The Lady with the Little Dog and Other Stories, 1896-1904

INTRODUCTION

Anton Chekhov’s fictional output in the last period of his life was relatively small, for several reasons. Most of his creative energy went into writing his four great plays, discussing them with directors of the Moscow Art Theatre, participating in some of the rehearsals, and, incidentally, marrying one of the actresses. Much of his time was also taken up by selecting and revising his earlier stories for a collected edition for which he had signed a contract with a publisher. Living mostly on his estate, Melikhovo, he was heavily involved with the life of the surrounding villages, building schools, restoring a church, and, as a doctor, receiving an endless stream of the impoverished sick, whom he treated free of charge. These experiences are reflected in the stories he wrote about peasant life. His own advancing tuberculosis forced him, in 1898–9, to sell his estate and move to the warmer climate of Yalta, where he stayed, off and on, until his last trip to Germany in June 1904. Although the number of stories he wrote in this period is relatively small, those he did write are among his great masterpieces.

The last decade of Chekhov’s life coincided with the emergence and rapid growth of Russian Modernism. Its literary variety, first labelled Decadence, then Symbolism, was intertwined with a vigorous new transcendental philosophical movement. Chekhov, personally acquainted with some of its representatives, responded to the movement as early as 1894 in his ‘Black Monk’, whose visionary hero he surrounded with an aura of poetry, while subjecting his condition to a cool medical diagnosis. Similarly, in his drama The Seagull, written in 1895, Treplev’s play within the play, which Arkadina promptly designates ‘decadent’, is a gentle parody of the new movement, not without lyrical overtones. Since Chekhov the agnostic had little use for the symbol as a glimpse of higher reality, he kept apart from the symbolists, but this does not mean that he shunned symbols as literary devices. Indeed, his stories are teeming with symbols, but they convey meanings within a human frame of reference.

As a result of Chekhov’s aloofness from the noisily arising symbolist movement and his avoidance of showy displays of new forms, this most influential of modernist short story writers can also be characterized, paradoxically, as the last of the nineteenth-century realists. In order to understand Chekhov the modernist, one needs to view Modernism as a broader movement, embracing far more than Symbolism.

Perhaps it will take us closer to understanding Chekhov the modernist if we look at his attitude to contemporary movements in the visual arts. One of the major stories opening his late period, ‘The House with the Mezzanine’ (1896), is subtitled ‘An Artist’s Story’ and is narrated by a painter. The world in this story is perceived as artistic space: the ‘vast colonnaded ballroom’ where the narrator stays is a forbidding place, ‘especially at night when the ten big windows were suddenly all aglow in the lightning’, and it is contrasted with the house on the neighbouring estate, a ‘dear, innocent old house that seemed to be staring at me with its attic windows’. Moreover, the artistic vision of the narrator, who is a landscape painter, is close to that of an impressionist. As he enters the Volchaninovs’ estate he notes that ‘a vivid golden light quivered here and there and transformed spiders’ webs into shimmering rainbows’, which suggests the perception of an impressionist, attempting to capture the transitory, shimmering appearance of surfaces. When he passes by the house with the mezzanine for the first time, he perceives the two young women as just two more items in the landscape, one with ‘a mass of auburn hair and a small stubborn mouth’, and the other with ‘a large mouth and big eyes’. Most telling is his perception that in the moonlight: ‘Dahlias and roses in the flowerbeds in front of the house were clearly visible and all of them seemed the same colour.’ All this could be attributed simply to Chekhov’s characterization of his hero, just as he used the vision of the black monk to characterize Kovrin. It is intriguing, however, that an impressionistic vision seems to inform not only the perceptions of the character but also the literary structure of the story. Like the impressionists, the author shows a preference for colour over line and mood over precise detail. The events of the story take place in the blurred distance of six or seven years before their recollection, with the result that the narrator is hard put to remember every detail and concentrates his attention on recreating the mood of that memorable summer. We are told that Zhenya reads all day, but never told what exactly she reads; after a summer of walking and talking with her the narrator is able only to ‘suspect’ that ‘she was extremely intelligent’; and he must have fallen in love with her, he surmises, because of the tender way she met him and saw him off. A characteristic feature, which is clearly the handiwork of the behind-the-scenes author, is a refusal to foreground important events, such as Lida’s obvious jealousy and angry bustling around the house after she has seen the painter and her sister returning from their walk on a particular Sunday. Deep philosophical questions about the existence of God and life everlasting are less important than Zhenya’s charming way of asking them, running ahead of the narrator in order to look him straight in the eye. Even the narrator’s big quarrel with Lida, which is a decisive moment in plot development, turns on arguments that are either banal or absurd, revealing that the mood and the characters’ interplay are more important than ideas. Such a refusal to foreground the important resembles the impressionists’ rejection of perspective in favour of a two-dimensional picture plane.

Impressionism arrived in Russia relatively late because public taste, for a long time, was held under the sway of the so-called Itinerants, a late-blooming realistic school, which depicted ‘the hardships of the common people in [their] canvases’, to use the words the painter attributes to Lida. By the 1890s, however, the school was beginning to lose its freshness, and a plein air school, a forerunner of Impressionism, gained ascendance, only to be rapidly superseded by Expressionism and various other post-impressionist trends. Chekhov was no doubt familiar with these trends, most explicitly through his friend Isaak Levitan, whose landscapes closely approached Impressionism. He also referred to Expressionism in his 1892 story ‘The Grasshopper’.

It has been debated among critics whether Chekhov himself could be regarded as a literary impressionist. Without going into details of the debate, let me just say that ‘The House with the Mezzanine’ itself, certainly the most impressionistic of Chekhov’s prose writings, does not stay within the confines of Impressionism. Impressionists generally chose cheerful subject matter, celebrating life in a burst of colour. Chekhov, by contrast, appears only to lure his readers into believing that they are being treated to bittersweet reminiscences with a serene, though melancholy, mood. In fact, when the readers’ senses are lulled into lyrical receptiveness, he assaults them with a jarring, disconcerting conclusion.

Lida’s crass act of wilfulness, Zhenya’s meek submission (‘If you only knew how bitterly Mama and I are crying’), and the artist’s passive acceptance induce the disturbing feeling that something has gone wrong. The bewilderment created by the denouement forces the reader to examine the text once more. If the narrator is so unwilling to make an effort to find Zhenya, was he really in love with her? Did he really spend the summer idly loafing around the countryside, or did he have a productive time? Did he simply affect the pose of the flâneur, while casually tossing off masterpieces? After all, we see him sketching, and Zhenya admiring his sketches – the favourite genre of the impressionists – on their walks. In that case, did he just take advantage of her as a muse and an admirer, and have little use for her once the productive summer was over? Or else, did he need both young women and the setting of their charming house with its park for inspiration, so that Zhenya by herself would not have sufficed? Another possible reading of the text would be that the real emotional give-and-take took place between the artist and Lida, rather than her younger sister. It is noteworthy that the time Lida comes over to Belokurov’s house she tells the artist that she and her mother, admirers of his art, would welcome him at their house (with no mention of Zhenya). Judging by his depictions of her, there is no doubt that he finds her very attractive, too. Instead of trying to win her affections, however, he taunts her by going on walks with her sister, by grumbling about her giving medical advice to poor people in the absence of a doctor, and finally by his outlandish claim that all her practical efforts to improve life in the neighbourhood are useless. It is his allegation that she dislikes him because he is a landscape painter, despite her original statement to the contrary; he delights in provoking her and finds her most inspiring when she is standing by the front porch, riding crop in hand, graceful and beautiful, but, as her subsequent behaviour shows, irritated by the sight of her sister returning from her walk with him. It seems as though the nervous tension created by him among the three of them were what sustained his inspiration. Whatever the case may be, Chekhov puts his reader to work, which is his salient feature as a modernist writer.

Chekhov’s deliberate elusiveness is in large part a response to civic-minded literary criticism demanding that the writer spoon-feed a social message to the reader. Descendants of the radicals of the 1860s and 1870s, civic-minded critics still prevailed in Chekhov’s time because the concept of literature as a torchbearer of truth, serving the people, had been deeply ingrained in the public consciousness. This concept of literature was embraced by a new semi-intelligentsia that had arisen as a result of the social and educational reforms introduced by Alexander II in the 1860s. The newly established local government organizations (elective district councils) called zemstvos (one of which Lida is fighting to influence in ‘The House with the Mezzanine’) demanded low-level managers, statisticians, white-collar workers for various tasks, and above all teachers. Many of the people filling these positions were radical students who had been expelled from the university or had simply joined the ‘going to the people’ movement out of idealism. Since their social credo was a faith in the innate ability of Russian peasants to rise above their station, they were broadly labelled ‘populists’ (narodniki). Clinging to the ideas of the sixties, this social group was not open to cultural innovations. The decadents and symbolists, conspicuously out to shock the reader with their difficult forms, were never able to reach it. Chekhov, too, was apt to épater le narodnik, for which he received ample criticism from the mid-1880s on, but in his reticent way he avoided outré modes of writing. (Nor did he wish to lose readership, dependent as he was on his literary income.) He wrote in a style perfectly comprehensible on the surface but full of pitfalls deep down.

Some of the themes Chekhov chose in his last period were sure to capture the attention of readers concerned with social issues. ‘Peasants’ (1897), for example, focuses on the brutality of peasant life, whose locus of evil is the tavern, where the men spend on vodka the last of their meagre earnings, and from where they come home drunk to beat their wives. Nikolay, who has returned from the city with his wife, Olga, and his daughter, Sasha, to his parents’ house because he had fallen sick, realizes from his supine position over the stove that the peasants’ misery is to a great extent their own fault. Olga, too, in a reported thought actually beyond her mental powers, comes to question: ‘Who maintains the pubs and makes the peasants drunk? The peasant. Who embezzles the village, school and parish funds and spends it all on drink? The peasant. Who robs his neighbour, sets fire to his house and perjures himself in court for a bottle of vodka? Who is the first to revile the peasant at district council and similar meetings? The peasant.’

When a house burns, the villagers are incapable of taking any meaningful action, and the fire would blaze out of control if the neighbouring landowner’s son, watched admiringly by his two pretty sisters, did not put it out with the help of his husky men. The authorities are present only to collect taxes and rates, taking away a family’s basic necessity, the samovar, in lieu of payment. Most peasants are illiterate, and when little Sasha, the only literate member of the family since she had been going to school in the city, reads from the Bible to them, they are moved to tears by Old Church Slavonic words that they do not understand. In general, they have no idea what their Russian Orthodox faith means, and when they pray to icons, they resemble pagans worshipping idols.

Here was a story to shock anyone who believed in the redeeming qualities of the Russian peasant. Leo Tolstoy protested that ‘Peasants’ was a libel against the simple Russian people, whom Chekhov did not know. (A groundless accusation, as we have seen.) An opponent of populism gleefully remarked that the story demonstrated the absurdity of the narodniks’ sentimental illusions. Such a reading, however, assigns too simplistic motives to a complex narrative. If it were merely a polemical piece of writing, how could we interpret, for instance, the role of the holy icon, carried from village to village, that moves the peasants to rise above their stuck-in-the-mud physical misery to at least a momentary spiritual awakening and to a feeling, in the teeth of all evidence, that there is a higher power that will protect them? The lyrical force the narrator lends to such scenes runs counter to the general tonality of the story. Most strikingly incongruous is the description of Olga and Sasha returning to the city, after Nikolay’s death, in the best of moods, even though they have to beg for alms, and even though it should be clear to them what eventual fate will await the penniless young girl in the city. (Not only do the incomplete Chapters X and XI point towards that fate, but Chekhov actually jotted down in a notebook that Sasha would take up prostitution.) The paragraph depicting mother and daughter cheerfully marching forth is as jarring as the ending of ‘The House with the Mezzanine’.

Peasants get their share of scorn also in the longest novella of Chekhov’s late period, ‘My Life’ (1896), but here the main targets of the narrator’s censure are a provincial town’s gentry, bureaucrats and professionals. Corruption is rampant, people draw salaries for work of doubtful value or live off their family fortunes, relying on others to work for them; and the rising entrepreneurial class ruthlessly exploits cheap labour. For an honest man like the hero of the story, Misail, the only decent thing to do is to earn his living by the sweat of his brow. It has been remarked that Misail is one of the first drop-outs in modern literature; I might add that he is relevant to our own time, for who has not seen children of well-to-do families refusing to go to college or university, preparing instead to become craftsmen?

Misail’s first-person narration rises to rhetorical heights as he indicts his social environment, but when he recounts his personal affairs his voice shifts to a deliberately flat tone, with not a ripple of self-irony – a marked contrast to the artist’s diction in ‘The House with the Mezzanine’. This is just another way Chekhov makes his reader responsible for evaluating the hero’s actions, which, as we have seen, is a signature trait of his method.

We as readers wonder why a twenty-five-year-old big, strong man lets his father slap his face. We are inclined to argue with him that, surely, he could have fended off his father’s hand or could have simply brushed him aside and walked out. Similarly, it is hard to swallow the fact that Misail allows people to taunt him on the streets, splash water on him and throw sticks at him. There is no reason why he should put up with Moisey’s theft of supplies from the larders in the house he and his new bride, Mariya, have recently restored; and why he should let the peasants rob them and even steal the building materials Mariya has generously bought to build a village school. It is not only the reader who judges: Mariya, too, watches her husband’s meekness with bewilderment, gradually losing her respect for him. The first crack in their marital relations appears when he tells her how his father beat him. It could be argued, of course, that tilling the land with Misail was only a wealthy woman’s whim and Mariya would not have lasted long on the farm in any case; yet his lack of assertiveness is certainly a contributing factor.

It appears that Chekhov the doctor has diagnosed an emotional disorder, a fundamental lack of a sense of self in his character. It is a trait that harms not only Misail himself but also those dear to him. Had he had the mettle to confront Dr Blagovo, who had seduced both his sister, Cleopatra, and his wife, he could certainly have secured financial support for his sister’s child by the doctor: his own contempt for financial gain should not have been exercised on behalf of his niece. The question arises, what caused Misail’s emotional flaw? The oppressive social environment is not a sufficient explanation. His upbringing provides a certain clue, especially if we consider that his sister shares his meekness. Or perhaps it is a genetic trait in both of them. ‘How feeble!’ says Cleopatra referring to herself before her disastrous appearance in the amateur theatricals, but she could be referring to both of them. Earlier in the story, discussing what useful work could be done in his corrupt and stultifying town, Misail says that at one time he dreamt of becoming a teacher, doctor or writer, but all that has remained a dream because he took a dislike to the Greek language and could not finish grammar school. He appreciates products of the intellect, he says, but he is not sure he has the ability to pursue mental work. One could argue that some kind of constitutional feebleness prevents him from exerting, or asserting, himself, which makes the story akin to Chekhov’s earlier ‘physiological sketches’, such as ‘The Name-day Party’. Yet ‘My Life’ is more ambiguous than that.

As the narrative closes we see Misail working as a house-painter, no longer despised but accepted by the town for what he is. He is bringing up his orphaned niece. The Tolstoyan principle of ‘Resist not evil by force’ seems to have worked: despite the corrupt environment, his honesty has earned him respect and he is engaged in useful work. We get a foretaste of this denouement as early as chapter XV: much as the peasants had stolen and cheated, the village school has nevertheless been built and is ready to open for the school year. Misail has benefited the peasants not by force but by perseverance and moral example. The readers are left to puzzle out for themselves whether ‘My Life’ is a piece of ‘critical realism’, a study of a psychologically flawed character, a mockery of Tolstoyan principles, or indeed an endorsement of them.

A similar provincial town is the setting for the 1898 story ‘Ionych’. Its hero, Dmitry Ionych Startsev, could be a very useful member of society working as a physician, appointed by a zemstvo to a village. Why does he become, under our eyes, a greedy moneybags who largely neglects his duties in the village in order to look after the wealthy in the nearby town? Chekhov insinuates that the stifling environment is to blame. A town where the most educated, interesting family is that of the Turkins is no place for a man of intellect and sensitivity to fulfil his potential. Chekhov’s main device employed to convey the monotony of the town’s life is repetition. The Turkins’ at-home gatherings always begin with Vera Iosifovna’s interminable readings from her novel in progress, which she does not even attempt to publish; they continue with the daughter’s, Yekaterina’s, forceful banging away at the piano; their highlight is a lavish dinner, over which Ivan Petrovich tells the same anecdotes and tosses out the same witticisms; and they conclude with the lackey, Peacock, striking a pose at his master’s command and exclaiming, ‘Die, wretched woman!’ The only two people who undergo change against the backdrop of the inert town are Yekaterina and Ionych. Her midnight assignation with him in the cemetery, redolent of Gothic Romanticism even though it is only a prank, betrays that she is not above her environment; and her decision to go away to the Conservatoire to study the piano professionally is witness to her inflated ego. One is reminded of ‘The Grasshopper’, whose heroine seeks to brush shoulders with greatness through art, not realizing, until it is too late, that a physician’s prosaic work can be far more elevated. Yet she does go away, seeking change. The changes in her and Ionych are conveyed through repetition with slight modifications. We see him travelling back and forth between village and town at first on foot, then in a carriage and pair, and ultimately by carriage with ‘three horses abreast’, while he himself grows in size in proportion to his equipage. In Yekaterina’s case the modification is that, although she plays just as badly after four years at the Conservatoire, by now she is aware of it.

Several questions arise. Did Ionych lose his human worth because he had been thwarted in love? Would reciprocated love have steered him in the right direction? If that is the case, was it personal misfortune, rather than the social environment, that crushed him? Or would he have become what he was, married or not? Should he as an individual be responsible for his behaviour regardless of his circumstances? Was Yekaterina’s decision to go to the Conservatoire motivated just by a silly girl’s vain ambition? Or was she genuinely seeking change, trying to escape her environment? Did the experience, leading her to the conclusion that her piano playing is as gifted as her mother’s writing, mature her enough to make her potentially a fit companion for an intelligent and useful man? Could Ionych be blamed for not responding to her belated offer of affection? As is usual with Chekhov, there are no clear answers; and a half-hidden poetic streak running through the texture disturbs the general mood. Peacock’s exclamation, ‘Die, wretched woman!’ which his melodramatic mistress must have taught him, turns out to be prophetic for Yekaterina, who will end up in the cemetery, the very place where she had jestingly sent Ionych.

One of the most persistent demands made on Chekhov by the populists was that he point at positive solutions to social problems or personal quests. His very last story, ‘The Bride’ (1903), has been interpreted by some as doing just that. Its heroine, Nadya, who might have remained stuck in the mire of stale provincial life with the slothful Andrey, makes a clear break, going away to study in St Petersburg. Perhaps she represents a new generation that will ring in change. Several troubling questions arise, however, in the course of the narrative. Her distant cousin Sasha, who incites her to tear herself away from home, has been to university himself, but is doing nothing worthwhile with his degree. For that matter, Andrey is a university graduate, too, but he does nothing except talk about how nice it would be to buy a small farm and work on it. Further, just as we were not told in ‘The House with the Mezzanine’ what Zhenya read so avidly, we are denied the information about what Nadya is studying and what she is planning to do with her education. It is as though ‘breaking away’ alone mattered, never mind what for. This impression is reinforced when we hear that Sasha is on his way to a cruise on the Volga with a friend and his wife, hoping to persuade her to take up studies and wanting ‘her life to be transformed’. Here the device of repetition with a slight modification diminishes in size the inspirational figure of Sasha, who, we thought, had been personally concerned with the future of his dear young relation. Perhaps his proselytizing was just a hobbyhorse. Nadya herself finds him grey and uninteresting when she visits him in Moscow on her way home after her first year away. Seeing how sick he is, she should insist on bringing him home for the summer and looking after him, but she lets him go with his friends, as though being less inspired by him also meant having less affection for him.

The final, most important ambiguity of the narrative, however, is Nadya’s narrated thought as she leaves her native town once more, this time, ‘for ever, so she thought’. The phrase could be interpreted as Nadya’s delusion about her future, which in fact held in store for her an eventual return to her town, defeated. One only needs to recall Yekaterina’s return to her parents’ house in ‘Ionych’. There are, however, other implications, too. At the beginning of the story it seems to Nadya that ‘somewhere else, beneath the sky, above the trees, far beyond the town, in the fields and forests, spring was unfolding its own secret life, so lovely, rich and sacred’. This refers to the impossibility of achieving personal happiness here and now. The same seems to apply to socially useful life, too: if Nadya is to make a contribution to the welfare of her nation, she has to do it somewhere else, not here. But if her provincial town is so backward, who should set it on the path of progress if not the native who has the capacity to come back and put her education to good use? Complaints about one’s milieu are almost always ironic in Chekhov, with the implication that the person who complains should get down to making improvements. It is characteristic that Sasha, waxing lyrical about the town’s bright future, does not propose to settle there and make a contribution to it.

There is something akin to Sasha’s preaching in the conclusion Ivan Ivanych draws from the tale of his brother’s paltry life in ‘Gooseberries’ (part of the 1898 ‘Little Trilogy’, together with ‘Man in a Case’ and ‘About Love’). Disgusted by the pettiness of Nikolay’s goal as well as achievement – the acquisition of a little estate with a gooseberry patch on it – Ivan goes around preaching that people should wake up and seek meaningful lives; but there is no indication that he has led one or helped anybody to achieve it. An important structural component of ‘Gooseberries’, also found in several other works, is the tension between ‘waiting’ (zhdat ’) and ‘living’ (zhit’). Nikolay postpones living – he scrapes and saves, marries out of calculation, missing personal happiness during his best years – until he comes into possession of a scrubby expanse of land on the banks of a river so polluted by a neighbouring brickworks and factory that its water is the colour of coffee. But Nikolay’s vociferous critic, Ivan himself, confesses that ‘I only feel sick at heart, irritable and exasperated’ – in other words, also postpones action, pleading the impotence of old age, and urges another man, Alyokhin, to engage in a meaningful life.

What about the doers, rather than preachers, who also appear in some of the stories? Nobody could be more useful than Lida of ‘The House with the Mezzanine’, yet, with her inability to soften enough to show affection, and with her tyranny over her mother and sister, she turns out to be a negative character. Varvara of ‘A Visit to Friends’ (1898) does enormous good working as a physician in a remote rustic region, but in the process she loses weight, feels exhausted, and talks of clairvoyance. One is reminded of Dr Astrov in Uncle Vanya (1899). (Indeed, many of the themes treated in the stories resurface in the plays.) Characteristically, the younger Nadezhda, as though not noticing Varvara’s fatigue, talks of wanting to work. Here the device for conveying incongruities is juxtaposition, with no comment by the narrator.

Apart from useful work, love might bring meaning to life, but happiness in love, like social progress, can only be achieved ‘somewhere else’. Anna Alekseyevna (Luganovich’s wife) of ‘About Love’ is the one bright colour in Alyokhin’s dreary life, but she is married to his friend, and although she clearly displays affection for him, he does not dare to reveal his love until the very last moment, when the Luganoviches are moving away, and Anna, very sick, is leaving for the Crimea. Adulterous love is consummated in ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ (1899), but despite the happy moments it brings to Gurov and Anna, they feel in the last scene like ‘two birds of passage, male and female, caught and forced to live in separate cages’. The less attainable happiness is, the more lyrical force is attached to the longing. One of the major stories of Chekhov’s late period, ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ is constructed with a full array of techniques characteristic of its author. Gurov’s prophetic thought, that ‘every affair, which at first adds spice and variety to life and seems such a charming, light-hearted adventure, inevitably develops into an enormous, extraordinarily complex problem… until finally the whole situation becomes a real nightmare’, appears to be fulfilled as the two lovers realize the depth of their feelings. But since this thought preceded Gurov’s acquaintance with Anna, the reader rightfully wonders whether their liaison, ‘an enormous, extraordinarily complex problem’ as it is, will eventually be dissolved, and the hero will be ready for a new adventure. When Gurov tries to tell an acquaintance of his what a charming woman he has met in Yalta, the response, ‘You were right the other day – the sturgeon was off!’, also puts Gurov’s love in the perspective of banal stories about amorous adventures that do not require much attention. When we finally realize – with the aid of devices such as the symbolic inkstand with a headless rider at the hotel and the grey fence across the street from von Diederitz’s house – that the lovers are suffering in earnest, the effect is all the more striking.

When there is the potential of a happy union between an unmarried man and an available woman, nothing transpires. Podgorin’s failure to propose to Nadezhda in ‘A Visit to Friends’ introduces us to another Chekhovian technique. First Podgorin likes Nadezhda, but bristles at the thought that her family is expecting him to marry her. Then she asks him to help her find some work in Moscow. This request – evidence in his eyes that she is not just a provincial miss waiting to get married, but a woman seeking an independent life – touches him so much that he asks himself, ‘Well, why don’t I marry her then?’ He eventually decides not to marry her, at the same time forgetting her request for help.

The failure to respond to what another character says – so common in Chekhov’s plays – is also an essential device in ‘The Bishop’ (1902). When his mother tells the Most Reverend Pyotr that his brother-in-law Ivan has died, leaving behind four small children unprovided for, Pyotr responds by asking her about his brother, Nikanor. Further, tired of all the formal respect people – even his mother – show him, the bishop finds comfort only in talking with his eight-year-old niece, Katya, because she treats him in a natural way. Having told him once more about her father’s death and her mother’s desperate struggle to make ends meet, the sobbing child asks him for some money. As a bishop, he can certainly afford to be generous, and he agrees to help. Aware of his state of health, he could hand some money over or send for some there and then, but, even though he is sobbing along with the little girl, he postpones help till Easter Sunday. He dies, ironically, on the eve of Easter, and Katya will go home empty-handed.

One character’s inattention to another’s needs finds its analogy in the narrator’s neglect of what the reader expects of him. We have seen the reader’s frustration over the lack of explanation at the end of ‘The House with the Mezzanine’, and the narrator’s insensitive silence about Podgorin’s disregard of Nadezhda’s plea in ‘A Visit to Friends’. This technique is employed with particular force in one of Chekhov’s most carefully crafted stories of his last period, ‘In the Ravine’ (1900).

With its large cast of characters paralleling and contrasting one another, ‘In the Ravine’ resembles a condensed novel. Grigory Tsybukin and his daughter-in-law Aksinya have greed and shrewdness in common; what differentiates them is that Aksinya lacks family feeling, which makes her unmerciful and invulnerable, while Grigory loves at least his elder son, Anisim, whose downfall leads to his own disintegration. A combination of cleverness and ruthlessness allows Aksinya to triumph even in downright crime, while Anisim, who is just as greedy and ruthless, is caught by the law because he is less clever. All three women in the household are beautiful and come from humble backgrounds – the Tsybukins can afford to marry whom they want – but they could not be more different. Aksinya immediately learns the practices of dishonest trading, outdoing her father-in-law. Barbara, with her gentleness and piety, relieves to some extent the oppressive gloom of pervasive immorality, but with her almsgiving she willy-nilly becomes the family’s publicity agent, polishing its image in the eyes of the villagers. Lipa – resembling Misail of ‘My Life’ – simply cannot grasp the concept that you can live at the expense of other people’s work, and she remains a manual labourer, scrubbing the floors and sleeping in the barn. A character parallel to her is the carpenter Yelizarov, who argues that a man earning his living by his manual skill is more respectable than a wealthy merchant.

By the end of the story we realize that the whole complicated matrix of analogies and contrasts – there are more than I have mentioned – is employed to illuminate the central heroine, Lipa, and the central event, the murder of her baby. When Anisim first comes to meet his prospective bride, her mother, Praskovya, is so numb with fright that she hides in the kitchen and takes no part in deciding her child’s fate. This anticipates Lipa’s inability to defend her baby. Prior to drawing up the deed to transfer Butyokhino to little Nikifor, Grigory tells Lipa to ‘look after’ his grandchild, and after the murder he reproaches her, ‘you didn’t look after my grandson’. Barbara, too, mutters, laying the dead baby out, ‘Her one and only child and still she couldn’t look after it, the stupid girl!’ Is this a just reproach? In order to answer the question we need to take a close look at the scene of the murder.

Lipa is in the kitchen doing the laundry when Aksinya rushes in after the family row over Butyokhino. There is no one else there except for Nikifor, placed on a bench next to a pile of unwashed clothes so as not to hurt himself in case he should fall. At the moment Aksinya appears Lipa has just ‘reached out for the large ladle of boiling water’ standing on the table. Aksinya yells at Lipa that she, a convict’s wife, has no business touching her, Aksinya’s, blouse. ‘Lipa was stunned, looked at her and did not seem to understand. But when she suddenly saw how Aksinya was looking at her and the baby, she did understand and she went numb all over.’ Aksinya grabs the ladle, pours the water on the child, after which: ‘A scream rang out, the like of which had never been heard in Ukleyevo and it was hard to believe it came from such a frail little creature as Lipa.’

Several details are worth noting here. One is that Lipa’s hand was just reaching for the ladle when Aksinya came in: consequently, she could have seized it before her adversary, and given her ‘large arms, just like a man’s’, resembling ‘two huge crab’s claws’, which have been emphasized before, she could at least have put up a fight, weak as she otherwise was. Another important detail is that having understood the meaning of the look Aksinya turned on the child, Lipa grows numb all over with fright, not even thinking that she might resist the aggressor. One is reminded, once more, of Praskovya sitting in the kitchen, numb with shyness, while her child’s fate was being decided. Finally, it is essential to note that not only has Lipa failed to defend her child, but she does not even try to take him to the hospital or summon any other kind of help for him; she just remains in the kitchen until the cook comes back. If this is a didactic tale, it amounts to a satire on the Tolstoyan dictum ‘Resist not evil by force.’ If you do not resist evil, it simply triumphs.

The narrator of ‘In the Ravine’ seems to be so outraged by the murder and by Lipa’s passivity that he cannot go into any further details. The chapter following the scene of murder opens with a matter-of-fact statement about Nikifor’s death; then the narrator launches into a long lyrical description of Lipa’s journey home, with the dead baby in her arms. We are impatient to come to some understanding of Lipa’s extraordinary behaviour during the murder and we are thirsting for news about Aksinya’s arrest and trial, but we are treated instead to the sounds of the cry of a bittern, of the croaking of frogs, and of Nature’s voice saying, ‘We only live once.’ It seems as though slices of life were given as they came to hand. We are reminded of the narrator’s refusal to foreground the essential in ‘The House with the Mezzanine’, but here the inappropriately placed lyricism is more jarring than any previous passage in Chekhov.

It is hard to imagine that the emotional pitch of the story could be raised even higher after the murder scene, but Chekhov succeeds in doing so when Lipa finally arrives home. Her in-laws’ reproach, that she ‘didn’t look after’ her child, is justified in the sense that she had indeed failed to defend Nikifor from the murderer, but it also makes us realize that she did not tell anybody about the murder. Grigory and Barbara, having no idea of what actually happened, are reproaching her for what they think was an accident. Aksinya has not been accused and will not be accused. This implicates not only the meek Lipa, but also Yelizarov, the only person close enough to her to get the true circumstances of the child’s murder out of her, if only he had paid attention to the matter. Aksinya soon orders Lipa from the house, calling her a ‘convict’s bird’. If we as readers and participants felt like throwing ourselves between the baby and the ladle in the murder scene, now we want to shout at Aksinya that she should be driven out and sent to prison. The reason why Chekhov can involve us in the situation so powerfully is that his narrator refrains from comment. If he explained that Lipa was too downtrodden a creature to dare raise an accusing finger, or that she didn’t think the corrupt police would arrest the influential Aksinya (which would probably not be the case even if the police were willing to shut their eyes to some of her lesser crimes), then, maybe, we would come to at least a partial understanding and reconciliation, but his silence farouche produces a most powerful shock.

The Chekhovian techniques I have mentioned, without attempting an exhaustive list, show a writer who has clearly moved beyond nineteenth-century realism. It is not an exaggeration to claim that he is among the most influential initiators of the modern short story, not only in Russia but far beyond its borders. Critical works have demonstrated his influence on various authors in the Bloomsbury group, on Hemingway and Faulkner, on the existentialists, and more recently on practitioners of minimalist prose. But his impact on individual writers, important as it may be, is not as significant as the ubiquitous presence of his literary devices, so pervasive that they seem ingrained in the modern short story.