The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Realisms 159

Chekhov saw what medical people can hardly avoid seeing: that possessing a mortal body means sooner or later something will go wrong with it – it will make a fool of itself, sicken, and die. Cancer and consumption follow their own rules, of course. But the same treatment, or the same accident, can have no effect on one organism, awful consequences on another, curative effects on a third. The body is not obliged to explain itself. Thus the body cannot be conceived as a moral unit. Medical records are neither shocking nor symbolically meaningful. They are records of an organism’s rise and fall. Pain, too, is simply there; it buys nothing and redeems nothing. In what is probably the most famous passage in all of Chekhov, from his short masterpiece “Lady with a Pet Dog” (1899), we are shown how this moral blankness can actually be recruited for human well-being and hope. Gurov and Anna Sergeyevna are sitting on the beach at dawn and listening to the “monotonous muffled noise of the sea”:

It had made that noise down below when neither Yalta nor Oreanda existed; it was making that noise now, and would continue to make that noise in that same hushed and indifferent way when we are no longer here. And in that permanence, in that complete indifference to the life and death of each one of us, is perhaps concealed a guarantee of our eternal salvation, a guarantee of the constant movement of life on earth and of endless perfection.36

In Chekhov, then, pain, illness, and dying are tragic in a clinical and local sense only, not in a moral sense. Death is not punitive, and survival is more a matter of good fortune or timing than of ethical absolutes. Two stories are exemplary in this regard, among the darkest in the canon. In each, one detects a doctor’s trained eye, and a doctor’s tactful, tolerant commiseration that does not pretend to know what it cannot know.

The short story “Enemies” (1887) opens five minutes after Kirilov, a district doctor, has lost his only child, a boy of six, to diphtheria. His wife is stretched out in despair over the dead body; the doctor’s hands are burnt with carbolic acid, the standard disinfectant for this contagious disease. At that moment a neighboring landowner knocks, in a panic, to summon the doctor: his wife has just fallen dangerously ill; can the doctor come? Kirilov says no, he is in mourning. The distraught man persists; finally the doctor, in a stupor, climbs into his carriage, and upon arrival at the man’s manor house it is discovered that the wife had feigned illness to run off with her lover, their house guest. Both doctor and client are stunned. This farce allows each to give furious vent to his individual grief. “Never in their lives,” Chekhov writes, “had they uttered so much that was unjust, cruel, and absurd. The unhappy are egotistic, spiteful, unjust, cruel, and less capable of understanding each