, Chekhov saw enough in the piece to carry a great many things over — some characters, settings and scenes, even a few swatches of dialogue — to the making of Uncle Vanya a few years later, though he obstinately insisted that the two plays were wholly independent, which in spirit they certainly are.
LOVE
Chekhov’s notebook contains this rather enigmatic remark about love (as sexual desire or romantic attraction): ‘Either it is a remnant of something “degenerating”, something which was once immense, or it is a particle of what will in the future develop into something immense, but at present it is unsatisfying, it gives much less than one expects.’ In each play that followed Ivanov Chekhov made love and sex central concerns, important notional presences. Love — erotic or romantic or spiritual — carries a great weight of significance in The Seagull, Uncle Vanya and Three Sisters, before tapering off in The Cherry Orchard.
The notebook entry, especially the part about love, or sex, being rather unsatisfying, has been exploited by those commentators who, for various reasons — ignorance, literary envy, feminist theory — want to find Chekhov himself deficient in erotic vigour or enthusiasm. Some argue, absurdly, that because so many of his stories and plays deal with unsuccessful love affairs or marriages, he personally thought dimly of such relationships, seeing them as inherently unsatisfying. One biographer asked the nonsensical rhetorical question: ‘What was a woman to him, no matter how desirable, when his life was all pen and paper?’ In all the commentary on Chekhov that sentence is, I think, surpassed in foolishness only by some remarks of a scholar who wrote, without any evidence, that Chekhov had a ‘gloomy view of heterosexual relationships’ and offered the following presumably helpful distinction: ‘A full appreciation of Chekhov’s work requires ... a certain degree of involvement, a response intellectual, or, as in the case of his love-stories, emotional.’