Reading Chekhov

Seven

Nina and I are sitting in an outdoor café a few miles down the coast from Oreanda, looking out on another spectacular vista—one on which Gurov and Anna, too, might have gazed—whose focal point is a castle called the Swallow’s Nest, built in 1912 (with great difficulty, one would think) atop a rocky cliff dramatically poised over the sea. American popular music, now obligatory in all public places in Russia, fills the air, and puts the Sublime in its place. A waiter brings us Cokes and ham-and-cheese sandwiches. Nina seems to have recovered from her morning’s malaise. She eats quickly, and when I offer her the second half of my sandwich—the sandwiches are huge—she accepts it readily. I don’t like to think what her normal diet is. She is somewhat overweight, but carries her heaviness well on her large frame. She must have been beautiful in her youth. Her features have a classical regularity, and her cheeks have an appealing flush. Chekhov would have taken note of her. He was acutely sensitive to the appearance of women. In his letters there are constant references—usually negative—to the looks of the women he encountered. Like the women in Badenweiler, the women in Yalta provoked his derision. “I haven’t seen one decent-looking woman,” he wrote to Olga from Yalta in February 1900. “There are no pretty women,” he wrote in September of that year. In December 1902: “I went into town for the first time yesterday . . . all you meet are people who look like rats, not one pretty woman, not one decently dressed.” (Fifteen years earlier, writing to his sister about a visit to the Holy Mountains monastery, he paused to say about his fellow pilgrims, “I did not know before that there were so many old women in the world; had I known, I would have shot myself long ago.”) Of course, there is irony in Chekhov’s presentation of himself as a cold appraiser of female flesh; by the time he lived in Yalta he was clearly out of the running as a rake. But the presence or absence of physical beauty—in male as well as in female characters—rarely goes unremarked in his work. In “The Kiss,” Ryabovitch’s unprepossessing appearance shapes his identity and determines his fate. In Uncle Vanya, the radiantly good Sonya is similarly burdened; Astrov cannot return her love because he is put off by her plainness. (“You like her, don’t you?” Yelena asks him. “Yes, I have respect for her,” he replies. “Does she attract you as a woman?” Astrov pauses and then says, “No.”) In an essay entitled “Prosaic Chekhov: Metadrama, the Intelligentsia, and Uncle Vanya,” Gary Saul Morson, writing of Chekhov’s dislike of histrionics and his regard for prosaic virtue—for “good habits, good manners, and small acts of consideration”—and reading the play as an apotheosis of the prosaic, understands Chekhov to be faulting Astrov for rejecting the estimable, plain Sonya and pursuing the useless, beautiful Yelena. “Chekhov, like Tolstoy, usually regards love based on passion or romance with deep suspicion,” Morson writes, and cites the comment of the kindly Dr. Samoilenko in “The Duel”: “The chief thing in married life is patience . . . not love but patience.” But Morson’s compelling essay only demonstrates the difficulty of making any generalization about Chekhov stick. Yes, Chekhov adopts the Tolstoyan position in “The Duel,” but in Uncle Vanya he swerves sharply from it. In his own life, far from regarding romantic love with suspicion, Chekhov considered it the sine qua non of marriage. He could not have put the matter more plainly than he did in a letter of 1898 to his younger brother Michael (who had been urging him to marry):

To marry is interesting only for love. To marry a girl simply because she is nice is like buying something one does not want at the bazaar solely because it is of good quality. The most important thing in family life is love, sexual attraction, one flesh; all the rest is dreary and cannot be reckoned upon however cleverly we make our calculations. So the point is not in the girl’s being nice but in her being loved.

Indeed, in Uncle Vanya, far from faulting Astrov for rejecting Sonya and pursuing Yelena, Chekhov suggests that Astrov can do nothing else. It isn’t a matter of choosing between a good course of action and a bad one. In these matters, one has no choice. “Alas, I shall never be a Tolstoyan! In women, what I like above all is beauty,” Chekhov wrote to Suvorin in 1891. The words “beauty” and “beautiful” echo throughout the play. Far from celebrating prosaic virtue, Vanya mourns its pitiful insufficiency. The action of the play is like the throwing of a stone into a still pond. The “beautiful people”—Yelena and Serebryakov—disturb the life of the stagnant household of Voinitsky and Sonya, stir up the depressed and exhausted Astrov, and then abruptly depart. The waters close over the stone and are still again. Uncle Vanya is a kind of absurdist Midsummer Night’s Dream. Strange events take place, but nothing comes of them. Visions of happiness appear and dissolve. Everything is as it was before. In the heartbreaking speech with which the play ends, Sonya speaks to Vanya of her faith in a “bright, lovely, beautiful” afterlife. Real life remains luster-less, uninteresting, unbeautiful.

In a story written in 1888 called “The Beauties,” Chekhov spells out what is coded in Vanya and, with characteristic originality, chooses as the vehicle for his meditation on beauty not a professor of aesthetics but a high-school boy. The boy and his grandfather are driving on the steppe on a hot, dusty summer day, and they stop in an Armenian village to visit a rich and funny-looking Armenian the grandfather knows. The boy settles himself in a corner of the Armenian’s stifling, fly-filled house, resigned to a long, boring wait while the grandfather and his host drink tea. The tea is served by the Armenian’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Mashya, and at the sight of her the boy feels:

all at once as though a wind were blowing over my soul and blowing away all the impressions of the day, with their dust and dreariness. I saw the bewitching features of the most beautiful face I have ever met in real life or in my dreams. Before me stood a beauty, and I recognized that at the first glance as I should have recognized lightning.

The boy notices that he is not the only one dazzled by the girl’s beauty; even his old grandfather is affected. He compares the experience of looking at the girl to that of looking at a ravishing sunset. He also notices a feeling of:

painful though pleasant sadness. It was a sadness vague and undefined as a dream. For some reason I felt sorry for myself, for my grandfather and for the Armenian, even for the girl herself, and I had a feeling that we all four had lost something important and essential to life which we should never find again. . . . Whether it was envy of her beauty, or that I was regretting that the girl was not mine, and never would be, or that I was a stranger to her; or whether I vaguely felt that her rare beauty was accidental, unnecessary, and, like everything on earth, of short duration; or whether, perhaps, my sadness was that peculiar feeling which is excited in man by the contemplation of real beauty, God only knows.

Chekhov’s powerful description of aesthetic experience (the story goes on to a second, less potent illustration of it) allows us to understand what the stakes were for Astrov and Voinitsky in their pursuit of the beautiful Yelena (as well as for Sonya in her pursuit of the handsome Astrov)—and for Chekhov himself in his apparently trivial attention to women’s looks. “That peculiar feeling”—whether aroused by a poem or a painting or a piece of music or a view of the sea or a beautiful girl—was Chekhov’s Holy Grail. Although he maintained a pose of ordinariness and was sincere in his valuation of “good habits, good manners, and small acts of consideration,” it was the extraordinary and the uselessly beautiful that deeply stirred him.

Chekhov’s long story “Three Years” (1895) is perhaps the most profound of his fables of beauty. It is a modern retelling of the legend of Beauty and the Beast. (It has been mistakenly taken to be a story about commercial culture in Moscow.) Laptev, a rich, decent, intelligent, but ugly man, falls in love with a beautiful young woman named Julia, who is repelled by him. Chekhov is merciless in his description of Laptev:

[He] knew that he was ugly, and now he felt as though he were conscious of his ugliness all over his body. He was short, thin, with ruddy cheeks, and his hair had grown so thin that his head felt cold. In his expression there was none of that refined simplicity which makes even rough, ugly faces attractive; in the society of women, he was awkward, overtalkative, affected. And now he almost despised himself for it.

Julia turns down Laptev’s proposal of marriage, and then decides to master her revulsion and accept him. She feels (as Irina in Three Sisters is to feel when she accepts the ill-favored Tuzenbach) that she cannot afford to be choosy. She is moving toward her mid-twenties, she lives at home with a self-absorbed, unloving father, and has no other prospects. Besides, she is kind and feels bad about refusing a decent, honest man. The novella traces the first three years of this sad marriage, narrating it mostly from Laptev’s point of view but also, so that we may feel her revulsion, from Julia’s. Six months into the marriage, in an exquisitely painful scene in Julia’s bedroom, the couple confront their situation.

“I understand your repulsion, your hatred, but you might spare me before other people; you might conceal your feelings.”

She got up and sat on the bed with her legs dangling. Her eyes looked big and black in the lamplight.

“I beg your pardon,” she said.

He could not utter a single word from excitement and the trembling of his whole body; he stood facing her and was dumb. She trembled, too, and sat with the air of a criminal waiting for explanations. . . .

“You’ve been my wife for six months, but you haven’t a spark of love for me in your heart. There’s no hope, not one ray of light! Why did you marry me?” Laptev went on with despair. “Why? What demon thrust you into my arms? What did you hope for, what did you want?”

She looked at him with terror, as though she were afraid he would kill her.

“Did I attract you? Did you like me?” he went on, gasping for breath. “No. Then what? What? Tell me what?” he cried. “Oh the cursed money! The cursed money!”

“I swear to God, no!” she cried, and she crossed herself. She seemed to shrink under the insult, and for the first time he heard her crying. “I swear to God, no!” she repeated. “I didn’t think about your money; I didn’t want it. I simply thought I should do wrong if I refused you. I was afraid of spoiling your life and mine. And now I am suffering for my mistake. I’m suffering unbearably!”

She sobbed bitterly, and he saw that she was hurt; and, not knowing what to say, dropped down on the carpet before her.

“That’s enough; that’s enough,” he muttered. “I insulted you because I love you madly.” He suddenly kissed her foot and passionately hugged it. “If only a spark of love,” he muttered. “Come, lie to me; tell me a lie! Don’t say it’s a mistake!” . . .

But she went on crying, and he felt that she was only enduring his caresses as an inevitable consequence of her mistake. And the foot he had kissed she drew under her like a bird. He felt sorry for her.

Julia undergoes the terrible suffering of losing the child who has compensated her for her loveless marriage. For many months she can do nothing but grieve. And then, with the inexplicable but inevitable change of heart that occurs in myths and fairy tales, she falls in love with Laptev. However, the Chekhov story does not end like a fairy story. Laptev does not turn into a prince. He remains that peculiar creature—half man, half emblem—by which we mean a Chekhov character. When the magical moment comes, when Julia tells Laptev that she loves him (the scene is in a garden, of course), the prosaic Chekhov appears and coolly breaks the spell: “She had told him she loved him, and he could only feel as though he had been married to her for ten years, and that he was hungry for his lunch.”