Chekhov

Chapter Seven

Only writing, then, would purge his grief, but what would he write? He had wasted time at the Lintvaryovs. He started writing A Dreary Story, and it was to become one of the longest, strangest and most powerful and self-accusing stories of his “clinical” type. It is divided into six parts. The theme springs from a growing obsession which he had often discussed with Suvorin, and perhaps a chance meeting in Yalta brought it to a head. There was a colony of writers in the resort, and one morning Chekhov was stopped in the street by a bold young girl of fifteen who addressed him by name. She wanted him to read and criticize a tale she had written. Chekhov was one of the few writers who responded to such intrusions from women. He read the story, liked it and sent it to Suvorin, who published it. For a while he wrote, encouraging her, and then the acquaintance stopped.

But—to be addressed by a stranger by name in a strange town! He had found a subject: the price of fame is that one ceases in everyone’s eyes, even in one’s own, to be “an ordinary human being who knows he will die.” This is the preoccupation of the famous professor of medicine in A Dreary Story and indeed of Chekhov himself. (Moscow gossip said that the death of a professor in the medical school was the source. This seems to have been quite untrue.)

One is bound to think of A Dreary Story as a catharsis, even from the perversity of its tide. It is a tour de force and an exemplar of the rule “When in doubt a writer should increase the difficulty.” The twenty-nine-year-old Chekhov set himself the task of projecting himself into the intimate life of a learned man of sixty-two who has an incurable disease and knows he will soon die but has revealed nothing of this to his family and friends. He is a professor of medicine and celebrated throughout Russia and Europe. He is a member of all the Russian, and three European, universities. “All that and a great deal more,” he writes, “makes up what is called my ‘name.’” It is a matter of pride that his fame eclipses his life as an “ordinary human being.” We see him writing a day-to-day diary, in the present tense and in the first person, looking back with rigid pride on his distinguished career and in the manner of a doctor recording his symptoms. Dryly—if with some vanity—he sets out his physical condition: a bald, dingy wrinkled old man with false teeth, mouth turning down at one side when he talks or lectures. He is subject to attacks of tic douloureux, the sight of which must stir “in everyone the grim and impressive thought, Evidently that man will soon die.” His memory is going, his ideas now lack sequence; the simpler the subject he writes about, the more agonizing is the effort, and he feels more at ease writing a learned article than when composing a congratulatory letter or a memorandum. He notes that he writes better in German or English than in Russian. Intellectually he is devastating. He knows he is unrepen-tantly an egotist. He still retains the belief

that science is the most essential thing in the life of man; that it always has been and will be the highest manifestation of love…. This faith is perhaps naïve and may rest on false assumptions, but it is not my fault that I believe that and nothing else.

Although the voice in the story is exclusively the professor’s, his “stream of consciousness” is as stern, sweeping and controlled as the Preacher’s in the withering book of Eccle-siastes, yet the narrative is particular and rippling with the Chekhovian sense of intimate drama.

The professor is an insomniac. At night his household becomes clear to us because of the sounds made by his family.

Two rooms away from me my daughter Liza says something rapidly in her sleep, or my wife crosses the drawing-room with a candle and invariably drops the matchbox; or a warped cupboard creaks.

An uneasy family. At dawn a cock crows, the porter below coughs with anger. The professor wakes and waits for his wife to come in and say—what she always says—that she is “just looking for something,” before she asks how he has slept. He knows by heart what she will say. It will be about money: that he owes money to the porter; that he has forgotten to send the monthly fifty rubles to their son, who is leading an extravagant life in Warsaw; that bread (thank God) is cheaper, but sugar is going up; that their daughter Liza, who is studying at the conservatoire, is ashamed to go out in her shabby fur coat when everyone knows that her father is a professor of the highest distinction; and on to her nagging lament that he refuses to add to their income by going into private practice as a doctor. He tries to calm her. Liza comes in, looking as pretty as his wife used to look when she was young, but after his sleepless night it seems to him that her kiss is “like the sting of a bee. I give a false smile and turn my head away.” Although he is a confirmed egotist he is ashamed of the secret thought that if his daughter were really concerned for him she would give up her expensive music lessons!

He is glad to be off to the university, to his real home, the home of his fame and power. Every day as he passes the little beer shop where, when he was a student, he used to make notes for his thesis, he never fails to remember dryly that this was where he wrote his first passionate love letters to his wife and that his diesis was entided Historia Morbi. Now at the university he meets the old hall porter who knows by heart every item of the careers of a whole generation of professors; in his way, the porter is an unconscious parody of them. He has picked up a hundred words of Latin and makes “free use of our terminology” and is vain of being able to set up a skeleton for the lecturers. There is the comedy of the professor’s interchanges with the faculty. They are all watching one another, of course; each of them obviously hoping to be his successor.

In Part Two he has returned home and is working in his room within hearing of the chattering of his family. Presently he hears a discreet ring of the doorbell. He knows who has rung it. He hears the rustle of skirts and “a dear voice.” It is the voice of Katya, his ward. He had taken her in to be brought up in the family when her father died eighteen years before. She had a small capital of her own. He remembers her as a trustful, apt and truthful little girl who used to sit quietly watching him as he worked. Everything went well until she was fourteen or so, when, as young girls do, she became stage-struck. They used to have long arguments about the theater. He has always hated the theater, especially the falsity of actors. Although he had done what he could to stop her, she suddenly joined a troupe of actors in Ufa or some such place. She had been wildly happy and wrote marvelous letters for four years, and then, of course, there was the usual disaster. She had fallen in love with an especially plausible actor, who soon left her. She had had a child by him and it died. She seems to have attempted suicide. The professor remembers that he wrote “boring” letters to her, sent her money, but he could no longer love her as he used to do.

That is all over. She has gone off now to live idly on her means in a flat nearby, an actressy place of cheap fans, silly pictures, little tables—all signs of spiritual scrappiness and indolence. Nevertheless, every day she drops in on the family, particularly to see him, and sits in his room watching him incuriously. To this ward of his he is a surrogate father. She is offhand with his wife and daughter, who have brought her up, and they have come to hate her. This hatred comes to a head when his daughter has a suitor. The professor is shocked by their hatred. It arouses his contempt for this primitive aspect of woman’s feeling:

I cannot recall one woman or girl of my acquaintance who would not consciously or unconsciously harbour such feelings…. Woman is as tearful and as coarse in her feelings now as she was in the Middle Ages and to my thinking [this is followed by the very Chekhovian view] those who advise that she should be educated like a man are quite right.

Now to farce. Enter his daughter’s suitor. The professor is appalled by the ludicrous man, who now begins to dine with them again and again. Special expensive dishes are cooked for him; the finest wines are brought out. His name is Gnekker.

He is … very stout and broad-shouldered, with red whiskers near his ears, and a little waxed moustache, which makes his plump smooth face look like a toy. He is dressed in a very short reefer jacket, a flowered waistcoat, breeches very full at the top and very narrow at the ankle, with a large check pattern on them, and yellow boots without heels. He has prominent eyes like a crab’s, his cravat is like a crab’s neck, and I even fancy there is a smell of crab-soup about the young man’s whole person.

The professor himself reveals a primitive medieval tendency. Incredible, the professor thinks, that a daughter of his should love such an obvious fraud. And to think his wife is blind to it!

In Part Three the professor begins to spend more time with the grateful, watchful but foolish Katya, who has taken up with another professor, a clever, cynical philologist. The three play cards and drink. We become aware that the professor is jealous. What begins to strike us is that all the characters may be talking together but they are not listening: although close, they are fundamentally isolated, as if in separate rooms. This, of course, is common among the characters of all Chekhov’s stories: they talk to one another but do not listen. We shall see this as being the spell of his plays later on in his life. In fact, A Dreary Story would indeed be a dreary if learned debate, but it has an unrepentant cold intellectual vivacity. In Part Five we have a burst of emotion in which all the parties break under the emotional strain and become clear to themselves.

In Part Six the professor goes alone to Kharkov to investigate Gnekker’s background. The final scene is in his hotel room. He is “famous”—the newspapers have picked up the news that he, the celebrity, is there. No freedom for “an ordinary human being” who is famous! In three months perhaps the same paper will be reporting his death. He sits in his hotel room, alone in the dreary town. No one has heard of the Gnekker family. The man is a fraud. The next day the professer has a telegram from his wife saying that Gnekker and his daughter are married! There is a tap on the door of his hotel room. Enter Katya, who says she is traveling to the Caucasus and has discovered the hotel he is staying at. She says: “Help me! … I cannot go on…. You are my father … my only friend! You are clever … you have lived so long; you have been a teacher!” In what will strike us for the first time as too obvious a trick on Chekhov’s part she pulls a handkerchief out of her bag to wipe her tears and a bundle of letters falls out.

On one of them I recognize the handwriting of Mikhail [the philologist] and accidentally read a bit of a word: “passionat….”

Clearly she is going to meet the philologist and this is her last appeal to the professor to tell her if she is right or wrong. In his account of this meeting the professor is powerless to make up his mind. He evades.

The absence of what my colleagues call a general idea I have detected in myself only just before death, in the decline of my days, while the soul of this poor girl has known and will know no refuge all her life, all her life!

All he can think of doing is to ask her to lunch. She recognizes the finality of his words and all he is able to think of saying is ‘Then, you won’t be at my funeral?”

He watches her leave the room. The great “name” is powerless as a human being. He knows she has gone for good and he writes: “I’ve seen her black dress for the last time…. Farewell, my treasure!”

Many critics thought this story as remorselessly objective as Tolstoy’s masterpiece Ivan Ilyich, about the great lawyer who knows he is dying. That resemblance is superficial. There were minor criticisms. His friend Pleshcheyev said the professor ought to have said more about Katya’s “husband.” Chekhov replied that

the professor could not write about Katya’s husband because [she herself] does not say anything about him; besides one of my hero’s chief characteristics is that he cares far too little about the inner life of those who surround him.

Many critics accused Chekhov of concealing, or at least being blind to, the unconscious erotic element in the relations of the old professor and Katya—a modern novelist would have made this central. Here Chekhov was indignant; if people, he wrote,

lose belief in the friendship, respect and boundless love which exist outside the sphere of sex, at least they should not attribute bad taste to me. If Katya were in love with an old man barely alive you must agree it would be a sexual perversion. … If there had been nothing more than this sexual perversion, would it have been worthwhile to write the story?

Some complained that he had not given the professor’s wife and daughter an inner life of their own, but Chekhov made the point that the egotistical professor was writing his own story and was absorbed in himself only and “had ceased to be sensitive to the family’s feelings.” In fact by masochistic indirection the professor has made us intimately aware of the family. Even in his anger about the “medievalism” of the mother and daughter we see that the professor is too self-centered to understand what is clear to us—that they are “ordinary human beings” who know their own minds, while he generalizes.

Of course the professor contains a good deal of Chekhov himself. The “lack of a central idea” haunted him as he wrote this intensely controlled story which projects so much of his own state of mind at this time. We notice how carefully his prose captures the professor’s academic manner and how he sustains a moral diagnosis without losing the natural grace of the artist. The story is like some stern gravestone which records the public figure and in which at the same time, between the engraved lines, we detect the fitful human being. Under the surface of Chekhov’s impressionism there is firm psychological architecture. After this story he will no longer be a moralizing Tolstoyan. As many critics have noticed, Chekhov is at the point of impasse. He has isolated himself.