About Love

Postscript

Anton Chekhov spent the winter of 1897-98 in France, most of it in Nice on the Côte d’Azur. He was avoiding the cold and damp of the Russian winter. In March of 1897 he had suffered a severe haemorrhage and was told that both his lungs were tubercular. Though he himself was a doctor, he had for the previous ten years succeeded in ignoring the symptoms of his disease. Now he could no longer pretend not to understand the dangerous state of his health.

That winter Chekhov read extensively in French and was much impressed by Émile Zola’s public intervention in the Dreyfus scandal. (One suspects that the little anecdote in “About Love” concerning the supposed Jewish gangsters might have its origins in this.) Chekhov improved his knowledge of the French language – he was interviewed about the Dreyfus affair in French – but he did only a limited amount of writing. In May of 1898 he returned to his estate at Melikhovo, and in July and August he published in the magazine Russian Thought the three connected stories translated here. A year later he described them as a series still far from complete, but he never returned to them, and they appear to be his only experiment in linking his stories.

Within an overall narrative about the travels in the Russian countryside of the veterinarian Ivan Ivanych and the teacher Burkin, Chekhov presents three framed tales, the first a kind of grotesque comedy of the sort associated with Gogol, the second not dissimilar but with a more explicit and impassioned response from its narrator, the third a poignant little story of failed love that may evoke for the reader Chekhov’s most famous story, “The Lady with a Little Dog.” Emotion grows more personal as we move from one to the next. In the first story Burkin tells a tale about an acquaintance. In the second Ivan Ivanych describes the life of his brother. In the third their friend Alyokhin recounts a painful story about his own life.

While the framed tales provide the dramatic core of each story, the outer narrative offers a vivid evocation of the Russian countryside, with a sense of history and geography complementing and containing the urgency of the tales. In “Gooseberries” an extraordinary passage describes the aging veterinarian Ivan Ivanych swimming in a cold mill pond, unwilling to stop, in the grip of some inexplicable joy; then at a paragraph break the story modulates in a single line to a quiet sitting room where the framed portraits of soldiers and fine ladies evoke a past gentility, and Ivan Ivanych begins to talk about his brother’s life, its obsession, the coarse and joyless littleness of his achievement.

A passage from the conclusion of the first story lifts our gaze from the events we’ve just been told about. “When, on a moonlit night, you see a wide village street with its peasant houses, haystacks, sleeping willows, tranquility enters the soul; in this calm, wrapped in the shade of night, free from struggle, anxiety and passion, everything is gentle, wistful, beautiful, and it seems that the stars are watching over it tenderly and with love, and that this is taking place somewhere unearthly, and that all is well.”

The point of view in Chekhov’s stories can be slippery. The “you” of this passage is unidentified, but the verb is in the second person singular; it speaks intimately from some detached narrative intelligence to each single reader in a passage that evokes a benign universe surrounding the events.

Yet just a few lines earlier we have read Burkin’s harsh conclusion to the tale he has been recounting. “We came back from the cemetery in a good mood. But that went on no more than a week, and life flowed by just as before, harsh, dull, stupid life, nothing to stop it going round and round, everything unresolved; things didn’t get better.”

Such a counterpoint of one voice with another, one mood with another, their contradiction, creates an ironic interplay not altogether unlike the form of Chekhov’s plays. Always, in Chekhov, there is a sense that the events suggest numerous possibilities, things that could occur offstage or after the narrative ends. The very last line of “About Love,” the third of these stories, offers a grim hint at what might be still to come.

In 1991 Oberon Press published Last Stories, my translations of the final six stories of Anton Chekhov’s career, including two or three of his finest and best known works. It seems appropriate to repeat here what I said in the introduction to that book, that while there are many translators whose Russian is better than mine, there are not so many who have had a long experience of writing narrative prose. These narratives are my personal versions of Chekhov’s stories; they are also as close as I can make them to the precision and suggestiveness of the originals.

This little book is homage to a great writer. It is dedicated to my two daughters, Maggie and Kate, who, many years ago, when I complained about the difficulty of finding Russian texts, collaborated to find and buy me a pile of second-hand books including the three volume collection of Chekhov stories from which the translations have been made.