Little Apples

Introduction

by Cathy Popkin

FORTY GOOD READS

Of the nearly six hundred stories collected in The Complete Works of Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, more than half stem from Chekhov’s early twenties (1880–85), well before he had been embraced by the literary establishment or acclaimed by critics as a great writer.

These were impecunious years for the young Chekhov, who, unlike his illustrious predecessors Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and Pushkin, emphatically did not hail from aristocracy. The grandson of a serf and the son of a merchant—a bankrupt one at that—the teenage Chekhov had been left behind in his native Taganrog to finish high school and fend off disgruntled creditors while his family fled in the dead of night. When Chekhov arrived in Moscow to matriculate at the university in 1879, he was reunited with parents and five siblings and assumed primary responsibility for the family’s keep; a good many of his early stories were written chiefly to keep the Chekhovs housed, clothed, and fed. Studying medicine by day and poring over the popular press after hours, Chekhov published humorous stories and sketches in the comic papers under dozens of pseudonyms; these pieces tended to be short, subject as they were to strict journalistic line limits, and calculated for quick laughs—as well as prompt payment.

Why should we bother, then, with such profit-driven juvenilia? Certainly publishers in the US and UK have shown scant interest in Chekhov’s early work. Until relatively recently, only a fraction of the 340-plus stories written before 1886 had appeared in English at all, and fewer still were readily available. Clearly the mythology of the “two Chekhovs”—one a young and callow humorist who dashed off trifles to make ends meet, the other a mature, sober tragedian who produced enduring works of art—has been tough to dislodge; the contrast between some of Chekhov’s initial efforts and his later, more widely known work is pronounced. But the connection between the early Chekhov of the comic press and the revered playwright of The Cherry Orchard is equally defining; even that last great drama of his Chekhov insisted on calling a comedy.

Indeed, chief among Peter Constantine’s purposes in treating us to the zanier side of Chekhov’s oeuvre1 has been to expand, and especially to diversify, our conception of what counts as “Chekhovian.” Not for nothing did Chekhov refer to his own stories as “motley”; until we accommodate the heterogeneity of the parts, we will be missing something essential about the whole.

Nor, importantly, are these variant Chekhovs a consequence of chronology alone. If Chekhov “differed” from himself, that divergence had only partly to do with attaining maturity or changing his modus operandi; Chekhov operated with multiple identities throughout his professional life (even beyond his prodigious use of pseudonyms). As a doctor who was also a writer, a man of science as well as a creator of verbal art, Chekhov actively pursued multiple avenues of investigation from the get-go. In letters to colleagues, he emphasized the complementarity of his disciplines (if I know the theory of circulation and can recite poetry, I’m that much richer)2 and the synergy of his dual professional allegiances (“when I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other”).3 During his 1890 research expedition to Sakhalin Island4 he deployed an especially impressive array of disciplinary approaches. In keeping with the multidisciplinary imperatives of medical geography, Chekhov surveyed the hygienic conditions of the penal colony by collecting the data of an ethnographer, geographer, meteorologist, demographer, cartographer, sociologist, statistician, and physician. Chekhov’s literary forays, too, lay bare the possibilities and pitfalls of all kinds of investigatory practices, from diagnosis to deposition, from library to laboratory, from microscopy to metaphysics, from painting to politics.

If Chekhov was attuned to the plurality of possible modes of reconnaissance he was equally fascinated by his era’s myriad forms of documentation, the profusion of specialized formats for recording and disseminating one’s professional findings. From the time he was learning to construct medical case histories at school while also scouring the papers to figure out which literary genres might sell, Chekhov developed an abiding interest in the many possible ways to structure an effective—and affective—account. In the course of his careers both scientific and literary, Chekhov experimented with documentary formats as diverse as statistical tables, exhibition catalogues, obituary notices, census questionnaires, letters, travelogues, timelines, diagrams, photographs, drawings, and diary entries, not to mention the idiosyncratic short stories and innovative dramatic forms he refined to such a level of artistry.

This preoccupation with documentary, expository, and artistic form is arguably the most defining by-product of Chekhov’s commitment to more than one line of inquiry. It is surely the hallmark of his best-known work: it conjures up the Akathist Hymn5 we long to hear in “Easter Eve” (1886), the psychiatric case history that structures “A Nervous Breakdown” (1889), the Gospel story that both moves and betrays in “The Student” (1895), the error-ridden telegram that brings sad tidings in “The Darling” (1899), the Christmas letter that fails—or, by some miracle, succeeds—in establishing contact “At Christmastime” (1900), the parable (of the prodigal son) that doesn’t hold up in “The Bride” (1903), along with the innumerable other verbal artifacts (anecdotes, arias, autopsy reports, calendars, caricatures, equations, laments, lectures, ledgers, legends, math problems, moral exempla, newspaper clippings, property assessments, psalms, saints’ lives, sermons, songs, syllogisms, transcripts, and a wide variety of liturgical offerings) that underlie Chekhov’s work throughout.

It’s not hard to spot the documentary forms lurking in the stories of the present volume; they include such verbal specimens as the typology (“The Temperaments—According to the Latest Science”), the feuilleton (“Salon des Variétés”), government regulations (“Persons Entitled to Travel Free of Charge on the Imperial Russian Railways”), down to the minutes of a professional meeting (“The Philadelphia Conference of Natural Scientists”). Some stories actually wear their genres on their sleeves: “An Idyll—But Alas!”; “The Turnip: A Folktale”; “Twenty-six (Excerpts from a Diary)”; “A Brief Anatomy of a Man”; “A Children’s Primer”; “On the Characteristics of Nations (From the Notebook of a Naïve Member of the Russian Geographic Society)”; “A Modern Guide to Letter Writing”; “Visiting Cards”; “Letters to the Editor”; “Man (A Few Philosophical Musings)”; and so on.

In many cases, what makes these renditions entertaining is the incompetence with which the paradigm in question is deployed: “Dirty Tragedians and Leprous Playwrights: A Dreadful, Terrible, and Scandalously Foolhardy Tragedy” is self-evidently a script, but one that contains largely words that are not meant to be spoken onstage. In other instances the content is grotesquely incongruent with the form that purveys it. When a high-ranking official in “The Eclipse” orders that the street lanterns remain lit throughout the night so that the eclipse of the moon will be visible, and cautions his interlocutors about the subversive potential of such planetary misbehavior, we are amused by his inexorable logic. But what makes the exchange most absurd is the form it takes: a sequence of documents in an official correspondence—Memorandum No. 1032 and its serial responses (Re: Memorandum No. 1032, etc., etc.)—with inflated rhetoric to match and witness signatures to provide authentication.

By exemplifying a recognizable genre or form but violating its norms, lampoons like these confirm in the breach the potency of a culture’s forms of writing. Still, we hardly need to know the specifics of nineteenth-century Russian bureaucratic culture to chuckle at Memorandum No. 1032 (etc.); neither is the overexposure of Chekhov’s single white male in his 1880 send-up of a personal ad (“À l’américaine”) lost on readers familiar with online dating. And the grammatical infelicities in student writing haven’t gotten any less impressive since Chekhov’s day (“Nadia N.’s Vacation Homework”). These stories are still funny.

But Chekhov’s interests go beyond poking fun at his contemporaries (and ours!), or even capitalizing on comedy when the cupboards were bare. Moreover, not all of his early stories are humorous, any more than the later ones are uniformly dark.

Perhaps the least funny of this lot is the title tale, “Because of Little Apples”—certainly the characters who do find humor in the state of affairs are the story’s most depraved. This latter-day incarnation of the Garden of Eden is already a fallen world, one whose denizens are deeply flawed and whose temptations are legion. There, beneath the tree of knowledge, different forms of cultural literacy are put to the test. Readers of the tale must rise to the epistemological challenges of several fields—religion, history, and literature—if they are to make sense of the setting, at once so mythically broad and so historically specific as well as symbolically rich; meanwhile, the boy and girl in the story are being judged on their knowledge of specific genres—stories, commandments, and prayers. For the vulnerable pair within the story, the penalty for inadequate mastery will be irrevocable loss.

In his singular attentiveness to fields and forms—the structures of knowledge and modes of communication—Chekhov explores how people attempt to construct meaning, how they make recourse to the categories of their culture, how they harness them and not infrequently become entrapped by them, misappropriating and misapplying such discursive frameworks in botched attempts to make sense of their lives or to communicate their plight. If, as we’ve noted, the discrepancy between actual situations and the clichéd, overblown, or otherwise inappropriate formulations used to represent them serves as a rich source of humor in Chekhov’s tales, this stubborn attachment to narratives or other forms of accounting that simply do not fit the context also has the potential to unleash great suffering. At base, Chekhov is interested in how people understand their predicaments, how they shape their responses and frame their behaviors, how people attempt and all too often fail to comprehend their own pain and, more frequently still, to tap into the pain of others.

In this respect, anyway, Chekhov’s capacity to “think medically” never deserted him, even when he was composing fiction. In fact, what aligns the two practices Chekhov was honing in the early 1880s (and what also amply justifies his professional “two-timing”) is their common goal of access—clinical and imaginative—to somebody else’s pain. Insofar as the stories in this volume illustrate vividly (and often hilariously) the frustrations and failures born of the wide gulf between life and our misguided constructions of it, they do serve a diagnostic function. These stories also have a certain palliative potential: if they don’t fully deliver us from evil, they do divert us and lighten thereby our postlapsarian load. And if by chance we should be edified and thus raised by them, then Chekhov’s early comedic tales will have proved therapeutic as well.6

1 Both in the forty stories collected here and in Constantine’s earlier collection, The Undiscovered Chekhov, published first with thirty-eight new translations and shortly thereafter, in paperback, with forty-three (Seven Stories Press, 1998; 1999).

2 To Alexei Suvorin, May 15, 1889.

3 The punch line of Chekhov’s oft-cited quip, “Medicine is my lawfully wedded wife, literature is my mistress” (to Suvorin, September 11, 1888).

4 Bleak island in the Sea of Japan, to which Russia exiled thousands of prisoners in the nineteenth century.

5 Special canticle with a complicated and highly specified structure.

6 I am indebted to Paul Reardon for this line of thought (“From Case Study to Comedy: Representation in Chekhov’s Early Stories,” unpublished).