Simply Chekhov

Carol Apollonio

• Publisher: Simply Charly
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781943657551
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria russa

"Wise, lucid, compassionate, and refreshingly to the point, this is a book after Chekhov's own heart. Carol Apollonio, one of the few people to have made a serious attempt to retrace Chekhov's steps on his epic journey from Moscow to eastern Siberia, proves to be an excellent guide both to his remarkable life and to the many facets of his literary world. It is as enjoyable to spend time with her as it is with the master himself."
—Rosamund Bartlett, author of Chekhov: Scenes from a Life, and translator of About Love and Other Stories.

Born in the port city of Taganrog in southern Russia, Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) survived a difficult childhood with an abusive father and put himself through school (while supporting his family), qualifying as a physician in 1884. At the same time he began practicing medicine, he also became celebrated for his short fiction, which redefined the genre with its formal innovations and psychological depth. His first serious play, The Seagull, was booed at its premiere in 1896, but—along with his other plays Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard —it came to be seen as a masterpiece, bringing a new realism to the theater and to acting, which continues to reverberate today. Afflicted with ill health for much of his life, Chekhov died of tuberculosis at the age of 44, prematurely depriving the world of a great writer and a great humanist.

In Simply Chekhov, Professor Carol Apollonio provides a concise and accessible introduction to Chekhov, both within his time and place (Russia on the eve of revolution) and as a master of world literature. Readers will meet the major figures of Chekhov's era—as well as his colorful family, lovers, colleagues, and friends—and gain an appreciation for the ways in which this real-life cast of characters are reflected in Chekhov's stories and plays.

Drawing on insights from her more than three decades of Chekhov scholarship, Apollonio not only presents strikingly original insights into Chekhov's major works, but explores the concerns—from the place of humans in the natural world to the threat of homelessness—that made him such a compelling figure and that remain relevant to the crises we face today.

3

Summers in Nature

After Chekhov graduated and was certified to practice medicine in June 1884, he spent some weeks in the countryside assisting the doctor at a hospital near the New Jerusalem monastery in Voskresensk, where his younger brother Ivan was working as a schoolteacher. Anton’s rural medical practice among local peasants provided endless subjects for stories: infectious diseases, childbirth, trauma, dysentery, and relatively minor but unpleasant procedures like pulling teeth. Among Chekhov’s many works featuring the latter are two comic stories, “Surgery” (1884) and “A Horsey Name” (1885). The former describes a gruesome tooth extraction by a medical assistant substituting for his absent supervisor. In the latter, a high-ranking official suffers a terrible toothache. His steward recommends a sorcerer he knows who can cure a toothache by casting a spell, but the steward cannot recall his name beyond that it’s somehow related to horses. A hilarious exchange ensues, with all the members of the household helpfully offering different horse-related names. By the time the steward finally hits upon the correct name, the sufferer has given up and had the tooth pulled. As with most great literature, the story’s significance lies not in any message, but in the joy it provides readers along the way. Autopsies were among Chekhov’s duties in Voskresensk; this experience is reflected in the famous 1899 story, “On Official Business,” which centers on the autopsy of a man who had committed suicide. “Grief” (1886) draws on Chekhov’s experience of doctoring in the countryside: an old woodworker takes his sick wife to the hospital during a snowstorm, delivering, along the way, what is partially a script for his upcoming conversation with the doctor, partially a confession and apology for his violence and drunkenness throughout their marriage, and partially a prayer or plea for his wife’s health. When he turns to look at her, she is dead—her face grave and solemn (like the reader deduces, the face of a saint on a wooden Russian icon); her hand, too, wooden—like the widower’s raw material.

The following summer, Chekhov rented a summer cottage (a dacha) from a family of impoverished nobility, Alexei and Maria Kiselyov, who were to become long-term friends. Near their estate of Babkino, Chekhov practiced medicine, took in new impressions, and wrote short masterpieces. The Kiselyovs, despite having fallen on hard times economically, appreciated the finer things in life: literature, art, and culture. Chekhov’s acquaintance with them provided him with a glimpse into the lives of gentry landowners, which in due time he would incorporate into his fiction and drama. For the next few years, the Chekhovs were to spend their summers in the countryside, first in Babkino, and later in Sumy, Ukraine, where they would rent a dacha from another gentry family, the Lintvaryovs. Many of their city friends including, as time went on, eminent literati, came to visit.

The rhythm of Chekhov’s travels to and through the countryside in the summer reflected a typical Russian pattern of life in accordance with the cycle of the seasons: long hard winters in the city and short, restful summers in the lap of nature. In the city, he wrote, corresponded with editors, attended the theater, indulged in the city’s nightlife, and practiced medicine. Gradually he gained a readership and became able to pick his outlets for publication. After the spring thaws, he moved with various family members to the countryside for the summer. There they spent time in conversation with their hosts and friends, listened to music, and spent hours outside, fishing, gathering mushrooms, resting, and appreciating nature. During the summers he spent in the country, despite his frequent assertions that he was lazy, bored, and got no work done, Chekhov produced an extraordinary body of writing, each work more profound than the one before.

As in summers during his teen years before he moved to Moscow, Chekhov took long journeys through the steppe between Moscow and the Black Sea at various times during his life, notably in the spring of 1887—a trip that gave material for stories like “Fortune” and “Tumbleweed,” which were published that year. In all these travels, he immersed himself in nature, observing the sounds, sights, and tastes of the lives of plants, animals, and human beings who lived in the countryside and the steppe. In Babkino and Sumy, he hosted many visitors: other writers and editors, family friends, and, notably, visual artists like the landscape painter Isaac Levitan and Franz Schekhtel, former fellow students of his brother Nikolai from the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture. All of these relationships and impressions in the lap of nature were to have a profound influence on his art. In his play, The Wood Demon and its later adaptation into Uncle Vanya, as well as in stories like “Panpipes” (1887), among Chekhov’s most appealing protagonists are environmental activists, before there was such a thing. But his treatment of the natural world moves beyond any thematic or programmatic content; Chekhov’s works introduce something entirely new to world literature: a depiction of sentient beings (humans and animals) whose inner spiritual, emotional, and psychological life merges with that of the environment. His poetics moves beyond the “pathetic fallacy” practiced by the Romantics, in whose works natural phenomena reflect inner psychological states. In works of this earlier tradition, thunder and lightning, for example, might signal a character’s rage or distress—but the individual’s experience is always the center of attention. In Chekhov’s works all human, animal, and plant life is an integral part of nature—not dominant, not separate from the natural world, but reflecting, submitting to, and interacting with its rhythms. This distinctive Chekhovian treatment of nature derives from his experiences living and traveling through the countryside; it also reflects his relationship with landscape artists during this time, particularly Levitan.

At one with nature

In this chapter, we move beyond what has been to this point a mostly chronological approach—tracking Chekhov’s life path from youth to maturity—to consider Chekhov’s writing in the context of his depiction of nature. He generally lived in the countryside during the summers, and beginning in the mid-1880s, his works set in nature reflect a particular and distinctive approach, whatever their time of writing. Chekhov devoted much of his free time in the countryside fishing. This particular passion left its mark on many stories, such as the hilarious early classics “Daughter of Albion” (1883), “The Burbot” (1885), and “The Malefactor” (1887), and later works like The Seagull. In addition to providing endless themes for Chekhov’s works, fishing also served as a metaphor for his creative process. In many letters, he wrote about his “laziness” or “idleness,” claiming that he was wasting his time and could not get anything done. Given his remarkable productivity over the 44 years of his life, this reads more like a fantasy than a statement of fact. But idleness, however he might have defined it, is an essential part of the creative process. The artist must clear his mind of superficial, venal, or mundane concerns and allow it, like soil, to lie fallow and absorb impressions. The other side of the creative process is hard work. Chekhov was never free of economic need; his writing was inextricably bound with the need to earn money. He committed in advance to produce work for journals, which meant he was always facing deadlines. In the early years, he committed to writing stories of a specified (short) length on certain days of the week, for various publications. Later, the pressures were different. Once he became famous, he was given the opportunity to write longer works for prestigious journals, for much better pay. This meant that he could spend more time on his craft. But the pressure remained—now compounded with the higher expectations of discriminating editors, critics, and readers, not to mention the envy of less gifted writers. And when he took on a large loan in 1892 to buy an estate in Melikhovo outside Moscow, that expense added a new source of stress. So his complaints of “idleness” related to an ongoing sense that, no matter how productive he was, there was always more to do. But the fact is, he did take time to recharge, to rest, and to relax with friends. Fishing was the quintessential “idle” activity. The artist sat quietly on the bank for hours, gazed over the surface of the water, waited, and thought. The point was not necessarily to get a fish (Chekhov generally threw them back); the point was the listening and looking. First, he observed. Then he retreated to his desk and wrote everything down.

Chekhov caught his ideas not only while sitting quietly and listening. They came to him at all times, whether he was in conversation with friends or going about his daily routine. He’d observe a situation, or hear a phrase; or a pithy thought or scrap of language would come to him. Memoirists record shreds of conversation in which Chekhov shared these observations. One acquaintance, Nikolai Teleshov, recalled a late-night barroom conversation in 1888 with Chekhov, his brother Mikhail, and another friend. Anton said that a curious person could find a story idea anywhere,

[…] in lemon slices that smell like onions; in greasy spots on a wall where cabbies have rested their heads: “how can it be that there are no ideas for stories?” Anton Pavlovich insisted. “Everything is a story idea, they are everywhere. […] You can even write well about the moon, even though it’s been done over and over. And it will be interesting. You just have to see something in the moon that is your own, not something that others have worked into the ground. “And how is that not a story idea?” he pointed out onto the street, where dawn was already starting to break. “Look over there: there’s a monk out walking with a cup, collecting donations for a bell … Don’t you feel a good theme just springing up all by itself? … There’s something tragic here—a black-robed monk in the pale dawn…

Chekhov carried a notebook in which he would jot down impressions, ideas, mini-situations, and pithy phrases. Unlike a writer like Tolstoy, for example, whose extensive, life-long diaries contributed intimately to and interacted with his fictional works, Chekhov’s notebook and occasional diary entries are sporadic and minimalistic, written, as it were, on the run. But they capture something essential; these scraps of words would serve as the kernel from which stories would grow. Some of Chekhov’s stories can be traced back to these snippets; more often the reader gets a tantalizing glimpse into potential stories that were never written—like fish that he tossed back.

The circumstances of his travel, along with the limitations of the French-Russian postal service during his convalescence in Nice in the fall of 1897, led him to write more than usual in his notebook during that time. He jotted down impressions from a visit to a casino:

October 9. I saw B.’s mother playing roulette. Unpleasant sight.

November 15. Monte Carlo. I saw how the croupier stole a louis d’or.

Compare Dostoevsky, himself a gambling addict, who wrote an entire novel, (The Gambler), in which the casino serves as a metaphor for hell, and gambling itself is a life-or-death game with fate, and all of it is packaged as an exposé of the evils of Western European secular culture.

Chekhov’s undated notebook entries (presented here in Constance Garnett’s translations) recall the format of his early comic stories, an entire world in a phrase:

The French say: “Laid comme un chenille”—as ugly as a caterpillar.

That sudden and ill-timed love-affair may be compared to this: you take boys somewhere for a walk; the walk is jolly and interesting—and suddenly one of them gorges himself with oil paint. The character in the play says to every one: “You’ve got worms.” He cures his daughter of the worms, and she turns yellow. A pregnant woman with short arms and a long neck, like a kangaroo. A man, who, to judge from his appearance, loves nothing but sausages and sauerkraut.

His income is twenty-five to fifty thousand, and yet out of poverty he shoots himself.

A government clerk gave his son a thrashing because he had only obtained five marks in all his subjects at school. It seemed to him not good enough. When he was told that he was in the wrong, that five is the highest mark obtainable, he thrashed his son again—out of vexation with himself.

The hen sparrow believes that her cock sparrow is not chirping but singing beautifully.

A large fat barmaid—a cross between a pig and white sturgeon.

Whenever he reads in the newspaper about the death of a great man, he wears mourning.

Z. goes to a doctor, who examines him and finds that he is suffering from heart disease. Z. abruptly changes his way of life, takes medicine, can only talk about his disease; the whole town knows that he has heart disease and all the doctors, whom he regularly consults, say that he has got heart disease. He does not marry, gives up amateur theatricals, does not drink, and when he walks does so slowly and hardly breathes. Eleven years later he has to go to Moscow and there he consults a specialist. The latter finds that his heart is perfectly sound. Z. is overjoyed, but he can no longer return to a normal life, for he has got accustomed to going to bed early and to walking slowly, and he is bored if he cannot speak of his disease. The only result is that he gets to hate doctors—that is all.

The wife cried. The husband took her by the shoulders and shook her, and she stopped crying.

He died from fear of cholera.

A gentleman owns a villa near Mentone; he bought it out of the proceeds of the sale of his estate in the Tula province. I saw him in Kharkhov to which he had come on business; he gambled away the villa at cards and became a railway clerk; after that he died.

The wife writes; the husband does not like her writing, but out of delicacy says nothing and suffers all his life.

An actress, forty years old, ugly, ate a partridge for dinner, and I felt sorry for the partridge, for it occurred to me that in its life it had been more talented, more sensible, and more honest than that actress.

(From Project Guttenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12494/12494.txt)

In a famous May 10, 1886 letter to his brother Alexander, Chekhov gave advice on how to write a good nature description. One key detail, fished out of the environment, is more effective than any attempt to catalogue all the elements in a scene:

In my opinion, descriptions of nature must be quite short and à propos. Commonplaces like “The setting sun, swimming in the waves of the darkening sea, bathed it in scarlet gold” etc., and “Swallows, flying over the surface of the water, chirped merrily”—this kind of commonplace needs to be tossed away. In descriptions of nature one must seize on specific details, assembling them in a particular way so that upon reading them, when you close your eyes, you see a picture. For example, you will get a moonlit night if you write that a bright star gleams in a broken bottle shard on a millpond dam and a plump black shadow of a dog or wolf darts past. Nature comes alive if you do not shrink from comparing its phenomena with human actions.

Chekhov cited this example in the 1886 story “The Wolf”; it also recurs later in The Seagull, when the young writer Treplyov characterizes his rival Trigorin’s craft:

My description of the moonlit night is long and unnatural. Trigorin has worked out his methods; it’s easy for him … He has the neck of a broken bottle gleaming on the weir, and the millwheel’s black shadow—and there’s his moonlit night, but what I have is the shimmering light, and the silent twinkling of stars, and the distant sound of a piano, fading away in the quiet fragrant air … it’s agonizing.

Chekhov’s descriptions are ruthlessly efficient; not a word is out of place. Their power derives not merely from the writer’s ability to choose the precise word for a given artistic purpose; on a deeper level, they fit into his overall artistic sensibility, according to which what is left implicit is far more powerful than what is said or written directly. There is a whole picture behind every word, just as everything we say in life is only the tiniest fragment of the world we live in. Our language is limited; it is a miracle that we ever manage to communicate anything important. This fact reflects a general truth of psychology—an invisible threat is scarier than the scary thing we see before us; or of religion—the divine transcends any ability to capture or describe it in human language. Chekhov’s carefully chosen words enable the reader to reconstitute a whole world: the whole lake, not just the broken bottle; the inner life of the fish, even if the outer fish is the only thing we see. According to this principle, everything of importance lies beyond the words. The unfulfilled promise, the marriage proposal that does not come to pass, the justice that is not done, the gun that shoots offstage—all of these elements give Chekhov’s plots their power. A character’s unspoken thoughts bear her anguish. In “In the Ravine,” Lipa sits down by a pond, holding the corpse of her murdered baby. She is alone in the universe with her sorrow. A woman brings her horse to the water, but the horse does not drink. “It won’t drink….,” comments Lipa. That is all, but that is enough.

What might be called th...