Peasants and Other Stories

INTRODUCTION

IT HAS ALWAYS been a serious obstacle to the understanding of Chekhov on the part of English-speaking readers that the volumes of translations of his stories made by Constance Garnett and others do not, as a rule, present his work in its chronological sequence. You get humorous sketches from his earliest phase, when he was writing for the comic papers, side by side with his most serious stories; and the various periods of this serious work are themselves all jumbled together: the terse ironical anecdote, which began by being funny and then turned pathetic; the more rounded-out drama of character and situation; the product of what Chekhov’s English biographer, Mr. Ronald Hingley, calls his Tolstoyan period, when new moral preoccupations and a new psychological interest appear; and the more complex social study with which we are concerned in this volume. This garbling of Chekhov’s development is one of the causes for the frequent complaints on the part of English-speaking critics that they cannot make out what he is driving at. What could one make of Mark Twain if one found The Mysterious Stranger followed immediately by The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, or of Joyce if a story from Dubliners were followed by a passage from Finnegans Wake.

In the later years of Chekhov’s life—1894–1903—he was occupied mainly with a series of works, plays as well as stories, that were evidently intended to constitute a kind of analysis of Russian society, a miniature Comédie Humaine. The stories often run to greater length than is usual with his earlier pieces, and they differ from the longer of these, such as The Steppe, The Duel, and Ward Number 6, in that the latter deal with individuals, whereas the larger-scale stories of this latest period—though they sometimes, as in The Bishop, center about an individual—tend to be studies of milieux. The method here is like that of the full-scale plays, from The Sea Gull to The Cherry Orchard, which were written within these years, 1896–1904. In going through Chekhov in the Soviet edition, where his stories are printed in their proper sequence, one becomes aware that this final series begins with the story called A Woman’s Kingdom. This follows immediately The Black Monk, a tale of the supernatural, rather suggestive of Hawthorne, which is also an inside presentation of a psychiatric case; but we find ourselves, with A Woman’s Kingdom, definitely in a new domain. Up to now, we have had usually in Chekhov a certain vein of the grotesque or satiric, an exaggeration, comic or bitter, that is not always made quite plausible; but we are now in a provincial household of which the domestic incidents are soberly and solidly presented. The subject is a social phenomenon: the difficult readjustments of a new industrial middle class. And in each of the long stories that follows, you have a household or a local community which is intended to be significant of the life of some social group: the new factory owners in A Woman’s Kingdom; the old Moscow merchant class in Three Years; in The Murder, the half-literate countrymen, fundamentalist and independent (“raskolniki or something of the sort”—raskolniki are dissident sectarians—Chekhov says in one of his letters); the Tolstoyan intelligentsia in My Life; the lowest stratum of the peasantry in Peasants; the new class of engineers in The New Villa; the kulaks, in In the Ravine, on their way to the commercial middle class; the professional churchmen in The Bishop; and in Betrothed, the old-fashioned provincial household and the revolt against it of the new generation. I have here brought these stories together, in the order in which they were written, omitting the more anecdotal ones with which they are interspersed. * That Chekhov was quite conscious that these interspersed pieces belonged to a different category from the more elaborate social studies would seem to be shown by his writing to his publisher (in a letter to A. S. Suvorin, June 21, 1897) that he did not want An Artist’s Story brought out in the same volume with Peasants, on the ground that it had “nothing in common” with the more ambitious story. (Actually, Peasants and My Life were first published together in a volume by themselves.) It will be noticed that the life of the gentry is not treated at length in this series, but The Sea Gull, Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard make up for this omission. It is probable that Chekhov preferred to deal with the land-owning class in the theater, because they could be made more amusing as well as more attractive than his peasant and commercial and industrial groups. One does not find in any of his stories the same sort of atmosphere and tone that is characteristic of these three plays; and, conversely, one cannot imagine the incidents of Peasants or In the Ravine so effectively presented in a play.

If one reads these late stories, then, in conjunction with the late plays, one is presented with an anatomy of Russian society, as observed and estimated by Chekhov, at the end of the nineteenth century and just before the Revolution of 1905 (Chekhov died in 1904). This picture is anything but reassuring. The propertied classes are losing their grip but cannot merge in any healthy fashion with the rising serfs who are buying them up. The old merchant class are narrow and harsh, their world is almost a ghetto; when the young people try to escape from it by aping the intelligentsia or marrying into the gentry, they find that they do not pan out, that they cannot adapt themselves. The recently arrived bourgeoisie—factory owners and engineers—are uncomfortable because they find themselves cut off from the people from whom they have sprung. The hierarchy of the church is a routine affair, unilluminated by true religious feeling, and fanatical religion on a lower level does not rise beyond savagery and superstition. The well-to-do peasants who have been turning into shopkeepers and entrepreneurs now carry their cupidity to criminal lengths. The poor peasants are living in ignorance and filth: they crawl about their villages like badly kept beasts, and when they try their luck in the city—untrained at any trade that is practiced there—they are hardly better off. One is brought to the conclusion that Chekhov, whose family had been serfs till the Emancipation and who knew the life of the lower classes, is here contradicting deliberately the Tolstoyan idealization and the Turgenevian idylizing of the peasantry, as, in his stories about religion, he is confronting Dostoevsky’s saints with something more degraded or prosaic. It is a picture, in general, of a feudal society attempting to modernize itself, but still in a state of transition that is considerably less than half-baked. One of the strongest impressions, in fact, conveyed by the whole of Chekhov’s work is that, although the old order is petering out, there is not very much to build on for a sound democratic and up-to-date Russia. And yet there is just barely a note of hope. The architect’s son of My Life does achieve a measure of satisfaction by abandoning his pretensions to gentility and settling down as a professional house-painter. In the last story Chekhov wrote, Betrothed—which counterbalances and to some extent offsets the first in this sequence, A Woman’s Kingdom—he does allow his heroine to break away, at the cost of moral effort and some ruthlessness, from her stultifying provincial family, and to study for a career in St. Petersburg. A cousin, a raté intellectual, has egged her on to this. He has told her that the more people like her become trained and “dedicated,” “the sooner the Kingdom of Heaven will descend upon the earth. In that time, little by little, there will not be left of your town one stone upon another. Everything will be changed, as if by magic. There will arise large and splendid houses, marvelous parks, extraordinary fountains, remarkable people.” There is, of course, an element of parody, or irony, in this vision of the future on the part of one who has been so unsuccessful in the present, as there is in The Three Sisters in the case of a somewhat similar prophecy; yet Nadya does get to St. Petersburg as the sisters do not get to Moscow.

I hope that this volume may help to redeem Chekhov, one of the tersest, most lucid and most purposive of writers, from the Anglo-Saxon charges of vagueness; to give something of his true weight and point for readers who may have been bewildered by reading him in scrambled collections.

—EDMUND WILSON

* Here is the complete chronology of the stories and plays of this period (I give all the titles in Constance Garnett’s translation): 1894. The Black Monk, A Woman’s Kingdom, Rothschild’s Fiddle, The Student, The Teacher of Literature, At the Manor, The Head Gardener’s Story; 1895. Three Years, The Helpmate, Whitebrow, Anna on the Neck, The Murder, Ariadne; 1896. An Artist’s Story, My Life, The Sea Gull; 1897. Peasants, Pechenyeg, At Home, The Schoolmistress, Uncle Vanya; 1898. The Man in the Case, Gooseberries, About Love, Ionich, A Doctor’s Visit, The Darling; 1899. The New Villa, On Official Business, The Lady with the Dog, At Christmas Time; 1900. In the Ravine; 1901. The Three Sisters; 1902. The Bishop; 1903. Betrothed; 1904. The Cherry Orchard. (If anyone should set out to read these consecutively in Constance Garnett’s edition, he would be put to considerable inconvenience.)