The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

156 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Anton Chekhov: lesser expectations, smaller forms

Chekhov’s relations with Dostoevsky were not profound. He referred to him rarely in his letters, ironically in his works, and had to force himself to finish Crime and Punishment (by age forty, he promised himself, he would get to the end; he did, and he was not impressed). Tolstoy, however, was an abiding presence in Chekhov’s life. The two writers were on very friendly terms. Beginning in the late 1890s, both were obliged to winter in the Crimea for health reasons, although Chekhov, thirty years younger, was by far the sicker man. Chekhov’s “Tolstoyan period”began in themid-1880s, when he wastwenty-five, andlasted for ten years. As Chekhov wrote to his friend Aleksei Suvorin, he had been swept up by Tolstoy’s immense energy and intellect, his authority, by his “very reasonableness, and no doubt a species of hypnotism peculiar to him.”33 The “reasonableness” or common sense of Tolstoy’s prose – its reliance on sober observation, logical clarity, and its subtle depiction of nuanced emotional states – offered special benefits to a young writer like Chekhov, who specialized in short forms. Before the 1880s, the short story had been largely a Sentimental or Romantic genre: nostalgic, conventionalized, felt to be a relic or fragment from an earlier era. Literary seriousness meant the big serialized novel, a cutting edge acknowledged by all writers. Even short-story masterpieces, such as Turgenev’s Sportsman’s Sketches (1852), were gathered together and sequenced by their author into a cycle. Realism was descriptive, full of ideas, fearless in its psychological probing, and long.

To be sure, the novel did have some competition. In the 1850s, the ethnographic “sketch” [ocherk] and newspaper feuilleton [from Fr. “leaf” or “sheet of paper,” usually street news or gossip by a roving observer or flaˆneur] emerged as favored short forms for recording everyday life, both urban and rural. Each featured a chatty, mobile first-person narrator whose job it was to report on the local terrain. Both the “sketch” and the “leaf” grew out of periodical print genres, the gossip column and the theatre- or special-interest section of newspapers, which were widespread in the popular press that was Chekhov’s literary apprenticeship. Dostoevsky extended this form far beyond a stroll around the city. His Notes from Underground (1864), which grew out of the intent to write a hostile review of Chernyshevsky’s What is to be Done?, became philosophical satire once Dostoevsky turned over the story to an irritable, first-person voice filtered through a well-read urban columnist, trapped for some reason in a dark garret where the only newsworthy item he could report on was himself.

Chekhov was obliged to support himself by his pen and early became a master of the chatty topical sketch. In his hundreds of commissioned stories