After 1886, Chekhov stopped using such overtly comical names, but in later stories we still find characters like Zhmukhin in “The Pecheneg” (1897), whose name, while credible enough, also suggests pushing, squeezing, oppression. Chekhov also persisted in his transcribing of noises. The dog in “The Teacher of Literature” (1894) does not simply bark; his “grrr…nya-nya-nya-nya” pervades the story. The night owl in “The Pecheneg” keeps calling “Sleep! Sleep!” The wind howls “Hoo! Hoo!” And in his descriptions of nature there is a pervasive anthropomorphism—trees that swoon, rivers that speak, the “malicious, but deeply unhappy” storm in “On the Road” (1886), the previous day’s mist in “Fear” (1892), which “timidly pressed itself to the bushes and hummocks.” In a letter of May 10, 1886, to his older brother Alexander, who was also trying to be a writer, he offers some advice:
For instance, you will succeed in depicting a moonlit night if you write that on the mill dam a piece of glass from a broken bottle flashed like a bright star and the black shadow of a dog or wolf rolled along like a ball and so forth. Nature comes alive if you’re not squeamish about comparing natural phenomena to human actions…
*1
Yet in a letter dated January 14, 1887, to an acquaintance, Maria Kiselyova, who complained to him that he kept digging in the “dung heap” of immorality, Chekhov asserts: “What makes literature art is precisely its depiction of life as it really is. Its charge is the unconditional and honest truth.” And further on he says of the writer: “He’s no different from the run-of-the-mill reporter.”*2 It is true that Chekhov’s stories are filled with details of everyday existence, often very dark and always very keenly observed. He had an unusually wide personal experience of Russian life on all levels, and portrays a great variety of people: landowners, peasants, the military, bureaucrats, farmers, townspeople, clergy high and low, provincial school teachers, intellectuals, university students, boys, mistresses, wives, hunters, shepherds. In one story the central character is a boy two years and eight months old; in another the central character is a dog. But the stories he tells about them are hardly run-of-the-mill reporting.
The formal variety of Chekhov’s stories is also far from “slice-of-life” realism. Sometimes he chooses suspended moments—on a train, on the road, in a cart—that allow for unexpected revelations, or pseudo-revelations. Many are essentially monologues, which occasionally lead to surprise reversals. In “The Siren” (1887), after a court session, the court secretary entices his superiors, even the stern philosopher, with an inspired and minutely detailed five-page discourse on Russian eating and drinking, ending with honey-spice vodka, of which he says: “After the first glass, your whole soul is engulfed in a sort of fragrant mirage, and it seems that you are not at home in your armchair, but somewhere in Australia, on some sort of ultrasoft ostrich…” There are doublings, as in the early “Fat and Skinny” or the late “Big Volodya and Little Volodya.” In his notes for the rather grim story “The Bet” (1889), he first refers to it as “a fairy tale.” The formal qualities of storytelling, of parables, anecdotes, and morality tales, are present throughout his work. It is nurtured by tradition, though he puts that tradition to his own use.
Chekhov was well aware of the political movements of his time and their main spokesmen. His characters refer at various moments to Sergei Aksakov and the Slavophiles, to the Nihilists, to the utilitarian Dmitri Pisarev, to the populist Nikolai Mikhailovsky, as well as to the French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the German philosopher Schopenhauer. He was friends with the conservative writer, journalist, and editor Alexei Suvorin, who published many of his stories in his journal Novoye Vremya (“New Times”), but he did not share the editor’s increasingly reactionary views, and broke with him over the controversy of the Dreyfus affair. Chekhov never espoused any ideas as a writer; he had no program, no ideology; the critics of his time wondered what his work was “about.” Tolstoy wrote of him in a letter to his son dated September 4, 1895: “he has not yet revealed a definite point of view.”*3 Chekhov revealed his attitude to the peasantry by offering a large number of them free medical treatment while living on his small country estate in Melikhovo. He showed his concern for the environment, not like the old man in “The Shepherd’s Pipe,” who bemoans at great length the dying out of nature, but by planting trees, like Doctor Astrov in the play Uncle Vanya.
In his stories, Chekhov does what storytellers have always done: he satirizes human pretensions and absurdities, he plays out the comedy of human contradictions, and ultimately, even in the darkest of them, he celebrates natural and human existence in all its conditional variety.
Richard Pevear
*1
Translation by Cathy Popkin, in her edition of
Anton Chekhov’s Collected Stories
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2014), p. 517.
*2
Popkin, p. 518.
*3
Popkin, p. 505.
JOY
IT WAS MIDNIGHT.
Mitya Kuldarov, agitated, disheveled, came flying into his parents’ apartment and quickly passed through all the rooms. His parents had already turned in for the night. His sister was lying in bed, reading the last page of a novel. His schoolboy brothers were asleep.
“Where have you been?” his astonished parents asked. “What’s the matter with you?”
“Oh, don’t ask! I never expected it! No, I never expected it! It’s…it’s even incredible!”
Mitya laughed loudly and sat down in an armchair, unable to stay on his feet from happiness.
“It’s incredible! You can’t even imagine! Just look!”
His sister jumped out of bed and, covering herself with a blanket, went over to her brother. The schoolboys woke up.
“What’s the matter? You don’t look yourself!”
“It’s from joy, Mama! I’m known all over Russia now! All over! Before only you knew that in this world there existed the Collegiate Registrar Dmitri Kuldarov,1 but now all of Russia knows it! Mama! Oh, lord!”
Mitya jumped up, ran through all the rooms, and sat down again.
“But what’s happened? Just tell us!”
“You live like wild animals, don’t read newspapers, don’t pay any attention to publicity, yet there are so many amazing things in the newspapers! When something happens, it gets known right away, nothing escapes them! I’m so happy! Oh, lord! Newspapers only write about famous people, and now they’ve written about me!”
“What’s that? Where?”
The papa went pale. Mama glanced at the icon and crossed herself. The schoolboys leaped out of their beds and, just as they were, in their nightshirts, went up to their older brother.
“That’s right! They’ve written about me! Now all of Russia knows me! Take this issue as a keepsake, mama! We’ll reread it sometimes. Look here!”
Mitya took a newspaper from his pocket, gave it to his father, and poked his finger at a place circled in blue pencil.
“Read!”
His father put on his spectacles.
“Go on, read!”
Mama glanced at the icon and crossed herself. The papa cleared his throat and began to read:
“On December 29th, at eleven o’clock in the evening, the Collegiate Registrar Dmitri Kuldarov…”
“You see, you see? Go on!”
“…the Collegiate Registrar Dmitri Kuldarov, leaving the alehouse on Malaya Bronnaya Street, at Kozikhin’s, and being in a state of inebriation…”
“It was me and Semyon Petrovich…It’s all described in minute detail! Keep reading! Go on! Listen!”