Reading Chekhov

One

After they have slept together for the first time, Dmitri Dmitrich Gurov and Anna Sergeyevna von Diderits, the hero and heroine of Anton Chekhov’s story “The Lady with the Dog” (1899), drive out at dawn to a village near Yalta called Oreanda, where they sit on a bench near a church and look down on the sea. “Yalta was hardly visible through the morning mist; white clouds stood motionless on the mountain-tops,” Chekhov writes at the start of the famous passage that continues:

The leaves did not stir on the trees, grasshoppers chirruped, and the monotonous hollow sound of the sea rising up from below, spoke of the peace, of the eternal sleep awaiting us. So it must have sounded when there was no Yalta, no Oreanda here; so it sounds now, and it will sound as indifferently and monotonously when we are all no more. And in this constancy, in this complete indifference to the life and death of each of us, there lies hid, perhaps, a pledge of our eternal salvation, of the unceasing movement of life upon earth, of unceasing progress towards perfection. Sitting beside a young woman who in the dawn seemed so lovely, soothed and spellbound in these magical surroundings—the sea, mountains, clouds, the open sky—Gurov thought how in reality everything is beautiful in this world when one reflects: everything except what we think or do ourselves when we forget our human dignity and the higher aims of our existence.

Today, I am sitting on that same bench near the church looking at the same view. Beside me is my English-speaking guide Nina (I know no Russian), and a quarter of a mile away a driver named Yevgeny waits in his car at the entrance of the footpath leading to the lookout point where Gurov and Anna sat, not yet aware of the great love that lay before them. I am a character in a new drama: the absurdist farce of the literary pilgrim who leaves the magical pages of a work of genius and travels to an “original scene” that can only fall short of his expectations. However, because Nina and Yevgeny have gone to some trouble to find the spot, I pretend to be thrilled by it. Nina—a large woman in her late sixties, with short, straight blond hair, forget-me-not blue eyes, and an open passionate nature—is gratified. She breaks into song. “It’s a big, wide wonderful world that we live in,” she sings, and then asks, “Do you know this song?” When I say I do, she tells me that Deanna Durbin sang it in the 1948 film For the Love of Mary.

“Do you like Deanna Durbin?” she asks. I say yes.

“I adore Deanna Durbin,” Nina says. “I have adored her since I was a girl.”

She tells me of a chance encounter in a church in Yalta, two years earlier, with an Englishwoman named Muriel, who turned out to be another adorer of Deanna Durbin, and who subsequently invited her to the annual conference of an organization called the Deanna Durbin Society, which was held that year in Scarborough, England. Nina owns videos of all of Deanna Durbin’s movies and knows all the songs Deanna Durbin sang. She offers to give me the address of the Deanna Durbin Society.

Nina was born and educated in St. Petersburg and, after studying languages at the university there, became an Intourist guide, presently moving to Yalta. She has retired, and, like most retirees in the former Soviet Union, she cannot live on her pension. She now hires out as an independent guide and waits for assignments from the Hotel Yalta, currently the only habitable hotel in the town. My trip to Yalta is a stroke of good fortune for her; she had not worked for a long time when the call from the hotel came.

It is the second day of my acquaintance with Nina, the third day of my stay at the Hotel Yalta, and the ninth day of my trip to the former Soviet Union. I have worked my way south from St. Petersburg and Moscow. My arrival in Yalta was marked by an incident that rather dramatically brought into view something that had lain just below my consciousness as I pursued my itinerary of visits to houses where Chekhov lived and places he had written about. I had flown from Moscow to Simferopol, the nearest town to Yalta with an airport, a two-hour drive away. Chekhov lived in Yalta during much of the last five years of his life. (He died in July 1904.) At that time, exile to places with mild climates, like the Crimea and the Riviera, was the favored therapy for tuberculosis, into whose last stages Chekhov was entering in the late 1890s. He built a handsome villa a few miles outside the city center, in a suburb called Autka, and also bought a small cottage on the water in a seaside Tatar village called Gurzuv. He wrote Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, as well as “The Lady with the Dog” and “The Bishop,” in these houses.

At the Simferopol airport, as I stood in line at the immigration counter waiting to have my passport and visa stamped, I saw, as if in a dream’s slow motion, a man in the baggage area on the other side of a glass panel walk out of the building with my suitcase in his hand. The hallucination proved to be real. In a daze, I filled out a lost luggage form and followed an English-speaking woman who worked for the Hotel Yalta to a car in the parking lot. She said she would trace my luggage and disappeared. The driver—the same Yevgeny who now sits in the car in Oreanda—drove me to the hotel in silence, his English and my Russian in exact equilibrium.

As we neared the Black Sea coast, the Ukrainian farm country gave way to a terrain resembling—and, in the variety and beauty of its vegetation, surpassing—that of the Riviera corniches. The winding road offered views of mountains and glimpses of the sea below. But when the Hotel Yalta came into view I caught my breath at its spectacular ugliness. It is a monstrous building—erected in 1975, with a capacity of twenty-five hundred people—that is like a brute’s blow in the face of the countryside. Its scale would be problematic anywhere, and on the hillside above Yalta it is catastrophic. Hundreds of—possibly a thousand—identical balconies jut out from a glass and concrete facade. The approach is an American supermarket-style parking lot. The vast, low-ceilinged lobby, with black marble floors and metallic walls, looks as if a failing bank had been crossed with a seedy nightclub. In one corner there is a bar and along one wall stands a row of slot machines. A great expanse of empty black marble floor lies between the slot machines and the hotel’s front desk. When I entered the lobby it was almost completely empty: two or three men were playing the slot machines and a couple sat at the bar. At the reception desk, I was given a key to a room on the fourth floor, and, after walking down an almost satirically long empty corridor, I opened the door to a cubicle about eight feet by twelve, pleasingly furnished in the blond-wood Scandinavian Modern style of the fifties and sixties, and affording just enough room for a double bed, a small round table with two chairs, an armchair, and a minuscule refrigerator. My little balcony—like its myriad replicas—offered a glimpse of the sea and a view of large swimming pools, tennis courts, various outbuildings, and an auditorium. No one was in the pools or on the courts, but American popular music blared out of a loudspeaker. I shut the glass door to muffle the sound and hopefully opened the refrigerator. It was empty. In the bathroom I found serviceable fixtures and a soap dish of plastic made to resemble brown marble.

On my arrival, an unsmiling young man named Igor, who spoke fluent English, had approached me in the lobby and led me to his office, where he enumerated the activities that had been arranged for the next two days with Nina and Yevgeny. These had been prepaid, and he wanted me to understand that anything more would cost extra. (The trip to Oreanda would be one such addition.) When I mentioned my lost luggage and asked if there was somewhere I could buy a nightgown and a change of clothes, he looked at his watch and said that if I walked down to the town—a twenty- or thirty-minute walk—I might still find some clothing stores open.

As I walked to the town in the late-afternoon sunlight, down a winding road fragrant with the smells of the trees and shrubs and wildflowers that lined it, and left the horrible hotel behind, I felt a stir of happiness. Though it was May, St. Petersburg had been icily wintry and Moscow only a few degrees warmer. But here it was true spring; the air was fresh and soft. In a few months—I knew from “The Lady with the Dog”—Yalta would be hot and dusty. On the day Gurov and Anna became lovers “it was sultry indoors, while in the street the wind whirled the dust round and round and blew people’s hats off. It was a thirsty day, and Gurov often went into the pavilion, and pressed Anna Sergeyevna to have syrup and water or an ice. One did not know what to do with oneself.” In the evening, after mingling with a crowd at the harbor that has gathered to meet a ship coming in, Gurov kisses Anna and they go to her hotel. After they have made love, Anna sits dejected “like ‘the woman who was a sinner’ in an old fashioned picture,” and Gurov callously cuts himself a slice of watermelon and eats it “without haste.” Gurov’s unforgettable gesture—the mark of the cold roué that he is—only deepens the mystery and heightens the poignancy of his later transformation into a man capable of serious love.

As I walked on, small village houses of a familiar old sort began to appear. Yalta seemed untouched by the hands that had heaved my monstrous hotel into the hillside above it. Along the seafront, some changes had of course taken place since Gurov and Anna strolled there. In the square opposite the harbor stood a huge statue of Lenin gesturing toward the sea; and the harbor itself had become the site of a kiddie park, outfitted with garishly colored cartoon figures. The shops along the tree-lined promenade—selling film and sun-tan lotion and mermaid dolls and souvenir china—had a neglected, unvisited air; perhaps business would pick up in the hot, dusty season. Many were closed for the day, including the clothing stores. When Chekhov visited Yalta for the first time, in July 1888, he disparaged it thus to his sister Maria: “Yalta is a mixture of something European that reminds one of the views of Nice, with something cheap and shoddy. The box-like hotels in which unhappy consumptives are pining, the impudent Tatar faces, the ladies’ bustles with their very undisguised expression of something very abominable, the faces of the idle rich longing for cheap adventures, the smell of perfumery instead of the scent of the cedars and the sea, the miserable dirty pier, the melancholy lights far out at sea, the prattle of young ladies and gentlemen who have crowded here in order to admire nature of which they have no idea—all this taken together produces such a depressing effect and is so overwhelming that one begins to blame oneself for being biased and unfair.”

I began my ascent up the hill. The sun was nearing the horizon, and there was a chill in the air. The weight of being thousands of miles from home with nothing to wear but the clothes on my back fell on me. I tried to pull myself together, to rise above my petty obsession with the loss of a few garments, and to that end invoked Chekhov and the heightened sense of what is important in life that gleams out of his work. The shadow of mortality hovers over his texts; his characters repeatedly remind one another, “We all have to die” and “Life is not given twice.” Chekhov himself needed no such reminders: the last decade of his life was a daily struggle with increasingly virulent pulmonary and intestinal tuberculosis. And yet when he was dying, in the spa of Badenweiler, where he had stupidly been sent by a specialist, he wrote letters to Maria in which he repeatedly complained not about his fate but about how badly German women dressed. “Nowhere do women dress so abominably. . . . I have not seen one beautiful woman, nor one who was not trimmed with some kind of absurd braid,” he wrote on June 8, 1904, and then, on June 28—in his last letter to anyone and his last comment on anything—“There is not a single decently dressed German woman. The lack of taste makes one depressed.”

I continued climbing the hill, in the inflexible grip of unhappiness over my lost clothes. And then the realization came: the recognition that when my suitcase was taken something else had been restored to me—feeling itself. Until the mishap at the airport, I had not felt anything very much. Without knowing exactly why, I have always found travel writing a little boring, and now the reason seemed clear: travel itself is a low-key emotional experience, a pallid affair in comparison to ordinary life. When Gurov picks up Anna at an outdoor restaurant (approaching her through her dog) they converse thus:

“Have you been long in Yalta?” [he says.]

“Five days.”

“And I have already dragged out a fortnight here.” There was a brief silence.

“Time goes fast, and yet it is so dull here!” she said, not looking at him.

“That’s only the fashion to say it is dull here. A provincial will live in Belyov or Zhidra and not be dull, and when he comes here it’s ‘Oh the dullness! Oh, the dust!’ One would think he came from Granada.”

Although the passage functions (as Vladimir Nabokov pointed out) as an illustration of Gurov’s attractive wit, it also expresses the truth that had just been revealed to me, and that Chekhov’s Yalta exile revealed to him—that our homes are Granada. They are where the action is; they are where the riches of experience are distributed. On our travels, we stand before paintings and look at scenery, and sometimes we are moved, but rarely are we as engaged with life as we are in the course of any ordinary day in our usual surroundings. Only when faced with one of the inevitable minor hardships of travel do we break out of the trance of tourism and once again feel the sharp savor of the real. (“I have never met anyone who was less a tourist,” Maxim Kovalevsky, a professor of sociology whom Chekhov met in Nice in 1897, wrote of his compatriot, and went on to say, “Visiting museums, art galleries, and ruins exhausted rather than delighted him. . . . In Rome I found myself obliged to assume the role of guide, showing him the Forum, the ruins of the palace of the Caesars, the Capitol. To all of this he remained more or less indifferent.”) Chekhov was deeply bored in Yalta before he built his house and put in his garden, and even afterward he felt as if he had been banished and that life was elsewhere. When he wrote of the three sisters’ yearning for Moscow, he was expressing his own sense of exile: “One does not know what to do with oneself.”

Chekhov’s villa in Autka—Nina took me there on our first day together—is a two-story stucco house of distinguished, unornamented, faintly Moorish architecture, with an extensive, well-ordered garden and spacious rooms that look out over Yalta to the sea. Maria Chekhova, who lived until 1957, preserved the house and garden, fending off Nazi occupiers during the war and enduring the insults of the Stalin and Khrushchev periods. It remains furnished as in Chekhov’s time: handsomely, simply, elegantly. As Chekhov cared about women’s dress (it does not go unnoted in the work, and is always significant), he cared about the furnishings of his houses. Perhaps his love of order and elegance was innate, but more likely it was a reaction against the disorder and harshness of his early family life. His father, Pavel Yegorovich, was the son of a serf who had managed to buy his freedom and that of his wife and children. Pavel rose in the world and became the owner of a grocery store in Taganrog, a town with a large foreign (mostly Greek) population, on the sea of Azov, in southern Russia. The store, as Chekhov’s best biographer, Ernest J. Simmons, characterizes it in Chekhov (1962), resembled a New England general store—selling things like kerosene, tobacco, yarn, nails, and home remedies—though, unlike a New England store, it also sold vodka, which was consumed on the premises in a separate room. In Simmons’s description, the place had “filthy debris on the floor, torn soiled oilcloth on the counters, and in summer, swarms of flies settled everywhere. An unpleasant mélange of odors emanated from the exposed goods: the sugar smelled of kerosene, the coffee of herring. Brazen rats prowled about the stock.”

Chekhov’s oldest brother, Alexander, in a memoir of Anton, wrote of a freezing winter night on which “the future writer,” then a nine-year-old schoolboy, was dragged by his father from the warm room where he was doing his homework and made to mind the unheated store. The account lays stress on the cruelty of the father and the misery of the boy, and is crudely written, in a sort of penny-dreadful style. The reticent Anton himself left no memoir of his childhood sorrows, though there are passages in his stories that are assumed to refer to them. In the long story “Three Years” (1895), for example, the hero, Laptev, says to his wife, “I can remember my father correcting me—or, to speak plainly, beating me—before I was five years old. He used to thrash me with a birch, pull my ears, hit me on the head, and every morning when I woke up my first thought was whether he would beat me that day.” In a letter of 1894 to his publisher and close friend Alexei Suvorin, Chekhov permitted himself the bitter reflection, “I acquired my belief in progress when still a child; I couldn’t help believing in it, because the difference between the period when they flogged me and the period when they stopped flogging me was enormous.” Chekhov had what he described to another correspondent in 1899 as “autobiographophobia.” The correspondent was Grigory Rossolimo, who had been a class-mate in medical school, and had written to Chekhov to ask him for an autobiography for an album he was assembling for a class reunion—which Chekhov supplied, but not before expressing his reluctance to write about himself. Seven years earlier, when V. A. Tikhonov, the editor of a journal called Sever, asked him for biographical information to accompany a photograph, Chekhov made this reply:

Do you need my biography? Here it is. In 1860 I was born in Taganrog. In 1879 I finished my studies in the Taganrog school. In 1884 I finished my studies in the medical school of Moscow University. In 1888 I received the Pushkin Prize. In 1890 I made a trip to Sakhalin across Siberia—and back by sea. In 1891 I toured Europe, where I drank splendid wine and ate oysters. In 1892 I strolled with V. A. Tikhonov at [the writer Shcheglov’s] name-day party. I began to write in 1879 in Strekosa. My collections of stories are Motley Stories, Twilight, Stories, Gloomy People, and the novella The Duel. I have also sinned in the realm of drama, although moderately. I have been translated into all languages with the exception of the foreign ones. However, I was translated into German quite a while ago. The Czechs and Serbs also approve of me. And the French also relate to me. I grasped the secrets of love at the age of thirteen. I remain on excellent terms with friends, both physicians and writers. I am a bachelor. I would like a pension. I busy myself with medicine to such an extent that this summer I am going to perform some autopsies, something I have not done for two or three years. Among writers I prefer Tolstoy, among physicians, Zakharin. However, this is all rubbish. Write what you want. If there are no facts, substitute something lyrical.

Maxim Gorky wrote of Chekhov that “in the presence of Anton Pavlovich, everyone felt an unconscious desire to be simpler, more truthful, more himself.” Chekhov’s mock biography produces a similar chastening effect. After reading it, one can only regard any attempt at self-description that is longer and less playful as pretentious and rather ridiculous.