The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Realisms 161

children, perhaps, can be found in mid-career Tolstoy: the fate of Petya Rostov in War and Peace. A life lovingly nurtured for seven years over a thousand pages is cut down by a random bullet in a single paragraph. It is a terrible shock in fiction, a shock of real-life proportions, to lose so casually a person we have come to know well. Getting to know a character can be a challenge in the short narrative form. In the newspaper sketches Chekhov wrote for a living in the early 1880s, he was often limited to a per-story length of one hundred lines. In very short compass, how might a writer deepen and thicken an environment so that meaningful choice, genuine accident, and the wisdom (or folly) of other lives can be experienced through it?

One means for adding dimensions to a work of slender compass is to evoke earlier, familiar literary worlds and fictive characters. The young Dostoevsky did this brilliantly with Gogol, and Chekhov often avails himself of this strategy. But mere isolated interjections tend to be ironic or unkind. In The Duel, for example, Layevsky is reminded of Anna Karenina’s dislike of her husband’s ears at just the moment when the white neck and curls of his own mistress are getting on his nerves. Such passing references make their point – both about Anna and about Layevsky’s lazy use of literary images for self-justification – but overall, Chekhov seeks to communicate on a plane more durable than ridicule. He wishes to examine other ways of adjusting to reality. For Chekhov is not so much a “realist” as he is an accepter of reality. His much discussed “comedic” quality probably originates here. Thus he gives us the genuine tragic accidents – “Enemies,” “The Name-day Party,” tragedies of the failure to heal or cure – and then the false tragedies, which are in fact comedic. These are situations felt as tragic by their indolent or self-pitying participants who cannot (or will not) act to change their situation, although they are free to do so. From Chekhov’s correspondence, we know that he considered such laziness to be a major vice of his age, and if his dramas were indeed the comedies he called them, it was because they built their plots out of this vice. Chekhov might have been drawn to recast Anna Karenina in just this direction, because the one thing that this tragic Tolstoyan heroine refused to do was to adjust to the reality that her own actions had brought about. By the 1880s, Anna Karenina was already an “infidelity stereotype.” The briefest reference to a plot detail (black unruly curls, meeting a future lover at a ball, squinting or screwing up one’s eyes when lying to oneself, prominent jutting ears, trains, or simply the name “Anna”) invokes the whole. Chekhov rewrote that whole several times, each time in a different key.

In the 1886 story “A Calamity,” a young woman with a sluggish, preoccupied husband is being courted passionately by a neighboring lawyer, Ilyin. He is ashamed of his behavior but attractive to her because of it. Trains are prominent