Reading Chekhov

Six

At the beginning of “The Student” (1894), Chekhov offers an arresting aural image: in a swamp “something alive droned pitifully with a sound like blowing into an empty bottle.” On my first night at the Hotel Yalta, lying in bed, I heard just such a sound coming in through the window, as relentlessly as a foghorn, but because Chekhov, too, had heard the call of this night creature, I went to sleep soothed and happy. The next night, when I heard the sound again, I realized that no bird or frog could be making a sound so regular and mechanical. What I was hearing was obviously coming from a piece of machinery at the swimming pools or one of the outbuildings. My imaginings thus rearranged, I found the sound irritating and could not fall asleep for a long time. Incidents from my second day with Sonia in Moscow—of a piece with the grating persistence of the sound—came to mind. This was the day of what she called “city tour”—a drive around Moscow of the sort tour buses offer, with a canned tour guide’s commentary by Sonia, which she made no effort to disguise. After an hour of what in New York would have been the equivalent of driving past the Empire State Building, the World Trade Center, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and Columbia University, I said I would prefer to receive a perhaps less global, more intimate sense of the city. For instance, could we see Chekhov’s grave, and were there any synagogues in Moscow? Sonia sighed and agreed to go to the Novodevichie cemetery, where Chekhov is buried. And, yes, there were two synagogues, though it would be inconvenient to drive to them. At the cemetery, Chekhov’s small, modest gravestone had a kind of Slavic Art Nouveau aspect and was in striking contrast to the ornate nineteenth-century monuments and the grandiose Soviet markers, many of them larger-than-life marble busts of the deceased.

In his memoir of Chekhov, Maxim Gorky fretted over the fact that Chekhov’s body arrived in Moscow from Badenweiler in a refrigerated railway car marked “Fresh Oysters.” “His enemy was vulgarity,” Gorky wrote. “He battled against it all his life. He ridiculed it, depicted it with his sharp, dispassionate pen. . . . And vulgarity took its revenge on him with a vile trick, laying his corpse—the corpse of a poet—in a railway car for ‘oysters.’ ” Other writers have said of the incident that Chekhov would have been amused by it—and also by another fortuitous slight to his corpse: at the Moscow train station, a number of people who had come to escort it to the cemetery followed the wrong coffin, that of a General Keller, which was being accompanied to the cemetery by a military band. But it is doubtful that Chekhov would have been amused. He was not amused at being dead. In a notebook he writes of looking out the window at a corpse being taken to the cemetery, and mentally addressing it thus: “You are dead, you are being carried to the cemetery, and I will go and have my breakfast.” The incidents of the car marked “Fresh Oysters” and the following of the wrong coffin were precisely the kind of incidents without consequences that had no interest for Chekhov (in his stories and plays Chekhov sometimes creates an illusion of lifelike pointlessness, but in fact every action has a point)—and are similarly without meaning for students of his life. This ended on the morning of July 3, 1904, and whatever happened thereafter is us having our breakfast.

Sonia’s initial negative response to my wish to see a synagogue—like her response to my wish to skip the Armory—presently turned into grudging aquiescence. It turned out that one of the Moscow synagogues was not all that difficult to reach. After Vladimir had parked the car a few yards from the synagogue, a rather gloomy nineteenth-century building, Sonia did not stir and said meaningfully, “I’ll stay here.” As I approached the synagogue, a group of people came toward me. I took them to be members of the congregation who had come out to greet a visitor. One of the group, whom I assumed to be its leader, came forward from the rest and looked at me eagerly. He was small and unshaven and wore a dark scruffy coat, and when he spoke to me I could not understand what he was saying. After a few moments a word that he repeatedly used became comprehensible. The word was dollari. So he and his cohorts were not, after all, characters from a Rabbi Small mystery but beggars. I was surrounded by hands reaching out for the dollar bills I was taking out of my wallet. When my dollars were gone, I gave out ruble bills, and the hands kept reaching out until my wallet was empty. The image came to mind—a horrible one—of someone feeding pigeons. I went into the synagogue, an uninviting place (I have seen such charmless synagogues in America) whose entry hall had announcements posted on its walls, like those posted in college buildings. I met no one; through a distant doorway I glimpsed a room where a stout man in a black suit and white shirt was eating. I started up a staircase, lost heart midway, and came down. Outside on the steps, the beggars were huddled over dark bundles, pulling pieces of cloth from them. They paid no attention to me. Back in the car, I saw Sonia suppress a look of triumph.

My visit to Moscow coincided with the celebration of Victory Day—the fifty-fourth anniversary of the Allied victory over the Nazis. Russia, which lost 27 million people in World War II, was far more absorbed by this occasion than by the current move to impeach President Yeltsin, with which the Western press was intensely involved. In Red Square there was a military parade followed by an evening celebration; thousands of people poured into the square, as if on their way to a rock concert; there were police barricades and a line of portable toilets. I joined the crowd, which was being channeled through a narrow arcade that led to an even narrower street, but when I reached an intersecting street leading away from the square I veered off, giving in to a fear aroused by the thought of the terrible disaster (mentioned in several of the Chekhov biographies) in Khodynka Field in Moscow in the spring of 1896, when nearly two thousand people were crushed to death during a distribution of gifts marking the coronation of Nicholas II.

Earlier in the day, while eating a late lunch in the nearly empty dining room of the Hotel Metropole—a vast hall with an elaborately painted ceiling, marble columns with gilded capitals, ornate chandeliers, potted palm trees, and a central fountain from which a putto and a goose rose—I became aware of a thin old man with a great many medals pinned to his dark jacket, who sat at a table near the fountain. He had finished eating, and was smoking. He was not in uniform; under the jacket was a sweater vest and a shirt and tie. His intelligent face was weary and watchful. He was perhaps the most distinguished-looking man I have ever seen in my life. A bouquet of flowers lay on his table, still in a plastic wrapper, like the bouquets fans bring to the stage at recitals. At a long table near the far wall a group of ten or twelve men and women were reaching the end of a celebratory lunch. From time to time they would rise and give a toast: “Na zdorov’e! Na zdorov’e!” Some of the men were in uniform and several wore medals. I wondered why the man with the intelligent face was sitting alone. Had he deliberately separated himself from the others, like Kutuzov separating himself from the deluded military strategists on the eve of the battle of Borodino, or was it an accident that he and they were in the same dining room? On a raised platform a pianist, who looked like Philip Larkin, played American show tunes. The intelligent man sat smoking in a relaxed contemplative attitude. A large tall man appeared at his table and bowed over his hand, almost kissing it; then the two men embraced. At the table of twelve, the toasts had ended and drunken singing had begun. Philip Larkin finished playing and joined the intelligent man at his table.

When I went to pay my bill at the Metropole, there was ahead of me at the cashier a tall, expensively dressed man of around sixty, with a large handsome head, who was in a state. Two young women behind the counter were anxiously looking for his passport. “It’s a diplomatic passport with a blue cover,” he said exasperatedly. He spoke English with a British accent. “Do you understand? A diplomatic passport. Blue cover.” One of the young women continued to shuffle unhappily through a pile of passports (Russian hotels still adhere to the practice most European countries have abandoned: keeping guests’ passports for a day or two for inspection by the police), while the other went through a ledger line by line. “They have lost your passport?” I asked. “Yes,” he said testily. The young women continued their search. The air was extremely tense. Suddenly, a tall, handsome older woman, wearing a stylish raincoat and a silk scarf with a designer’s name on it, appeared at the man’s elbow, took in the situation, and said in English, with a slight German accent and a great air of authority, “Go upstairs, Henry, and look in your luggage.” Henry obeyed and disappeared into an elevator. The woman—the baroness, as I thought of her—waited for Henry at the side of the counter, while I paid my bill; when my credit card failed to register and I had to produce another, she made a sympathetic comment. The smell of her good perfume wafted toward me. Henry reappeared. Yes, he had found the passport. He was flustered, but he did not apologize to the clerks he had frightened. This was a man of obviously flawed character. What would Chekhov have made of him? Mincemeat, probably. There is a frequently reproduced portrait of Chekhov by an artist named Joseph Braz that is remarkable for its complete failure to capture Chekhov’s likeness. (Chekhov said it made him look as if he were sniffing horseradish.) There is an equally inaccurate conception of Chekhov as a writer who condemns no one and “forgives” his characters all their sins. In fact, Chekhov was entirely unforgiving of any of his characters who were cruel or violent—the sadistic Nikita of “Ward No. 6,” the infant murderer Aksinya of “In the Ravine,” the evil hypocrite Matvey of “Peasant Wives.” He was also down on a certain kind of woman he saw as selfish and predatory—Olga in “The Grasshopper,” Ariadne in the story of that name, Natasha in Three Sisters—and on a certain kind of soulless man: Ionitch in the story of that name, the father in “My Life,” the professor in Uncle Vanya. (Henry would probably find a place among the foolish and pretentious characters who appear in the early satiric stories and tend to fade from the mature work.) But the flawed characters for whom Chekhov is best known—and who have fostered the idea of his infinite tolerance—are the Laevskys and Gurovs and Ananyevs and Vanyas and Vershinins and Ivanovs, for whom Chekhov sometimes, but not always, arranges a redemptive transformation.

Chekhov’s attitude toward these good/bad guys—a singular combination of censoriousness and tenderness—derives, there is reason to think, from Chekhov’s relationship to his two older brothers. Two long letters in which Chekhov tells Nikolai and Alexander off, respectively, permit us to move in very close to this relationship.

In the letter to Nikolai (March 1886), Chekhov writes:

. . . You have often complained to me that people “don’t understand you.” Goethe and Newton did not complain of that. Only Christ complained of it, but He was speaking of His doctrine and not of Himself. People understand you perfectly well. And if you do not understand yourself, it is not their fault.

I assure you as a brother and as a friend I understand you and feel for you with all my heart. I know your good qualities as I know my five fingers; I value and deeply respect them. . . . You are kind to the point of softness, magnanimous, unselfish, ready to share your last farthing; you have no envy nor hatred; you are simplehearted, you pity men and beasts; you are trustful, without spite or guile, and do not remember evil. You have a gift from above such as other people have not: you have talent. This talent places you above millions of men, for on earth only one out of two million is an artist. Your talent sets you apart: if you were a toad or tarantula, even then, people would respect you, for to talent all things are forgiven.

You have only one failing, and the falseness of your position, and your unhappiness and your catarrh of the bowels are all due to it. That is your utter lack of culture. Forgive me, please, but veritas magis amicitia. You see, life has its conditions. In order to feel comfortable among educated people, to be at home and happy with them, one must be cultured to a certain extent. . . .

Cultured people must, in my opinion, satisfy the following conditions:

1. They respect human personality, and therefore they are always kind, gentle, polite, and ready to give in to others. They do not make a row because of a hammer or a lost piece of India-rubber. . . . They forgive noise and cold and dried-up meat and witticisms and the presence of strangers in their homes.

2. They have sympathy not for beggars and cats alone. Their heart aches for what the eye doesn’t see. . . .

3. They respect the property of others, and therefore pay their debts.

4. They are sincere, and dread lying like fire. They don’t lie even in small things. A lie is insulting to the listener and puts him in a lower position in the eyes of the speaker. They do not pose, they behave in the street as they do at home, they do not show off before their humbler comrades. They are not given to babbling and forcing their uninvited confidences on others. Out of respect for other people’s ears they more often keep silent than talk.

5. They do not disparage themselves to rouse compassion. They do not play on the strings of other people’s hearts that they may sigh and make much of them. They do not say “I am misunderstood” or “I have become second rate,” because all this is striving after cheap effect, is vulgar, stale, false. . . .

6. They have not shallow vanity. They do not care for such false diamonds as knowing celebrities. . . . If they do a pennyworth they do not strut about as though they had done a hundred rubles’ worth, and do not brag of having entry where others are not admitted. . . . The truly talented always keep in obscurity among the crowd, as far as possible from advertisement. . . .

7. If they have talent they respect it. They sacrifice to it rest, women, wine, vanity. . . .

8. They develop aesthetic feeling in themselves. They cannot go to sleep in their clothes, see cracks full of bugs on the walls, breathe bad air, walk on a floor that has been spat upon, cook their meals over an oil stove. They seek as far as possible to restrain and en-noble the sexual instinct. What they want in a woman is not a bed-fellow. . . . They want, especially if they are artists, freshness, elegance, humanity, the capacity for motherhood. . . .

And so on. This is what cultured people are like. In order to be cultured and not to stand below the level of your surroundings it is not enough to have read “The Pickwick Papers” and learn a monologue from “Faust.”

What is needed is constant work, day and night, constant reading, study, will. . . . You must drop your vanity, you are not a child . . . you will soon be thirty. It is time!

I expect you. . . . We all expect you.

The letter to Alexander (January 2, 1889) is less a set piece, and more disturbingly immediate and intimate (it followed a visit by Chekhov to St. Petersburg, where Alexander lived):

I was seriously angry at you. . . . I was repelled by your shocking, completely unprecedented treatment of Natalia Alexandrovna [Natalia Golden, Alexander’s second common-law wife] and the cook. Forgive me please, but treating women like that, no matter who they are, is unworthy of a decent, loving human being. What heavenly or earthly power has given you the right to make them your slaves? Constant profanity of the most vile variety, a raised voice, reproaches, sudden whims at breakfast and dinner, eternal complaints about a life of forced and loathsome labor—isn’t all that an expression of blatant despotism? No matter how insignificant or guilty a woman may be, no matter how close she is to you, you have no right to sit around without pants in her presence, be drunk in her presence, utter words even factory workers don’t use when they see women nearby. . . . A man who is well bred and really loving will not permit himself to be seen without his pants by the maid or yell, “Katka, let me have the pisspot!” at the top of his lungs. . . .

Children are sacred and pure. Even thieves and crocodiles place them among the ranks of the angels. . . . You cannot with impunity use filthy language in their presence, insult your servants, or snarl at Natalia Alexandrovna: “Will you get the hell away from me! I’m not holding you here!” You must not make them the plaything of your moods, tenderly kissing them one minute and frenziedly stamping at them the next. It’s better not to love at all than to love with a despotic love. . . . You shouldn’t take the names of your children in vain, yet you have the habit of calling every kopeck you give or want to give to someone “money taken from the children.” . . . You really have to lack respect for your children or their sanctity to be able to say—when you are well fed, well dressed and tipsy every day—that all your salary goes for the children. Stop it.

Let me ask you to recall that it was despotism and lying that ruined your mother’s youth. Despotism and lying so mutilated our childhood that it’s sickening and frightening to think about it. Remember the horror and disgust we felt in those times when Father threw a tantrum at dinner over too much salt in the soup and called Mother a fool. There is no way Father can forgive himself all that now. . . .

Natalia Alexandrovna, the cook, and the children are weak and defenseless. They have no rights over you, while you have the right to throw them out the door at any moment and have a good laugh at their weakness if you so desire. Don’t let them feel that right of yours.

Anton Chekhov was a younger brother, but he writes here with the calm superiority of a firstborn. He himself has acquired the culture that Nikolai lacks; he does not sit around the house in his underwear and yell for the pisspot. The letters remind us of someone: of von Koren, in “The Duel.” They are like notes for the speeches von Koren will make about Laevsky’s hopelessness. But the priggish von Koren is not the hero of “The Duel” (as his predecessor, the priggish Dr. Lvov, is not the hero of Ivanov). Not being an actual firstborn, Chekhov evidently never felt comfortable in the firstborn’s posture of superiority, and expressed his dislike of the censorious side of himself by stacking the deck against his fictional representations of it: von Koren and Lvov are “right,” but there is something the matter with them; they are cold fish. Chekhov, in his relationship with his older brothers, brings to mind the biblical Joseph. Chekhov’s “sourceless maturity”—like Joseph’s—may well have developed during his enforced separation from the family. And like Joseph, who wept when he saw his brothers again, in spite of their unspeakable treatment of him, Chekhov’s love for his big brothers transcended his anger with them; he evidently never entirely shed his little brother’s idealization of them. Out of this family dynamic developed the weak, lovable figure who recurs throughout Chekhov’s writing and is one of its signatures. Vladimir Nabokov saw encapsulated in this figure the values lost when Russia became a totalitarian state. In Nabokov’s view (put forward in his Wellesley and Cornell lectures in the 1940s and ’50s, and collected in Lectures on Russian Literature), the Chekhov hero—“a queer and pathetic creature that is little known abroad and cannot exist in the Russia of the Soviets”— “combine[s] the deepest human decency of which man is capable with an almost ridiculous inability to put his ideals and principles into action. . . . Knowing exactly what is good, what is worthwhile living for, but at the same time sinking lower and lower in the mud of a humdrum existence, unhappy in love, hopelessly inefficient in everything—a good man who cannot make good.” The émigré Nabokov goes on to write, “Blessed be the country that could produce that particular type of man. . . . [The] mere fact of such men having lived and probably still living somewhere somehow in the ruthless and sordid Russia of today is a promise of better things to come for the world at large— for perhaps the most admirable among the admirable laws of Nature is the survival of the weakest.”