Reading Chekhov

Eight

Driving back to Yalta from Oreanda, I suggest to Nina, sitting beside me in the rear seat—as I had suggested to Sonia in Moscow—that she buckle her seat belt. Sonia’s response had been to inform me icily that only people in front were required to use seat belts. (Vladimir drove without one, buckling up only when he was about to pass a police checkpoint.) I asked Sonia if she thought the rear seat belts were there for decoration. She looked at my strapped-in middle contemptuously. “It is not necessary for you to do that,” she said. The ever-agreeable Nina, however, puts on her seat belt, like a good child consenting to try a new food. She translates my von Korenesque lecture on the foolhardiness of driving without a seat belt to the unbelted Yevgeny, who laughs heartily and tells the following anecdote, which he says came from a doctor at a sanitarium where he once worked: “When there is an automobile accident, the person who wasn’t wearing a seat belt is found with a leg here, an arm there, the head there. The person who was wearing a seat belt is found in his seat completely intact—and dead.”

Illustrations like this of resistance to advances in knowledge appear throughout Chekhov’s stories and letters. In a letter to his family written during his journey to Sakhalin (May 1890), he comments on the primitive state of medicine in a village near Tomsk. “Bleeding and cupping are done on a grandiose, brutal scale. I examined a Jew with cancer in the liver. The Jew was exhausted, hardly breathing, but that did not prevent the feldsher from cupping him twelve times.” This terrible scene is reprised in the death of Nikolai Tchikildyeev, in “Peasants” (1897). (Chekhov has him cupped twelve times, like the Jew—and then, as if to quantify the difference between life and art, twelve times again.) In the reluctant autobiographical note that Chekhov composed for his medical-school reunion, he spoke of the impact of his medical education on his writing:

It significantly broadened the scope of my observations and enriched me with knowledge whose value for me as a writer only a doctor can appreciate. It also served as guiding influence; my intimacy with medicine probably helped me to avoid many mistakes. My familiarity with the natural sciences and the scientific method has always kept me on my guard; I have tried wherever possible to take scientific data into account, and where it has not been possible I have preferred not writing at all. . . . I am not one of those writers who negate the value of science, and I would not wish to be one of those who believe they can figure out everything for themselves.

Note the many negatives: Chekhov’s acknowledgment of the “broadened scope” and “enrichment” the study of medicine has given him is perfunctory, compared to his gratitude for what it has helped him to avoid. As in his letter to Shcheglov about the limits of psychological understanding (“Nothing is clear in this world. Only fools and charlatans know and understand everything”), Chekhov is at pains to dissociate himself from any position of authority. When writing of the horrendous treatment of the Jew with liver cancer, he does not offer an alternative cure. Chekhov spoke of medicine as his wife and writing as his mistress (he later recycled the quip to say that fiction was his wife and the theater his mistress), but he never practiced medicine full-time, nor attained any particular distinction as a physician. Medicine in Chekhov’s day did not have the power to cure that it has only recently begun to wield. Doctors understood diseases they were helpless to cure. An honest doctor would have found his work largely depressing. Simmons speculates that Chekhov’s study of medicine originated in an incident of serious illness when he was fifteen—an attack of peritonitis—which led to friendship with the doctor who attended him. Simmons also notes that Chekhov “always attributed to this attack the hemorrhoidal condition which never ceased to trouble him for the remainder of his life.” We hear a lot about these hemorrhoids in Chekhov’s letters. They evidently bothered him a good deal more than the symptoms of tuberculosis, which appeared as early as 1884, but which he was not to acknowledge as such for thirteen years. “Over the last three days blood has been coming from my throat,” he wrote to Leikin in December 1884. “No doubt the cause is some broken blood vessel.” And then, two years later, “I am ill. Spitting of blood and weakness. I am not writing anything. . . . I ought to go to the South but I have no money. . . . I am afraid to submit myself to be sounded by my colleagues.” It wasn’t until March 1897, after a severe hemorrhage at the Hermitage restaurant in Moscow, that he allowed himself to be sounded and diagnosed. Chekhov’s knowing–not knowing that he had the disease that killed him was, of course, an expression of denial, but it was also a product of the cruel-kind nature of tuberculosis itself, whose course is not predictable (consumptives have been known to live to old age) and which (as René and Jean Dubos point out in The White Plague: Tuberculosis, Man and Society) “waxes and wanes with long periods of apparent remission followed by periods of exacerbation.” It was also of a piece with (and may have been implicated in the formation of) Chekhov’s stance of insistent uncertainty. If nothing is clear in this world, then everything is possible—even the prospect of health.

The hemorrhage at the Hermitage occurred just as Chekhov and Alexei Suvorin were sitting down to dinner. Blood began pouring from Chekhov’s mouth and the flow could not be stemmed. Suvorin took Chekhov to his suite at the Slaviansky Bazaar (where Chekhov was to book Anna Sergeyevna a few years later) and summoned Chekhov’s colleague Dr. Nikolai Obolonsky, who could not persuade Chekhov to go to the hospital. The hemorrhage did not abate until morning, when Chekhov insisted on returning to his own hotel, the Moscow Grand (he was now living at Melikhovo and no longer kept a Moscow residence), and on behaving as if nothing had happened. On March 25, after further hemorrhages, he finally entered the clinic of a Dr. Ostroumov, where advanced tuberculosis was diagnosed. The clinic was located near the Novodevichie Cloister, in whose cemetery, seven years later—after writing Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard, “The Lady with the Dog,” “The Bishop,” “In the Ravine,” “Gooseberries,” and “Ionitch,” among other masterpieces—Chekhov would be buried.

While at the Oustromov clinic, with his characteristic inability to refuse almost any request, Chekhov read the manuscripts of two stories sent him by a stranger, a high-school girl named Rimma Vashchuk, who wanted to know whether she had “a spark of talent.” He promptly wrote back to say he liked one of the stories, but that the other, entitled “A Fairy Tale,” was “not a fairy tale, but a collection of words like ‘gnome,’ ‘fairy,’ ‘dew,’ ‘knights’—all that is paste, at least on our Russian soil, on which neither gnomes or knights ever roamed and where you would hardly find a person who could imagine a fairy dining on dew and sunbeams. Chuck it . . . write only about that which is or that which, in your opinion, ought to be.” Stung by Chekhov’s criticism, the girl sent him an angry letter, and he, incredibly, wrote to her again from his hospital bed, to patiently explain his criticism. “Instead of being angry, you had better read my letter more carefully,” he began. She returned an apology.

During the amended “city tour,” on the way to the Novodevichie cemetery, Sonia pointed out a low, long, white building behind some trees as the former Ostroumov clinic, which is now a part of the Moscow University medical school—and, a few blocks later, identified a large red wooden house as Tolstoy’s Moscow house. I knew that Tolstoy had visited the debilitated Chekhov two days after his arrival at the clinic, but I hadn’t realized how close to the clinic he lived. “We had a most interesting conversation,” Chekhov wrote two weeks later to Mikhail Menshikov, of Tolstoy’s visit, “interesting mainly because I listened more than I talked. We discussed immortality. He recognizes immortality in its Kantian form, assuming that all of us (men and animals) will live on in some principle (such as reason or love), the essence of which is a mystery. But I can imagine such a principle or force only as a shapeless, gelatinous mass; my I—my individuality, my consciousness—would merge with this mass—and I feel no need for this kind of immortality, I do not understand it, and Lev Nikolayevich was astonished that I don’t.” Three years later, when Tolstoy was himself ill, and there was a great deal of speculation about the seriousness of his condition, Chekhov wrote again to Menshikov, to say that he had come to think that Tolstoy was not terminally ill, but he added:

His illness frightened me, and kept me on tenterhooks. I am afraid of Tolstoy’s death. If he were to die, there would be a big empty place in my life. To begin with, because I have never loved any man as much as him. I am not a believing man, but of all beliefs I consider his the nearest and most akin to me. Second, while Tolstoy is in literature it is easy and pleasant to be a literary man; even recognizing that one has done nothing and never will do anything is not so dreadful, since Tolstoy will do enough for all. His work is the justification of the enthusiasms and expectations built upon literature. Third, Tolstoy takes a firm stand, he has an immense authority, and so long as he is alive, bad taste in literature, vulgarity of every kind, insolent and lachrymose, all the bristling, exasperated vanities will be in the far background, in the shade. Nothing but his moral authority is capable of maintaining a certain elevation in the moods and tendencies of literature, so-called . . .

Chekhov had met Tolstoy only a few times, but “when he spoke about Tolstoy,” Gorky writes in his memoir of Chekhov, he “always had a particular, barely detectable, affectionate and bashful smile in his eyes. He would lower his voice as if talking of something spectral, mysterious, something requiring mild and cautious words.” As for Tolstoy, “he loved Chekhov,” Gorky wrote, “and always when he looked at him his eyes, tender at that moment, seemed to caress Chekhov’s face.” However, Tolstoy did not love Chekhov’s plays. He is reported to have said to Chekhov, “You know, I cannot abide Shakespeare, but your plays are even worse.”

Chekhov, in turn, had a few reservations about Tolstoy’s writings. He didn’t like the characterization of Napoleon in War and Peace (“As soon as Napoleon is taken up, we get a forcing of effect and a distortion to show that he was more stupid than he actually was,” he wrote to Suvorin in 1891), and took issue with certain of Tolstoy’s pronouncements in The Kreutzer Sonata. “Tolstoy treats that which he does not know and which he refuses to understand out of sheer stubbornness, ” he wrote Alexei Pescheyev in 1890. “Thus his statements about syphilis, about asylums for children, about women’s aversion to copulation, etc., are not only open to dispute, but they actually betray an ignorant man who, in the course of his long life, has not taken the trouble to read two or three pamphlets written by specialists.” But he felt constrained to add: “And yet all these defects scatter like feathers before the wind; one simply does not take account of them in view of the merits of the novel. . . .” Chekhov had also gone through a period of belief in Tolstoy’s ideas about nonviolence and then had become skeptical of them. But, as is evident from his comments about the threat of Tolstoy’s death, he never lost his sense of Tolstoy’s artistic pre-eminence.

Earlier in the day, in the Arbat, once an elegant shopping district and now, much reduced in size, an undervisited tourist trap of souvenir shops, secondhand stores, and kitsch art galleries, Sonia had stopped before a small oil painting of a vase of lilacs.

“This is good,” she said.

“Are you going to buy it?” I asked.

Sonia shook her head. With a modest little smile, she explained that she painted herself and therefore recognized good art when she saw it. She had paused simply to register her appreciation. She painted on weekends and during vacations, specializing in still lifes and portraits.

My journalist’s portrait of Sonia as a latter-day Natasha Prozorov was taking shape. Her remarks about art contributed a nice Natashaesque touch. Of course, not everything Sonia said and did had this kind of value. In fact, most of what she said and did went unrecorded in my notebook. Journalistic subjects are almost invariably stunned when they read about themselves in print, not because of what is revealed but because of what has been left out. Journalists, like the novelists and short-story writers who are their covert models, practice a ruthless economy. The novice who wishes to be “fair” to his subjects and to render them in all their unruly complexity and contradictoriness is soon disabused. The reality of characters in fiction—and of their cousins in journalism—derives precisely from the bold, almost childlike strokes with which they are drawn. Tolstoy renders Anna Karenina through her light, resolute step, her eagerness, her friendliness and gaiety, her simple, elegant dress. He confines her thoughts and actions to a range of possibility that no person in life is confined by. Chekhov’s realism, as we have seen, is of a different order; his economy is even more stringent, his strokes even blunter. His Natasha is a figure about whom we know almost nothing in particular—she is simply a concentration of coarseness and bullying willfulness. In the first act, before she shows her true colors, appearing to be only a girl from the town who feels awkward in the house of her aristocratic fiancé, she undergoes a small mortification. Olga, the oldest sister, points out to her that her green sash doesn’t go with her pink dress, that “it looks queer.” Natasha’s taste in dress has already been deplored by Masha, in something of the way Chekhov deplored the dress of German women. But, on another level, something more serious than bad taste is at issue in Olga’s reprimand, namely, bad faith, as denoted by the color green and its association with the Serpent. (According to Chekhov’s stage directions, Olga addresses Natasha about the sash “with alarm,” suggesting that she has “recognized” Natasha.) In the story “In the Ravine,” written a year earlier, and also about the takeover of a household by a ruthless daughter-in-law, Chekhov actually describes the woman in question as a snake.

Aksinya had naive gray eyes that rarely blinked and a naive smile played continually on her face. And in those unblinking eyes, and in that little head on the long neck, and in her slenderness there was something snakelike; all in green but for the yellow on her bosom, she looked with a smile on her face as a viper looks out of the young rye in the spring at the passersby, stretching itself and lifting its head.

Aksinya is perhaps the most evil character in Chekhov. In a scene that matches, and, in its shocking unexpectedness, possibly surpasses the horror of the blinding of Gloucester, Aksinya scalds to death a baby who stands in the way of her ascendancy. Natasha comes nowhere near this level of evil-ness. She is unbearable, but she would never commit murder. Aksinya is all in green, Natasha wears only a green sash—a touch of evil. My Sonia—clearly a Natasha rather than an Aksinya—might fittingly have worn a green scarf. However, I am bound to report that she wore a red scarf (over a white angora sweater). Nonfiction may avail itself of the techniques of elision and condensation by which fiction achieves its coherence, but is largely barred from the store of mythopoetic allusion from which fiction derives its potency. Even Chekhov, when writing nonfiction, doesn’t write like Chekhov. The book he wrote reporting on a three-month visit to the prison colony of Sakhalin in the summer of 1890, for example, is a worthy and often interesting work, but rarely a moving one, and never a brilliant one.

The Island of Sakhalin isn’t an artistic failure, since Chekhov had no artistic ambitions for it. He saw it as a work of social and natural science, and he even considered submitting it to the University of Moscow medical school as a dissertation attesting to his qualifications to teach there. (The idea was broached to the dean of the medical faculty by Grigory Rossolimo, and scornfully turned down.) It ran serially in the journal Russian Thought in 1893, and was published as a book in 1895. There are occasional Chekhovian passages, but not many; it is a book largely of information. In 1897, when he was in Nice for his health, Chekhov was asked by an editor to write a story “on a subject taken from life abroad”; he declined, explaining, “I am able to write only from memory, I never write directly from observed life. I must let the subject filter through my memory, until only what is important and typical in it remains in the filter.” In the book on Sakhalin, Chekhov wrote from file cards and scholarly books and reports. His customary artist’s fearlessness gave way to a kind of humility, almost a servility, before the ideal of objectivity and the protocols of scientific methodology. Like a convict chained to a wheel-barrow (one of the punishments at Sakhalin), he drags along the burden of his demographic, geographic, agricultural, ethnographic, zoological, and botanical facts. He cannot omit anything; his narrative line is constantly being derailed by his data. In his autobiography for Rossolimo, Chekhov registered his awareness that “the principles of creative art do not always admit of full accord with scientific data; death by poison cannot be represented on stage as it actually happens.” In the Sakhalin book, the conflict between science and art is almost always resolved in science’s favor. Chekhov tells it like it is, and allows his narrative to go where his mountain of information pushes it, which is all over the place, and ultimately nowhere. Chekhov’s horror at the harshness and squalor of life in the colony, his contempt for the stupidity and callousness of the administration, and his pity for the convicts and settlers sometimes does break through the posture of scientific detachment. But in rendering the sufferings on this island of the damned, Chekhov could not achieve in three hundred pages what he achieved in a four-page passage at the end of his story “The Murder” (1895) about Sakhalin convicts in fetters loading coal onto a steamer on a stormy night.

If the trip to Sakhalin yielded no work of literary distinction, its personal (and eventual literary) significance for Chekhov was momentous. He needed to go on a journey. In a letter to Suvorin written on May 4, 1889, from a rented dacha in the Ukraine, he wrote, “There is a sort of stagnation in my soul. I explain it by the stagnation in my personal life. I am not disappointed, I am not tired, I am not depressed, but simply everything has suddenly become less interesting. I must do something to rouse myself.” It is impossible to know, of course, what Chekhov meant by the stagnation in his personal life, but it seems likely that his malaise was connected to the final illness (from tuberculosis) of his brother Nikolai, whom he had been nursing since March, first in Moscow and then at the dacha. The letter of May 4 characteristically makes no mention of the rigors of the death watch, but three glancing references to Nikolai tell the story of Chekhov’s sense of stuckness: “I’m in a good mood, and if it weren’t for the coughing painter and the mosquitoes—even Elpes formula is no protection against them—I’d be a perfect Potyomkin,” and, later, “Bring me some banned books and newspapers from abroad. If it weren’t for the painter, I’d go with you,” and, a few lines down, “Lensky [an actor in the Maly Theater] has invited me to accompany him on tour to Tiflis. I’d go if it weren’t for the painter, who’s not doing any too brilliantly.” Nikolai died on June 17, and in September Chekhov completed his powerful and long “A Dreary Story,” about an eminent professor who comes to the end of his life and finds it frighteningly meaningless; he realizes that he lacks a ruling idea with which to make sense of his existence. The atmosphere of the work is like a taste of tin in the mouth, the fatigue behind the eyes produced by something unbearable. That it was written by a man in mourning is not surprising; perhaps only a man in mourning could have written a tale of such sour painfulness. Simmons speculates that Nikolai’s death from tuberculosis forced Chekhov to confront the probability of his own death from the disease and, further, that “A Dreary Story” reflects Chekhov’s own need for a ruling idea. On October 4, 1888, in a much-quoted letter, Chekhov had written of his independence of any such need:

I am not a liberal, not a conservative, not a believer in gradual progress, not a monk, not an indifferentist. I should like to be a free artist and nothing more, and I regret that God has not given me the power to be one. I hate lying and violence in all their forms. . . . I regard trademarks and labels as a superstition. My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and the most absolute freedom— freedom from violence and lying, whatever forms they may take. This is the program I would follow if I were a great artist.

A year later, Chekhov was no longer so comfortable with his artist’s freedom. At the end of 1889, he abruptly dropped literature and began to make preparations for the six-thousand-mile journey to Sakhalin, at the easternmost end of the continent. In letters to his baffled friends, Chekhov gives various high-minded reasons for making the trip—to fulfill his debt to science, to rouse the conscience of an indifferent public—but the explanation that has the greatest ring of truth is the one he gave to Shcheglov in a letter of March 22: “I am not going for the sake of impressions or observations, but simply for the sake of living for six months differently from how I have lived hitherto.”

The letters Chekhov wrote during the two-and-a-half-month journey are some of the best he has left us. They permit us to see, as if in a movie with a large budget for special effects, the hardships he endured as he made his way across the continent, first by train and riverboat, and then (for the largest part of the trip—nearly three thousand miles) by frail open horse-drawn vehicles on rutted and sometimes washed-out roads. (The Trans-Siberian Railroad did not yet exist.) He traveled, day and night, in frigidly cold weather and endless spells of rain. He suffered from hunger and cold and painful shoes. Before he became accustomed to it, the jogging and lurching of the open carriage made his bones ache. For a consumptive to undertake such a trip would seem like a form of suicide. But, strangely, Chekhov didn’t sicken; on the contrary, he thrived. As the journey progressed, he stopped coughing and spitting blood, and started feeling really well (even his hemorrhoids subsided). In The White Plague, the Duboses devote a chapter to some of the odder forms of therapy that were thought up during the premodern period of tuberculosis. One of these was the horseback-riding cure, popular in the eighteenth century. They cite several cases of patients (one of them John Locke’s nephew) who recovered from tuberculosis after strenuous daily riding, and note a Dutch physician’s recommendation that consumptives “of the lower classes who were confined to sedentary occupations endeavor to find employment as coachmen.” They go on to write of a cobbler who did become a coachman. “He was well as long as he remained in the saddle (on the box) but lost his health when he returned to cobbling.” Chekhov remained well until he returned to Moscow, in the fall of 1890, when his poor health promptly returned. (“It’s a strange business,” he wrote to Suvorin on December 24. “While I was traveling to Sakhalin and back I felt perfectly well, but now, at home, the devil knows what is happening to me. My head is continually aching, I have a feeling of languor all over, I am quickly exhausted, apathetic, and worst of all, my heart is not beating regularly.”)

In his letters during the trip, he exulted over his endurance. On June 5, during a stopover in the Siberian town of Irkutsk, where he slept in a real bed and had a bath (“The soapsuds off my head were not white but of an ashen brown color, as though I were washing a horse”), he wrote to Leikin:

From Tomsk to Krasnoyarsk was a desperate struggle through impassable mud. My goodness, it frightens me to think of it! How often I had to mend my chaise, to walk, to swear, to get out of my chaise and get into it again, and so on! It sometimes happened that I was from six to ten hours getting from one station to another, and every time the chaise had to be mended it took from ten to fifteen hours. . . . Add to all that hunger, dust in one’s nose, one’s eyes glued together with sleep, the continual dread that something would get broken in the chaise. . . . Nevertheless I am well content, and I thank God that He has given me the strength and opportunity to make this journey. I have seen and experienced a great deal, and it has all been very new and interesting to me not as a literary man, but as a human being. The Yenissey, the Taiga, the stations, the drivers, the wild scenery, the wild life, the physical agonies caused by the discomforts of the journey, the enjoyment I got from rest—all taken together is so delightful that I can’t describe it. . . .

On June 20, Chekhov exulted again to Leikin from a ship on the Amur River:

I have driven with horses more than four thousand versts. My journey was entirely successful. I was in good health all the time and lost nothing of my luggage but a penknife. I can wish no one a better journey. The journey is absolutely free from danger, and all the tales of escaped convicts, of night attacks, and so on are nothing but legends, traditions of the remote past. A revolver is an entirely superfluous article. Now I am sitting in a first-class cabin, and feel as though I were in Europe. I feel in the mood one is in after passing an examination.

Chekhov arrived at Sakhalin on July 11, and remained there for three months, traveling all over the island and using the device of a census to gain entrance into prisons and settlers’ huts. (Simmons theorizes that the project of a scientific investigation of the colony was itself an after-the-fact rationale to justify his journey to his friends—and to himself.) Chekhov set about his work with characteristic energy and zeal. He managed to interview thousands of people; along with the convicts and settlers, he interviewed the indigenous Gilyaks and Ainus. By October, he was more than ready to leave.

Back in Moscow in December (he made the return journey by ship from Vladivostok—through Hong Kong, Ceylon, India, Egypt, and Turkey—to Odessa) he wrote to Suvorin, “I know a great deal now, but I have brought away a horrid feeling. While I was staying in Sakhalin, I had only a bitter feeling in my inside as though from rancid butter; and now, as I remember it, Sakhalin seems to me a perfect hell. For two months I worked intensely, putting my back into it; in the third month, I began to feel ill from the bitterness I have spoken of, from boredom, and the thought that the cholera would come from Vladivostok to Sakhalin, and that I was in danger of having to winter in the convict settlement.” But a week later he wrote to Suvorin, “How wrong you were when you advised me not to go to Sakhalin . . . what a sour creature I would be now if I had sat at home. Before my journey The Kreutzer Sonata seemed to me to be an event, but now it seems to me absurd and ridiculous. Either I’ve grown up because of my journey or I have gone crazy—the devil knows which.”

On the eve of Chekhov’s heroic journey a complication had arisen that almost ruined it. An artist named N—, “a nice but tedious man,” wanted to travel with him. Chekhov enlisted Suvorin’s aid, writing, “To refuse him my company I haven’t the courage, but to travel with him would be simple misery.” Chekhov went on, “Be my benefactor, tell N— that I am a drunkard, a swindler, a nihilist, a rowdy character, and that it is out of the question to travel with me, and that a journey in my company will do nothing but upset him.” “When one is traveling one must be absolutely alone,” Chekhov wrote to his sister on June 13, concluding his complaints about a trio of traveling companions—an army doctor and two lieutenants—he had picked up somewhere along the way and now wished to shed. He had begun to complain about the trio in a previous letter to Masha (June 7): “I like silence better than anything on the journey, and my companions talk and sing without stopping, and they talk of nothing but women.” Chekhov finally shed the officers by traveling first-class on the Amur River steamer, where they had booked second-class.

That he had picked them up in the first place is consistent with his lifelong inconsistency in regard to solitude. (On the boat, he actually sought out the officers and had tea with them.) He liked silence, but he also didn’t like it. He complained about trying to write in a room where someone was banging on the piano, a baby was crying, and someone else was asking his advice about a medical matter; but when the house was silent he would ask his brother to play the piano. He complained about the number of guests at Melikhovo, but also said he couldn’t live without guests. (“When I’m alone, for some reason I become terrified, just as though I were alone in a frail little boat on a great ocean,” he wrote to Suvorin in June 1889.) At the end of his life, when he felt stuck in Yalta, as he had felt stuck with the dying Nikolai, he complained about the crowd of visitors he had—and about his feeling of isolation. He was a restless man—perhaps because he understood too well what rest represented. “Life is only given us once, and one wants to live it boldly, with full consciousness and beauty,” the consumptive narrator of “An Anonymous Story” (1893) says. Chekhov lived only forty-four years, and during the last third of his life he was surely conscious of the likelihood of a premature death. Those of us who do not live under such a distinctly stated sentence of death cannot know what it is like. Chekhov’s masterpieces are always obliquely telling us.