The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

160 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

other than fools. Unhappiness does not bring people together but draws them apart . . .”37 In this story there is no philosophy, no attempt at transcendence, no defense of the nobility of suffering. Dostoevsky and Tolstoy would have tried to provide both. Most Chekhovian characters lack the energy for such transformations.

The second story does present an epiphany, but it is a clinical one – and also stained with carbolic acid. This is “The Name-day Party” (1888), narrated from the perspective of a woman seven months pregnant. Throughout the tedious day, corsetedin to conceal her condition, the wife watches her attractive husband act the charming host to younggirls while she, exhausted, obliged to be gracious to unwanted guests, resents both him and his reluctance to confide his troubles to her. Name-days – the Russian equivalent of birthdays, celebrated not on your birth date but on the official day of the saint after which you were named – were important family events and full-day celebratory affairs. It is an ordinary stressed day in the obligatory social life of a marriage. But it ends with premature labor, an operation, death of the infant, an unknown number of blank days and nights, the despair of the husband, and for the wife, a “mistiness in the brain from chloroform” and “dull indifference to life.” The husband weeps by the window and wrings his hands: “Olya! Why didn’t we take thought for our child?”

But there had been no reason to take special thought. At the end of this bleak story, no specific person or event is to blame. It was a ghastly accident. Chekhov is astute at presenting the frivolities and insincerities of both social and family life, and the name-day party was indeed a strain. But neither corsets nor social conventions were necessarily lethal to an unborn child. If the doctors treating Olya discovered why her body had suddenly broken down and miscarried, Chekhov doesn’t tell us. He cannot and will not do what Tolstoy does in “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” written two years earlier, which is to condemn everything the suffering hero had lived by – that entire round of legal and social duties that made up the life of the condemned judge, Ivan Ilyich – in order to justify the ghastly accident (cancer) that led to his death. No narrator has the right to reconstitute moral causality with such assurance and pass final judgment. About this matter Chekhov felt very strongly: he even wrote “A Tedious Story” (1889), his counter-version of a “bad death,” in response to Tolstoy’s didactic Ivan Ilyich.

On this matter of radical contingency and tragic accident, Chekhov would have considered Dostoevsky even less of a precedent. The symbolic move made at the end of The Brothers Karamazov, where Alyosha gathers all grieving parties together on anote of rejoicingand reaffirmationafterIlyushaSnegiryov’s death, is not available in Chekhov’s world. A better lesson from the lives and deaths of