Reading Chekhov

Five

After returning to the hotel from the trip to Gurzuv, I was summoned again to Igor’s office. Without looking up from some papers on his desk, he said, “Your suitcase has been found. They will bring it from the airport this evening.” It took me a moment to grasp what he had said and to hope it was true. I said thank you and left the office. Something in Igor’s manner made me disinclined to question him—and even to feel obscurely in the wrong. Humorlessness as profound as Igor’s is unnerving. In fact, the suitcase materialized a few hours later. Someone had rifled it, but had taken nothing. I will never know what happened. Grace, as usual, had arrived on flat, silent feet.

I went to eat dinner at a restaurant Nina had recommended on the hotel’s seaside boardwalk. To reach the boardwalk, one descends several hundred feet in an elevator built into the cliff on which the hotel stands. The elevator opens into a long tunnel leading to the beach. The tunnel is dark and dripping, and one’s pace quickens the way it does in the sordid transfer tunnels in the New York subway. I met no one in the elevator or the tunnel or along the boardwalk; most of the bars and restaurants and saunas and massage studios were closed. (I later learned from Igor that there were only fifty guests in the hotel; more were expected in the hot, dusty season.) The beach was nearly deserted. I passed a father playing in the dark sand with a shivering child. It was a melancholy scene—not the sweet melancholy of twilight on summer beaches after everyone has gone home but the acrid melancholy of failed enterprises. The sea was gray and still, as if it, too, had lost its will to beguile.

I looked for the restaurant Nina had mentioned—it was called the Krymen—with small expectation of finding it open, but it was open, though without customers. After a search, a tattered handwritten menu in English with strange spellings was produced by an amiable waitress, and soon a delicious dinner of trout and potatoes and cucumber-and-tomato salad was set before me. I am always touched by simple, nicely prepared food, by the idea that a stranger I will never meet has taken care over my dinner, cooking it perfectly and arranging it handsomely on the plate. I feel something friendly and generous wafting toward me. Conversely, I feel the malice and aggression in pretentious, carelessly prepared hotel food; and even the elegant, rigorously prepared dishes served in good restaurants often produce in me a sense of the egotism of their makers: they are doing it for art’s sake, not for mine. I have a few times in my life eaten food on the highest level of gastronomy, food imbued with the impersonality of art—from which flowed the same spirit of kindliness and selflessness that I felt at the Krymen.

In “The Wife” (1892), Chekhov describes a meal served at the house of a benign old landowner named Bragin:

. . . first a cold course of white suckling pig with horseradish cream, then a rich and very hot cabbage soup with pork in it, with boiled buckwheat . . . pie was served; then, I remember, with long intervals between, during which we drank homemade liquors, they gave us a stew of pigeons, some dish of giblets, roast suckling pig, partridges, cauliflower, curd dumplings, curd cheese and milk, jelly, and finally pancakes and jam.

The narrator, Pavel Andreitch Asorin, is another of Chekhov’s flawed heroes who is mysteriously transformed into a decent person. He and his wife, Natalya Gavrilovna, are living together—but not living together—on his country estate. They are like an estranged modern couple who stubbornly continue to occupy a large rent-controlled apartment. The relationship itself has a modern flavor—the raw, close-to-the-bone ambivalence of marriage in the theater of Pinter and Albee. The story centers on a famine in the village, and on the struggle between Natalya, who has organized a successful relief fund, and Asorin, a harsh, abrasive man who attempts to take over her work and run it into the ground because he can’t bear the idea of her effectiveness. Asorin’s transformation occurs when he awakes from a nap after the gargantuan meal. “I feel as though I had woken up after breaking the fast at Easter,” he tells his host, and as he drives home he feels that “I really had gone out of my mind or become a different man. It was as though the man I had been till that day were already a stranger to me.” When he arrives home, he goes to his wife and tells her, “I’ve shaken off my old self with horror, with horror; I despise him and am ashamed of him.” He begins a new life of philanthropy and serene relations with Natalya. In the story’s final words, “My wife often comes up to me and looks about my rooms uneasily, as though looking for what more she can give to the starving peasants ‘to justify her existence,’ and I see that, thanks to her, there will soon be nothing of our property left, and we shall be poor; but that does not trouble me, and I smile at her gaily. What will happen in the future I don’t know.”

Contemporary critics took the line they had taken with “Lights” (and later with “The Duel”), reproving Chekhov for his hero’s abrupt, unmotivated change of character. But, after enough time goes by, a great writer’s innovations stop looking like mistakes; today we no longer find the transformations of Asorin and Laevsky and Ananyev jarring, and we accept the lacunae in their psychologies as normal attributes of the inhabitants of Chekhov’s world. We feel, moreover, that on some level the transformations have been prepared for—and it is to this level that a new school of Chekhov criticism has been devoting itself. These critics, who are reading Chekhov’s texts “with the attention accorded poetry,” as one of them—Julie de Sherbinin, a professor of Slavic literature at Colby College—writes, have come upon an unexpected source of possible meaning in a lode of hitherto uninterpreted material; namely, Chekhov’s repeated references to religion. It is a kind of “Purloined Letter” situation: the references to the Bible and to the Russian Orthodox liturgy have always been there, but we haven’t seen them, because we took Chekhov at his word as being a rationalist and a nonbeliever. “How could I work under the same roof as Dmitri Merezhkovsky?” Chekhov wrote in July 1903 to Sergei Diaghilev, who had invited him to coedit the journal The World of Art with Merezhkovsky. “He is a resolute believer, a proselytizing believer, whereas I squandered away my faith long ago and never fail to be puzzled by an intellectual who is also a believer.” And of a Moscow professor named Sergei Rachinsky, who ran a religious elementary school, he wrote (in a March 1892 letter to Shcheglov), “I would never send my children to his school. Why? In my childhood, I received a religious education and the same sort of upbringing—choir singing, reading the epistles and psalms in church, regular attendance at matins, altar boy and bell-ringing duty. And the result? When I think back on my childhood it all seems quite gloomy to me. I have no religion now.” However, if we slow the pace of our reading and start attending to every line, we will not fail to pick up the clue in a remark like Asorin’s “I feel as though I had woken up after breaking the fast at Easter,” or in Ryabovitch’s feeling that he has been anointed with oil. Indeed, we will find that whenever a Chekhov character undergoes a remarkable transformation, an allusion to religion appears in its vicinity, in the way mushrooms grow near certain trees in the forest. These allusions are oblique, sometimes almost invisible, and possibly not even conscious.

The Dupin of this new perspective is Robert Louis Jackson, professor of Slavic languages and literatures at Yale, whose writing and teaching on the religious subtext in Chekhov’s stories have inspired a generation of younger critics. Chekhov was wary of critics—in “A Dreary Story” he wonderfully satirizes (through his narrator, a professor of medicine) what he calls “serious articles”:

In my childhood and early youth I had for some reason a terror of doorkeepers and attendants at the theater, and that terror has remained with me to this day. . . . It is said that we are only afraid of what we do not understand. And, indeed, it is very difficult to understand why doorkeepers and theater attendants are so dignified, haughty, and majestically rude. I feel exactly the same terror when I read serious articles. Their extraordinary dignity, their bantering, lordly tone, their familiar manner toward foreign authors, their ability to split straws with dignity—all that is beyond my understanding; it is intimidating and utterly unlike the quiet, gentlemanly tone to which I am accustomed when I read the works of our medical and scientific writers.

Although the tone of the Jacksonian critics could not be quieter or more gentlemanly (or ladylike, as the case may be), Chekhov might well have found their readings intimidating. He would surely marvel at Julie de Sherbinin’s reading of “The Teacher of Literature”—a story about a young man’s idealization of and subsequent disillusionment with his wife—as a symbolic evocation of the two Marys of Russian Orthodoxy: the virgin mother of God and the harlot Mary of Egypt. And at Alexandar Mihailovic’s reading of “Ionich”—a story about the decline of a conscientious, progressive-minded young district doctor with a tendency toward plumpness, into a corpulent monster of avarice and misanthropy—as a fable of self-burial. But he would have to concede that these interpretations are not made of air— the religious allusions from which they take their cue are in the text.

Sherbinin points out in her book Chekhov and Russian Religious Culture that “Chekhov was the Russian writer most conversant with the rites and texts of Orthodoxy, as jarring as such a claim might seem, given the centrality of Christian thought to the giants of nineteenth-century letters.” It is to the gloomy childhood lived under the rule of the harsh, fanatical father that Chekhov owed this preeminence. While Tolstoy was playing tennis, Chekhov was poring over Scripture or singing akathistoi. When he reached adulthood, Chekhov was, perforce, an authority on religion. His writer and artist friends would consult him on fine points of the Bible and the liturgy. The painter I. E. Repin, for example, while working on a painting of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, enlisted Chekhov’s help in determining whether there had been a moon on the night of the vigil. The mystery of how the grandson of a serf, growing up in semipoverty in an uncouth small town, became one of the world’s great writers becomes less mysterious when we take into account the extent to which his religious education prepared him for a literary career. When he began to write his powerful, elliptical stories, he had models ready to hand— the powerful, elliptical stories of the Bible. Chekhov is said to be the father of the modern short story. It might be more accurate (and helpful to contemporary writers wishing to learn from him) to think of him as the genius who was able to cut to the quick of biblical narrative. The brevity, density, and waywardness of Chekhov’s stories are qualities characteristic of Bible stories.

In a story written in 1886 called “Panic Fears,” the unidentified narrator relates three incidents of uncanniness. The second and third of them turn out to have natural explanations: a railway car with no engine speeding along a railroad track turns out to be a car that got unyoked from a train going up a hill, and a big black dog with a sinister, mythic aura wandering in the forest turns out to be just a dog who has strayed from its master. But the first mystery— a strange light glimmering in the window of a church belfry, which neither comes from within nor is a reflection of anything without—is never solved. The story’s position on the supernatural is unclear. Chekhov could be saying that since two of the three mysteries had natural explanations, the remaining one probably does, too—we just don’t know what it is. Or he could be saying that there are more things in heaven and earth than rationalism can account for. Chekhov’s allusions to religion are like the strange light. Since he was secretive about his work, what he “meant” by his repeated references to the rituals and texts of the religion he had abjured remains anyone’s guess. The Jacksonian critics are careful never to claim that they have found their way to Chekhov’s intentions. They frankly acknowledge the doubt that is the matrix of their work. But perhaps it is precisely because the whole thing is so mystifying—Does Chekhov actually believe? Are the religious allusions conscious and purposeful?—that it stimulates such audacious critical thought. Every work of genius is attended by mystery, of course; criticism can no more account for art’s radiance than the narrator of “Panic Fears” can account for the sourceless light. But the steady gaze of the Jacksonian critics gives their conjectures a special authority: they do not stray from the text; they keep their eye on the light.