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The Princess by Chekhov
I have recently read a shocking and impressive short story by Chekhov, The Princess. This brief story is so revealling on the causes of the Russian revolution and on how the classes were divided in Russia back then, that I would certainly recommend it for a Social Studies class. The Princess Vera Gavrilovna visits a Monastery to seek shelter, we are lead to think, from all the problems and responsibilities of her life: conflicts, things to pay, complaints and whatever is involved in being a princess, managing a vast fortune. The reader is lead to believe the princess is a wonderful person whom the world has wronged and fails to understand. Later on, while relaxing in the gardens of the monastery, an old doctor passes by and being forced a greeting by the princess, ends up telling the truth about himself, having been fired by her some time before, and about the real state of her estates, the misery of the people, the inequalities and unjustices, the hypocritical behaviour of the glamorous princess in contrast with the poverty of the people whose lives she controls. The Princess is of course shocked by all the revelations and when the reader expects her to open her eyes to the truth, she blames the old man for being rude and goes on to her glamorous shallow life.
A better summary of the story here. The whole story below. It's short, takes almost as much as reading the summary and it's quite worth it. and a huge thank you to James Rusk who has organized the website 201 Stories by Chekhov, also here. I'm adding it to my Reading List.
From a slightly different period (1560), The Princess above by Tintoretto, displayed at the National Gallery, also runs from a meanacing danger, not truth but St. George's dragon.
A comment on this story by Dan Schneider: "Perhaps the greatest of his argument tales is The Princess in which Chekhov brilliantly distills all the gripes of the working class from time immemorial into one bitter doctor who is allowed top vent his fury on an arrogant and immature princess whose profligate ways are bankrupting her subjects". (...) "Yet, just when it seems the Princess is about to have an epiphany along the lines of Ebenezer Scrooge from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, reality sets in, and the doctor backs down, and all remains as it was".
And after the story below, at the bottom of this posting I'm including a great article by Philip Hensher, a review of the book Reading Chekhov by Janet Malcolm, originally published by the Atlantic Magazine, found on Google.
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The Princess, by Anton Checkhov
A CARRIAGE with four fine sleek horses drove in at the big so-called Red Gate of the N--- Monastery. While it was still at a distance, the priests and monks who were standing in a group round the part of the hostel allotted to the gentry, recognised by the coachman and horses that the lady in the carriage was Princess Vera Gavrilovna, whom they knew very well.
An old man in livery jumped off the box and helped the princess to get out of the carriage. She raised her dark veil and moved in a leisurely way up to the priests to receive their blessing; then she nodded pleasantly to the rest of the monks and went into the hostel.
"Well, have you missed your princess?" she said to the monk who brought in her things. "It's a whole month since I've been to see you. But here I am; behold your princess. And where is the Father Superior? My goodness, I am burning with impatience! Wonderful, wonderful old man! You must be proud of having such a Superior."
When the Father Superior came in, the princess uttered a shriek of delight, crossed her arms over her bosom, and went up to receive his blessing.
"No, no, let me kiss your hand," she said, snatching it and eagerly kissing it three times. "How glad I am to see you at last, holy Father! I'm sure you've forgotten your princess, but my thoughts have been in your dear monastery every moment. How delightful it is here! This living for God far from the busy, giddy world has a special charm of its own, holy Father, which I feel with my whole soul although I cannot express it!"
The princess's cheeks glowed and tears came into her eyes. She talked incessantly, fervently, while the Father Superior, a grave, plain, shy old man of seventy, remained mute or uttered abruptly, like a soldier on duty, phrases such as:
"Certainly, Your Excellency. . . . Quite so. I understand."
"Has Your Excellency come for a long stay?" he inquired.
"I shall stay the night here, and to-morrow I'm going on to Klavdia Nikolaevna's -- it's a long time since I've seen her -- and the day after to-morrow I'll come back to you and stay three or four days. I want to rest my soul here among you, holy Father. . . ."
The princess liked being at the monastery at N---. For the last two years it had been a favourite resort of hers; she used to go there almost every month in the summer and stay two or three days, even sometimes a week. The shy novices, the stillness, the low ceilings, the smell of cypress, the modest fare, the cheap curtains on the windows -- all this touched her, softened her, and disposed her to contemplation and good thoughts. It was enough for her to be half an hour in the hostel for her to feel that she, too, was timid and modest, and that she, too, smelt of cypress-wood. The past retreated into the background, lost its significance, and the princess began to imagine that in spite of her twenty-nine years she was very much like the old Father Superior, and that, like him, she was created not for wealth, not for earthly grandeur and love, but for a peaceful life secluded from the world, a life in twilight like the hostel.
It happens that a ray of light gleams in the dark cell of the anchorite absorbed in prayer, or a bird alights on the window and sings its song; the stern anchorite will smile in spite of himself, and a gentle, sinless joy will pierce through the load of grief over his sins, like water flowing from under a stone. The princess fancied she brought from the outside world just such comfort as the ray of light or the bird. Her gay, friendly smile, her gentle eyes, her voice, her jests, her whole personality in fact, her little graceful figure always dressed in simple black, must arouse in simple, austere people a feeling of tenderness and joy. Every one, looking at her, must think: "God has sent us an angel. . . ." And feeling that no one could help thinking this, she smiled still more cordially, and tried to look like a bird.
After drinking tea and resting, she went for a walk. The sun was already setting. From the monastery garden came a moist fragrance of freshly watered mignonette, and from the church floated the soft singing of men's voices, which seemed very pleasant and mournful in the distance. It was the evening service. In the dark windows where the little lamps glowed gently, in the shadows, in the figure of the old monk sitting at the church door with a collecting-box, there was such unruffled peace that the princess felt moved to tears.
Outside the gate, in the walk between the wall and the birch-trees where there were benches, it was quite evening. The air grew rapidly darker and darker. The princess went along the walk, sat on a seat, and sank into thought.
She thought how good it would be to settle down for her whole life in this monastery where life was as still and unruffled as a summer evening; how good it would be to forget the ungrateful, dissipated prince; to forget her immense estates, the creditors who worried her every day, her misfortunes, her maid Dasha, who had looked at her impertinently that morning. It would be nice to sit here on the bench all her life and watch through the trunks of the birch-trees the evening mist gathering in wreaths in the valley below; the rooks flying home in a black cloud like a veil far, far away above the forest; two novices, one astride a piebald horse, another on foot driving out the horses for the night and rejoicing in their freedom, playing pranks like little children; their youthful voices rang out musically in the still air, and she could distinguish every word. It is nice to sit and listen to the silence: at one moment the wind blows and stirs the tops of the birch-trees, then a frog rustles in last year's leaves, then the clock on the belfry strikes the quarter. . . . One might sit without moving, listen and think, and think. . . .
An old woman passed by with a wallet on her back. The princess thought that it would be nice to stop the old woman and to say something friendly and cordial to her, to help her. . . . But the old woman turned the corner without once looking round.
Not long afterwards a tall man with a grey beard and a straw hat came along the walk. When he came up to the princess, he took off his hat and bowed. From the bald patch on his head and his sharp, hooked nose the princess recognised him as the doctor, Mihail Ivanovitch, who had been in her service at Dubovki. She remembered that some one had told her that his wife had died the year before, and she wanted to sympathise with him, to console him.
"Doctor, I expect you don't recognise me?" she said with an affable smile.
"Yes, Princess, I recognised you," said the doctor, taking off his hat again.
"Oh, thank you; I was afraid that you, too, had forgotten your princess. People only remember their enemies, but they forget their friends. Have you, too, come to pray?"
"I am the doctor here, and I have to spend the night at the monastery every Saturday."
"Well, how are you?" said the princess, sighing. "I hear that you have lost your wife. What a calamity!"
"Yes, Princess, for me it is a great calamity."
"There's nothing for it! We must bear our troubles with resignation. Not one hair of a man's head is lost without the Divine Will."
"Yes, Princess."
To the princess's friendly, gentle smile and her sighs the doctor responded coldly and dryly: "Yes, Princess." And the expression of his face was cold and dry.
"What else can I say to him?" she wondered.
"How long it is since we met!" she said. "Five years! How much water has flowed under the bridge, how many changes in that time; it quite frightens one to think of it! You know, I am married. . . . I am not a countess now, but a princess. And by now I am separated from my husband too."
"Yes, I heard so."
"God has sent me many trials. No doubt you have heard, too, that I am almost ruined. My Dubovki, Sofyino, and Kiryakovo have all been sold for my unhappy husband's debts. And I have only Baranovo and Mihaltsevo left. It's terrible to look back: how many changes and misfortunes of all kinds, how many mistakes!"
"Yes, Princess, many mistakes."
The princess was a little disconcerted. She knew her mistakes; they were all of such a private character that no one but she could think or speak of them. She could not resist asking:
"What mistakes are you thinking about?"
"You referred to them, so you know them . . ." answered the doctor, and he smiled. "Why talk about them!"
"No; tell me, doctor. I shall be very grateful to you. And please don't stand on ceremony with me. I love to hear the truth."
"I am not your judge, Princess."
"Not my judge! What a tone you take! You must know something about me. Tell me!"
"If you really wish it, very well. Only I regret to say I'm not clever at talking, and people can't always understand me."
The doctor thought a moment and began:
"A lot of mistakes; but the most important of them, in my opinion, was the general spirit that prevailed on all your estates. You see, I don't know how to express myself. I mean chiefly the lack of love, the aversion for people that was felt in absolutely everything. Your whole system of life was built upon that aversion. Aversion for the human voice, for faces, for heads, steps . . . in fact, for everything that makes up a human being. At all the doors and on the stairs there stand sleek, rude, and lazy grooms in livery to prevent badly dressed persons from entering the house; in the hall there are chairs with high backs so that the footmen waiting there, during balls and receptions, may not soil the walls with their heads; in every room there are thick carpets that no human step may be heard; every one who comes in is infallibly warned to speak as softly and as little as possible, and to say nothing that might have a disagreeable effect on the nerves or the imagination. And in your room you don't shake hands with any one or ask him to sit down -- just as you didn't shake hands with me or ask me to sit down. . . ."
"By all means, if you like," said the princess, smiling and holding out her hand. "Really, to be cross about such trifles. . . ."
"But I am not cross," laughed the doctor, but at once he flushed, took off his hat, and waving it about, began hotly: "To be candid, I've long wanted an opportunity to tell you all I think. . . . That is, I want to tell you that you look upon the mass of mankind from the Napoleonic standpoint as food for the cannon. But Napoleon had at least some idea; you have nothing except aversion."
"I have an aversion for people?" smiled the princess, shrugging her shoulders in astonishment. "I have!"
"Yes, you! You want facts? By all means. In Mihaltsevo three former cooks of yours, who have gone blind in your kitchens from the heat of the stove, are living upon charity. All the health and strength and good looks that is found on your hundreds of thousands of acres is taken by you and your parasites for your grooms, your footmen, and your coachmen. All these two-legged cattle are trained to be flunkeys, overeat themselves, grow coarse, lose the 'image and likeness,' in fact. . . . Young doctors, agricultural experts, teachers, intellectual workers generally -- think of it! -- are torn away from their honest work and forced for a crust of bread to take part in all sorts of mummeries which make every decent man feel ashamed! Some young men cannot be in your service for three years without becoming hypocrites, toadies, sneaks. . . . Is that a good thing? Your Polish superintendents, those abject spies, all those Kazimers and Kaetans, go hunting about on your hundreds of thousands of acres from morning to night, and to please you try to get three skins off one ox. Excuse me, I speak disconnectedly, but that doesn't matter. You don't look upon the simple people as human beings. And even the princes, counts, and bishops who used to come and see you, you looked upon simply as decorative figures, not as living beings. But the worst of all, the thing that most revolts me, is having a fortune of over a million and doing nothing for other people, nothing!"
The princess sat amazed, aghast, offended, not knowing what to say or how to behave. She had never before been spoken to in such a tone. The doctor's unpleasant, angry voice and his clumsy, faltering phrases made a harsh clattering noise in her ears and her head. Then she began to feel as though the gesticulating doctor was hitting her on the head with his hat.
"It's not true!" she articulated softly, in an imploring voice. "I've done a great deal of good for other people; you know it yourself!"
"Nonsense!" cried the doctor. "Can you possibly go on thinking of your philanthropic work as something genuine and useful, and not a mere mummery? It was a farce from beginning to end; it was playing at loving your neighbour, the most open farce which even children and stupid peasant women saw through! Take for instance your -- what was it called? -- house for homeless old women without relations, of which you made me something like a head doctor, and of which you were the patroness. Mercy on us! What a charming institution it was! A house was built with parquet floors and a weathercock on the roof; a dozen old women were collected from the villages and made to sleep under blankets and sheets of Dutch linen, and given toffee to eat."
The doctor gave a malignant chuckle into his hat, and went on speaking rapidly and stammering:
"It was a farce! The attendants kept the sheets and the blankets under lock and key, for fear the old women should soil them -- 'Let the old devil's pepper-pots sleep on the floor.' The old women did not dare to sit down on the beds, to put on their jackets, to walk over the polished floors. Everything was kept for show and hidden away from the old women as though they were thieves, and the old women were clothed and fed on the sly by other people's charity, and prayed to God night and day to be released from their prison and from the canting exhortations of the sleek rascals to whose care you committed them. And what did the managers do? It was simply charming! About twice a week there would be thirty-five thousand messages to say that the princess -- that is, you -- were coming to the home next day. That meant that next day I had to abandon my patients, dress up and be on parade. Very good; I arrive. The old women, in everything clean and new, are already drawn up in a row, waiting. Near them struts the old garrison rat -- the superintendent with his mawkish, sneaking smile. The old women yawn and exchange glances, but are afraid to complain. We wait. The junior steward gallops up. Half an hour later the senior steward; then the superintendent of the accounts' office, then another, and then another of them . . . they keep arriving endlessly. They all have mysterious, solemn faces. We wait and wait, shift from one leg to another, look at the clock -- all this in monumental silence because we all hate each other like poison. One hour passes, then a second, and then at last the carriage is seen in the distance, and . . . and . . ."
The doctor went off into a shrill laugh and brought out in a shrill voice:
"You get out of the carriage, and the old hags, at the word of command from the old garrison rat, begin chanting: 'The Glory of our Lord in Zion the tongue of man cannot express. . .' A pretty scene, wasn't it?"
The doctor went off into a bass chuckle, and waved his hand as though to signify that he could not utter another word for laughing. He laughed heavily, harshly, with clenched teeth, as ill-natured people laugh; and from his voice, from his face, from his glittering, rather insolent eyes it could be seen that he had a profound contempt for the princess, for the home, and for the old women. There was nothing amusing or laughable in all that he described so clumsily and coarsely, but he laughed with satisfaction, even with delight.
"And the school?" he went on, panting from laughter. "Do you remember how you wanted to teach peasant children yourself? You must have taught them very well, for very soon the children all ran away, so that they had to be thrashed and bribed to come and be taught. And you remember how you wanted to feed with your own hands the infants whose mothers were working in the fields. You went about the village crying because the infants were not at your disposal, as the mothers would take them to the fields with them. Then the village foreman ordered the mothers by turns to leave their infants behind for your entertainment. A strange thing! They all ran away from your benevolence like mice from a cat! And why was it? It's very simple. Not because our people are ignorant and ungrateful, as you always explained it to yourself, but because in all your fads, if you'll excuse the word, there wasn't a ha'p'orth of love and kindness! There was nothing but the desire to amuse yourself with living puppets, nothing else. . . . A person who does not feel the difference between a human being and a lap-dog ought not to go in for philanthropy. I assure you, there's a great difference between human beings and lap-dogs!"
The princess's heart was beating dreadfully; there was a thudding in her ears, and she still felt as though the doctor were beating her on the head with his hat. The doctor talked quickly, excitedly, and uncouthly, stammering and gesticulating unnecessarily. All she grasped was that she was spoken to by a coarse, ill-bred, spiteful, and ungrateful man; but what he wanted of her and what he was talking about, she could not understand.
"Go away!" she said in a tearful voice, putting up her hands to protect her head from the doctor's hat; "go away!"
"And how you treat your servants!" the doctor went on, indignantly. "You treat them as the lowest scoundrels, and don't look upon them as human beings. For example, allow me to ask, why did you dismiss me? For ten years I worked for your father and afterwards for you, honestly, without vacations or holidays. I gained the love of all for more than seventy miles round, and suddenly one fine day I am informed that I am no longer wanted. What for? I've no idea to this day. I, a doctor of medicine, a gentleman by birth, a student of the Moscow University, father of a family -- am such a petty, insignificant insect that you can kick me out without explaining the reason! Why stand on ceremony with me! I heard afterwards that my wife went without my knowledge three times to intercede with you for me -- you wouldn't receive her. I am told she cried in your hall. And I shall never forgive her for it, never!"
The doctor paused and clenched his teeth, making an intense effort to think of something more to say, very unpleasant and vindictive. He thought of something, and his cold, frowning face suddenly brightened.
"Take your attitude to this monastery!" he said with avidity. "You've never spared any one, and the holier the place, the more chance of its suffering from your loving-kindness and angelic sweetness. Why do you come here? What do you want with the monks here, allow me to ask you? What is Hecuba to you or you to Hecuba? It's another farce, another amusement for you, another sacrilege against human dignity, and nothing more. Why, you don't believe in the monks' God; you've a God of your own in your heart, whom you've evolved for yourself at spiritualist séances. You look with condescension upon the ritual of the Church; you don't go to mass or vespers; you sleep till midday. . . . Why do you come here? . . . You come with a God of your own into a monastery you have nothing to do with, and you imagine that the monks look upon it as a very great honour. To be sure they do! You'd better ask, by the way, what your visits cost the monastery. You were graciously pleased to arrive here this evening, and a messenger from your estate arrived on horseback the day before yesterday to warn them of your coming. They were the whole day yesterday getting the rooms ready and expecting you. This morning your advance-guard arrived -- an insolent maid, who keeps running across the courtyard, rustling her skirts, pestering them with questions, giving orders. . . . I can't endure it! The monks have been on the lookout all day, for if you were not met with due ceremony, there would be trouble! You'd complain to the bishop! 'The monks don't like me, your holiness; I don't know what I've done to displease them. It's true I'm a great sinner, but I'm so unhappy!' Already one monastery has been in hot water over you. The Father Superior is a busy, learned man; he hasn't a free moment, and you keep sending for him to come to your rooms. Not a trace of respect for age or for rank! If at least you were a bountiful giver to the monastery, one wouldn't resent it so much, but all this time the monks have not received a hundred roubles from you!"
Whenever people worried the princess, misunderstood her, or mortified her, and when she did not know what to say or do, she usually began to cry. And on this occasion, too, she ended by hiding her face in her hands and crying aloud in a thin treble like a child. The doctor suddenly stopped and looked at her. His face darkened and grew stern.
"Forgive me, Princess," he said in a hollow voice. "I've given way to a malicious feeling and forgotten myself. It was not right."
And coughing in an embarrassed way, he walked away quickly, without remembering to put his hat on.
Stars were already twinkling in the sky. The moon must have been rising on the further side of the monastery, for the sky was clear, soft, and transparent. Bats were flitting noiselessly along the white monastery wall.
The clock slowly struck three quarters, probably a quarter to nine. The princess got up and walked slowly to the gate. She felt wounded and was crying, and she felt that the trees and the stars and even the bats were pitying her, and that the clock struck musically only to express its sympathy with her. She cried and thought how nice it would be to go into a monastery for the rest of her life. On still summer evenings she would walk alone through the avenues, insulted, injured, misunderstood by people, and only God and the starry heavens would see the martyr's tears. The evening service was still going on in the church. The princess stopped and listened to the singing; how beautiful the singing sounded in the still darkness! How sweet to weep and suffer to the sound of that singing!
Going into her rooms, she looked at her tear-stained face in the glass and powdered it, then she sat down to supper. The monks knew that she liked pickled sturgeon, little mushrooms, Malaga and plain honey-cakes that left a taste of cypress in the mouth, and every time she came they gave her all these dishes. As she ate the mushrooms and drank the Malaga, the princess dreamed of how she would be finally ruined and deserted -- how all her stewards, bailiffs, clerks, and maid-servants for whom she had done so much, would be false to her, and begin to say rude things; how people all the world over would set upon her, speak ill of her, jeer at her. She would renounce her title, would renounce society and luxury, and would go into a convent without one word of reproach to any one; she would pray for her enemies -- and then they would all understand her and come to beg her forgiveness, but by that time it would be too late. . . .
After supper she knelt down in the corner before the ikon and read two chapters of the Gospel. Then her maid made her bed and she got into it. Stretching herself under the white quilt, she heaved a sweet, deep sigh, as one sighs after crying, closed her eyes, and began to fall asleep.
In the morning she waked up and glanced at her watch. It was half-past nine. On the carpet near the bed was a bright, narrow streak of sunlight from a ray which came in at the window and dimly lighted up the room. Flies were buzzing behind the black curtain at the window. "It's early," thought the princess, and she closed her eyes.
Stretching and lying snug in her bed, she recalled her meeting yesterday with the doctor and all the thoughts with which she had gone to sleep the night before: she remembered she was unhappy. Then she thought of her husband living in Petersburg, her stewards, doctors, neighbours, the officials of her acquaintance . . . a long procession of familiar masculine faces passed before her imagination. She smiled and thought, if only these people could see into her heart and understand her, they would all be at her feet.
At a quarter past eleven she called her maid.
"Help me to dress, Dasha," she said languidly. "But go first and tell them to get out the horses. I must set off for Klavdia Nikolaevna's."
Going out to get into the carriage, she blinked at the glaring daylight and laughed with pleasure: it was a wonderfully fine day! As she scanned from her half-closed eyes the monks who had gathered round the steps to see her off, she nodded graciously and said:
"Good-bye, my friends! Till the day after tomorrow."
It was an agreeable surprise to her that the doctor was with the monks by the steps. His face was pale and severe.
"Princess," he said with a guilty smile, taking off his hat, "I've been waiting here a long time to see you. Forgive me, for God's sake. . . . I was carried away yesterday by an evil, vindictive feeling and I talked . . . nonsense. In short, I beg your pardon."
The princess smiled graciously, and held out her hand for him to kiss. He kissed it, turning red.
Trying to look like a bird, the princess fluttered into the carriage and nodded in all directions. There was a gay, warm, serene feeling in her heart, and she felt herself that her smile was particularly soft and friendly. As the carriage rolled towards the gates, and afterwards along the dusty road past huts and gardens, past long trains of waggons and strings of pilgrims on their way to the monastery, she still screwed up her eyes and smiled softly. She was thinking there was no higher bliss than to bring warmth, light, and joy wherever one went, to forgive injuries, to smile graciously on one's enemies. The peasants she passed bowed to her, the carriage rustled softly, clouds of dust rose from under the wheels and floated over the golden rye, and it seemed to the princess that her body was swaying not on carriage cushions but on clouds, and that she herself was like a light, transparent little cloud. . . .
"How happy I am!" she murmured, shutting her eyes. "How happy I am!"
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The Incomparable Naturalism
Only an artificer of the highest skill could have produced so seamless an illusion of reality
by Philip Hensher
Even the greatest of writers can boast a distinguished posthumous detractor: Shakespeare had Tolstoy and Shaw, and Jane Austen had Charlotte Brontë. The statements these detractors made are so important and interesting that in the end they actually contribute to the sense of their subjects' worth and complexity. Indeed, one might ask whether a writer can ever be regarded as of the first rank if he or she has never attracted intelligent, passionate rejection. Regarding minor talents we don't trouble to disagree, and no one has ever thought it worth being extensively rude about Surtees, whereas Dostoyevsky, Thomas Mann, and Marcel Proust stand at the summit of literary achievement partly because we are never finished arguing about them.
But Chekhov has never attracted anything but admiration. As far as I know, no one has ever tried to mount a general case against him. Since his death very few practitioners of the art have regarded him as anything but the supreme artist of the short story. It is true that Hemingway, in a combative mood, once pretended not to care for him; but even Hemingway was obliged to exempt half a dozen stories from condemnation. Chekhov's influence has been enormous, and always benevolent; even those writers closest to him in manner, such as Katherine Mansfield and V. S. Pritchett, strike us not as imitators but as writers who found in his characteristic manner ways in which they could discover their own characteristic manners. Writers find their own classics; but sooner or later everyone must reckon with Chekhov.
The reason for this supremacy among writers is often said to be Chekhov's incomparable naturalism. Put in a naive way, the usual claim is that Chekhov was not really a writer, with all the artifice and manipulation that implies, but someone who simply set down "life." His stories, like life, have no beginnings, middles, or ends; they do not deal in crises and happy endings; they are simply glimpses of ordinary lives in their untidiness and irresolution. (How radical an approach that remains may be attested by any writer, even now: like many serious writers of short stories, I've experienced having a story turned down on the grounds that it had "no beginning, middle, or end." I wish I'd had the wit to say, "Few episodes in life do, apart from this telephone call.")
It's certainly true that Chekhov always wanted to give the impression that life continued outside the boundaries of his narrative, and many of his stories end by telling us that his characters' lives go on beyond the last page. "The day after this meeting I left Yalta and how Shamokhin's story ended I do not know" ("Ariadne"). The child Sonya sits, at the end of "An Anonymous Story," looking at the narrator "as if she knew that her fate was being decided," but what that fate is, the story does not explore. "There is no more to be said about him" dismisses the eponymous hero of "Doctor Startsev," but his life goes on. Many stories end with unanswered questions—"What kind of life would it be?" ("The Steppe")—or with the initiation of some new action. Many, like "Terror" and "A Marriageable Girl," end with a departure for some new place, or, like "The Russian Master," with the promise to run away. Almost all of them contain, like the beautiful last paragraph of "A Lady With a Dog," the contemplation of "a wonderful new life." At the simplest level a remarkable number of Chekhov's stories end with a change in the weather: "It began to drizzle" ("The Duel"); "All night long rain drummed on the windows" ("Gooseberries"); "The sun began to rise" ("Lights"); the extravagant and, for once, rather overdone transformation of the seascape at the end of "Gusev."
All these endings, focusing on a new beginning rather than concluding something, emphasize what many people have most admired in Chekhov: a sense that life has been glimpsed here, and not glimpsed fully. At its grandest and most mysterious that conviction homes in on the famous unexplained noise that interrupts and concludes the action of The Cherry Orchard—a great string breaking in the distance. Plenty of productions have tried to turn that into a symbol, but it is rather more than that: it is a convulsive acknowledgment that there are things in the world, and in these lives, that neither the artist nor the audience can understand. But to describe Chekhov as purely a chronicler of life, as naive critics have done, is quite wrong. Rather, these expressions of incompleteness are supremely effective artistic conventions, designed to give the powerful illusion of real life. The inconclusive ending may be thought of as something that springs from Chekhov's observations of life; on the other hand, just as plausibly, one could say that Chekhov was imitating one of the most effective devices of his great master, Pushkin. Many of Chekhov's endings are variations on the beautiful and startling conclusion of Pushkin's Tales of the Late Belkin: "My readers will excuse me from the unnecessary chore of relating the denouement." (It's always worth remembering what a huge international reputation Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy acquired—in the unlikeliest places—in the decades after the initial craze for it in England.) Chekhov's characteristic untidiness is, surely, drawn directly from the very deliberate narrative shape of Eugene Onegin. The illusion of reality in Chekhov is dazzlingly effective; only an artificer of the highest skill could have produced so seamless an illusion. And, viewed coldly, Chekhov's plots can be as sensational and melodramatic as anything to be found in Dostoyevsky. The fantastic farrago of the immense dramatic torso which posthumous editors have titled Platonov is customarily written off as an early aberration, but a distinct taste for the extreme persisted to the end of Chekhov's life. Men, women, and infants are brutally murdered; coincidences abound; passionate declarations and terrible confessions come thick and fast. We don't normally think of Chekhov as a gothic writer, but we shouldn't neglect the ghost in "The Black Monk" or the frightful escalations of "Murder" and "In the Hollow." The extraordinary sadistic sequence of "Ward Number Six," with the brutal payoff of the doctor's being confined to the asylum, is one from which even O. Henry might have shrunk; and it is one of Chekhov's very best things.
The idea that Chekhov's stories trace the disorganized, untidy shape of real-life events is a powerful one, but to see how false it is, one might look at the structure of "Doctor Startsev." Startsev is a young physician in a provincial town. He is taken up by a rather vulgar but charming family, the Turkins, who give "artistic" soirees. Their daughter, Catherine, who dreams of going to Moscow to study the piano, attracts his attention, and he proposes to her. She refuses, saying that she wants to devote herself to her art. Some years pass, and Startsev attends another soiree. Catherine tries to get him to propose again, but he has grown cold and bored with her. The story ends with Startsev, fat, unfeeling, and rich, and Catherine, older and suffering from poor health, living their sad separate lives.
In one sense this is a beautifully naturalistic performance with an unremarkably unhappy ending, but in another it could hardly be more formal. The structure is as artificial as a Bach fugue; the first soiree at the Turkins' is recapitulated in every detail, but the recapitulation is in a minor key. The only difference—it is one of Chekhov's grandest coups—is that what once delighted Startsev now bores and irritates him. The illusion of life is, as ever, overpowering—and immensely skillful. In reality Chekhov's art is as calculated as Swinburne's. So where does that illusion come from? Why do we feel that here we are being shown "real life" in a way we are not in, say, the first book of The Idiot? "In the Hollow," perhaps Chekhov's greatest story, has much of the same quality of steadily mounting fury, but at no point do we have the sense, which Dostoyevsky was at some pains to instill, of being caught in the workings of a gigantic, relentless machine. "Doctor Startsev," once examined, is as mechanical a morality tale in its awesomely literal recapitulations as Tolstoy's "How Much Land Does a Man Need?" But always one feels the illusion of real life, and never the organizing hand of the creative imagination. In part this is owing to Chekhov's addiction to unfinished actions; even "In the Hollow," which has as shatteringly final a narrative as can be imagined, ends with a fade-out, as Lipa and Praskovya go on crossing themselves, over and over. And in part it is down to Chekhov's refusal ever to intrude himself with a judgmental adverb. I reflected, when I read Janet Malcolm's description in Reading Chekhov of "an almost satirically long empty corridor" in a hotel, that that was an indulgence Chekhov would never have permitted himself. Chekhov's judgments were sure and final and terrible; but he did not make them with adverbs.
Overwhelmingly, that sense of life arises from the astonishing, unelaborated concreteness of Chekhov's evocations of the world. He was the son of a grocer, and in a sense one could say that he never lost the attention a grocer pays to trivial domestic objects. Chekhov's world is, supremely, a world of things. To list those things is an instructive exercise. From the first four paragraphs of "In the Hollow": belfry, chimney, factory, road, railway station, unpressed caviar, jar, mud, fences, willows, waste, acetic acid, cotton, calico, tannery, cattle, stone-built house, church, vodka, skins, grain, pigs, peasant bonnet, timber. (A deliberately random stretch of prose). The properties of objects are always specified: always "Ukrainian" rugs, for instance. The objects of actions are always delineated; if people eat or drink, we are always told what they are eating or drinking. (There is a slightly odd limit to Chekhov's specificity: we are hardly ever told about financial facts—something that Jane Austen never neglected—for a reason I don't pretend to be able to explain.) Many, perhaps most, novelists direct their attention toward the facts of the world only when those facts reflect some psychological truth. This is not so with Chekhov; it is not particularly necessary that when Olga takes a walk in "The Party," we are told she walks through "a thicket of wild pears, wood-sorrel, young oaks and hops." The landscapes are hardly ever illustrative backdrops to an emotional crisis; food and clothes—two things Chekhov was evidently fascinated by—may demonstrate a character's social status, but no more than that. It is impossible to imagine Chekhov's using a dress to prove a moral point in the way Proust used the Duchesse de Guermantes's red ball gown in "The Guermantes Way."
That throughout Chekhov the physical details are lavish and specific is one of the reasons that many of his readers have come to prefer the stories to the plays, where this aspect of his genius could not be fully expressed. These details very rarely attain the status of descriptions, however. More characteristically they are simply lists of objects: "pickled sturgeon, button mushrooms, Malaga wine and plain honey cakes which left a tang of cypress in the mouth" ("The Princess"); "fringes, ribbons, braid, knitting material, buttons" ("Three Years"). Each object appears unnecessary and even surprising in so frugal a writer; cumulatively, though, they create not just a world of unprecedented solidity but the sensation of human lives lived in that world. And every so often we do get a glimpse of what Chekhov surely felt—a sort of ecstasy induced by the simplest objects and self-effacingly ascribed to his characters: "The timid novices, the stillness, the low ceilings, the smell of cypress-wood, the modest fare, the cheap curtains on the windows—these things all touched her, moved her, disposing her to contemplation and good thoughts" ("The Princess").
I said the appearance of life was an illusion, but perhaps it would be truer to say that Chekhov's manner reflects a conviction that there is nothing for the writer to talk about but the physical world and people's lives within it; the means by which the conviction is conveyed are not naive ones, and are clearly identifiable by analysis. But the effectiveness and subtlety of Chekhov's conventions do not mean that his supreme artifice is, in any sense, a conjuring trick, or meretricious.
Nevertheless, if Malcolm's book is not Chekhovian in tone or manner, that is not a requirement in a biography—one wouldn't want a biography of Milton to be in blank verse, after all. Her project, one slowly realizes, is to travel to Chekhov's territory in the hope of coming across some plausibly Chekhovian stories and lives. Applied to most writers, that would be a terrible idea: it would be a foolhardy biographer of Proust who wangled invitations to the luncheon parties of modern French duchesses. But Chekhov's subjects are mundane, and it is not obviously embarrassing for an investigator like Malcolm to explore ordinary Russian lives, to try to set out the wishes and disappointments of her guides and acquaintances in the course of her Russian journey. Well, no one expects her to fall in love and conduct an affair with an aimless waster encountered at a shabby spa, but there are plenty of lives in our own world as disappointed and blocked as anything in Chekhov; Chekhov's great subject is the most ordinary thing in the world. In the end, it must be said, Malcolm doesn't produce anything as rich as the slightest of Chekhov's stories on these subjects, but who, truly, could have?
Other aspects of Malcolm's study can only be put down to an incompatibility of cultures. Malcolm is an intensely metropolitan figure, of course, and her journey from her milieu to the ramshackle provinces of the former Soviet Union is, to a striking degree, the reverse of the journey the sisters dream of in Three Sisters. And her interests, I think, are not exactly Chekhov's. Some valuable work has been done recently on Chekhov's relations with formal religion, but it is perverse to pay attention to such issues in so short a study: Chekhov was, surely, the most worldly and secular of Russian writers. He very rarely even troubled to attack religion and its human manifestations. An exception is the assault on faith in "In the Hollow"—a story Malcolm rather startlingly misreads on this score, failing to see how thoroughly Chekhov damned the consolations offered by a belief in the afterlife. Quite simply, Chekhov wasn't particularly interested. The Jewish question, which emerges in Malcolm's attempts to visit a Moscow synagogue, is certainly a big one in contemporary Russia, but is not one that seems to have engaged Chekhov very extensively.
When Malcolm writes about Chekhov's relations with his family, there is a distinct and rather damaging mismatch of cultures. She quotes two splendid letters to his brothers. In one he told Nikolai, "You have only one failing ... your utter lack of culture," and set out what he saw as the virtues and dignity of the cultured outlook. In the other he berated Alexander for treatment of his common-law wife that was "unworthy of a decent, loving human being." Malcolm reads this in a contemporary Freudian manner:
Not being an actual firstborn, Chekhov evidently never felt comfortable in the firstborn's posture of superiority, and expressed his dislike of the censorious side of himself by stacking the deck against his fictional representations of it: von Koren and Lvov [characters in "The Duel" and "Ivanov"] are "right," but there is something the matter with them; they are cold fish. Chekhov, in his relationship with his older brothers, brings to mind the biblical Joseph. Chekhov's "sourceless maturity"—like Joseph's—may well have developed during his enforced separation from the family ... Chekhov's love for his big brothers transcended his anger with them; he evidently never entirely shed his little brother's idealization of them.
There is a troubling sense here that Malcolm thinks that European culture, then and since, placed the same value on intimate and open family relations that contemporary American culture does; like many American commentators on European writers, she fails to see the extremely high value other cultures place on the notion of personal dignity. The subject of The Cherry Orchard, "My Life," "In the Hollow," "The Princess," and dozens of other unsparing examinations of domestic conduct is not primarily emotional failure but impropriety. Worryingly, Malcolm seems to think that Chekhov was deploring a failure to talk, a failure to be sufficiently loving and sharing.
Chekhov will survive the adulation of his admirers, and the limitations inadvertently placed on him by such homage direct our attention to the gigantic range of his intelligence. Even a genius like Mansfield or Pritchett or Raymond Carver strikes us now as starting from a particular moment in the indefinite history of our engagement with Chekhov; with every re-reading the most careful reader of the master will see more, and become more painfully aware that his mind, his powers of observation, were larger than ours to an inconceivable degree. His subjects were confined and specific, and he was the great poet of the provincial. But when an observer as sophisticated and open as Janet Malcolm looks at him, the conclusion is painful and inescapable: our limitations are rigid and proximate; to Chekhov's genius no limits have yet been plausibly proposed.