How to Write Like Chekhov

A self-made man who worked his way out of the provincial port of Taganrog and a childhood marked by fiscal anxiety and low status, Chekhov was brutally honest in his assessment of self and others.¹⁶ His correspondence and his fiction are testaments to his truth-telling on all subjects— except for his health, about which he was in constant denial. His medical training and his devotion to the principles of the French physician Claude Bernard fed a staunchly materialist realism—and the willingness to call a spade a spade. In a famous letter to his editor Alexei Suvorin, Chekhov articulated the theoretical principle at the basis of his work: "You are confusing two notions, the solution of a problem and the correct posing of the question. Only the second is essential for the artist."¹⁷ If there was one thing in which Chekhov believed heart and soul it was in the transformative power of heeding this fundamental diagnostic imperative. Four years before his death, he wrote, looking back at his work, "I only wanted to tell people honestly: look, look at how badly you live, how boring are your lives. The important thing is that people should understand this; if they do understand this, they will certainly invent a different and a far better life. Man will become better only once we have shown him as he is."¹⁸

Russia in the final decades of the nineteenth century was still a nasty, brutish, unforgiving sort of place for someone not born into the aristocracy and thus lacking automatic admission to university study and a high-priced European grand tour, followed by an advantageous marriage and a sinecure in government service. Chekhov relied on himself— in life as well as in his art. He had no use for coteries, cliques, and societies. Moving in and out of literary and social milieus, he was immune to the intellectual fads for which educated, pedigreed Russians had an almost fatal weakness. Populism, socialism, decadence, symbolism, Tolstoy's dogma of nonresistance to evil and adulation of the peasant—all washed off Chekhov's back like so much rain. "I have peasant blood flowing in my veins," Chekhov wrote to Suvorin. "So I am not the one to be impressed by peasant virtues." Nor was he swayed by Tolstoy's fanatical asceticism about the virtue of abstinence from physical pleasures. "My sense of fair play tells me," he wrote, "that there is more love of humanity in steam and electricity than in chastity and abstention from meat."¹⁹

This pragmatic attachment to comfort and security— what we would call the "bourgeois values"—was only the material side of Chekhov's ethos of existential responsibility. A stoic by conviction and necessity, Chekhov sought a moral calculus by which modern man could live a virtuous and pleasurable life. His ill health in fact provided a constant "reality check" on what was important and what superfluous. Living with the omnipresent awareness of death, the tubercular Chekhov applied the yardstick of mortality to every expenditure of passion, irritation, despair, anguish, pettiness, hard-heartedness, greed, or vanity.

This proto-existential calculation might have struck contemporaries as amoral, but it was entirely consonant with the modern sensibility charted by, among others, Dosto- evsky, Nietzsche, and Freud. Theirs too was a universe from which God—the ultimate umpire of right and wrong, good and evil—had been banished. Chekhov, force-fed religion by a tyrannical father, had developed a spiritual allergy to absolutes. Yet he realized that by declaring God dead, modern man had not eliminated the problem of meaning and value; he had only moved its solution to another plane.

Chekhov's stories—even the earliest comic sketches dashed off for money—expose conventional piety as a feeble moral guide with a selective memory, ready to excuse every kind of viciousness in the name of abstractions (Order! Security! Family!). This was, in fact, the moral climate of the closing decades of the nineteenth century, when, exhausted by the legal, social, and economic reforms of Alexander II, Russia slumped into a stultifying inertia of official Orthodoxy and nationalism. Rather than tackling the big political issues, however, Chekhov took his moral crusade into the private lives of individuals. In his view, only the individual personality, unencumbered by dogma, could right the wrongs of a class, a nation, or an age and sow the seeds of genuine historical change. "I believe in particular people, I see salvation in particular personalities, scattered here and there throughout the whole of Russia—whether they are intellectuals or peasants, there is strength in them, though they are few."²⁰

skeptic

A physician with a deep understanding of the material causes of spiritual distress—poverty, malnutrition, poor hygiene, sexual frustration, sleep deprivation—Chekhov asked how one can live with dignity and joy without the Big Overseers of Religion, State, and Ideology looking over one's shoulder. As he famously confided in a letter to Alexei Pleshcheyev, "My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and absolute freedom, freedom from violence and falsehood, no matter what form these might take. This is the program to which I would adhere were I a great artist."²¹ In an age of creeping agnosticism, when death is the only absolute, Chekhov's protagonists eat, drink, work, court, and carry on trivial conversations between the iron necessity of death and the terrifying freedom to improvise meaning for life. Sentenced to die and powerless to chart the trajectories of their lives (which are usually entirely out of their control), all are shown, in ways subtle and small, as having the freedom to choose how to respond to the challenges and obstacles of the everyday. In a letter to his brother Nikolai, Chekhov sketched out this "gospel" in characteristically concrete terms, avoiding all abstraction:

Educated people, in my opinion, should satisfy the following conditions: They respect the individual, and therefore they are extremely tolerant, gentle, polite, and

compliant They don't make a fuss about a hammer or a

lost galosh They forgive noise, cold, overcooked meat,

and jokes. .They don't humiliate themselves with the aim of arousing somebody else's sympathy. They don't play on other people's heartstrings so as to be sighed and fussed over in return. They don't say: "Nobody understands me!" or: "I've wasted my talents!" ... They are not vain. They are not interested in such false treasures as acquaintance with celebrities. . They cultivate their aesthetic sense. They are incapable of going to sleep in their clothes, of seeing bedbugs in a crack in the wall, of breathing foul air, of walking on a floor that has been spat on, of eating things cooked on a kerosene stove.²²

The ethical code formulated in constant mindfulness of death includes aesthetics in a way that is familiar to us. For Chekhov, the good life is inseparable from the beautiful, and both require respect for nature. In his letters and his stories, Chekhov insists on seeing nature as the arena in which the fullness of the human personality can be given its scope. And it is in his characters' regard or disregard for the nonhuman beings of the world—plants and animals— that Chekhov finds the ethical core of individuals. In this respect too, he was prescient of our contemporary commitment to environmental responsibility by promoting the preservation of nature as the touchstone of the moral potential of man. As A. P. Chudakov reminds us, Chekhov "was the first literary figure to include in the ethical sphere man's attitude to nature."²³