Reading Chekhov

Eleven

I left the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg after the second act of an exceptionally trite and listless Carmen, but not before mingling with the intermission crowd in one of the buffets, where children in velvet party clothes and adults in evening dress crowded around refreshment stands and carried away glasses of champagne and fruit drinks and dishes of ice cream and small plates piled with sandwiches and pastries and chocolates wrapped in cornucopias of colored foil. I felt a stir of memory, a flutter of the romance theater held for me when I was myself a child in a velvet dress.

The role of theater in relieving the bleak joylessness of Chekhov’s childhood has been noted by his biographers. He and his classmates would go to the Taganrog Theater to see plays or hear operettas, sitting in the cheap seats, and sometimes even wearing dark glasses and their fathers’ coats to avoid expulsion. (Unaccompanied schoolboys were not allowed in the theater. A boyhood memory doubtless inspired the moment in “The Lady with the Dog” when two schoolboys, illicitly smoking on the stair landing of a provincial theater, look down and see Gurov emotionally kissing Anna’s face and hands.)

Chekhov began writing plays at an early age. (The untitled manuscript of the half-baked play we call Platonov surfaced in the 1920s and was thought to have been written when he was twenty or twenty-one.) In the English-speaking world, Chekhov is better known as a dramatist than as a story writer. Everyone has seen a Cherry Orchard or an Uncle Vanya, while few have even heard of “The Wife” or “In the Ravine.” But Chekhov was never comfortable as a playwright. “Ah, why have I written plays and not stories!” he wrote to Suvorin in 1896. “Subjects have been wasted, wasted to no purpose, scandalously and unproductively.” A year earlier, when the first draft of The Seagull had been coolly received by theater people and literary friends, Chekhov had written to Suvorin, “I am not destined to be a playwright. I have no luck at it. But I’m not sad over it, for I can still go on writing stories. In that sphere I feel at home; but when I write a play, I feel uneasy, as though someone were peering over my shoulder.”

Chekhov wrote “The Steppe” (1888) in a month and “The Name-Day Party” (1888) in three weeks; it took him almost a year each to drag the Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard out of himself. Ill health undoubtedly played a role, but there is reason to think that the feeling of being watched as he worked, of no longer being alone in his room, was implicated as well. Of course, writing a play is never as private an act as writing a story or a novel. As he works, the playwright feels a crowd of actors, directors, scenery designers, costumers, lighting specialists, and sometimes even an audience at his back. He is never alone, and he evidently likes the company. But, just as Chekhov never resolved his ambivalence toward actual guests, so he never resolved his ambivalence toward the imaginary figures who, peering over his shoulders when he wrote for the theater, inhibited him as he was not inhibited when he wrote stories. (In 1886, though, when his stories first began attracting notice, he reported a similar feeling of invasion to his friend Viktor Bilibin: “Formerly, when I didn’t know that they read my tales and passed judgment on them, I wrote serenely, just the way I eat pancakes; now, I’m afraid when I write.”) The theater drew and repelled Chekhov in equal measure. When, in 1898, he was approached by Nemerovich-Danchenko of the newly formed Moscow Art Theater, for permission to perform The Seagull, he refused. He had sworn off the theater. As Nemerovich-Danchenko reported in his memoirs, “he neither wished nor did he have the strength to undergo the great agitation of the theater that had occasioned him so much pain.” Nemerovich persisted, however, and prevailed. Had he not, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard might still be rattling around the imaginary lumber room where Chekhov stored the subjects he didn’t want to “waste.”

During a torpid passage in the Petersburg Carmen, my mind drifted to a small, odd detail in “The Lady with the Dog.” As Gurov and Anna are strolling around Yalta after they have picked each other up in the restaurant, Gurov tells her “that he had taken his degree in Arts, but had a post in a bank; that he had trained as an opera singer, but had given it up.” Trained as an opera singer! After Chekhov drops this arresting piece of information about his hero, he moves on so quickly that it scarcely registers. Chekhov never returns to it; few readers of the story will recall it. Chekhov is characteristically laconic about Gurov. He doesn’t even tell us why he is in Yalta. He simply deposits him there. Chekhov was always admonishing writers who sent him manuscripts to trim down their work. “Abridge, brother, abridge! Begin on the second page,” he advised his brother Alexander in 1893. He may have begun “The Lady with the Dog” on his own second page, preferring a lacuna to an overlong explanation of why a healthy, youngish married man would be alone for a month at a seaside resort peopled largely by consumptives and women with symptoms of hysteria. But he pauses to tell us that Gurov is a failed artist and a reluctant bank official, and goes on to speak of his womanizing as if it were a kind of natural by-product of his antipathy to the Philistine male business world. “In the society of men, he was bored and not himself; with them, he was cold and uncommunicative, but when he was in the company of women he felt free, and knew what to say to them and how to behave; and he was at ease with them even when he was silent.” Gurov speaks of women as “the lower race,” but he doesn’t mean it. Women represent the freedom and ease of art, as men stand for the constraint and anxiety of commerce.

But had given it up. We may assume that Gurov had abandoned his career as an opera singer because he wasn’t good enough. “You can do nothing . . . if God hasn’t given you the gift.” God does not give the gift freely or often: the untalented will always be with us. The gift’s uneven distribution within Chekhov’s own family may have instilled in him his special sympathy for the have-nots of art. His brother Alexander was the conspicuous example of the failed artist whose failure was out of his hands—whose chronic whining and feeling of being cheated by life was understandable, and perhaps even fitting, in the light of his incurable talentlessness. Chekhov never wrote directly about Alexander (or any of his siblings), but in two stories he touches on the plight of the untalented in a way that may owe something to his brother’s bitter situation. In “Ionitch,” (1898) a young woman named Ekaterina, who has dreams of being a great pianist, returns from her studies at a conservatory knowing that “there was nothing special about me”—that she is just a provincial girl who plays the piano like other provincial girls. Faute de mieux, she tries to rekindle the interest of the district doctor she rejected during her time of grandiose ambition, but she fails, and a light goes out in her soul. At the end of the story, “she has grown visibly older, is constantly ailing, and every autumn goes to the Crimea with her mother.” Similarly, in “A Dreary Story” a trusting and charming young woman named Katya goes off to pursue a career as an actress, only to return home in the bitter knowledge that she has no talent. She, too, suffers a disappointment in love, and when we last see her she, too, is like a delicate flower that has been trampled on. The salvation through prosaic work that characters like Laevsky and Sonya and Asorin find seems to be out of the reach of those who mistakenly aspire to become artists. (In The Seagull, Nina, who in many ways resembles Katya, and has similar trying adventures in art and love, finally succeeds in becoming an artist, because she does have the gift. Both Katya and Nina are believed to be based on Lydia Mizinova, one of the women with whose affections Chekhov trifled, and whose ambitions as a singer were not realized.) Chekhov’s sympathy for the artistically underpowered does not extend to the pretentious. He had little patience with those who, in the face of the glaring evidence of their ordinariness, believe themselves to be exceptional. In “The Grasshopper” (1892), Chekhov draws a mordant portrait of a pretty young dilettante named Olga Ivanovna, married to a modest but highly regarded doctor and scientist named Osip Stepanitch Dymov, who fancies herself an artist and avidly collects celebrities in the art, literary, and theatrical worlds. She patronizes her husband and drifts into an affair with one of the artist celebrities, a painter named Ryabovsky. Only when it is too late—when her husband is dying of diphtheria, contracted from a patient—does she realize that it is Dymov who is the great man, and she and her celebrities are pathetic nonentities. There is a scene no one but Chekhov could have written, in which Dymov, bearing a package of caviar, cheese, and white salmon, arrives at his rented summer cottage looking forward to a nice evening with his wife, whom he has not seen for two weeks. He finds Olga not at home and the cottage overrun with her artistes. When she finally appears, she sends the tired and hungry Dymov back to the city for a pink dress she wants to wear to a wedding the next day. Dymov obediently gets back on the train and the artistes eat the caviar, cheese, and white salmon. Olga is one of the most flawed, though by no means most hateful, of Chekhov’s women. She is foolish rather than malevolent—a goose rather than a snake. As Dymov lies dying, she achieves a tragic understanding of her weakness and of her missed opportunities: “She seemed to herself horrible and disgusting,” and “she had a dull, despondent feeling and a conviction that her life was spoilt, and that there was no setting it right anyhow.”