Reading Chekhov

Two

"This morning I felt giddy,” Nina tells me at the lookout in Oreanda. “I was afraid I would not be able to come today. Fortunately I am better.” I question her about her symptoms and urge her to see a doctor. She explains that she hasn’t the money for a doctor—doctors can no longer get by on their salaries from the state and now charge for their services. I ask if there are clinics, and she says yes, but they are overcrowded—one has to wait interminably. She finally agrees to go to a clinic the next day to have her blood pressure checked. Nina and I took to each other immediately. She is extremely likable. Because she is large and I am small she has begun giving me impulsive bear hugs and calling me her little one—for lack of a better equivalent for the Russian diminutive. Over the two days we have been together, I have received an increasing sense of the pathos of her life. She is very poor. Her apartment is too small, she says, to keep a cat in. The dress she is wearing was given to her by a Czech woman whose guide she was a few years ago. She is grateful when clients give her leftover shampoo and hand cream; nothing is too small. Earlier in the day, during a visit to the Livadia palace, where the Yalta agreement was signed, she told me that as a young child she lived through the nine-hundred-day siege of Leningrad. Her grandparents died during the siege, and her parents’ lives, she said, were shortened because of the sacrifices they made for their children. Now, as she talks about the leftover shampoo, I think about the large tip I will give her at the end of the day, anticipating her surprise and pleasure. Then a suspicion enters my mind: has she been putting on an act and playing on my sympathy precisely so that I will give her money? A week earlier, in St. Petersburg, someone else had used the term “putting on an act.” I had been walking along the Nevsky Prospect with my guide, Nelly, when I was stopped in my tracks by the horrifying sight of an old woman lying face down on the pavement convulsively shaking, a cane on the ground just out of reach of the trembling hand from which it had fallen. As I started to go to her aid, Nelly put her hand on my arm and said, “She lies here like this every day. She is a beggar.” She added, “I don’t know if she’s putting on an act or not.” I looked at her in disbelief. “Even if she’s acting, she must be in great need,” Nelly allowed. I then noticed a paper box with a few coins in it sitting on the ground near the cane. As the occasional passerby added a coin to the box, the woman took no notice; she simply continued to shake.

If Nina is acting, I think, she, too, must be impelled by desperation, but I decide that she is on the level. There is an atmosphere of truth about her. She is like one of Chekhov’s guileless innocents; she is Anna Sergeyevna in late middle age. We rise from the seat and walk over to a semicircular stone pavilion at the edge of the cliff. Names and initials have been penciled on or scratched into the stone. In Chekhov’s story “Lights” (1888), the hero, an engineer named Ananyev, speaks of a decisive youthful encounter in a stone summerhouse above the sea, and offers this theory of graffiti:

When a man in a melancholy mood is left tête-à-tête with the sea, or any landscape which seems to him grandiose, there is always, for some reason, mixed with melancholy, a conviction that he will live and die in obscurity and he reflectively snatches up a pencil and hastens to write his name on the first thing that comes handy. And that, I suppose is why all convenient solitary nooks like my summer-house are always scrawled over in pencil or carved with pen-knives.

Ananyev is another of Chekhov’s redeemed womanizers, though he undergoes his transformation of soul after hideously betraying the story’s gentle, trusting heroine, Kisotchka. The story was written eleven years before “The Lady with the Dog,” and it was not well received. “I was not entirely satisfied with your latest story,” the novelist and playwright Ivan Shcheglov wrote to Chekhov on May 29, 1888, and went on:

Of course, I swallowed it in one gulp, there is no question about that, because everything you write is so appetizing and real that it can be easily and pleasantly swallowed. But that finale—“You can’t figure out anything in this world . . .”—is abrupt; it is certainly the writer’s job to figure out what goes on in the heart of his hero, otherwise his psychology will remain unclear.

Chekhov replied, on June 9:

I take the liberty of disagreeing with you. A psychologist should not pretend to understand what he does not understand. Moreover, a psychologist should not convey the impression that he understands what no one understands. We shall not play the charlatan, and we will declare frankly that nothing is clear in this world. Only fools and charlatans know and understand everything.

To Suvorin, who had also criticized the story’s apparent inconclusiveness (his letter has not survived), Chekhov wrote:

The artist is not meant to be a judge of his characters and what they say; his only job is to be an impartial witness. I heard two Russians in a muddled conversation about pessimism, a conversation that solved nothing; all I am bound to do is reproduce that conversation exactly as I heard it. Drawing conclusions is up to the jury, that is, the readers. My only job is to be talented, that is, to know how to distinguish important testimony from unimportant, to place my characters in the proper light and speak their language.

These modest and sensible disclaimers—which have been much quoted and are of a piece with what we know of Chekhov’s attractive unpretentiousness—cannot be taken at face value, of course. Chekhov understood his characters very well (he invented them, after all), and his stories are hardly deadpan journalistic narratives. But his pose of journalistic uninquisitiveness is no mere writer’s waffle produced to ward off unwelcome discussion. It refers to something that is actually present in the work, to a kind of bark of the prosaic in which Chekhov consistently encases a story’s vital poetic core, as if such protection were necessary for its survival. The stories have a straightforward, natural, rational, modern surface; they have been described as modest, delicate, gray. In fact they are wild and strange, archaic and brilliantly painted. But the wildness and strangeness and archaism and brilliant colors are concealed, as are the complexity and difficulty. “Everything you write is so appetizing and real that it can be easily and pleasantly swallowed.” We swallow a Chekhov story as if it were an ice, and we cannot account for our feeling of repletion.

To be sure, all works of literary realism practice a kind of benevolent deception, lulling us into the state we enter at night when we mistake the fantastic productions of our imagination for actual events. But Chekhov succeeds so well in rendering his illusion of realism and in hiding the traces of his surrealism that he remains the most misunderstood— as well as the most beloved—of the nineteenth-century Russian geniuses. In Russia, no less than in our country, possibly even more than in our country, Chekhov attracts a kind of sickening piety. You utter the name “Chekhov” and people arrange their features as if a baby deer had come into the room. “Ah, Chekhov!” my guide in Moscow—a plump, blond, heavily made-up woman named Sonia—had exclaimed. “He is not a Russian writer. He is a writer for all humanity!” Chekhov would have relished Sonia. He might have—in fact he had—used her as a character. She was a dead ringer for Natasha, the crass sister-in-law in Three Sisters, who pushes her way into control of the Prozorov household and pushes out the three delicate, refined sisters. Sonia saw her job as guide as an exercise in control, and over the two days I spent with her I grew to detest her— though never in the serious way one comes to detest Natasha. My struggle with Sonia was almost always over small-stakes points of touristic arrangement; and her power to get to me was, of course, further blunted by my journalist’s wicked awareness of the incalculable journalistic value of poor character. After delivering herself of her estimate of Chekhov, Sonia went on to speak of unpleasant experiences she had had with certain previous American clients who had put her down. “They considered themselves superior to me,” she said, but when I asked her how they had shown this she couldn’t say. “I just felt it.” Then she added (as I somehow knew she would) that it was never the rich Americans who made her feel inferior, always the other kind.

One of my major battles with Sonia was over the issue of a two-hour visit to the Armory in the Kremlin, scheduled for the next day and, in Sonia’s view, the high point of my—of every—trip to Russia. I asked Sonia what was in the Armory, and when she told me that it was a “magnificent” collection of armor and ancient gold and gems and Fabergé eggs, I said that that kind of thing didn’t interest me, and that I would just as soon skip it. Sonia looked at me as if I had gone mad. Then she abruptly said that skipping the Armory was impossible: the tour was scheduled, and it was too late to change the schedule. I repeated that I would prefer not to go to the Armory, and Sonia lapsed into silence. We were in a car, on our way to Melikhovo, Chekhov’s country house, forty miles south of Moscow. Sonia began to converse in Russian with Vladimir, the driver, and continued doing so for many miles. In St. Petersburg, when Nelly spoke to our driver, Sergei—usually to give him some direction—she did so tersely and apologetically. Sonia used her talk with the driver as a form of punishment. Finally, she turned to me and said, “It is essential that you see the Armory—even for only forty-five minutes.” “All right,” I said. But Sonia was not satisfied. My attitude was so clearly wrong. “Tell me something,” Sonia said. “When you were in St. Petersburg, did you go to the Hermitage?” “Yes,” I said. “Well,” Sonia said in a tone of triumph, “the Armory is much more important than the Hermitage.”

When we arrived at Melikhovo, I recognized the house from pictures I had seen, but was surprised by the grounds, which were a disorderly spread of wild vegetation, haphazardly placed trees, and untended flower beds. There seemed to be no plan; the grounds made no sense as the setting for a house. Chekhov bought Melikhovo in the winter of 1892 and moved there with his parents, his sister, and his younger brothers, Ivan and Michael, in the spring. It was a small, run-down estate, which Chekhov rapidly transformed: the uncomfortable house was made snug and agreeable, kitchen and flower gardens were put in, an orchard was planted, a pond dug, the surrounding fields planted with rye and clover and oats. It was characteristic of Chekhov to make things work; thirteen years earlier he had arrived in Moscow, to start medical school, and pulled his family out of poverty by what seems like sheer force of character. The father’s store had failed and he had fled to Moscow to escape debtor’s prison. Alexander and the second-oldest brother, Nikolai, were already in Moscow studying at the university, and the mother and sister and younger brothers followed; sixteen-year-old Anton was left behind in Taganrog to finish high school. Little is known about the three years Chekhov spent alone in Taganrog. He boarded with the man who had, like Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard, bailed out the family at a crucial moment, for the price of their home. Anton was not a brilliant student, but he graduated and received a scholarship from the town for his further studies. He was a tall, robust boy with a large head, a genial nature, and a gift for comedy. (He had entertained his family and now entertained his classmates with imitations and skits.)

When Chekhov rejoined his family in Moscow, in 1880, the possessor of what the critic James Wood has called a “strange, sourceless maturity,” he quickly became its head. The authoritarian father, now a pitiable failure, had allowed the family to sink into disorderly destitution. The elder brothers made contributions—Alexander through writing sketches for humor magazines and Nikolai through magazine illustrations—but they lived dissolute lives, and only when Anton, too, began writing humorous sketches did the family’s fortunes change. He wrote strictly for money; if some other way of making money had come to hand, he would have taken it. The humor writing was wretchedly paid, but Chekhov wrote so quickly and easily and unceasingly that he was able to bring in considerable income. In the early writings, no hint of the author of “The Duel” or “The Lady with the Dog” is to be found. Most of the sketches were broadly humorous, like pieces in college humor magazines, and if some are less juvenile than others, and a few make one smile, none of them are distinguished. Chekhov began to show signs of becoming Chekhov only when he turned his hand to writing short fiction that wasn’t funny. By 1886, his writing was attracting serious critical attention as well as bringing in real money. Because of Chekhov’s earnings from his writings (he never made any money as a physician; he mostly treated peasants, free), the family was able to move to progressively better quarters in Moscow. The purchase of Melikhovo was a culminating product of Chekhov’s literary success—and of the illusion (one that Russian writers, Chekhov included, are particularly good at mocking) that life in the country is a solution to the problem of living.

With his characteristic energy and dispatch, Chekhov organized his family so that there was a productive division of labor—the mother cooked, the sister took care of the kitchen garden, Ivan did the agriculture, and Anton took charge of horticulture, for which he proved to have great talent. (The father, who had been and remained a religious fanatic, would retreat to his room for his observances and the making of herbal remedies.) Chekhov came remarkably close to living out the pastoral ideal, and even passed the test that city people who moved to the country in nineteenth-century Russia invariably, ingloriously flunked— that of being helpful to the peasants. Chekhov built three schools, donated his services as a doctor, and worked in famine and cholera relief—all the while writing some of his best stories, and almost never being without a houseful of visitors. (His frequent, abrupt removals to Moscow or St. Petersburg suggest that the problem of living remained.)

Although I recognized the house, I was actually seeing not the one in the photographs—which had been torn down in the 1920s—but a replica, built in the late ’40s. (Resurrecting destroyed buildings seems to be a national tic. In Moscow I saw a huge church with gold domes that was a recently completed replica of one of the churches Stalin wantonly tore down.) The interiors of Melikhovo had been carefully restored, re-created from photographs supplied by Maria Chekhova, then in her eighties. The rooms were small and appealingly furnished; they gave a sense of a pleasant, very well-run home. The walls were covered with Morris-print-like wallpapers, and over them paintings and family photographs hung in dense arrangements. Everything was simple, handsome, unaffected. But I think that Chekhov would have found it absurd. The idea of rebuilding his house from scratch would have offended his sense of the fitness of things. I can imagine him walking through the rooms with a look of irony on his face as he listened to the prepared speech of our tour guide, Ludmilla. Ludmilla was a youngish woman with glasses, dressed in trousers and a shabby maroon snow jacket, who was full of knowledge of Chekhov’s life but had read little of his work. She spoke of Chekhov with a radiant expression on her face. She told me (through Sonia) that a good deal of the furniture and many objects in the house were original; when the house was being torn down the local peasants had sacked it, but during the restoration returned much of what they had taken. I asked if they had been forced to do so by the Soviet authorities, and she said, “Oh, no. They did so gladly. Everyone loved Anton Pavlovich.” When I questioned her about how she came to be working at the museum she gave a long reply: She had never been able to read Chekhov; his writing left her cold. But one day she visited Melikhovo (she lived in a nearby town) and while in the house had had some sort of incredible spiritual experience, which she cannot explain. She kept returning to Melikhovo—it drew her like a magnet—and finally the director of the museum had given her a job.

After finishing her tour of the ersatz house and the disorderly garden, Ludmilla walked out to the exit with Sonia and me, and from her answer to one of my questions it appeared that she wasn’t paid for her work. “So you work here as a volunteer,” I said. “No,” she said, she just wasn’t paid, the way many people in Russia were not being paid now. Wages were frequently “delayed” for months, even years. I asked Ludmilla how she lived if she wasn’t paid. Did she have another job that did pay? Sonia—not relaying my question—looked at me angrily and said, “We will not talk about this. This is not your subject. We will talk about Chekhov.”

I debated with myself whether to challenge Sonia, and decided I would. I said, “Look, if we’re going to talk about Chekhov, we need to say that Anton Pavlovich cared about truth above all else. He did not look away from reality. People not being paid for work is something he would have talked about—not brushed away with ‘Let’s talk about Chekhov.’ ” I sounded a little ridiculous to myself—like someone doing an imitation of a character in a socialist realist novel—but I enjoyed Sonia’s discomposure, and when she started to answer I cut her off with “Tell Ludmilla what I just said.” Sonia obeyed, and Ludmilla, smiling her sweet smile, said, “This is why I find it hard to read Chekhov. There is too much sadness in it. It is his spirituality that attracts me—the spirituality I receive from learning about his life.”

On the drive back to Moscow, Sonia praised the “good taste” of Melikhovo, before relapsing into conversation with Vladimir. He was a large, swarthy man of around fifty, wearing a black leather coat and exuding a New York taxi driver’s gruff savoir faire. The contrast between him and Sergei, my St. Petersburg driver, a slender young man who dressed in jeans and carried a book, was like the contrast between Moscow and St. Petersburg themselves. St. Petersburg was small and faded and elegant and a little unreal; Moscow was big and unlovely and the real thing in a city. St. Petersburg came at you sideways; Moscow immediately delivered the message of its scale and power. Chekhov loved Moscow and had reserved feelings about St. Petersburg, even though his literary career got properly under way only when, in 1882, the St. Petersburg editor and publisher A. N. Leiken invited him to write for his humorous weekly, Fragments, and moved into full gear when he began writing for Suvorin’s St. Petersburg daily New Times. He would visit St. Petersburg, first to see Leiken and then Suvorin, but he never really warmed to the city. In his fiction, people from St. Petersburg tend to be suspect (In “An Anonymous Story” an unsympathetic character named Orlov is described as a St. Petersburg dandy) or apologetic (“I was born in cold, idle Petersburg,” the sympathetic Tuzenbach says in Three Sisters). In St. Petersburg, Chekhov suffered the worst literary failure of his life, with The Seagull— comparable to Henry James’s failure with Guy Domville. At its premiere, at the Alexandrinsky Theater in 1896, it was booed and jeered, and the reviews were savage. (According to Simmons, “The News dismissed the play as ‘entirely absurd’ from every point of view,” and a reviewer for the Bourse News said the play was “not The Seagull but simply a wild fowl.”) The failure is generally attributed to a special circumstance of the premiere: it was a benefit for a beloved comic actress named E. I. Levkeeva, and so the audience was largely made up of Levkeeva fans, who expected hilarity and, to their disbelief and growing outrage, got Symbolism. At its next performance, which was attended by a normal Petersburg audience, The Seagull was calmly and appreciatively received, and positive criticism began to appear in the newspapers. But by that time Chekhov had crawled back to Melikhovo, and believed that he was finished as a playwright. “Never again will I write plays or have them staged,” he wrote to Suvorin.

Because of Chekhov’s slender and ambivalent ties to St. Petersburg, the city has no Chekhov museum, but a few of his letters and manuscripts have strayed into its Pushkin Museum, and on the morning of my first day in Nelly’s charge she took me to inspect them. We sat at a table covered with dark green cloth, opposite a young, round-faced archivist named Tatyana, who displayed each document like a jeweler displaying a costly necklace or brooch. (Once, when Nelly reached out her hand toward a document, Tatyana playfully slapped it.) Chekhov’s small, spidery handwriting, very delicate and light, brought to mind Tolstoy’s description of him as reported by Maxim Gorky: “What a dear, beautiful man; he is modest and quiet like a girl. And he walks like a girl.” One of Tatyana’s exhibits was a letter of 1887 to the writer Dmitri Grigorovich, commenting on a story of Grigorovich’s called “Karelin’s Dream.” Today, Grigorovich’s work is no longer read; his name figures in literary history largely because of a fan letter he wrote to Chekhov in March 1886. At the time, Grigorovich was sixty-four and one of the major literary celebrities of the day. He wrote to tell the twenty-six-year-old Chekhov that “you have real talent—a talent which places you in the front rank among writers in the new generation.” Grigorovich went on to counsel Chekhov to slow down, to stop writing so much, to save himself for large, serious literary effort. “Cease to write hurriedly. I do not know what your financial situation is. If it is poor, it would be better for you to go hungry, as we did in our day, and save your impressions for a mature, finished work, written not in one sitting, but during the happy hours of inspiration.” Chekhov wrote back:

Your letter, my kind, warmly beloved herald of glad tidings, struck me like a thunderbolt. I nearly wept, I was profoundly moved, and even now I feel that it has left a deep imprint on my soul. . . . I, indeed, can find neither words nor actions to show my gratitude. You know with what eyes ordinary people look upon such outstanding people like yourself, hence you may realize what your letter means for my self-esteem. . . . I am as in a daze. I lack the ability to judge whether or not I merit this great reward.

Chekhov went on to acknowledge the haste and carelessness with which he wrote:

I don’t recall a single tale of mine over which I have worked more than a day, and “The Hunter,” which pleased you, I wrote in the bathhouse! I have written my stories the way reporters write up their notes about fires—mechanically, half-consciously, caring nothing about either the reader or myself.

And:

What first drove me to take a critical view of my writing was . . . a letter from Suvorin. I began to think of writing some purposeful piece, but nevertheless I did not have faith in my own literary direction.

And now, all of a sudden, your letter arrived. You must forgive the comparison, but it had the same effect on me as a government order “to get out of the city in twenty-four hours.” That is, I suddenly felt the need for haste, to get out of this rut, where I am stuck, as quickly as possible.

In his letter about “Karelin’s Dream,” Chekhov gives a remarkable account of the way being cold at night gets into one’s dreams:

When at night the quilt falls off I begin to dream of huge slippery stones, of cold autumnal water, naked banks—and all this dim, misty, without a patch of blue sky; sad and dejected like one who has lost his way, I look at the stones and feel that for some reason I cannot avoid crossing a deep river; I see then small tugs that drag huge barges, floating beams. All this is infinitely grey, damp, and dismal. When I run from the river I come across the fallen cemetery gates, funerals, my school teachers. . . . And all the time I am cold through and through with that oppressive nightmare-like cold which is impossible in walking life, and which is only felt by those who are asleep. . . . When I feel cold I always dream of my teacher of scripture, a learned priest of imposing appearance, who insulted my mother when I was a little boy; I dream of vindictive, implacable, intriguing people, smiling with spiteful glee—such as one can never see in waking life. The laughter at the carriage window is a characteristic symptom of Karelin’s nightmare. When in dreams one feels the presence of some evil will, the inevitable ruin brought about by some outside force, one always hears something like such laughter. . . .

These dreams, in their atmosphere of dread and uncanniness, put one in mind of the novels of Dostoevsky and the paintings of Edvard Munch, and hint at anxieties of which Chekhov preferred never to speak. Chekhov’s biographers regularly note his reserve, even as they attempt to break it down. With the opening of the Soviet archives, hitherto unknown details of Chekhov’s love life and sex life have emerged. But the value of this new information—much of it derived from passages or phrases cut out of Chekhov’s published letters by the puritanical Soviet censorship, and absurdly said to make him “more human”—is questionable. That Chekhov was not prudish about or uninterested in sex is hardly revealed by his use of a coarse word in a letter; it is implicit in the stories and plays. Chekhov would be unperturbed, and probably even amused, by the stir the restored cuts have created—as if the documentary proof of sexual escapades or of incidents of impotence disclosed anything essential about him, anything that crosses the boundary between his inner and outer life. Chekhov’s privacy is safe from the biographer’s attempts upon it—as, indeed, are all privacies, even those of the most apparently open and even exhibitionistic natures. The letters and journals we leave behind and the impressions we have made on our contemporaries are the mere husk of the kernel of our essential life. When we die, the kernel is buried with us. This is the horror and pity of death and the reason for the inescapable triviality of biography.

The attentive reader of Chekhov will notice a piece of plagiarism I have just committed. The image of the kernel and the husk comes from another famous passage in “The Lady with the Dog,” in the story’s last section. Gurov, after parting with Anna at the end of the summer and returning to his loveless marriage in Moscow, finds that he can’t get her out of his mind, travels to the provincial town where she lives with the husband she doesn’t love, and is now clandestinely meeting with her in a hotel in Moscow, to which she comes every month or so, telling her husband she is seeing a specialist. One snowy morning, on his way to the hotel, Gurov reflects on his situation (all the while conversing with his daughter, whom he will drop off at school before proceeding to his tryst):

He had two lives: one, open, seen and known by all who cared to know, full of relative truth and of relative falsehood, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances; and another life running its course in secret. And through some strange, perhaps accidental, conjunction of circumstances, everything that was essential, of interest and of value to him, everything that made the kernel of his life, was hidden from other people; and all that was false in him, the sheath in which he hid himself to conceal the truth—such, for instance, as his work in the bank, his discussions at the club . . . his presence with his wife at anniversary festivities—all that was open. And he judged of others by himself, not believing in what he saw, and always believing that every man had his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy and under the cover of night. All personal life rested on secrecy, and possibly it was partly on that account that civilized man was so nervously anxious that personal privacy should be respected.

“The Lady with the Dog” is said to be Chekhov’s riposte to Anna Karenina, his defense of illicit love against Tolstoy’s harsh (if ambivalent) condemnation of it. But Chekhov’s Anna (if this is what it is) bears no real resemblance to Tolstoy’s; comparing the two only draws attention to the differences between Chekhov’s realism and Tolstoy’s. Gurov is no Vronsky, and Anna von Diderits is no Anna Karenina. Neither of the Chekhov characters has the particularity, the vivid lifelikeness of the Tolstoy lovers. They are indistinct, more like figures in an allegory than like characters in a novel. Nor is Chekhov concerned, as Tolstoy is, with adultery as a social phenomenon. In Anna Karenina, the lovers occupy only a section of a crowded canvas; in “The Lady with the Dog,” the lovers fill the canvas. Other people appear in the story—the crowd at the Yalta harbor, a Moscow official with whom Gurov plays cards, the daughter he walks to school, a couple of servants—but they are shadowy figures, without names. (Even the dog is unnamed—when Gurov arrives at Anna’s house, and sees a servant walking it, Chekhov makes a point of noting that “in his excitement he could not remember the dog’s name.”) The story has a close, hermetic atmosphere. No one knows of the affair, or suspects its existence. It is as if it were taking place in a sealed box made of dark glass that the lovers can see out of, but no one can see into. The story enacts what the passage about Gurov’s double life states. It can be read as an allegory of interiority. The beauty of Gurov and Anna’s secret love—and of interior life—is precisely its hiddenness. Chekhov often said that he hated lies more than anything. “The Lady with the Dog” plays with the paradox that a lie—a husband deceiving a wife or a wife deceiving a husband—can be the fulcrum of truth of feeling, a vehicle of authenticity. (Tolstoy would argue that this is the kind of self-deception adulterers classically indulge in, and that a lie is a lie.) But the story’s most interesting and complicated paradox lies in the inversion of the inner-outer formula by which imaginative literature is perforce propelled. Even as Gurov hugs his secret to himself, we know all about it. If privacy is life’s most precious possession, it is fiction’s least considered one. A fictional character is a being who has no privacy, who stands before the reader with his “real, most interesting life” nakedly exposed. We never see people in life as clearly as we see the people in novels, stories, and plays; there is a veil between ourselves and even our closest intimates, blurring us to each other. By intimacy we mean something much more modest than the glaring exposure to which the souls of fictional characters are regularly held up. We know things about Gurov and Anna—especially about Gurov, since the story is told from his point of view—that they don’t know about each other, and feel no discomfort in our voyeurism. We consider it our due as readers. It does not occur to us that the privacy rights we are so nervously anxious to safeguard for ourselves should be extended to fictional characters. But, interestingly, it does seem to occur to Chekhov. If he cannot draw the mantle of reticence over his characters that he draws over himself—and still call himself a fiction writer—he can stop short of fully exercising his fiction writer’s privilege of omniscience. He can hold back, he can leave his characters a little blurred, their motives a little mysterious. It is this reticence that Shcheglov and Suvorin were responding to in their criticism of “Lights.” Chekhov’s replies, with their appealing expressions of epistemological humility and journalistic detachment, skirt the issue, put his interlocutors off the scent of his characters’ secrets. In a story called “Difficult People,” written in 1886, we can see the shoot from which Gurov’s meditation on double life is to grow. A dreadful row has taken place at a provincial family dinner table between an authoritarian father and a rebellious son. The son storms out of the house and, full of bitterness and hatred, sets out for Moscow on foot. Then:

“Look out!” He heard behind him a loud voice.

An old lady of his acquaintance, a landowner of the neighborhood, drove past him in a light, elegant landau. He bowed to her, and smiled all over his face. And at once he caught himself in that smile, which was so out of keeping with his gloomy mood. Where did it come from if his whole heart was full of vexation and misery? And he thought nature itself had given man this capacity for lying, that even in difficult moments of spiritual strain he might be able to hide the secrets of his nest as the fox and the wild duck do. Every family has its joys and its horrors, but however great they may be, it’s hard for an outsider’s eye to see them; they are a secret.

Chekhov hid the secrets of his literary nest as well as those of his personal one; he was closemouthed about his compositional methods and destroyed most of his drafts. But he didn’t merely withhold information about his literary practice; the practice itself was a kind of exercise in withholding. In his letter of March 1886 to Grigorovich, Chekhov noted a curious habit he had of doing everything he could not to “waste” on any story “the images and scenes dear to me which—God knows why—I have treasured and kept carefully hidden,” and, again, writing to Suvorin in October 1888, he cited “the images which seem best to me, which I love and jealously guard, lest I spend and spoil them, adding, “All that I now write displeases and bores me, but what sits in my head interests, excites, and moves me.”

In the much-anthologized story “The Kiss” (1887) Chekhov gave brilliant form to his sense of the danger of dislodging what sits in one’s head from its place of safety. A brigade on the march spends the night in a provincial town, and its nineteen officers are invited for evening tea at the house of the local squire, a retired lieutenant-general named von Rabbek. The central consciousness of the story is Ryabovitch, “a little officer in spectacles, with sloping shoulders, and whiskers like a lynx’s,” who thinks of himself as “the shyest, most modest, and most undistinguished officer in the whole brigade.” At von Rabbek’s house Ryabovitch is struck by the social adroitness of the host and hostess and their grown son and daughter, who have invited the officers strictly out of duty, and at a time when it is inconvenient to do so—they are having a house party—but who put on a dazzling performance of hospitality. “Von Rabbek and his family skillfully drew the officers into the discussion, and meanwhile kept a sharp lookout over their glasses and mouths, to see whether all of them were drinking, whether all had enough sugar, why someone was not eating cakes or not drinking brandy. And the longer Ryabovitch watched and listened, the more he was attracted by this insincere but splendidly disciplined family.” During a period of dancing, in which Ryabovitch does not participate (“He had never once danced in his whole life, and he had never once in his life put his arm round the waist of a respectable woman”), he follows the von Rabbek son and some officers to a billiard room in another part of the house, and then, feeling himself in the way (he does not play billiards, either), decides to return to the drawing room. But in retracing his steps Ryabovitch makes a wrong turn and finds himself in a small dark room. Suddenly, a young woman rushes toward him, murmurs “At last!” and kisses him. Realizing her mistake—she had come to the room for a lovers’ tryst, clearly—she shrieks and runs off. The encounter has a momentous effect on Ryabovitch. It is almost like a conversion experience. “Something strange was happening to him. . . . His neck, round which soft, fragrant arms had so lately been clasped, seemed to him to be anointed with oil; on his left cheek near his moustache where the unknown had kissed him there was a faint chilly tingling sensation as from peppermint drops. . . . He was full of a strange new feeling which grew stronger and stronger. . . . He quite forgot that he was round-shouldered and uninteresting, that he had lynx-like whiskers and an ‘undistinguished appearance.’ ” (That was how his appearance had been described by some ladies whose conversation he had accidentally overheard.) The next morning, the brigade leaves the town, and throughout the day’s march Ryabovitch remains under the spell of the kiss, which has acted on his imagination like a powerful drug, releasing delicious fantasies of romantic love. At the end of the day, in the tent after supper, he feels the need to tell his comrades about his adventure.

He began describing very minutely the incident of the kiss, and a moment later relapsed into silence. . . . In the course of that moment he had told everything, and it surprised him dreadfully to find how short a time it took him to tell it. He had imagined that he could have been telling the story of the kiss till next morning.

One of the officers, a sleazy womanizer named Lobytko, is moved to respond with a crude story about a sexual encounter in a train. Ryabovitch vows “never to confide again.” Twelve years later, Chekhov will write another version of this scene in “The Lady with the Dog.” After Gurov returns home from Yalta, he is “tormented by an intense desire to confide his memories to someone,” and one evening, as he is leaving a Moscow club, he impulsively says to an official with whom he has been playing cards:

“If only you knew what a fascinating woman I made the acquaintance of in Yalta!”

The official got into his sledge and was driving away, but turned suddenly and shouted:

“Dmitri Dmitrich!”

“What?

“You were right this evening: the sturgeon was a bit too strong!”

In both cases, something lovely and precious has been defiled by the vulgar gaze of the outer world. Both men immediately regret their impulse to confide. But the telling scene in “The Kiss” has an additional moral—a literary one. Ryabovitch makes the painful discovery that every novice writer makes about the gap that lies between thinking and writing. (“It surprised him dreadfully to find how short a time it took him to tell it.”) The gossamer images that sit in one’s head have to be transformed into some more durable material—that of artful narration—if they are not to dissolve into nothing when they hit the chilly outer air. Chekhov lodges the cautionary incident of Ryabovitch’s artless blurting out within his own artful narration. What poor Ryabovitch fails to communicate to his comrades in his amateur’s innocence Chekhov succeeds in communicating to us with his professional’s guile. He is like the practiced von Rabbeks, who perform their function of giving pleasure because they must and because they know how. “You can do nothing by wisdom and holiness if God has not given you the gift,” a monk in “On Easter Eve” (1886) says in a discussion of the poetics of certain hymns of praise in the Russian Orthodox liturgy called akathistoi. “Everything must be harmonious, brief and complete. . . . Every line must be beautified in every way; there must be flowers and lightning and wind and sun and all the objects of the visible world.” Chekhov’s own literary enterprise could hardly be better described. His stories and plays—even the darkest among them—are hymns of praise. Flowers and lightning and wind and sun and all the objects of the visible world appear in them as they appear in the work of no other writer. In almost every Chekhov work there is a moment when we suddenly feel as Ryabovitch felt when the young woman entered the room and kissed him.