The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Realisms 165

the “indifferent noise of the sea” that, according to some strange impersonal contract, promises us salvation. Chekhov’s truths, if he has truths, are not punitive, not public, and not symbolic. Tolstoy could not agree to this. The inadequate, makeshift, purely private and secret structures that sustain true human relations in Chekhov’s most luminous stories could not, for Tolstoy, be an acceptable moral resolution. So Tolstoy was to some extent correct when, in 1897, he remarked that Chekhov “wrote like an impressionist.” He was wholly incorrect to suggest that Chekhov wrote like a Decadent.

By the turn of the century, “getting out from under Tolstoy,” explicitly and implicitly, was a major task forthe new generation of Russian writers and artists. This “seer of the flesh” seemed far too cramped and archaic. Writers looked to Pushkin, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov for guidance. Many of them celebrated precisely what Tolstoy despised: mixed-art extravaganzas, opera, the potential of St. Petersburg as a cultural icon. But what they insisted upon most earnestly was mystery at the core of a narrative and of a self.