Reading Chekhov

Ten

The second day of my stay in cold, idle St. Petersburg had been scheduled to begin with a visit to one of Catherine the Great’s palaces, but when I told Nelly that palaces didn’t especially interest me, she—unlike Sonia when I balked at the Armory—simply asked what I wanted to do instead. As with Nina, I felt an immediate rapport with Nelly. She was younger than Nina—she had a fresh, round face, and short, wavy brown hair, and looked to be in her fifties. She was not poor, and was more sophisticated, and more reserved. When I asked her about herself, she told me just so much and no more: that she was a widow (her husband had died of cancer two years earlier); that she had recently remodeled her apartment; that she had a tomcat; that she had been a university teacher of languages, and then had gone into the travel business, originally working for Intourist and now for a private agency called Esperance; that she bought her clothes abroad. She performed her job as guide and translator with beautiful precision, as if it were a piano sonata; throughout my stay in the city, she seemed to know exactly when to explain and when to be silent; when to be present and when to vanish.

She and the driver, Sergei, met me at the St. Petersburg airport, a place that time seems to have forgotten. The terminal, of an early totalitarian-modern style, is worn and faded, leached of all menace. It was empty and silent. Here and there along the stone-floored corridor leading to passport control, a spindly potted palm inclined toward a dusty window. No other flight had come in—perhaps ours was the flight of the day or week—and it took no time to get through the formalities. Sergei picked up my suitcase, and he and Nelly led me to the car, which was parked in a small lot directly in front of the terminal. Was I in Mother Russia or at the Brewster, New York, train station?

Driving in from the airport, we passed ugly, flimsy housing projects, which grew less ugly and more substantial as we neared the city. Nelly said that the apartments in the outlying projects, built post-Khrushchev, were incredibly tiny. The projects closer to the city, which had been built in the Stalin period, had decent-size apartments and were much coveted. My hotel, the Astoria, built in the late nineteenth century and recently renovated, was as empty as the airport. Normally, American tourists fill the city’s hotels and restaurants, but fear that anti-American feeling had been aroused by our recent mindless bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade had kept them away. (I, in fact, encountered no anti-American feeling during my stay in Russia.) My handsome room was furnished with imperial-style antiques and looked out on the dull-gold dome of St. Isaac’s cathedral, which was designed by an Italian architect and has a beautiful Florentine austerity. During the Soviet period, the cathedral housed a Museum of Atheism, but now it had resumed Russian Orthodox services, as churches throughout the former Soviet Union were doing. Nelly told me that under Communism belief was tolerated among those willing to remain in society’s lowliest positions; but to rise in the hierarchy it was necessary to be an atheist. Atheism was the “official religion,” she said. On the way to the hotel, she had pointed out a church in which the Soviets had dug a swimming pool—now being filled in.

The next morning, when Nelly asked me to propose a substitute for the visit to Catherine’s palace, I had one ready, and a few minutes later Sergei pulled up in front of a small house on a narrow side street where Dostoevsky had once lived, and which was now the Dostoevsky Museum. We bought tickets and walked through a series of small rooms filled with conventional Victorian furniture and objects. If one stretched one’s imagination, one could read into the slight dreariness and somberness of the rooms some connection to the author of Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. But they could just as well have been occupied by a government clerk or a retired army officer.

Chekhov never met Dostoevsky, who died in 1881, at the age of sixty, and was not drawn to his writing; as he exalted Tolstoy, he edged away from Dostoevsky. In March 1889, he wrote to Suvorin, “I bought Dostoevsky at your store, and am now reading him. Pretty good but too long-winded and too indelicate. There is much that is pretentious.” And one day in 1902, while out fishing on an estate in the Urals, Chekhov said to a friend, “We’re such a bone-lazy people. We’ve even infected nature with our laziness. Look at this stream—it’s too lazy to move. See how it twists and turns, all because of laziness. All our famous ‘psychology,’ all that Dostoevsky stuff, is part of it, too. We’re too lazy to work, so we invent things.” (The friend was Alexander Tikhonov, a twenty-two-year-old student of mining engineering, who later became the Soviet writer Alexander Serebrev. His book Time and People, in which the passage appears, has not been translated into English. I quote from an extract in David Magarshack’s biography.) Satiric references to “that Dostoevsky stuff” recur in Chekhov’s stories. In his not all that funny sendup of detective fiction “The Swedish Match” (unlike any other story by Chekhov, it seems too long), an eager young sleuth, trying to pin a murder on the victim’s elderly sister, tells the examining magistrate, “Ah, you don’t know these old maids, these Old Believers! You should read Dostoevsky!” Or in “Neighbors” (1892), a pathetic loser named Vlassich is trapped in a “strange marriage in the style of Dostoevsky”—to a prostitute, naturally. But Chekhov’s relationship to Dostoevsky is not quite as simple as it may appear. Literary influence is a complicated business, and does not hinge on like or dislike. It is not always conscious. There is reason to think that Chekhov, though he disliked Dostoevsky, drew on him nevertheless. “Neighbors” is one of the works in which this influence—unconscious or merely covert, who can say?—may be glimpsed.

The story is narrated by a young man named Pyotr Mihailich, whose sister, Zina, has been seduced by the pathetic Vlassich. Vlassich is separated but not divorced from the Dostoevskian tart, and Zina has defiantly moved in with him on his run-down farm. Pyotr rides out to the farm intending to horsewhip his sister’s seducer—and stays to eat strawberries with the errant pair. He finds he cannot hate Vlassich. Indeed, he “was fond of Vlassich; he was conscious of a sort of power in him.” At the end of the story, as Pyotr Mihailich rides home, he berates himself. “I am an old woman! I went to solve the question and I have only made it more complicated—there it is!” Making it more complicated is, of course, Chekhov’s own stock in trade; but when, near the end of “Neighbors,” the story takes a joltingly strange turn, we may wonder whether he realized just how complicated he was making it. (We do know that Chekhov himself was critical of the story; he wrote to Suvorin that he thought it shouldn’t have been published.) The strange turn comes when Zina, making nervous, black-humorous conversation with her brother, says of her new home, “It’s a charming house. . . . There’s some pleasant memory in every room. In my room, only fancy, Grigory’s grandfather shot himself. . . . And in this dining-room, somebody was flogged to death.” Vlassich then tells the gruesome story of a sadistic Frenchman called Olivier, who had leased the house and had “sat here at this table drinking claret” while stable boys beat to death a young divinity student Olivier disliked. Pyotr Mihailich, angry at himself for his inaction, thinks, “Olivier behaved inhumanly, but one way or another he did settle the question, while I have settled nothing and have only made it worse. . . . He said and did what he thought right, while I say and do what I don’t think right; and I don’t know really what I do think. . . .” Chekhov knew very well what he thought of violence—he hated it—and Pyotr Mihailich’s perverse approval of Olivier’s violence seems more in “the style of Dostoevsky” than in that of Chekhov. A Raskolnikov or a Stavrogin might have rationalized such brutality, but surely not soft, nebbish Pyotr Mihailich. The lapse may help us untangle the knot of Chekhov’s relationship to Dostoevsky. That Chekhov was concerned with the question of evil that reverberates through Dostoevsky’s novels is clear from works like “Ward No. 6,” “In the Ravine,” and “Peasant Wives.” He may have found Dostoevsky pretentious, but he might not have been impelled to write these stories had not The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment come into his ken. As Chekhov divided his life between the time he was beaten and the time he was no longer beaten, so his stories break down into those that take place in the universe where “everything is permitted” and those set in the world of ordinary human beings who cannot stop making each other miserable but do not step over the line into barbarism. He had begun to look into the abyss early in his writing career; among the contributions to the humor magazines there are grim little tales that point directly to the mature works of despair. One of these is the seven-page story “Because of Little Apples” (1880), in which another sadist watches another beating. This time, a landowner catches a young engaged peasant couple eating apples in his orchard, and devises the amusing punishment of forcing first the girl to beat the boy and then the boy to beat the girl. When it’s the boy’s turn, his sadistic impulses are set off, and in his “ecstasy” he cannot stop beating the girl. Chekhov will reuse this Dostoevskian psychological insight in “Peasant Wives.” Here the evil hypocrite Matvey watches the husband of the woman he has seduced go out of control and beat and kick the woman he loves until she collapses. The beating in “Because of Little Apples” stops (when the landowner’s daughter appears on the scene) before the girl is seriously injured but not before the relationship between the pair is irreparably damaged. The boy and the girl walk out of the orchard in opposite directions and never see each other again. The scent of Dostoevsky that subtly emanates from the story was picked up by Robert Louis Jackson. In an essay called “Dostoevsky in Chekhov’s Garden of Eden” Jackson plausibly connects the story’s “motifs of physical cruelty and spiritual disfiguration, the absolute humiliation of the individual, and sadistic delight in cruelty” to Dostoevsky’s work in general, and, in particular, to a chilling story about the destruction of innocence called “A Christmas Party and a Wedding.” He believes that the nineteen-year-old author of “Little Apples” was already thoroughly conversant with Dostoevsky’s work (which would mean that he was rereading it when he made his comment to Suvorin) and that the parallels between “A Christmas Party” and “Little Apples” are too obvious to ignore.

Chekhov never again wrote so directly about the catastrophe that occurred in the biblical first garden. His gardens thenceforth are prelapsarian, sites of redemption and renewal, freedom and air. References to the Serpent’s gift of sexual guilt are relegated to out-of-the-way corners of the narrative, and lodged in brief, unemphatic references to the eating of fruit. Zinaida, the sexy heroine of “An Anonymous Story,” who diverts the hero from a revolutionary mission, is introduced lying on a sofa eating a pear, for example; the temptress antiheroine of “Ariadne” eats apples and oranges in the middle of the night (as well as roast beef, ham, and men); and, in the most famous example, Gurov eats watermelon—a display not only of his callousness but an allusion to the transgressive sex that has just taken place. The lovers in “An Anonymous Story” and “Ariadne” end up as alienated as the peasant couple in “Little Apples.” It is worth recalling about Anna and Gurov that after they have sex it is touch and go whether they, too, will go off in opposite directions. When Anna assumes her Mary Magdalene attitude, and reproaches herself for being “a vulgar, contemptible woman,” Gurov feels “bored, already, listening to her” and “irritated by the naive tone, by this remorse, so unexpected and inopportune.” But, as roués know how to do, he controls his irritation, and sweet-talks Anna out of her uninteresting remorse. Most significant, he gets her out of the room. It is the trip to Oreanda—to the sea, mountains, open sky—that marks the beginning of the peaceful love that is to arise between them, and of his transformation. Dostoevsky’s heavy shadow doesn’t fall on this story, of course—the most delicate and fragrant of Chekhov’s tales—or on the largest part of his work. And, where it does fall, it is so oblique that we need the help of a literary radiologist like Jackson to make it out.

When we left the Dostoevsky Museum, Nelly directed Sergei to drive us to the nearby Anna Akhmatova Museum, located in a wing—the former servants’ wing—of an eighteenth-century palace called the Fountain House, where the poet lived on and off for thirty years. The museum is filled with representations (photographs, paintings, drawings, sculptures) of a strikingly beautiful and elegant woman— tall, slender, with dark bangs, always unsmiling—who achieved fame as an avant-garde poet in her early twenties and lived to become one of the heroines of the tragedy of Russian Communism. Though a child of privilege, Akhmatova, born in 1889 (as Anna Andreyevna Gorenko—in 1911 she took the pen name Akhmatova, after a Tatar princess who was her great-grandmother), chose not to join the aristocrats, artists, and writers who left Russia after the revolution, and threw in her lot with those who remained to see the tragedy through. Her fortitude in the face of suffering and loss—her first husband was shot by the Bolsheviks, her only son was imprisoned three times, for a total of thirteen years, her friend and fellow poet Osip Mandelstam died in a labor camp, as did her third husband—and the major poetry she quietly produced during three decades as a banned (and thus destitute) writer have given her legendary status. Isaiah Berlin, recalling an extraordinary night-long conversation he had with Akhmatova in the autumn of 1945, when she was fifty-six, wrote: “She did not in public, nor indeed to me in private, utter a single word against the Soviet regime: but her entire life was what Herzen once described virtually all Russian literature as being—one uninterrupted indictment of Russian reality.”

Akhmatova’s poem “Requiem,” perhaps the best known of her works in the West, was written during one of her son’s incarcerations, at the height of the Stalin terror, and takes us into this reality with chilling directness:

You should have been shown, you mocker,

Minion of all your friends,

Gay little sinner of Tsarskoye Selo,

What would happen in your life—

How three-hundreth in line, with a parcel,

You would stand by the Kresty prison,

Your fiery tears

Burning through the New Year’s ice.

Over there the prison poplar bends,

And there’s no sound—and over there how many

Innocent lives are ending now.

Akhmatova herself escaped arrest, though not the fear of it by which life in Russia was defined during the Stalin years. In a memoir of Akhmatova, Nadyezda Mandelstam, the widow of the poet, writes: “Of everything that happened to us, what was most significant and powerful was the fear and what it produced—a loathsome feeling of disgrace and impotence. There is no need to try to remember this; ‘this’ is with us always.” Mandelstamova goes on to record Akhmatova’s stoicism and courage and consistent good conduct during a period when just being decent was to take your life in your hands.

Berlin writes of Akhmatova as “immensely dignified, with unhurried gestures, a noble head, beautiful, somewhat severe features, and an expression of immense sadness . . . she moved and looked like a tragic queen.” One is somehow not surprised to learn that this Niobe “worshiped Dostoevsky,” and did not care for Chekhov:

She asked me what I read: before I could answer she denounced Chekhov for his mud-coloured world, his dreary plays, the absence in his world of heroism and martyrdom, of depth and darkness and sublimity—this was the passionate diatribe, which I later reported to Pasternak, in which she said that in Chekhov “no swords flashed.”

But when Berlin revisited the Soviet Union in 1956, and spoke with Akhmatova on the telephone (she did not dare see him, for fear of endangering her son, who was briefly out of prison), she told him that she had reread Chekhov, and acknowledged, he writes, that “at least in ‘Ward 6’ he had described her situation accurately, hers, and that of many others.” This, too, is not surprising. It only underscores the divide between Chekhov’s Dostoevskian examinations of extreme situations—works full of “depth and darkness and sublimity,” “heroism and martyrdom”—and those situated on the blessedly “dreary” other side of the barbed wire.

At the museum, a gray-haired woman with a crocheted shawl and a wool cap attached herself to Nelly and me— one of the army of retired women with insufficient pensions who are glad to find ill- or unpaid work in museums—and recited an earnest and naïve spiel about the poet’s life. The largest part of the museum is given over to Akhmatova’s early life: to the paintings, drawings, sculptures, and photographs (among them a drawing by Modigliani, whom Akhmatova met in Paris in 1911) that Akhmatova’s contemporaries, ravished by her interesting beauty, tripped over each other to make; and to exhibits of books and manuscripts from the period when she was still able to publish. In addition, there are rooms that supposedly reconstruct the various periods when Akhmatova lived at the Fountain House—first with her second husband, Vladimir Shileilko, an Assyriologist; then with her third husband, the art historian Nikolai Punin (and with his ex-wife and child; such was communal apartment life in those days); then (after her separation from Punin) in a room of her own in the Punin apartment. When her friend Lydia Chukovska visited her in this room in 1938, she found that its “general appearance . . . was one of neglect, chaos. By the stove an armchair, missing a leg, ragged, springs protruding. The floor unswept. The beautiful things—the carved chair, the mirror in its smooth bronze frame, the lubok prints on the walls— did not adorn the room; on the contrary, they only emphasized its squalor further.” By the end of the war, when another friend, Natalia Roskina, visited the room, the beautiful things were gone. “The circumstances in which Akhmatova was then living could not be described as impoverished, for poverty implies having a little of something. She had nothing,” Roskina writes in a memoir of 1966. “There was a small, old desk in her room and an iron bed covered with a shabby blanket. The bed was obviously hard and it was obvious that the blanket provided no warmth.”

Akhmatova’s room in the museum has none of the squalor of Chukovska’s description or the bleakness of Roskina’s. It is of a piece with the elegant young beauty in the drawings and paintings and sculptures and photographs. It is sparsely furnished, but as if by willful design rather than out of pathetic necessity. Only choice and rare pieces of furniture and objects have been admitted: a leather-covered chaise with curved wooden legs on which a small black leather suitcase mysteriously rests; a glass-fronted rosewood cabinet with a few interesting pieces in it (a fan, a strange bottle with a crystal stopper, a porcelain statuette of Akhmatova in her youth); a chair with a white fringed shawl thrown over it; a carved chest with a couple of leather-bound books and three commedia dell’arte rag dolls lying on it. The room looks out on the palace’s grassy, tree-filled courtyard. There is no trace in it of the line that stood in front of the Kresty prison or of the corpulent old woman Akhmatova became in the last years of her life. Shrines operate under a kind of reverse Gresham’s law: beauty, youth, order, pleasure drive out ugliness, old age, disorder, suffering. In Paris, in 1965, Akhmatova was shown an article in an émigré journal that spoke of her as a martyr, and she protested, “If they want to write about me over here, let them write about me the way they write about other poets: this line is better than that one, this is an original use of imagery, this image does not work at all. Let them forget about my sufferings.” Chekhov sounded a similar note of asperity in the summer of 1901 in a letter to Olga: “You write, ‘my heart begins to ache when I think of the silent, deep well of melancholy within you.’ What nonsense is this, my darling? I am not melancholy and never have been and feel tolerably well and when you’re with me I feel absolutely fine.” Akhmatova was fourteen when Chekhov died. Had he lived he undoubtedly would have met her in St. Petersburg literary society, and would not have complained about her looks or her clothes. He might or might not have liked her poetry, but he would have known better than anyone what she meant when she said, “Let them forget about my sufferings.”