Stories
Authors: Anton Chekhov
ONTENTS
NTRODUCTION
In the autumn of 1844 a young writer named Dmitri Grigorovich was sharing rooms with a friend of his from military engineering school, the twenty-three-year-old Fyodor Dostoevsky, who was at work on his first novel,
Poor Folk.
Through Grigorovich the finished manuscript reached the hands of Vissarion Belinsky, the most influential critic of the time, whose enthusiasm launched Dostoevsky’s career. More than four decades later, in 1886, this same Grigorovich, now an elder statesman of literature, came across the humorous sketches of someone who signed himself “Antosha Chekhonte,” bro
ught them to the attention of the publisher Alexei Suvorin, and thus “recognized” the last great Russian writer of the nineteenth century—Anton Chekhov.
Grigorovich also wrote to the young man himself, scolding him for not taking his work seriously and for hiding behind a pseudonym. Chekhov was astonished and deeply moved. In his reply, dated March 28, 1886, after apologizing for scanting his talent, though he suspected he had it, and thanking Grigorovich for confirming that suspicion, he explained:
… In the five years I spent hanging around newspaper offices, I became resigned to the general view of my literary insignificance, soon took to looking down on my work, and kept plowing right on. That’s the first factor. The second is that I am a doctor and up to my ears in medicine. The saying about chasing two hares at once has never robbed anybody of more sleep than it has me.
The only reason I am writing all this is to justify my grievous sin in your eyes to some small degree. Until now I treated my literary work extremely frivolously,
casually, nonchalantly; I can’t remember working on
a single
story for more than a day, and “The Huntsman,” which you so enjoyed, I wrote in a bathing house … All my hope lies in the future. I’m still only twenty-six. I may manage to accomplish something yet, though time is flying …
*
Just a month earlier, Chekhov had written to a friend saying that his real commitment was to medicine, while literature was a mistress he would one day abandon. Now he likened the effect of Grigorovich’s letter on him to “a governor’s order to leave town within twenty-four hours.” And he obeyed the order. He began to write less and work more. The first story signed with his real name, “Panikhida,” appeared in Suvorin’s magazine
New Time
that same year—the start of a close and sometimes difficult collaboration between writer and editor that would continue for the rest of Chekhov’s life. Though a delight in the absurd and a sharp eye for human folly remained central to his work, he was no longer merely a humorist. The repentant sketch-writer had made his entry into serious literature.
Chekhov’s contemporaries were struck by his originality. He invented a new kind of story, which opened up areas of life that had not yet been explored by Russian literature. Tolstoy saw it at once. “Chekhov is an incomparable artist,”
he is quoted as saying, “an artist of life … Chekhov has created new forms of writing, completely new, in my opinion, to the whole world, the like of which I have not encountered anywhere … Chekhov has his own special form, like the impressionists.” Tolstoy was not alone in using the term “impressionism” to describe Chekhov’s art. We may see what he meant if we look at “The Huntsman,” the story that first caught Grigorovich’s eye. Written entirely in the present tense, it opens with some fragmentary observations about the weather, a brief but vivid and (typically for Chekhov) slightly anthropomo
rphized description of the fields and forest, a few spots of color—the red shirt and white cap of the huntsman. A woman appears out of nowhere. She and the huntsman talk, she tenderly and reproachfully, he
boastfully and casually. “Ashamed of her joy,” she “covers her mouth with her hand.” He scratches his arm, stretches, follows some wild ducks with his eyes. It is clear from what he says that they cannot live together. He gets up and leaves; she watches him go: “Her gaze moves over the tall, skinny figure of her husband and caresses and fondles it …” He turns, hands her a worn rouble,
and goes on. She whispers, “Good-by
e, Yegor Vlasych!” and “stands on tiptoe so as at least to see the white cap one more time.” That is all. The story does not build to any moment of truth; it does not reach any significant conclusion. It simply stops.
In a letter of May 10, 1886, to his older brother Alexander, who had taken up writing before him with only modest success, Chekhov, from his new position as a recognized author, set forth six principles that make for a good story: “1. Absence of lengthy verbiage of a political-social-economic nature; 2. total objectivity; 3. truthful descriptions of persons and objects; 4. extreme brevity; 5. audacity and originality: flee the stereotype; 6. compassion.” It is a remarkably complete description of Chekhov’s artistic practice. Authorial commentary, if not entirely absent, is kept to an abs
olute minimum. The most ordinary events, a few trivial details, a few words spoken, no plot, a focus on single gestures, minor features, the creation of a mood that is both precise and somehow elusive— such is Chekhov’s impressionism. “This seemingly slight adjustment of tradition,” wrote the critic Boris Eikhenbaum, “had, in fact, the significance of a revolution and exerted a powerful influence not only on Russian literature, but also on the literature of the world.”
*
Chekhov’s way of composition
wordlessly
extends the limited scope of the story by means of juxtaposition, alternation, simultaneity, that is, by means of a new kind of poetic logic. His art is constructive not in a narrative but in a musical sense, to borrow D. S. Mirsky’s terms.
**
Not that he wrote “musical” prose; on the contrary, his language is perhaps the plainest in Russian literature; but he built his stories by musical means—curves, repetitions, modulations, intersecting tones, unexpected resolutions. Their essence, as Mirsky says, is not development but envelopment in
a state of soul. They are “lyric constructions.” That may partly explain the importance Chekhov gives to sounds, to precisely transcribed noises—night watchmen rapping on their wooden bars, the distinctive calls of corncrakes, cuckoos, bitterns, and “angry, straining frogs,” the banging of shutters in a sto
rm, the howling or singing of wood stoves, the humming of samovars, the ringing of bells—symbolic sounds, of which the most famous is the very last note in his work, the breaking string at the end of
The Cherry Orchard.
Another aspect of Chekhov’s originality is the inclusiveness of his world. He describes life in the capitals and the provinces, city life, village life, life in the new industrialized zones around the cities, life in European Russia, Siberia, the Crimea, the Far East, the life of noblemen, officials, clergy high and low, landowners, doctors, intellectuals, artists, actors, merchants, tradesmen, peasants, prisoners, exiles, pampered ladies, farm women, children, young men, old men, the sane, and the mad. “One of the basic principles of Chekhov’s artistic work,”
Boris Eikhenbaum notes, “is the endeavor to embrace all of Russian life in its various manifestations, and not to describe selected spheres, as was customary before him. The Chekhovian grasp of Russian life is staggering; in this respect, as in many others, he cannot be compared with anyone …” His characters are not monumental personalities dramatically portrayed, like the heroes of Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, they are sharply observed types—the darling, the explainer, the fidget, the student, the malefactor, the man in a case, the heiress, the bishop, the fiancée. They are made of “the common stuff of h
umanity,” as Mirsky has said, “and in this sense, Chekhov is the most ‘democratic’ of writers.” There is something in them reminiscent of Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims—the knight, the miller, the prioress, the parson, the manciple, the pardoner, the wife of Bath— but Chekhov’s world is more scattered, and his people are transients of a more accidental sort: summer guests, doctors on call, hunters in the field, riders on ferries, passersby, city people displaced to the country, country people out of place in the city. Their pilgrimage has no definite goal.
Chekhov’s early work was a popular success, and remains popular to this day among ordinary Russian readers, who do not share the common Western image of Chekhov as the pessimistic “poet of crepuscular moods,” the “last singer of disintegrating trifles.”
His first
collection,
Tales of Melpomene,
was published in 1884, the year he finished his medical studies; the second,
Motley Stories,
was published in 1886, and did so well that he gave up the idea of practicing medicine full-time and, with Grigorovich’s blessing, devoted himself to writing. A year later came the collection
In the Twilight,
which was awarded the prestigious Pushkin Prize in 1888. Among the sketches and anecdotes of these early collections are some masterpieces of artistic concentration and force: not only “The Huntsman” but “The Malefactor,” “Anyuta,” “Easter Night,” “Vanka,” “
Sleepy.” Chekhov began writing plays at the same time, and with equal success. His first play,
Ivanov,
opened in Moscow on November 19, 1887. In January 1889 it was staged in Petersburg, where it was greeted with enthusiasm and much discussed in the newspapers and literary journals. The production later toured the provinces.
But, precisely because of its originality, Chekhov’s work met with opposition from the established critics of the time. For decades literary criticism had been dominated by political ideologists, who judged literary works according to their social “message,” their usefulness to the common cause. The writer was seen first of all as a pointer of the way, a leader in the struggle for social justice; his works were expected to be “true to life” and to carry a clear moral value. Faced with stories like “Anyuta” or “Easter Night,” what were these critics to say? What were they to th
ink of a writer whose first precept was the “absence of lengthy verbiage of a political-social-economic nature”? Chekhov’s “impressionism” was seen as a form of art for art’s sake, a denial of the writer’s social role, and a threat to the doctrine of realism, and he was attacked for deviating from the canons of useful art.
In fact, just as Chekhov created a new kind of story, he also created a new image of the writer: the writer as detached observer, sober, restrained, modest, a craftsman shaping the material of prose under the demands of authenticity and precision, avoiding ideological excesses, the temptations of moral judgment, and the vainglory of great ideas. That is how Chekhov himself ha
s most often been seen, and certainly it was in part what he wanted to be. He often joked about his ideological shortcomings. “I still lack a political, religious and philosophical world view,” he wrote to Grigorovich on October 9, 1888. “I change it every month—and so I’ll have to limit myself to descriptions of how my heroes love, marry, give birth, die, and how they speak.” He considered that the writer’s job,
and thought it was enough. On October 27, 1888, he wrote to Alexei Suvorin:
The artist must pass judgment only on what he understands; his range is as limited as that of any other specialist—that’s what I keep repeating and insisting upon. Anyone who says the artist’s field is all answers and no questions has never done any writing or had any dealings with imagery. The artist observes, selects, guesses and synthesizes … You are right to demand that an author take conscious stock of what he is doing, but you are confusing two concepts:
answering the questions
and
formulating them correctly.
Only the latter is required of an author.
The leading critic of the time, the populist Nikolai Mikhailovsky, said that those who admired Chekhov admired him precisely for the “indifference and impassibility” with which he applied his excellent artistic apparatus to a swallow or a suicide, a fly or an elephant, tears or water—“a revelation they call ‘the rehabilitation of reality’ or ‘pantheism.’ All in nature … is equally worthy of artistic treatment, all can give equal artistic pleasure, and one must avoid selection according to a general idea or principle.” Mikhailovsky considered this a waste of Chekhov’s genuine talent. And
Tolstoy, for all his admiration, was of a somewhat similar opinion. In August 1895, after Chekhov’s first visit to his estate, he noted in his diary: “He is very gifted, must have a good heart, but up to now he has no definite point of view on things.” The place Chekhov gave to contingency in his choice of themes and arrangement of details, the lack of any general idea to unify the whole, was considered his great originality or his great defect as an artist.
Chekhov privately defended himself against the attacks of his critics in a letter written on October 4, 1888, to Alexei Pleshcheev, literary editor of the
Northern Herald:
The people I am afraid of are the ones who look for tendentiousness between the lines and are determined to see me as either liberal or conservative. I am neither liberal nor conservative, nor gradualist, nor monk, nor indifferentist. I would like to be a free artist and nothing else, and I regret God has not given me strength to be
one. I hate lies and violence in all their forms, and consistory secretaries are just as odious to me as Notovich and Gradovsky [two unscrupulous left-wing journalists]. Pharisaism, dullwittedness and tyranny reign not only in merchants’ homes and police stations. I
see them in science, in literature, among the younger generation. That is why I cultivate no particular predilection for policemen, butchers, scientists, writers or the younger generation. I look upon tags and labels as prejudices. My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love and the most absolute freedom imaginable, freedom from violence and lies, no matter what form the latter two take. Such is the program I would adhere to if I were a major artist.
In his memoir
Chekhov with Us,
written not long after Chekhov’s death in 1904, Kornei Chukovsky called this now-famous letter “a gauntlet flung in the face of an entire age, a rebellion against everything it held sacred.” The anger in it is far from the sobriety of a detached observer of life. It is the anger of a man looking back over decades of empty rhetoric, of the posturings of literary professionals, of newspaper battles between various factions and tendencies, of general ideas that led nowhere, of new political and artistic movements that drew young people in, distorted
their lives, and left them with nothing, of falsity and cruelty coming both from the authorities and from their opponents. Chekhov portrayed these things time and again in his stories and plays, obstinately opposing them in the name of his “holy of holies.” The restraint of the cool scientist, which was his artistic ideal, was nourished by strong feeling and, as Chukovsky rightly says, by rebellion.
