Chekhov depicts Anna Akimovna’s inner feelings with delicacy and understanding, especially the contradiction between her social displacement and her natural search for a mate. As often happens in Chekhov this, the central question of the text, is left unresolved. What kind of husband would be appropriate for her, considering the double world she lives in? Her attraction to Pimenov is natural, given her own background and the strong masculine qualities that he exudes; moreover, as a worker like her father, he would be able to provide the strength and direction the enterprise needs: stop the director from defrauding the company, send the blood-sucker Lysevich packing – in a word, save the factory. But then Anna tries to imagine Pimenov in her world, and immediately the attraction is lost. Moreover, the advice she gets from different quarters is contradictory: some recommend a husband from the nobility, others recommend a worker, while others recommend debauchery. Anna’s problem is that she has too much – too much money, too much femininity to lavish on a potential partner, too many choices.
Philanthropy is an important secondary theme in the story. As Anna recalls, the Russian merchants prefer to give their money to the indigent rather than their own workers. While this idea is not explained directly, the perspicacious reader might suspect that it is because they relish the servile expressions of gratitude that such charity evokes. To salve her own conscience, Anna decides to give the fifteen hundred roubles that have fallen into her lap to an out-of-work bureaucrat, Chalikov, chosen at random. The picture of misery evoked by Chekhov in his depiction of the Chalikov household is subtly nuanced and unsentimental, and is realized from the perspective of Anna herself. Anna is too honest with herself to accept the insincere expressions of gratitude and self-abasement that her generosity evokes. Disgusted by Chalikov’s self-abasement, she quickly renounces her idea of giving all the money to him: however much he receives, he will simply drink it. Chalikov wallows in self-pity and finds solace in vodka and in beating his wife and children. No charity will change that. Eventually the fifteen hundred roubles end up in the hands of the lawyer Lysevich, who will squander them. The Chalikov episode is suggestive of Chekhov’s view of the hopelessness of out-and-out charity, its inability to change circumstances. At the same time, the portrait of Chalikov’s shiftlessness and self-pity serves as a background for the contrasting image of Pimenov – the intelligent and industrious factory-worker, who has both her father’s and her picture on his table and who, for his pains, will receive nothing. Chekhov’s indictment of human attitudes is, as usual, understated and merciless.
Chekhov’s art at its best constitutes an intense condensation of motifs and themes into a poetic whole. ‘The Student’ is perhaps the finest example of this, and indeed this was the opinion of the author himself. Among the typically Chekhovian images that we find in this work are the hunter, the sound of the birds (i.e. the hunter’s prey…), the sudden springtime frost and the light of the fire. However, we find in it a new theme too, and one that was to light the way to certain key works of Russian literature in the century to come. It is the notion of the interconnectedness of history – the continuous chain of events that links the past to the present. The events from the Gospel that the theology student Ivan Velikopolsky recounts to the two widows acquire an unsuspected immediacy and relevance, to the point that the two widows, mother and daughter, react – the mother Vasilisa by smiling and bursting into tears, and the daughter by turning red. The English reader is tempted to compare the situation to Eliot’s ‘even now, in sordid particulars, / The eternal design may appear’. More relevant for Russian literature is the immediacy with which the retelling of the Gospel speaks to a suffering people; this was to become the leitmotif of two central works of twentieth-century Russian literature, Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita and Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago.
As in other works we have discussed, in this story too there is an epiphany. Velikopolsky has left his father, a parish priest, coughing at home (evidently suffering from tuberculosis); his barefoot mother is cleaning the samovar, while their twenty-two-year-old son goes shooting, hardly the most sacred Good Friday activity for a theology student from a religious family. Velikopolsky is hungry, since his family is observing the fast; his keenly felt hunger (golod) echoes the sudden drop in temperature (kholod). The student is reminded of two constants in the life of the Russian people. At the same time the two widows he encounters have just eaten and are warm because of the fire, yet there is a sense that their religious sentiments are more deeply and directly felt than his, even if they observe the outward trappings of religion less. It is through their reaction to his recounting the story from the Gospel that the student is suddenly overtaken by an intense feeling of joy: ‘… and an inexpressibly sweet anticipation of happiness, of a mysterious unfamiliar happiness, gradually took possession of him. And life seemed entrancing, wonderful and endowed with sublime meaning’. Much of Chekhov’s search seems to be precisely for a definition of happiness; here, for a moment, it is captured – and indeed one gets the strong conviction from Chekhov’s works that for him happiness can only be momentary. As a fin de siècle writer Chekhov echoes the impressionist notion that one can only capture the moment. To this, however, the story suggests two corollaries: first, that such joy is a chance occurrence, and second, that although it is momentary, it is linked to other such moments in a chain of recurrences. This is an important corrective to Ryabovsky’s flashy ‘impressionist’ philosophy of the unrepeatable moment: for Velikopolsky the present joy holds within it the promise of joy to come.
There is, moreover, another, concealed message to be drawn from the story, namely the importance of literature. The student recounts the events from the Gospel: the widows are moved precisely by his words. That is to say, the role of Velikopolsky is analogous to that of a writer, and the story therefore has a metapoetic aspect to it. In other words, it constitutes among other things a reflection on the importance and meaning of art. One may compare Velikopolsky’s function to that of the Russian icon-painter. The icon-painter’s role is to reproduce through a miracle, an act of grace, the presence of the holy person in material form. It matters not that the end result resembles closely other icons – in fact, it is important that it should resemble them, should be the latest in a chain of miracles, a chain of moments of grace extending back in time. This is the realization that Velikopolsky has of the interconnectedness of history, of touching the two ends of a chain. Now more than ever, from the perspective of over a hundred years of bloodshed and tumult in Russia, we can see the justice of the idea that literature can provide consolation and catharsis to a suffering people through a retelling of age-old truths – the verbal equivalent of the consolation that the Russian people through history have derived from the icon.
Chekhov attempted several times to write a novel; the story ‘Three Years’ resulted from one of these attempts. The result is far from the novel form; rather it is an extended short story or ‘tale’. Chekhov’s art had moved far from the classical architecture of the Russian realist novel: its carefully developed beginning, evolution and lengthy epilogue contrasted radically with his brevity, truncated structures and open ending (for example, the astonishing last sentence of the tale). His notion of plot was different, since for him what was important was the internal evolution of feelings, not any overt set of events, and his elliptical form focused, not on detail, as the art of, say, Tolstoy had done, but on the detail – a crucial difference. That is to say, by a process of elimination, the details that remain acquire a force they do not have in the copious descriptions typical of the realist novel. As an example, one may point to the umbrella in this story that Julia leaves at Laptev’s sister’s and which serves as the crucial element that leads to his proposal of marriage. It is of deep significance that, at the end of the tale, Julia, dressed elegantly in fashionable clothes, is holding the old umbrella, which Laptev has recently produced from the chest of drawers where he had been keeping it, and given to her. Indeed, after the mention of
this detail, the declaration of love that she makes to him is almost unnecessary.
The process of writing led to a concentration on fewer characters, rather than the development of multiple plot lines that would have been necessary for a novel. Nevertheless, in this case the extended form, and especially the longer chronological extent marked by the title of the work (the phrase ‘three years’ recurs several times in the text itself), enables Chekhov to develop his themes with greater effect. The central theme is, of course, Laptev and Julia’s marriage; how it begins without love on her part, and how it is only after she has grown and changed that she begins to love him and makes her declaration. Chekhov very carefully nuances the effect by describing Laptev’s inner feelings at this declaration (he is hungry and, we infer, unaffected), and Yartsev’s apparent infatuation with Julia. The message is very Chekhovian – we should not rely on marriage as a source for happiness; Laptev recalls that the only time he had been happy was when he spent the night under Julia’s umbrella. The marriage theme is developed in other parallel lines: Polina and Yartsev’s relationship, for example, a relationship that, as Yartsev stresses, has nothing to do with love (an affirmation we might do well to question); and the outrageous behaviour of Panaurov towards women.
The growing maturity of Julia is reflected in her relationship with her father-in-law. In this figure we see the other profoundly Chekhovian theme, a theme that is related to that of marriage, namely that of fatherhood. Laptev recalls with bitterness his upbringing, especially the beatings he received from his dictatorial father (in a passage that surely has autobiographical overtones). Like Anna Akimovna in ‘A Woman’s Kingdom’, Laptev and his brother Fyodor have made the wrenching social transition from being the grandchildren of a serf to inheriting a family business worth millions. Their father, although wealthy, had retained the patriarchal ways and the dictatorial manners of a peasant family head. The situation of Lida and Sasha, Laptev’s nieces, and the loss of their father Panaurov to another woman also speak of the theme of fatherhood (and its concomitant, abandonment or orphanhood). It is predictable that Panaurov would eventually abandon his second wife, and also that he would even try to flirt with Julia and encourage her to acquire a lover. Panaurov’s attitude to both marriage and fatherhood is totally cynical, and his shameless sponging off his brother-in-law Laptev simply confirms his spinelessness. At the end Laptev, although he and Julia have lost their own child, has become a father – to his sister’s children, Lida and Sasha. This is part of his becoming a man, as is replacing his autocratic father at the head of the family business and taking over the reins.
As we have come to expect in Chekhov’s work, the secondary characters are drawn with carefully chosen, often devastating detail that ‘rubs the reader’s nose’ in reality. For example, there is the carefully noted fact that Panaurov’s second wife has the beginnings of a moustache. We learn that Laptev’s brother Fyodor is seriously ill, and that his flowery manner of speech and flippant manner hide a deep unhappiness; tellingly, it is Julia who consoles him when he breaks down. Yartsev is a typical member of the Russian intelligentsia; Chekhov first mocks his literary strivings – again the detail that he signs his articles with a single letter ‘Ya’ (‘I’) reads as ironical, a literary cliché – so that when we learn that his belief in science is matched by his optimism that ‘we’re on the threshold of some fantastic triumph’ we know to take it with a huge pinch of salt. Yartsev’s boosterism contrasts totally with Laptev’s feelings of resignation: ‘I feel as if our life’s over and that some dull half-life is just beginning.’ Such details might be multiplied many times over: what is important is that the reader becomes attuned to Chekhov’s carefully modulated irony.
However understated, and however much the reader has to look between the lines to discover it, Chekhov’s ultimate concern is spiritual. The crisis of faith that he documents may legitimately be seen as the theme of nineteenth-century Russian literature, as it grapples with the imported values of western culture and politics, and as the industrialization and westernization of the country led to a questioning and rejection of traditional religious values. It is precisely this crisis that is central to the story ‘Murder’. Here we see the journey of the murderer Yakov from a stifling and stultifying preoccupation with the form of religion that leads to the murder of his cousin, to a new faith – religion’s true spiritual content. Buried in the text are clues pointing back to two other key texts in Russian literature – Dostoyevsky’s The Devils (in Russian Besy) and Pushkin’s poem of the same name that Dostoyevsky used as an epigraph to his own work. Chekhov could rely on his readers’ knowledge of the previous works to evoke certain echoes. Essentially, Pushkin’s poem describes the situation of a young man who is lost in a snowstorm. Enough clues are built into the description of Matvey’s return to the inn to create a resonance between the poem and the story; this is then maintained by the repeated use of the word besy. In using Pushkin’s poem as an epigraph to his novel, Dostoyevsky had seized upon the latent potential of the poem to serve as a metaphor for the spiritual crisis of the young Russian lost in a world without faith, and document its consequences in terms of Stavrogin’s sexual debauchery and Pyotr Verkhovensky’s disdain for human life. The howling of the storm, that Pushkin had likened to the wailing of demons or devils, thus assumes an enormous symbolic significance.
At the same time, there are crucial differences between Chekhov’s story and the two preceding texts. In part, they are class differences. Chekhov describes, not the milieu of a young Russian officer who has hired a coach, nor that of the provincial aristocracy we find in Dostoyevsky’s story, but rather the world of the impoverished innkeeper who has been displaced by the advent of the railway, his cousin, the victim of an industrial accident, and the owner of a railway buffet who has fallen on hard times. There is a gritty reality to Chekhov’s descriptions of a milieu he knew only too well. Moreover, the last part of the story takes place on Sakhalin Island and is the direct result of his observations of the life of the prisoners there. Chekhov simply describes this reality – unsentimentally, with an eye to the telling detail, without any attempt to sugar the pill and gloss over his characters’ faults. Ironically, in the slight format of a short story, he achieves something that eluded Dostoyevsky in vastly organized novel after novel (e.g. Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment) – namely a convincing description of the spiritual renewal of one man. One might call this the holy grail of nineteenth-century Russian literature.
The topography of Chekhov’s work is largely located in two areas of Russia. The first of these is the south of Russia, initially the southern steppe around the town of Taganrog, where he was born and grew up; typical steppe landscapes with their two dominant features – the coal mine and the cherry orchard – are found in numerous works, not only of his early period. In the last years of his life the advanced state of his tuberculosis forced him to return south to seek a milder climate, this time in Yalta on the Crimean peninsula, but even before that Crimean landscapes began to occur in his work (e.g. in the final episode of ‘The Black Monk’). The second region of Russia that figures largely in his work is Moscow, where he moved in 1879. His Muscovite experiences give rise to the many sketches of the country estates around that city and their denizens, the impoverished gentry, and also, of course, to the different areas in the city itself, as in ‘Three Years’. Chekhov did not speak any foreign language fluently, and only went abroad to Western Europe (Italy and France) for the first time in early 1891, so that foreign scenes are almost totally absent from his work. The story ‘Ariadna’ is an exception; evidently the scenes that take place in Italy and the Adriatic coast were based on experiences gained during his 1891 trip. Shamokhin’s comments on the Adriatic resorts no doubt reflect Chekhov’s own sentiments. The Russian film director Nikita Mikhalkov used material from ‘Ariadna’ for his film Dark Eyes (Ochi chornye), starring Marcello Mastroianni.
The story that the hero Shamokhin tells seems very much to conf
orm to the view of women and sex reflected in Chekhov’s work in general. Chekhov once remarked of sex that it was either the vestige of something that was wonderful in the past, or else the beginning of something that might be wonderful one day. Shamokhin’s idealistic view of love comes up against several snags. First, there is the fact that Ariadna, far from appreciating his idealistic love, instead falls for the sheer animal sexuality of Lubkov. Lubkov’s technique might be described as ‘full frontal attack’, with no consideration of any abstraction such as love. His cynicism about women can be compared to that of Panaurov in ‘Three Years’ or Lysevich in ‘A Woman’s Kingdom’. Both Lubkov and Panaurov leave a trail of abandoned women and children behind them. It must be said, on the other hand, that the cold and narcissistic Ariadna, however beautiful she might be, hardly deserves the adulation that she harvests. Her seduction and abandonment is an appropriate response to her lack of redeeming qualities. She will presumably continue to drift from one dependent relationship to another. Shamokhin has chosen as an object for his infatuation a woman who conforms to and confirms his idea of women’s worthlessness.