How to Write Like Chekhov

The protagonist of his early play The Wood-Demon, a physician by the name of Khrushchov, sounds the clarion call of eco-activism when he protests his neighbor's decision to cut down a forest: "To fell a thousand trees, to destroy them for a couple of thousand rubles, for clothes for your womenfolk, for whims and luxury.. ,[t]o destroy them so that posterity will curse our barbarity!"²⁴ This sentiment echoes in a number of Chekhov's works—"Gooseberries," Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard—in the various iterations that eventually found their way into our environmentalist program. Chekhov's concern for the biosphere stems from a peasant's pragmatism but sounds like the formula for contemporary holistic thinking. For example, the protagonist of an early story notes: "The sun, the sky, the woods, the rivers, the creatures—it was all created, adapted, mutually adjusted. Everything was put in order and knows its place."²⁵

craftsman

Chekhov's life fit neatly within the life span of Leo Tolstoy, who preceded him by thirty-two years and outlived him by another six. The elder realist had much to teach the young doctor, but the precocious pupil forged boldly ahead into the faster rhythms, smaller forms, and telegraphic style fit for the coming century of progress, speed, and shortened attention spans. The two squared off like David and Goliath, the miniaturist versus the creator of what Henry James dubbed the "loose baggy monster" of War and Peace. Chekhov complained that tendentiousness and prejudice spoiled Tolstoy's prose. Tolstoy, for his part, lamented Chekhov's clinical training as a physician for the same reason. Yet the old man had profound admiration for the younger's achievement. "In Chekhov," Tolstoy wrote, "everything is real to the verge of illusion. His stories give the impression of a stereoscope. He throws words about in an apparent disorder, and, like an impressionist painter, he achieves wonderful results by his touches."²⁶

What were the touches that produced this unprecedented realism? His superbly crafted stories are modern because they have the appearance of being under-engineered. They give no answers. They don't insult our intelligence. They don't give short shrift to psychological complexities. They acknowledge the vast importance of the minute, venal things in life—like the pinching shoe and the borborygmi of the belly—as decisive for destiny. Chekhov recrafted the rules of engagement and moved the short story genre into the modern age, handing us a virtually new form, trimmed of its traditional fat and gristle. For one, he abolished the fussy, intrusive, judgmental narrators of the nineteenth century who insinuate themselves between the slice of life held up for scrutiny and the reader's eye. His narrator does not lead us by the hand or tell us when to laugh or cry, decry or applaud. He lets his characters speak their minds, in their own words, no matter how incoherently they may grope for the semblance of a thought. What they fail to say explicitly emerges from the silences, the gaps between words, and from the sparse notation of setting, atmosphere, gesture, and costume.

Chekhov posited an intelligent, independent-minded reader, someone who frankly acknowledges having trouble subscribing to cut-and-dried nostrums, religious frameworks, and conventional cant, who goes to fiction not in order to reinforce pet peeves or confirm what's already known. The Chekhovian reader wants to be challenged to think in unfamiliar ways, to be made uncomfortable, to be stretched and affronted, even bored and disappointed. Life, after all, is like that.

I like to think that if Chekhov's texts were buildings, they would be designed by Le Corbusier rather than by McKim, Mead, and White, the high priests of the frilly, ornamented confections of the Beaux Arts. Chekhov eliminates the frame—not always, to be sure, but generally. The conventional opening gambit of the short story inherited from Boccaccio and his Decameron is the narrative situation of a group of friends gathering, under some pretext or another, to exchange stories. Chekhov typically leaps into the thick of the action—or non-action, as the case may be—and trusts us to get our bearings from the subtle signposts he gives us.

He abhors clutter. In a letter to his brother Alexander, Chekhov writes, "There's no need to chase after a crowd of characters. Only two should be at the center of gravity: he and she."²⁷ His boilerplate advice on revisions is to throw out the first three pages and eliminate clichкs, redundancies, and ornament for its own sake. Chekhov's minimalist aesthetic is hard to pull off, because if one goes the route of "less is more," the "less" must derive from a very deep and extensive fund of knowledge. "It's not enough to put words together. One has to know something. One has to work at knowing something. One has to study and have something to say about the world. In short, one needs to be a scientist."

teacher

How relevant is the advice of someone writing over one hundred years ago—and, to make matters worse, in a place with cultural traditions, reading habits, and conventions seriously different from our own? As I have been trying to argue, Chekhov is neither anachronistic nor culturally narrow in his subject matter and in his form. His sublime stories are the best proof that, up against roughly the same pressures, distractions, impediments, and insecurities that we face today, he had a few tricks up his sleeve. Chekhov's life experience is particularly helpful to those of us who also need to blast a hole for writing in the logjams of our lives. His doubled professional life gave him the perfect balance between the potentially claustrophobic isolation that writing requires and the intense and extensive contact with the most diverse personalities and predicaments that medicine affords. As a physician—one pathetically inept at charging and collecting fees—he daily came into contact with the full gamut of human behavior. Every medical intervention became the occasion for a story. By the time he entered the field, medicine, at least as taught by his theoretical mentor Dr. Claude Bernard, had shed its cruder ties to moral and ethical etiology. In other words, rather than moralize overtly or by implication, medical science pathologized life. Throughout Chekhov's life, medicine remained a solid ally in helping him avoid the—to our sensibility—intrusive moralizing of a Dostoevsky or Tolstoy.

And finally, we want Chekhov's advice on writing because we frankly like him. The best sense of the man comes, not surprisingly, from his correspondence with the actress Olga Knipper, whom he courted and married before his death.²⁸ Her questions to him about his hygiene, dress, eating, sleeping, and working habits reveal a bachelor coddled by an adoring sister and mother; an obsessively gregarious host who could not say no to guests who sapped him of strength and time for his writing; a frail invalid husbanding his dwindling vital energy; a jealous, emotionally reticent lover loath to spill his guts; and a balding man squaring off against middle age by massaging hair tonics into his scalp. Writing came hard to him in his last years, when he challenged himself to write plays that would revolutionize the theater and short stories as terse as haiku.

writing matters

Chekhov had a deep motive for his aesthetic iconoclasm: he believed in the profoundly transformative power of art. Writing matters because, he was convinced, it has an impact on the ways in which we see reality, and by extension, the ways in which we eventually choreograph the relationships and responses in our lives. That is why in matters of craft Chekhov was an obsessive perfectionist who chronically missed deadlines and agonized over every adjective, comma, and semicolon. "In a work of art," he explained, "punctuation often plays the part of musical notation. It demands instinct and experience, not knowledge from a textbook."²⁹ If his contemporaries found his work disorienting, disturbing, and depressing, it was perhaps because he forced them into the terra incognita of a new, utterly modern sensibility that they felt themselves inadequate to enter. "New literary forms always produce new forms of life," he jotted in his notebook. "And that is why they are so revolting to the conservative human mind."³⁰