Reading Chekhov

Thirteen

In my room at the Hotel Yalta, I tried to turn on the TV, to get the news (during a telephone call to New York, I had heard that Yeltsin was about to be impeached), but could not. I called the front desk, and was told, “There is a woman on your floor. She will help you.”

“What woman?”

“There is a woman on every floor, near the elevator. She will help you.”

I walked down the long corridor and eventually found a room where a fat, slatternly woman with long blond hair was sitting. The room was astonishing. It had been commandeered by grape ivy vines, which trailed and twined over the walls and ceiling, forming a kind of canopy and giving everything in the room a green tinge. The vines grew from two incongruously small plastic pots on a windowsill. The paucity of soil gave the plants a leggy and slightly deprived look, but in no way diminished their will to push on and cover the world with themselves. Earlier in the day, Nina and I had seen indoor plants living under the most luxurious conditions imaginable, in the conservatory of a palace built by a Prince Volkonsky—plants with glossy dark green leaves, set in large clay pots filled with dark, rich soil. But the leggy grape ivy tended by the slatternly woman belonged to the same universe of horticulture as the glossy plants tended by professional gardeners. “All Russia is a garden,” begins Trofimov’s great speech in The Cherry Orchard about his intimations of the happiness the future will bring to his country—a speech one doesn’t quite know how to listen to in the light of the catastrophe that actually befell Russia.

I told the woman my problem with the television. She nodded and went to a corner cupboard, from which she withdrew a key. She used it to lock her room before following me to my room, where she pointed out a switch I had missed. I gave her a tip, for which she thanked me profusely. I reflected that my telephone call to New York, which cost fifteen dollars, was more than a week’s pay for her—and for most of the people I had met in Russia. The comparison was the sort of trite and useless rhetoric Chekhov would sometimes put in the mouth of a character whose reformist views excited his skepticism. One such reformer is the narrator of “An Anonymous Story,” a confused revolutionary nobleman, who compares a dress costing four hundred rubles to the pitiful wages in kopecks of poor women. “An Anonymous Story” is a strange, febrile work that reads as if it had been written nonstop in the state of heightened consciousness that tuberculosis has been said to induce in artists. (In actuality, the story was set aside for several years after it was started.) It begins arrestingly:

Through causes which it is not the time to go into in detail, I had to enter the service of a Petersburg official called Orlov, in the capacity of a footman. . . . I entered the service of this Orlov on account of his father, a prominent political man, whom I looked upon as a serious enemy of my cause. I reckoned that, living with the son, I should—from the conversations I would hear, and from the letters and papers I would find on the table—learn every detail of the father’s plans and intentions.

But the story does not live up to its promise. For reasons one can attribute only to Chekhov’s own lack of enthusiasm for revolution, the narrator loses interest in his cause, becoming exclusively preoccupied with the predicament of Orlov’s beautiful young mistress, Zinaida (to whom Orlov is behaving with typical Petersburg swinishness). But the opening scenes, retailing the upper-class revolutionary’s masquerade as a servant—scenes that perhaps only someone who had himself been on both sides of the class divide could have written—have a special sardonic sparkle. Chekhov wrote easily about the upper classes—the term “Chekhovian” evokes faded nobility on decaying estates— but he evidently never forgot that he himself had not been gently reared. In a letter to Suvorin written in January 1889, he speaks of a “feeling of personal freedom” that “only recently began to develop in me,” and continues:

What writers belonging to the upper class have received from nature for nothing, plebeians acquire at the cost of their youth. Write a story of how a young man, the son of a serf, who has served in a shop, sung in a choir, been at a high school and university, who has been brought up to respect everyone of higher rank and position, to kiss priests’ hands, to revere other people’s ideas, to be thankful for every morsel of bread, who has been many times whipped, who has trudged from one pupil to another without galoshes, who has been used to fighting, and tormenting animals, who has liked dining with his rich relations, and been hypocritical before God and men from the mere consciousness of his own insignificance—write how this young man squeezes the slave out of himself, drop by drop, and how waking one beautiful morning he feels that he has no longer a slave’s blood in his veins but a real man’s.

This passage is much quoted and is generally believed to be an expression of Chekhov’s free-spiritedness. In fact, it subtly enacts what it condemns; it is itself servile, unpleasantly suggesting that the plebeian is innately inferior, that he needs to expunge some noxious substance within himself before he can rise to the level of the aristocrat. The image of squeezing is unpleasant. Chekhov writes here almost like a self-loathing Jew reassuring himself that he has passed. Nowhere else in his writings does he express such sentiments. It is a moment of anxiety that has no sequel. But it is a moment—like the “Karelin’s Dream” letter—that flares out of the genial documents of his life like an out-of-control fire glimpsed from a moving train.

That it was to Alexei Suvorin that this letter was addressed is surely no accident. If Chekhov loved Tolstoy better than any man, it was Suvorin with whom he felt most comfortable. Suvorin was another self-made man, and also the grandson of a serf. He was twenty-six years older than Chekhov, and the millionaire publisher of New Times, a right-wing daily with the largest circulation of any newspaper in Russia, as well as the owner of a large publishing house, five bookshops, and the majority of the bookstalls in Russian railway stations. In addition, he was a writer (of plays and stories) of some accomplishment. Suvorin’s invitation to Chekhov in 1886 to write stories for New Times at the high rate of twelve kopecks a line is regarded as the fulcrum of Chekhov’s artistic emergence. He had already begun to liberate himself from the humor genre; he was writing longer, nonhumorous stories for the daily Petersburg Gazette. But the Gazette paid poorly, and it was only Suvorin’s offer that permitted him to cut his ties with the humor magazines and devote himself to serious fiction. Grigorovich wrote Chekhov an electrifyingly flattering letter, but it was Suvorin who created the conditions under which he could produce art.

The friendship that developed between the middle-aged magnate and the young writer aroused the sort of envy and derision such relationships do. Chekhov, of course, did not share the reactionary and anti-Semitic views of New Times—which only made his motives seem more suspect. (In actuality, the differences between Chekhov’s and Suvorin’s politics were not as great as they appeared; in private, Suvorin could evidently permit himself less objectionable views than those of his paper. In time, however, the paper’s shrill anti-Dreyfusism was to put a serious strain on the friendship.) The theater critic Alexander Kugel wrote (Donald Rayfield tells us), “The way [Suvorin] entertained Chekhov, looked at him, enveloped him with his eyes, reminded one somehow of a rich man showing off his new ‘kept woman.’ ” Along the same lines (according to Simmons), Shcheglov quoted a Petersburg literary rival of Chekhov as saying: “Chekhov is a Suvorin kept woman!” This was not so: Chekhov took no money from Suvorin beyond his earnings and an occasional loan (which he always punctually repaid). Suvorin’s hospitality to him at his mansion in St. Petersburg (Nelly pointed it out to me during a tour of the city—a large red stone building of a sturdy Victorian cast) and at his estate in the Crimean resort town of Feodosia was reciprocated by Chekhov in the country houses he rented before buying Melikhovo, and then at Melikhovo (which, much to his sorrow, Suvorin didn’t like). Everything was extremely correct in this regard. (How far Chekhov was from sponging off Suvorin can be inferred from a letter he wrote to his sister while traveling in Europe with Suvorin: he wistfully noted how cheap the trip would have been had he not had to stay in the fancy hotels and eat in the expensive restaurants that Suvorin favored.)

When the two men weren’t together, they faithfully—you could almost say obsessively—corresponded. We have only Chekhov’s side of the correspondence. Simmons reports that when Chekhov died Suvorin turned over Chekhov’s letters to Maria in exchange for his own. The latter were never seen again, so we don’t know what tone Suvorin adopted toward his protégé. But from Chekhov’s letters we may gather that he and Suvorin were more like a father and son who adored each other than like a kept woman and her wealthy protector. Suvorin was the generous, appreciative, worldly, bookish father Chekhov should have had, rather than the narrow, cruel tyrant he got. The relationship, as Rayfield has characterized it, was “one of the most fertile in Russian literature.” Olga, who was perpetually reproaching Chekhov for the brevity and levity of his letters to her (“Write me a beautiful, sincere letter and don’t take refuge in jokes, as you so often do. Write what you feel”), would have killed for one of Chekhov’s beautiful, sincere letters to Suvorin. “You complain of the shortness of my letters,” Chekhov wrote to Olga in 1901, and lamely explained, “My dear, my handwriting is small.” To Suvorin he wrote letters that ended only when his fingers began to ache. “In case of trouble or boredom where am I to go? Whom am I to turn to?” he wrote in the summer of 1893 when Suvorin was about to go abroad. “There are devilish moods when one wants to talk and write, yet I don’t correspond with anybody but you, and there is nobody whom I talk with for any length of time.”

But even to Suvorin Chekhov refused the ultimate epistolary satisfaction, the unconditional declaration of love. “This doesn’t mean that you are better than all those whom I know,” he felt constrained to add, “but it does mean that I have grown used to you and that you are the only one with whom I feel free.” A number of memoirists have written of Chekhov’s inability to get close to anyone. One must always be skeptical of such an observation, since it can simply describe the relationship of the subject and the memoirist, and not necessarily apply to the subject’s other relationships. In Chekhov’s case, though, the observation comes from a variety of sources, and it seems to fit. The consensus is that Chekhov was extremely charming to everyone and close to no one—not even to Suvorin, to whom he came closer to being close than to anyone else. In his last years, weakened by illness, he married a woman with whom—had he been healthy—he probably would have broken, as he had broken with all the other women in his life. It was not in his character to give his heart away.

It was also not his habit to give himself away in his work; he was not a confessional writer. But in one story at least he may have practiced a veiled form of autobiography. That story is “Kashtanka” (1887), narrated from the point of view of a female dog, and presented as a story for children. In fact, it is a dark, strange, rather horrible (as well as wonderful) fable that I, for one, would never read to a child. The story reverses the usual formula of the well-treated animal who is wrested from a comfortable home and made to endure cruel hardship until it is finally reunited with its humane original master or mistress. Kashtanka is a hungry and ill-treated animal who gets lost, is adopted by a kindly man, and then is reunited (by her own choice) with her abusive original owner. The kindly man finds Kashtanka shivering in the doorway of a bar during a snowstorm, and takes her home and feeds her. He is an animal trainer who has a circus act performed by a cat, a gander, and a pig. He adopts Kashtanka, starts teaching her tricks, for which she proves to have great aptitude, and one day brings her to the circus to perform in the act with the others. The original owner, an alcoholic carpenter, happens to be in the audience with his son, and when the two of them call to her, Kashtanka leaps out of the ring to go to them, and unhesitatingly, and even joyfully, resumes her life of privation.

Chekhov prepares for the ending by depicting the household of the kindly master as a faintly sinister place. Kashtanka and the cat and the gander are kept in a room always identified as the little room with dirty wallpaper. An uneasiness is always present, a kind of uncanniness that reaches a climax one night when the gander utters a horrible shriek and then pathetically dies, as the dog howls and the standoffish cat huddles against her. When read as a parable of alienation—a case study of homesickness—the dog’s return to the original master takes on a sort of tragic inevitability. We know that the sleek, well-groomed animal Kashtanka has become under the care of the kindly circus master will soon again be a bag of bones, beaten by the carpenter and tortured by the son. But she will be cured of her unease; she will be where she belongs, leading her own proper life, rather than a life that is not really hers.

When Chekhov wrote “Kashtanka,” he was himself living an alien new life. In 1886 he had been abruptly catapulted from obscurity to celebrity. He had been taken up by literary Russia’s greatest circus master and pronounced a genuine artist. (“I want to make an artiste of you,” Kashtanka’s new master says to her. “Do you want to be an artiste?” And, after seeing her perform—as if he had Grigorovich’s letter to Chekhov in front of him—he exclaims, “It’s talent! It’s talent! Unquestionable talent! You will certainly be successful!”) But being a part of Suvorin’s circus act made Chekhov as tense as it made him happy. We have seen his dismay at no longer being able to produce stories the way he eats pancakes. His letters of the period have a feverish, manic quality, he seems all over the place in them, like an excited, unsure puppy. He is alternately boastful and fearful. Chekhov’s letters now also begin to express an ambivalence toward writing that was to remain with him. They suggest that the literary artist, like the animal performer, is doing something unnatural, almost unseemly. Making art goes against nature. People, like animals, weren’t made to perform such feats. If life is given only once, it shouldn’t be spent writing. Chekhov would often talk of idleness as the only form of happiness. He said he loved nothing better than fishing. At the same time, like Trigorin in The Seagull, he was afflicted with the writer’s compulsion to perpetually, ruthlessly sift life for material, to be writing something in his head all the time.

If it was Chekhov’s fate to be a reluctant literary performer, it was also his fate to remain with his impossible “original owners.” His adoption by Suvorin was as inconsequential as Kashtanka’s adventure with the circusmaster. Chekhov’s autocratic father, the kindly, uneducated mother, who had been helpless to defend him against the father, the feckless older brothers, the not brilliant younger ones, and the unmarried Maria were the people to whom he felt connected. All the rest were “customers,” to use Kashtanka’s term for outsiders. The friendly reserve he maintained toward outsiders was the outward token of the iron tie to the family. Literally as well as figuratively, Chekhov never left home. Whatever he meant by his new “feeling of freedom,” he didn’t mean the usual young person’s leavetaking of his family. He kept his parents with him in Moscow and Melikhovo, and, after his father’s death, in 1889, he brought his mother to his house in Yalta. Maria, too, was always with him. According to her memoirs (written in old age), she turned down the proposal of an attractive man named Alexander Smagin, “because I could not do anything that would cause unpleasantness to my brother, upset the customary course of his life, and deprive him of the conditions for creative work which I always tried to provide.” Chekhov had merely remained silent when she announced her intention of marrying, Maria reports, but this was enough for her to break with Smagin. (Having sacrificed herself for her brother, she was understandably put out when he himself married; however, she remained a fixture in the household, and she and Olga were friends into old age.) Chekhov was as closemouthed about his relationship to his sister as he was about his relationship to any other woman. The letters he wrote to her when he traveled are easy and natural (as are his letters to his brothers). But what the relationship was like—what its tone was, what its themes were—remains among the secrets of the nest.

When I turned on the television set in my room at the Hotel Yalta, I had the choice of four channels, two of them in German. All were blurred. I chose one of the Russian stations, which was showing an American movie. Instead of being dubbed, the film was shown with the sound very low, almost inaudible, and with a loud overvoice translating the characters’ speech into Russian. By listening very hard, I could make out some of what the characters were saying. The film seemed to be about a mortally ill child whose father takes him to a desert where God has instructed the father to build a stone altar. The child’s mother, back home, sends a friend to beg for his return. The father refuses. “What shall I tell Caroline?” the friend asks. I did not need to strain my ears for the reply: “Tell her that I love her.” At the end, the sky opens, lightning flashes over the altar, and the miracle occurs: the boy is cured. In Chekhov, there are no miraculous cures. When characters are sick, they die. It is hard to think of a Chekhov play or story in which no death occurs (or over which, having already occurred, it doesn’t hover, as the drowning of Ranevskaya’s son hovers over The Cherry Orchard). Death is the hinge on which the work swings.

“The Lady with the Dog” is an apparent exception—no one in the story dies or has died. And yet death is in the air. Gurov’s spiritual journey—his transformation from a connoisseur of women to a man tenderly devoted to a single ordinary woman—is a journey of withdrawal from life. His life as a womanizer wasn’t nice, but it was vital; his secret “real life” in the Moscow hotel has a ghostly quality. He and Anna are like people for whom “the eternal sleep awaiting us” has already begun. Anna’s Yalta hotel room smelled of a scent from a Japanese shop, and there was a watermelon on the table; the room at the Slaviansky Bazaar is odorless, and there is nothing to eat. Anna Sergeyevna is pale, and dressed in gray (“his favorite gray dress”); Gurov, catching a glimpse of himself in the mirror, sees that his hair is gray. The color of ashes has already begun to infiltrate the story. When Gurov—like Orpheus descending to the underworld—traveled to S—, he found a long gray fence in front of Anna Sergeyevna’s house and in his hotel room “the floor was covered with gray army cloth, and on the table was an inkstand, gray with dust.” (Something stirs in one’s memory here. One recalls that at the end of “A Dreary Story” the dying professor stays in a hotel in Harkov, where he sleeps under “an unfamiliar gray quilt” and peevishly remarks, “It’s so gray here—such a gray town.”) In the Moscow hotel room, Gurov notes that “he had grown so much older, so much plainer during the last few years,” and goes on to observe of Anna Sergeyevna, “The shoulders on which his hands rested were warm and quivering. He felt compassion for this life still so warm and lovely, but probably already not far from beginning to fade and wither like his own.” He sounds almost as if he were speaking of a corpse. In Yalta, only a year or two earlier, he had been struck by Anna’s youth, by “how lately she had been a girl at school doing lessons like his own daughter.” (She was twenty-two.) He had (twice) noted her schoolgirlish “diffidence” and “angularity.” But now this woman who could be his daughter is on the verge of “fading” and “withering.” His actual daughter accompanies him on his walk to his tryst in the Moscow hotel. What is Chekhov getting at with his theme of the two daughters? Is he anticipating Freud’s mythopoetic reading of King Lear in “The Theme of the Three Caskets”? Does Anna Sergeyevna—like Cordelia—represent the Goddess of Death? Has Gurov, like the professor in Harkov (and Chekhov in Yalta), come to the end of the line? We do not ask such questions of the other Russian realists, but Chekhov’s strange, coded works almost force us to sound them for hidden meanings. Chekhov’s irony and good sense put a brake on our speculations. We don’t want to get too fancy. But we don’t want to miss the clues that Chekhov has scattered about his garden and covered with last year’s leaves. These leaves are fixtures of Chekhov’s world (I have encountered them in the gardens of no other writer), and exemplify Chekhov’s way of endowing some small quiet natural phenomenon with metaphorical meaning. One hears them crunch underfoot as one walks in the allée where this year’s leaves have already sprouted.