Selected Stories

Introduction

CHEKHOV, AFTER SHAKESPEARE, is the most-staged playwright in the English-speaking world, and given the number of languages into which his stories have been translated, he must be among the world’s most-read writers. How can a writer who lived two centuries removed and worlds away engage our intellect so keenly and touch our sensibilities so deeply? For an answer we should turn to the past.

During Chekhov’s lifetime (1860–1904), Russia underwent rapid change in its transformation from an agrarian society to an urbanized, diversified one. The established dyad of gentry-peasantry—for which land was the source of power and which had set norms and values for generations—was disintegrating. The official end of serfdom in 1861 accelerated the change, of which Chekhov was both beneficiary and chronicler. Only two generations from serfdom himself (his father’s father had purchased the family’s freedom), Chekhov found in the unleashed energies of emancipation an unprecedented gallery of types, and his fiction captured the burgeoning Russian democracy, from bishops and doctors to shopkeepers, cabbies and criminals. No other Russian writer has such scope and breadth of characters, occupations, situations and locales. In Chekhov’s democratic worldview, no one was excluded.

The Russian educated class was also in ascendancy. Its members were in constant agitation over Russia’s future and fell primarily in the intellectual camp of positivism, which had replaced the idealism and metaphysics of the preceding several generations. These generations had revered the artist as an inspired visionary who was a guide to ideals and morals that were transcendent in origin. In contrast, positivism held that the only true knowledge was scientific knowledge, and that metaphysical questions such as the existence of God were not only unanswerable, but irrelevant. The positivists believed that human beings on their own, using science as a means, could transform society and bring about a ”radiant future.” Logically, there was no place for the charismatic artist or spirituality in a rational movement, yet the zeal with which ”scientific” positivism embraced nineteenth-century science was quasireligious.

Chekhov matured in this heady atmosphere, receiving his medical degree in 1884. The innovative medical education of the time had become laboratory-oriented, empirical, with all hypotheses to be verified by other scientists. It was rigorously objective and had no patience with received wisdom, untested generalities or intuitive truths. Chekhov revealed his intellectual pedigree even as he wrote of art in a letter dated 30 May 1888: ”In my opinion it is not the writer’s job to solve such problems as God, pessimism, etc.; his job is merely to record who, under what conditions, said or thought what about God or pessimism. 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.”

This clinical attitude is evident in Chekhov’s early work, in which typically the narrator is not engaged in the action. Most of the stories and sketches depict fools, self-satisfied ignoramuses, obsequious toadies—the mean, the low, the less-than-human. One can only laugh at, not with, such characters, for we do not recognize ourselves in them. The comic low type is simple, his actions predictable and his motivation primitively linear. He is quantifiable. Any traits that might individualize him as a unique being are excluded. This is the matrix of Chekhov’s early stories, such as ”The Confession” (1883) and ”The Milksop” (1885). But a turning point is sensed in ”Agafya” (1886) when in the very last paragraph the central figure, suddenly graced with will and dignity, becomes a full person. And in ”The Kiss” (1887), Chekhov shatters the external mode of description and enters the complexity of mind and consciousness of the protagonist.

The scientific mind, in dismissing the unique and singular in favor of the typical, acts in a profoundly antihumanist fashion when it examines humankind. When attempting to gain meaning from human experience, in trying to draw order from what otherwise were discrete, unrelated occurrences, the early Chekhov relied on his scientific rationalism. But scientific rationalism does not address the need to find meaning in life, the universal imperative of intellect.

In answer to this search for universal meaning, rationalism discovered laws of nature that legitimated the rule of tooth and claw, with the disadvantaged, the feeble and the naive becoming natural victims. Yet people aspire to a state of nature that is harmonious, equitable, just and beautiful. The possibility of such a state had once been a matter of faith. The rationalist replaced faith with knowledge and committed himself to a theory of progressive human development.

But no rational theory is comprehensive enough to make sense of the arbitrary and chaotic world in which we live. The uncommon, uniquely individual events remain a mystery. (The thinking character in Chekhov on occasion comes to this realization, e.g., Laptev in ”Three Years” [1895]. Rationalism gives him no ultimate answers; faith he does not possess; he is therefore left in total meaninglessness.) The absolute inevitability of natural processes suddenly becomes an absolute tyranny. The individual is not his own master and cannot change himself. The law of nature, rather than offering answers, is found to have total indifference for the seeker. This gives nineteenth-century ”optimistic” positivism its dark edge of pessimism for, in the phrase of Russian philosopher Lev Shestov, ”the certainty that the existing order is immutable is for certain minds synonymous with the certainty that life is nonsensical and absurd.” Such were the intellectual parameters of Chekhov’s world.

Given the sense of a human being as a mere pawn in an absurd world, Chekhov could only write of ruin and loss, with time as thief and nature as ravager, and man as both victim and instrument of this universal order. It is a grim vision. But the dark task of reporting it is lightened when the victim of the absurd world is a mindless buffoon, the object of the narrator’s joke. Both the narrator and reader are untouched, protected by laughter.

Occasionally the laughter stills when the writer sees that in the world of fools there are also children, the pure and the innocent. With the shielding veil of laughter stripped there remains only the recognition of absurdity and a resultant hopelessness, for no uplifting higher order presents itself. The last vestige of an individual’s striving to transcend the brutal reality of nature is his recognition of meaninglessness, the loss of hope in ever achieving transcendence. The state of hopelessness thus becomes the sole reminder that humans are still somehow noble.

With every cell of his body Chekhov must have felt helpless before the invisible and unrelenting laws of nature. He himself was being consumed by a faceless organism, eaten alive by an unrelenting beast with the neutral scientific name of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacillus of consumption. As a doctor he knew there was no cure. Every hour, every cough, must have reminded him that human beings will lose to the forces of nature.

Yet Chekhov, the stoic scientist, surely needed comfort. He found it in those of his characters who, through suffering or loss, rose to hopelessness. In their breakout achievement they became his brothers and sisters. In his imagination he presses them close to his chest, holds them dear, cherishes them in a common bond. Hopelessness becomes a virtue that separates them from the herd of humanity. Note the ending of ”The House with the Mansard” (1896) for the gentle presentation of the artist’s futile lament, and the tender treatment of Olga’s descent into hopelessness in ”Peasants” (1897). Think of the endings of Chekhov’s four major plays—when his characters reach hopelessness Chekhov embraces them with great sympathy.

And yet that is not all there is to Chekhov, for he is a study in quiet contrast. Like the Russian Orthodox funeral service, the panikhida, which at the nadir of grieving and lamentation introduces a motif of hope and redemption, softly progressing from minor to a subtle major, Chekhov whispers of freedom, human potential and dignity. His art is a continuing and heroic creative act in the face of malevolent nature and nihilism. The creative act is an emanation of freedom. Though creation needs materiel (a preexisting cultural context), it itself is unprecedented; this is the freedom that gives it unique life. Though freedom, human communion, conscience and love are rare in Chekhov’s world, he implicitly accentuates their value by showing their scarcity.

Time in Chekhov is an unrelenting destroyer, the distant twin of Nemesis in classical tragedy. In making human imagination and creation ruthlessly temporal, it effaces hope. Yet Chekhov’s creations live on, having easily outlived the seven years after his death, which he repeatedly prophesied as the limit of the reading public’s interest in him.

Many Chekhov stories, early and late, are centered on characters who deny the validity of the other. The central figures assume all human traits and aspects to themselves while denying them to others. Human relationships then become vertical, subject to object. Intersubjectivity—authentic communication among equals—is precluded. Agency, decision making, authority all belong to the subject who holds power. Nevertheless, this domination-submission model is at times overcome, almost always aided by the presence and recognition of beauty, the constant catalyst to which most people are blind. The relationship between Olga and her sister-in-law in ”Peasants,” for example, is transfigured by the contemplation of the church in the meadow across the river.

Many of the stories also expose the condition of poshlost, a Russian word describing a vulgar way of life, the surrender of the self to the fashionable and the popular, the cheap and the transient. It is the deadening of all authentic feeling and the striking of an affected pose. It means a life of unreflecting self-approval, a self-absorbed, triumphant mediocrity. In ”Three Years” Yulia’s father, the doctor, carries the symptoms of the condition and Panaurov, Nina’s husband, is a particularly trenchant case.

As Chekhov’s writing became increasingly subtle, the people in his stories moved from caricatures to characters, growing from flat to round, from cardboard to a vulnerable flesh that bled when injured. This makes their situation all the more poignant, for they are trapped in a reality that did not move with them. Chekhov saw the society of his time as thwarting human potential, individual development and personal freedom. Especially sharply drawn is the suppression and abuse of the defenseless—children and women. There appears a growing major theme of the spiritual imprisonment of women, especially educated women, who suffer from the lack of opportunity to manifest themselves and shape their lives. In ”Three Years,” Laptev cannot leave his environment because of his ”habituation to captivity and his servile condition.” The constraints that keep him a prisoner are internal. His wife’s condition is even more frustrating, because her bonds are externally imposed and her intelligence makes her awareness of them achingly poignant.

Chekhov’s deep understanding of the unequal treatment of women and his awareness that such repression deprives society of a source of energy, creativity and well-being are part of what mark him as a modernist. Nowhere in his works does he privilege one gender over the other. His affirmation that human frailty and human dignity are not gender specific but that the integrity of men is perhaps more fragile accentuates his prescience of modern sensibility.

Yet contemporary readers may readily undervalue Chekhov’s innovativeness because his original style and techniques have been incorporated by generations of subsequent writers. The universal hallmark of the modern short story, which is the movement in consciousness from innocence to experience, was a structural innovation of Chekhov’s. The movement away from external and objective description to a focus on the consciousness of the protagonist is another Chekhovian innovation. In ”Three Years,” Laptev’s thoughts and meditations are revealed in inner speech, his voice coming close to that of the narrator. And there is also Chekhov’s nonjudgmental narrator and the presentation of characters in whom experience creates the acute restructuring of moral nature without the establishment of moral certitude. All are major contributions to modern fiction. Because Chekhov died at the age of forty-four in 1904, we forget that he was of the generation of Freud (b. 1856) and Kandinsky (b. 1866), two figures who also shaped modernity.

His gift to modern sensibility is the intimation of indeterminacy. Before Chekhov, fiction was driven by passions, claims and counterclaims, action and counteraction, cause and effect—all the elements of the ageless plot. Chekhov eschewed them all, even dismissing causality. Plot then became meaningless. It is all chance happening in Chekhov, sheer accident. Could any stance be more modern? If there is no cause and effect, there can be no responsibility, no accounting for one’s acts, only drift and the satisfaction of immediate urges. No wonder we embrace Chekhov; he is our father.

But if meaninglessness is the human condition, then acts of kindness take on a great significance, because there is no imperative for them. There is no value system that valorizes kindness; there is no reward for it. In fact, there is often only risk and cost. Kindness then becomes a purely existential act, a giving of the self at once heroic and tragic, as exemplified in the heroine of ”The Darling” (1898).

What could be the source of such kindness? As expected, Chekhov gives no answer. But those who practice a giving of themselves—doctors, teachers, priests—are always the objects of sympathy and even reverence by Chekhov’s narrators. Humans are imperfect, fallible and prone to error, he seems to say. And so the greatest human virtue is not moral certitude but charity, in its timeless sense of caritas, love of the heart, through which we see the deepest being of another and experience her or his inner life as if it were our own.

—George Pahomov