The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

162 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

in the story – some train whistle is always interrupting his entreaties – but not as a tragic motif. The story ends as the heroine is rushing out the door to a tryst with the persistent and lovesick Ilyin; her husband wasn’t interested in hearing about her temptation, her daughter suddenly struck her as phlegmatic. The young wife is disgusted at her own duplicity, appetite, and ordinariness (to that extent she is still an “Anna”). But to balance those self-recriminating Tolstoyan moments, she is also curious, excited, and willing. Chekhov does not dismiss the seriousness and validity of lust. Like a doctor he gently probes its dynamics. The heroine will learn some sort of lesson from this “Calamity,” but it will not be a tragic one.

The same non-tragic message, albeit in a cynical key, underlies “Anna on the Neck” (1895). Anna Petrovna, eighteen-year-old beauty from a poor family married against her will to a pompous middle-aged bureaucrat, quickly perceives that her husband values her solely as a social asset and stepping stone to higher rank, the Order of St. Anna. This husband is no unexciting but inoffensive Aleksei Karenin; he is a direct descendant of Dostoevsky’s Luzhin. But Chekhov’s Anna cannot get out of the marriage in time, as Dunya Raskol-nikova did, and must adjust to her new reality. After she succeeds in pleasing the appropriate “Excellency” at a gala ball, she calls her husband a blockhead to his face and more honest relations between them are established. Her infidelities become her own business. And she is no longer visited by her nightmare, that a “storm cloud or locomotive was moving in on her to crush her.”

In “About Love” (1898), the third rewrite of the novel, Chekhov is already parodying Tolstoy in a deeper, more spiritually satisfying way. Rather than merely supply alternative erotic andcynical contexts for the Annaplot, Chekhov now rematches entire Tolstoyan characters. “About Love” is the final story in Chekhov’s Little Trilogy. Its narrator, Pavel Konstantinovich Alyokhin, closely resembles Tolstoy’s Konstantin Levin:aloner,anintellectual turned farmerwith ahigh sense of honorand ahabitofsevereself-criticism. Thelovestory he relates to his friends concerns his unconsummated passion for Anna Alekseyevna, wife of his good friend, and he frames it with his confession, years later, that the failure to consummate this passion was probably a mistake. Chekhov’s variant bears all the marks of a clinical tragedy as he understood that genre: a tragedy of accident and timing. A Levin and a Kitty fall in love – both of them decent, proper people committed to responsible behavior – but they fall in love after the woman has married someone else. This is the plot that could easily have occurred in Anna Karenina, but Tolstoy makes sure it will not. He safely removes his attractive Kitty and disillusioned Levin from circulation until the wound caused by their mutual “accident of timing” – her rejection of his initial proposal, his pout over it – could heal on both sides. These two author’s pets