How to Write Like Chekhov

For Chekhov, there could be no contradiction between action and observation because for him observation—objective, scrupulous, open-minded, and profoundly respectful—was itself the most hopeful and productive form of action. Contemporary writers—for instance, the Italian Natalia Ginzburg (1916-91), recognize this fine balance between the "engagement" of the socially committed intellectual and the "disengagement" of the observer as "absolutely necessary, indispensable for a novelist."⁷

I have heard it said that dancers learn, not by watching the teacher or the star pupil, but by imitating those who are just a bit better than they are. The same holds for writing. I do not know how this works; I only know that one learns from Chekhov. Maybe, as Vladimir Nabokov suggested, this is due to his "phenomenal sociability"—"his constant readiness to hobnob with anyone at all, to sing with singers and to get drunk with drunkards."⁸ This gregarious spirit emerges even in the collage of fragments taken from the research and writing program that Chekhov used in investigating a penal colony located on a remote island in the Sea of Okhotsk. And it is in this spirit of convivial collegiality that we offer this book. We hope that it will prove to be a useful guide and that it might even relieve the solitude of those who wish to write, who love to travel responsibly, and who keep close to their hearts the ideal of a kind of writing that is precise, honest, and engaged.

INTRODUCTION BY LENA LENCEK

"A man needs only seven feet of earth." "No, it's a corpse that needs seven feet, not a man. A man needs the whole world."

—Anton Chekhov⁹

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mong nineteenth-century Russian authors, Anton Chekhov holds the record for worst publicists. Writers, critics, and friends who in life professed boundless admiration for his work damned him with the kind of praise that kills reputations. Here are some examples: "Tchekhov was the poet of hopelessness. Stubbornly, sadly, monotonously, during all the years of his literary activity, nearly a quarter of a century long, Tchekhov was doing one thing alone: by one means or another he was killing human hopes."¹⁰ Or another, by his theatrical collaborator Constantin Stanislavsky: "The Chekhov mood is that cave in which are kept all the unseen and hardly palpable treasures of Chekhov's soul."¹¹ Maxim Gorky, who owed Chekhov a vast debt of gratitude for tireless mentoring and encouragement, came up with the following: "The author's mind...shows up in hard outline the monotonous roads, the crooked streets, the little squalid houses in which tiny, miserable people are stifled by boredom and laziness and fill the houses with an unintelligible, drowsy bustle."¹² Prerevolutionary and Soviet critics doggedly promoted Chekhov as a kind of aesthetic phenobarbi- tal, labeling him as "a singer of twilight moods," "a poet of superfluous people," "a sick talent," "a poet of anguish," a voice of "world sorrow," and—the clincher in the bunch— an "optimopessimist."¹³

That after such an introduction—much of it crammed onto the back cover of a repulsive puce-and-avocado-col- ored paperback—I would have ventured into the gloom- shrouded isle of Chekhov still amazes me. I was eighteen and had made my way through an archipelago of Russian writers, from Pushkin through Tolstoy, and so far each stop had been a luminous revelation. I loved the way these wordsmiths and plot-meisters seized my imagination, drilled into the core of adolescent angst, and delivered answers to my deepest questions about why the world was the way it was. From Pushkin's effervescent irony, I passed to Gogol's sublime buffoonery to Turgenev's elegiac polemics, Dostoevsky's sin-your-way-to-Jesus verities, and the steely morality of Tolstoy clad in the velvet glove of flawless realism.

By the time I reached Chekhov, I was in full novel gear. I could cruise effortlessly through digression-studded, intricate plots, protracted philosophical ruminations, oddly gripping debates on obscure topics, and, of course, the rich roll call of characters identified by baroque naming protocols— given name, patronymic, surname, plus a dozen affectionate and abusive derivatives. I was not prepared for brevity, nuance, and plotlessness.

Chekhov turned out to be a giant among writers: lapidary, subtle, generous, infectious, and respectful of his readers in ways that the other Russians with better PR could not even imagine. He published 568 stories in a lifetime that spanned a total of 44 years. He corresponded with all the major and minor writers, critics, and artists of his time; mentored dozens of aspiring authors; and left a legacy that included copious advice on the art of writing—and living—well.

iconoclast

Chekhov's contemporaries might have found him the incarnation of melancholy, but I rather suspect that they were at a loss for how to peg his startlingly novel voice. That elusive hovering between tragedy and comedy that marks his work is in fact the first murmuring of a characteristically modern consciousness and sensibility. By this I mean our unease with a spectrum of reductive explanations (ideologies, dogmas, organized religion), our skepticism, anxiety, appetite for every pleasure of the flesh, irony, and commitment to a single, terrifying value: freedom. Rich with the sociological, economic, and political complexities of late czarist Russia from which they draw their local color, Chekhov's stories offer few consolations to readers seeking escape from quotidian banalities or rules of conduct. They offer no palliatives, no ultimate solutions rooted in metaphysics.

Working at a time when Russian readers expected their writers to preach in the tones of Old Testament prophets, Chekhov was a bewildering anomaly. Since Peter the Great had revolutionized Russia "from above" by imposing a west European "high culture" and a stringently autocratic rule buttressed by Orthodoxy, secret police, and censorship, Russians had come to rely on their imaginative literature to perform the role that public discourse plays in the West. To do so, however, Russian writers had to adopt rhetorical subterfuges that masked their true targets, and readers adapted by learning to decipher the double-coded allusions to forbidden topics. So, for nearly two hundred years, fictions, ingeniously couched in "Aesopian language," spoke to every political development in the czarist establishment and the world at large. But in Chekhov's little stories, readers looked in vain for allusions to current events and editorial commentary. His tales about ordinary people doing ordinary things in ordinary places offered a stark moraclass="underline" live fully, simply, with integrity, paying attention to every instant, every sensation, and every interaction.

Chekhov sounded a prophetic retreat from the oracular mission of the writer that had been the earmark of Russian artistic prose. "All great sages are as despotic as generals," he confided to Suvorin. "So to hell with the philosophy of the great men of this world!"¹⁴ Instead, the epistemology on which he built his aesthetics required a vow of humility and a preliminary admission of ignorance. "It is high time for writers, and especially for true artists," insisted Chekhov, "to admit that it's impossible to explain anything. Socrates acknowledged this long ago, as did Voltaire. Only the crowd thinks it knows and understands everything there is to know and understand. And the more stupid it is, the more open- minded it thinks itself to be. But if an artist whom the crowd trusts admits that he understands nothing of what he sees, this fact alone will make a great contribution to the realm of thought and will mark a great step forward."¹⁵ Here, Chekhov's thinking is truly revolutionary, for no other Russian writing before him had pared down the list of prerequisites for authoritative authorial speech to a negative trait: the refusal to claim knowledge in the face of its absence.