Reading Chekhov

Twelve

In a first-class compartment of the train bearing me from St. Petersburg to Moscow—the Petersburg-Moscow Express, on which Anna Karenina traveled, carrying her red bag—I looked out the window at a rain-drenched landscape of birches and evergreens and occasionally glanced at the fat young man who lay sleeping on the seat opposite, less than two feet away. He slept for almost the entire five-hour journey, waking only to eat a meal brought by a woman attendant. As he ate, he did not once meet my gaze, and I had the feeling that his long sleep was in part or perhaps even wholly induced by a profound, helpless bashfulness.

As a literary pilgrimage this one, of course, was even more absurd than the trip to Oreanda. Anna’s first-class compartment could not have been anything like the one the fat young man and I occupied, about which there was nothing first-class. Its furnishings were cheap and ugly relics of the Soviet period. The food, served in plastic containers, was gray and inedible. And yet there was a feeling here of something comfortable and familiar. Outside it was raw and wet; here it was warm and cozy. My seat—a high, narrow banquette equipped with a mattress covered with a printed cloth, and a plump large pillow—was agreeable to curl up on. It resembled the high bed on which the engineer Asorin naps, in the warm, cozy house of Bragin, after his transformative dinner. In his stories, Chekhov liked to contrast the harsh weather of God’s world with the kindlier climate of man’s shelters from it. He liked to bring characters out of blizzards and rain storms into warm, snug interiors. In “Gooseberries,” Burkin, a schoolteacher, and Ivan Ivanovitch, a veterinarian, have got caught in a downpour while out walking, and arrive drenched and muddy and cross at the house of a landowner named Alehin, who lives alone and welcomes them gladly. After bathing, “when the lamp was lighted in the big drawing-room upstairs, and Burkin and Ivan Ivanovitch, attired in silk dressing gowns and warm slippers, were sitting in armchairs; and . . . [the servant] lovely Pelagea, stepping noiselessly on the carpet and smiling softly, handed tea and jam on a tray,” Ivan Ivanovitch tells the story that gives “Gooseberries” its name.

“Gooseberries” is the second in a series of three loosely connected stories-within-stories (the outer stories have the same main characters) that Chekhov wrote in the summer of 1898—stories, as it develops, that do not celebrate the hearth but, on the contrary, constitute a three-part parable about the perils of staying warm and safe, and thereby missing what is worthwhile in life, if not life itself. In each instance the pleasant outer story of safe refuge has an ironic relationship to a disturbing inner story of wasted life. Chekhov hated to be cold and loved to be warm, but he knew that the payoff was in the cold. This is why he went to Sakhalin. This is why when he was in lush, semitropical Yalta he longed for the austere, icy Moscow spring.

In the first story of the series, “The Man in a Case,” Burkin tells Ivan Ivanovitch—they have found shelter in a barn after a day of hunting—the tragicomic tale of a Greek teacher named Byelikov, who “displayed a constant and insurmountable impulse to wrap himself in a covering, to make himself, so to speak, a case which would isolate him and protect him from external influences. Reality irritated him, frightened him, kept him in continual agitation, and, perhaps to justify his timidity, his aversion for the actual, he always praised the past and what had never existed; and even the classical languages which he taught were in reality for him galoshes and umbrellas in which he sheltered himself from real life.” When a bit of actuality—a small loss of face—penetrates his defenses, Byelikov cannot survive it. He takes to his bed and dies within a month.

In “Gooseberries,” the aversion for the actual is illustrated by Ivan Ivanovitch’s younger brother, Nikolai, a government clerk, who lives wrapped in a cocoon of longing for a small country estate, fitted out not only with the usual amenities—kitchen garden, duck pond, servants’ quarters—but with a stand of gooseberry bushes. Achieving this gemütlich fantasy becomes an obsession, driving him to extremes of miserliness and avarice. He marries an elderly and ugly widow for her money, and keeps her on such short rations that she dies three years later. Now, at last, he can buy his estate, a charmless place without a gooseberry on it. However, he plants twenty gooseberry bushes and settles into the life of a country squire. Ivan Ivanovitch comes for a visit and finds his brother living like an escapee from Dead Souls—fat, uncouth, complacent, putting on airs, spouting platitudes about the management of the peasants. A servant brings a plate of sour, unripe berries—the first harvest from the new bushes—and Nikolai greedily eats them, as though they were the finest fruit of ancient bushes. Watching him, Ivan Ivanovitch has an epiphany, which he relates to Burkin and Alehin: Like Nikolai, he says, we are all insulated against reality. “We do not see and we do not hear those who suffer, and what is terrible in life goes on somewhere behind the scenes. . . . Everything is quiet and peaceful, and nothing protests but mute statistics: so many people gone out of their minds, so many gallons of vodka drunk, so many children dead from malnutrition. And this order of things is evidently necessary; evidently the happy man feels at ease only because the unhappy bear their burdens in silence, and without that silence happiness would be impossible.”

He goes on:

There ought to be behind the door of every happy, contented man someone standing with a hammer continually reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people; that however happy he may be, life will show her laws sooner or later, trouble will come for him— disease, poverty, losses, and no one will see or hear, just as now he neither sees nor hears others.

Ivan Ivanovitch goes on in this didactic vein, ending with a plea for activism: “Do good,” he says. Then Chekhov, as if anticipating the reader’s reaction, writes, “Ivan Ivanovitch’s story had not satisfied either Burkin or Alehin. . . . It was dreary to listen to the story of the poor clerk who ate gooseberries. They felt inclined, for some reason, to talk about elegant people, about women.”

The final story, “About Love,” narrated the next day by Alehin during lunch, satisfies this inclination. This time, the aversion for the actual takes the form of renunciation. It is a fragment of Alehin’s autobiography. Several years before, he and a young woman named Anna Alexyevna, who was married to a good but dull man, had met and fallen in love. However, unlike Gurov and Anna Sergeyevna (whom, in her delicate charm, Anna Alexyevna resembles), Alehin and Anna Alexyevna did not act on their feelings. For years they suppressed them, Alehin playing the part of the friend of the family, the bachelor uncle to the children, and Anna maintaining the appearance of the devoted wife. Only when the husband was taking up a new post in a distant region and Alehin came to say good-bye to Anna Alexyevna on the train did they finally acknowledge their love.

When our eyes met in the compartment, our spiritual fortitude deserted us both; I took her in my arms, she pressed her face to my breast, and tears flowed from her eyes. Kissing her face, her shoulders, her hands, wet with tears—oh, how unhappy we were—I confessed my love for her, and with a burning pain in my heart I realized how unnecessary, how petty, and how deceptive all that had hindered us from loving was. I understood that when you love you must either, in your reasonings about that love, start from what is highest—from what is more important than happiness and unhappiness, sin or virtue in their accepted meaning—or you must not reason at all.

I kissed her for the last time, pressed her hand, and parted forever. The train had already started. I went into the next compartment—it was empty—and until I reached the next station I sat there crying.

Alehin, though hardly a caricature like the Greek master or the squire brother, shares their existential malady. Like the coat and galoshes in which Byelikov encases himself and the fantasy with which the brother protects himself from the real, his attachment to conventional morality condemns him to his life of quiet desperation. A fourth desperate life— Anna Alexyevna’s—is shown encasing itself in the padding of nervous illness; the train that bears her away is taking her to a transitional rest cure in the Crimea. When Chekhov wrote “The Lady with the Dog,” he doubtless remembered her.

The three encased men of the trilogy are not the first (or the last) such in Chekhov’s work. A predecessor is Dr. Andrey Yefimitch Ragin, the hero of “Ward No. 6,” written six years earlier. Ragin is a much more fully developed example of a man who insulates himself from reality, and “Ward No. 6” is a masterpiece. But Chekhov was habitually reluctant to let go of a theme, and his compulsion to rework it in many variations is a signature of his work. It is also an aid to the critic. The ceaseless amplifications are a kind of message about meaning.

The meaning of “Ward No. 6” expands when the story is read in the light of the trilogy. Conventionally, it is read as a work of powerful social protest, a political fable whose horrifying mental ward stands for the repressive czarist state. In its rendering of suffering, this short work of fiction achieves what Chekhov’s wordy factual book about Sakhalin (which he was still trying to write when he wrote “Ward No. 6”) cannot. The factual work is like a photograph of a person taken from far away; “Ward No. 6” is a close-up, with all the pores and lines showing. The Island of Sakhalin prods and pokes; “Ward No. 6” stabs.

The story begins with a description of the repulsive out-building in which five lunatics are imprisoned. With a few strokes, Chekhov creates a place of such disgusting squalor and stench that the reader himself wants to flee from it. The lunatics receive no treatment. Their only human contact is with a guard named Nikita, who “belongs to the class of simple-hearted, practical, and dull-witted people, prompt in carrying out orders, who like discipline better than anything in the world, and so are convinced that it is their duty to beat people.” Nikita’s “fists are vigorous” and he “showers blows on the face, on the chest, on the back, on whatever comes first.” The ward is part of a provincial hospital that is itself a hell. Ragin has been the chief of the hospital for some years. He is intelligent and decent but helplessly ineffectual, yet another of Chekhov’s good men who cannot make good. He “had no strength of will nor belief in his right to organize an intelligent and honest life around him. He was absolutely unable to give orders, to forbid things, or to insist.” Although Ragin immediately realizes that the hospital is a place of evil and should be closed down, he takes no action. He sinks into a life of escape from life. He has less and less to do with the hospital and never goes into the mental ward. He does almost nothing at all, in fact. He reads and talks to the town’s postmaster, Mihail Averyanitch, “the only man in town whose society did not bore [him]” but who is actually a bore and a cheat. Then one day chance brings Ragin to Ward 6 and into conversation with a thirty-three-year-old paranoid inmate named Ivan Dmitritch Gromov, who (unlike the four other inmates) is of noble birth.

In April 1892, Chekhov described “Ward No. 6” to Avilova—surely not without irony—as “very boring . . . since woman and the element of love are entirely absent from it.” (He added, “I can’t bear such tales, and as for writing this one, I did it inadvertently somehow, and frivolously.”) In fact, however, the element of love is very much present in the story. How else to describe the pleasure and excitement aroused in Ragin by his encounter with Gromov, a genuinely interesting and appealing man, someone with whom he can finally engage? Ragin starts coming regularly to Ward 6 and holding philosophical debates with Gromov. He comes alive. Gromov is a precursor of R. D. Laing’s sane madman in a mad world. His paranoia is a too acute awareness of the wrongs of the world. Ragin takes the position that active efforts to alleviate the wrongs of the world are useless and pointless, since we all will die. He advocates a stoic indifference to external reality. “There is no real difference between a warm, snug study and this ward,” he says. “A man’s peace and contentment do not lie outside a man, but in himself.” The cold and starved and beaten Gromov wonderfully replies, “You should go and preach that philosophy in Greece, where it’s warm and fragrant with the scent of pomegranates, but here it is not suited to the climate. . . . Diogenes did not need a study or a warm habitation; it’s hot there without. You can lie in your tub and eat oranges and olives. But bring him to Russia to live: he’d be begging to be let indoors in May, let alone December. He’d be doubled up with the cold.” As the conversation continues, the madman eloquently challenges the sane doctor’s quietism, and draws a devastating portrait of him:

“You are naturally a flabby, lazy man, and so you have tried to arrange your life so that nothing should disturb you or make you move. You have handed over your work to the assistant and the rest of the rabble while you sit in peace and warmth, save money, read, amuse yourself with reflections, with all sorts of lofty nonsense . . . in fact you have seen nothing of life, you know absolutely nothing of it, and are only theoretically acquainted with reality. . . . You see a peasant beating his wife, for instance. Why interfere? Let him beat her, they will both die sooner or later, anyway. . . . A peasant woman comes with toothache . . . well, what of it? Pain is the idea of pain, and besides ‘there is no living in this world without illness; we shall all die, and so, go away, woman, don’t hinder me from thinking and drinking vodka.’ . . . We are kept here behind barred windows, tortured, left to rot; but that is very good and reasonable, because there is no difference at all between this ward and a warm snug study. A convenient philosophy. You can do nothing, and your conscience is clear, and you feel you are wise. . . . No sir, it is not philosophy, it’s not thinking, it’s not breadth of vision, but laziness, fakirism, drowsy stupefaction. . . .”

None of this penetrates. Ragin can only laugh with pleasure at having found such an interesting and intelligent man to talk to. “That’s original,” he says to Gromov of his harsh portrait. Only when he is himself thrown into the ward— this is the story’s incredible plot twist, which Chekhov succeeds in making believable—does he at last confront reality. Here is the form the confrontation takes:

Nikita opened the door quickly, and roughly, with both his hands and his knee, shoved Andrey Yefimitch back, then swung his arm and punched him in the face with his fist. It seemed to Andrey Yefimitch as though a huge salt wave enveloped him from his head downwards and dragged him to the bed; there really was a salt taste in his mouth: most likely the blood was running from his teeth. He waved his arms as though he were trying to swim out and clutched at a bedstead, and at the same moment felt Nikita hit him twice on the back. . . . Then all was still, the faint moonlight came through the grating, and a shadow like a net lay on the floor. It was terrible. Andrey Yefimitch lay and held his breath: he was expecting with horror to be struck again. He felt as though someone had taken a sickle, thrust it into him, and turned it round several times in his breast and bowels. He bit the pillow from pain and clenched his teeth, and all at once through the chaos in his brain there flashed the terrible, unbearable thought that these people, who seemed now like black shadows in the moonlight, had to endure such pain day after day for years. How could it have happened that for more than twenty years he had known it and had refused to know it?

The next day, Ragin dies of a stroke, and the story ends.

Reading “Ward No. 6” as a political parable is not adequate to its power. One puts it down feeling that in writing it Chekhov had in mind nothing so local as the condition of the Russian empire. As always, it is with the human condition that he is preoccupied. “Life will show her laws sooner or later, trouble will come for [the happy, contented man]— disease, poverty, losses, and no one will see or hear, just as now he neither sees nor hears others.” Nikita embodies the brutality of life itself coming at us all with its big fists. Chekhov condemns Ragin for his refusal to bestir himself on behalf of his suffering fellow men, but he also understands him. As a nonbeliever, he, too, has felt the absurdity of it all in the light of our ineluctable permanent extinction beneath the cold stars of a ten-billion-year-old universe.

In “Lights,” he puts into the mouth of his reformed rake, Ananyev, a speech about the philosophy of absurdism that at once satirizes it and gives it its due.

“I was no more than twenty-six at the time [when he seduced and betrayed the trusting Kisochka], but I knew perfectly well that life was aimless and had no meaning, that everything was a deception and an illusion, that in its essential nature and results a life of penal servitude in Sakhalin was not in any way different from a life spent in Nice, that the difference between the brain of a Kant and the brain of a fly was of no real significance. . . . I lived as though I were doing a favor to some unseen power which compelled me to live. . . . The philosophy of which we are speaking has something alluring, narcotic in its nature, like tobacco or morphia. It becomes a habit, a craving. You take advantage of every minute of solitude to gloat over thoughts of the aimlessness of life and the darkness of the grave.”

To a young listener, who himself finds life absurd, and challenges a distinction that Ananyev makes between the pessimism of the old and the pessimism of the young, Ananyev replies:

The pessimism of old thinkers does not take the form of idle talk, as it does with you and me, but of Weltschmerz, of suffering; it rests in them on a Christian foundation because it is derived from love for humanity and from thoughts about humanity, and is entirely free from the egotism which is noticeable in dilettantes. You despise life because its meaning and its object are hidden from you alone, and you are afraid only of your own death, while the real thinker is unhappy because the truth is hidden from all, and he is afraid for all men.

In his stories and plays, Chekhov is afraid for all men. He was only in his twenties and thirties when he wrote most of them, but like other geniuses—especially those who die prematurely—he wrote as if he were old. Toward the end of “Ward No. 6,” he veers off—as he does in other dark and terrible works, such as “Peasants” and “In the Ravine”—to rejoice for all men in the beauty of the world. There is always this amazing movement in Chekhov from the difficult and fearful to the simple and beautiful. As Ragin lies dying, Chekhov tells us, he sees “a greenness before his eyes”; then “a herd of deer, extraordinarily beautiful and graceful, of which he had been reading the day before, ran by him.”

“Life is given to us only once.” The line (or a variant) appears in story after story and is delivered so quietly and offhandedly that we almost miss its terror. Chekhov was never one to insist on anything. He didn’t preach, or even teach. He is our poet of the provisional and fragmentary. When a story or play ends, nothing seems to be settled. “Ward No. 6,” for instance, does not end with the image of the beautiful deer. Before Ragin dies another thought passes through his mind: “A peasant woman stretched out her hand to him with a registered letter. . . . Mihail Averyanitch said something, then it all vanished, and Andrey Yefimitch sank into oblivion forever.” The registered letter—there is a bit of theatricality in its not being an ordinary letter—glints with meaning. What does it say? Who sent it? The ending of “Ward No. 6” inevitably evokes (and was surely influenced by) the ending of “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” but Chekhov declines to report the mystical experience that Tolstoy confidently reports his hero to have had. Chekhov enters the dying Ragin’s mind, but emerges with the most laconic and incomplete of reports. Tolstoy’s audacious authorial omniscience gives him his position as the greatest of the nineteenth-century Russian realists. Chekhov’s experiments with authorial reticence—equally audacious in their way— point toward twentieth-century modernism.