Гражданин Чехов / Citizen Chekhov

A literary portrait from the book
“No Violinist Needed”
by Pavel Basinsky

Citizen Chekhov

One hundred years have passed since the death of Anton Pavlovich Chekhov.

There was a myth during Chekhov’s lifetime that was readily believed by many of his readers, even by admirers of the great writer, which was zealously puffed, in particular, by his critics.

 

It was the myth regarding Chekhov's supposed lack of an ideology.

 

The turn of the century was, in the socio-political sense, a highly charged era in Russia, somewhat similar to our “perestroika”. Both then, as now, it was the beginning of the collapse of a mighty empire. In such eras, writers are expected to make politically defined statements. And if they do not "match the moment", then such writers are immediately thrown to the sidelines of the historical process. Say what needs to be said!

 

It was not possible to discard Chekhov. His was too bright a talent, bright even in those tiny, humorous, hundred-line miniatures written by "Antosha Chekhonte", commissioned specially by "The Dragonfly" or "The Alarm Clock". The collection of those little gems, known as ‘Motley Stories’, went through several editions and sold like hot cakes even in the provinces. Although, among his humorous offerings some were highly dramatic (such as "A Daughter of Albion"), and although Chekhov's talent had already been noted by elders of the literary scene such as N. S. Leskov and D. V. Grigorovich, the critics did not immediately recognize Chekhov as "a serious" writer. But then, when this was admitted, altogether different conversations began.

 

" The Twilight singer"... "gloomy people"... "superfluous people"...  Amazing though it may seem, none of this contradicted the original of Antosha Chekhonte, the scoffer. Where there are no “ideas” there is no “direction”, in which case the only thing possible is either sneering, or melancholy and pessimism. Even the insightful V. V. Rozanov wrote: “... his mournful thought and tone are full of half-life. It flickers, flashes, glows, but does not come alight.”

 

And, gazing at this “flickering”, looking long and hard you are suddenly filled with a mystical fear: “what if it suddenly goes out”. And you shout: “Set it all on fire,  better to burn the lot than to have that terrible darkness and cold, when suddenly it all expires.”

Well – they set it ablaze…

 

Once Chekhov told Ivan Bunin with a laugh how Skabichevsky had written that he  (Chekhov) would "die drunk in the gutter." A. S. Skabichevsky was a famous critic and publicist at the time, and a liberal populist by conviction. “You know,” Bunin replied to Chekhov, “Skabichevsky once told me that he had never in all his life seen rye growing, nor talked to a single peasant.” “Well, well,” Chekhov laughed, “and all his life he wrote tales about the common people and stories from folklife!”

 

To be fair, we should note that neither Chekhov nor Bunin were entirely justified in ridiculing Skabichevsky. An educated man, a tireless publicist as well as a literary historian, he hadn’t exactly been writing about Chekov in his review, but about the fate of the ordinary Russian journalist in general. Menial work squeezes him dry, "like a lemon", he becomes an alcoholic, and that's it... he dies drunk in the gutter.

 

And yet it’s astonishing that such a clear and simple (in the highest sense), such a strikingly distinct genius as Chekhov was classified with an almost pathological persistence as an "indistinct", "vague", "spineless writer."  Chekhov lived a remarkably bright and rich life, full of hard work and dangers. From an early age till the end of his days he bore a large family on his shoulders, built schools and hospitals, treated cholera patients, made his way to Sakhalin on steamboats and sundry conveyances, returning back through China, Ceylon and Singapore (incidentally, he brought animals back to Moscow then unknown – the mongoose), was loved by many women and fell in love himself, he renovated his own estate in Melikhovo and a dacha in the Crimea, travelled abroad several times (he describes Venice in letters home with the poetic delight of a young man!), he knew Ukraine well and the Caucasus reasonably so. In Moscow he could meet a hundred people a day yet still write and write as though in penal servitude, never allowing himself a breather, or to rest on his laurels which, incidentally, he had already garnered in no small measure during his lifetime.

 

At the same time, let’s not forget that Chekhov's life was short and that in his early twenties he showed the first signs of consumption which  relentlessly attacked him, the symptoms of which he himself diagnosed as a doctor. And how to the very last day he cared for his brother Nikolay, an artist, who died of tuberculosis almost in Anton Pavlovich’s arms in 1889. And how he punished himself for granting himself a short rest, one day away from the sick Nikolay!

 

 

Or here's another little detail. It was in the mid nineties. Russia was once again having a spat with England over the Middle East. A presentiment of war hung in the air. The terminally ill Chekhov writes briefly to A. S. Suvorin: “If there is war in spring, I will go. In the last year or two there have been so many different kinds of incidents in my personal life (the other day there was even a fire at my house) that nothing remains for me but to go to war, as Vronsky did—only not to fight, of course, but to treat the wounded". With irony - but at the same time in all seriousness!

 

And this a "semi-life"?! This life is comparable to Pushkin's! Chekhov, although unlike anyone else, somehow had the most in common with Pushkin — both in terms of fate, and literature.

 

Chekhov himself, in whom there was not even a shade of haughtiness, received such personal criticism with lordly indifference. In this he was a gentleman who knew his own worth and did not stoop to reviling his critics.

 

He once eviscerated them by describing them as “voluntary martyrs” who walk through the crowded streets shouting: “Shoemaker Sidorov makes boots badly!”, “Joiner Ivanov makes chairs well!” as if the chairs and boots would be made better or worse as a result of this. But on one occasion he could stand it no longer, and blew his top.

 

In the magazine “Russian Thought”, which Chekhov collaborated with, an anonymous author called him an "unprincipled" writer. In a letter to the magazine's publisher V. M. Lavrov, Chekhov responded vehemently: “One doesn’t usually reply to criticism, but in this case, it’s not so much criticism as defamation... I have never been either an unprincipled writer or, what amounts to the same thing, a scoundrel... Your accusation is outright slander. I can’t ask him to take it back since it has already come into its own, and cannot be cut down with an axe... All that remains is merely to point out your mistake... That after your accusation, not only is it impossible for there to be business relations between us, that goes without saying, but even a nodding acquaintance…”

However, the fact that few people during his lifetime noticed the high moral and civic virtues of Chekhov's personality (among them Suvorin, Tolstoy, Gorky and Bunin) is not in itself surprising. Chekhov always hid himself behind the armour of soft irony (“soft armour” is a contradiction, but not in Chekhov’s case), who was ashamed of loud praise and avoided it in every way possible. And not because he was humble (he adored restaurants, noisy parties and, as he himself put it, “glamorous women”), but because he feared, more than anything in the world, deception and lies.

Bunin recalls: “Once he went to Alupka in the company of a few close people, and there breakfasted in a restaurant; he was convivial, cracking lots of jokes. Suddenly, a gentleman sitting at the next table rose with a glass in his hand:

 

“Gentlemen I’d like to propose a toast to Anton Pavlovich, present here among us, the pride of our literature, the singer of dusky sentiments!”

Turning pale, he got up and left…”

 

What had stung him the most? "Dusky sentiments" or "pride of our literature"? Both of them, of course. Lies and falseness, those sisters of baseness.

 

At the same time, he was no stranger to pride, but of a completely different kind. He was proud of his medical practice and somehow, not without boasting, wrote in a letter (I think to Suvorin) that he could have saved Prince Andrei Bolkonsky from death, who, judging by Tolstoy's descriptions, had been poorly treated, because medicine in those days was wretched. (The irony being that today’s doctors would, of course, have  saved Chekhov.) And with what unconcealed pride he wrote about his Sakhalin trip!

“I don’t know what the upshot will be, but I have done a lot: еnough for three dissertations... I travelled all over the settlements, went into all the huts and spoke with everyone; I used the card system during the census, and I have already recorded about ten thousand convicts and settlers. In other words, there is not a single convict or settler on Sakhalin who would not talk to me. I was especially successful in the census of children, on which I place high hopes...” Yes, this is pride!

 

 

Not knowing or understanding Chekhov's personality, it is very difficult to break through to the true meaning of his prose and plays. This is, moreover, that case where the box opens with surprising ease, but for some reason many people are looking for some particular, some incredibly complex lock-picks.

Chekhov's enigma is in his simplicity and the absence of any falseness. People look for “variability”, for “ambiguities” or some “secret subtexts” in him. Chekhov is modern not because he is “variable” (a favorite word of the postmodern era with its collapse of traditional values), but because he is simple in the highest sense of the word, like Pushkin who was born in the eighteenth century but remains modern even in the twenty-first century, in contrast to “complicated” writers, such as Vyazemsky or Odoevsky.

 

The same is true of Chekhov. His younger contemporaries – Gorky or Leonid Andreev, who much more closely conformed to their "motley" and "variable" era – are largely outdated; whereas Chekhov, like Pushkin, does not have a single dated line. This is because he described a person as a person, and not as a Man (Gorky), nor as “Someone in Gray” (Andreev).

 

He somehow seems to have been mistaken in one correspondence, saying that there would be no revolution in Russia, that everything would continue as before.

There was a revolution, there was the Gulag, there was a terrible world war. Art and literature were tempted, and they decided that this experience could not be reflected by ordinary artistic means, that man himself had changed so much that he was no longer a man at all, but some kind of "existential essence", a product of the world's Absurdity. And they tried to fit Chekhov within this conceptual framework.

And he was posthumously named a writer of "creativity from nothing." This was the title of an article about Chekhov by the Russian thinker Lev Shestov which, for all its philosophical profundity and religious flavourings, began with the shockingly blasphemous words: "The man's dead –  so now you can talk about him freely." Had Chekhov been alive he would undoubtedly have choked hearing such a phrase.

This was already the second myth about Chekhov, further to his "lack of an ideology" or “lack of principles".

At the very least, open his favorite short story “The Student” where all the people from Peter the Apostle to a late 19th century theological academy student, and two peasant women cooking stew over a fire, are suddenly united in an unbroken linkage of simple human understanding. Yes, it can be cold in the world, it can be scary, but it is precisely for this that man was created, in order to warm this coldness, in order to illuminate this darkness with a divine spark. This spark may be a trip to Sakhalin, it may be brilliant prose, but it may equally be the simple words of a student who consoles  two widows with a tale of Peter the Apostle's suffering. "At just such a fire the Apostle Peter warmed himself," said the student, stretching out his hands to the fire, "so it must have been cold then, too. Ah, what a terrible night it must have been, granny! An utterly dismal, long night!"

"The past," he thought, "is linked with the present by an unbroken chain of events flowing one from another."

 

Chekhov understood this better than all the writers of the 20th century. The continuity of events, their level and constant meaning, the yearning of the three sisters “to Moscow! to Moscow!" is no different from the modern armada of “newcomers” flowing to Moscow, if you view it not as a crowd, but take each person as a unique individual. The comical and dramatic duel between von Koren and Laevsky (“The Duel”) is no better than a brawl between contemporary “new Russians”: in both cases there is pride, disrespect for another person's dignity and, inevitably, moral defeat. Daughters who leave their drunken fathers and younger siblings (“Anna on the neck”) for the sake of an easy, luxurious life are always contemporary and ... disgusting. There will always be Dymovs and there will always be “grasshoppers”. And all this will always be senseless, because it is connected by an unbreakable chain with the entirety of world history, in which Chekhov felt himself not a slave nor a master, but a free citizen. A doctor. A writer.

Ultimately, just a decent person.