Even more telling is the character of the socially and politically active young girl, Lida Volchaninova, who appears in one of the most poetic stories of Chekhov's maturity, "The House with a Mansard." In his book on Chekhov, Kornei Chukovskv, a perceptive and knowledgeable Soviet critic, pretended to be puzzled why the do-gooder Chekhov depicted Lida so harshly and her idle younger sister with so much kindness and sympathy. "Hypnotized by Chekhov's magical craftsmanship, all of Russia fell poetically in love with this spineless, weak girl and came to despise her older sister for the very deeds and actions which not in literature, but in real life were so dear to Chekhov," Chukovsky wrote (the italics are his). "The Chekhov we know from innumerable memoirs and letters,—the district physician, the founder of libraries, the builder of schools—had he met Lida not in literature, but in life, would undoubtedly have become her faithful ally; but in literature he is her indicter and enemy."
In a book published in the Soviet Union, this is as far as Chukovsky could go in making his point, but the story itself tells us more. Yes, there is no doubt that Lida's social-improvement program parallels Chekhov's own. But this outwardly civilized partisan of civil rights is in her private life an authoritarian who keeps her mother and sister in fear and subjugation. She is also a political fanatic. When her political convictions are brought into question and challenged by the artist-narrator with whom her sister is in love, Lida steps in and brutally breaks up their love affair. The very act of questioning her cherished political views is seen by Lida as a threat to her dominant position in the family—and she strikes out at her opponent with every ethical and unethical means she can muster. In this story, political fanaticism is as inhuman and as destructive as religious fanaticism was in "Peasant Women" and "The Murder."
Unlike Lida and Dr. Lvov, other Chekhovian characters who are committed to revolutionary change are not necessarily dehumanized by rigid fanaticism and the dogmatic classification of all mankind into "us" and "them." There is the appealing Sasha in "The Bride," the naively idealistic Petya Trofimov in The Cherry Orchard and Vladimir, the intellectual would-be terrorist who narrates "An Unknown Man's Story" ("An Anonymous Story" in Constance Garnett's English version). Vladimir could agree to commit a political assassination in principle, but he was unable to bring it off once he came to see his intended victim as an individual human being rather than an abstract political cipher. With the hindsight of the second half of the twentieth century, it is not difficult to imagine this entire group of dedicated, revolutionarv-minded young people succeeding in their efforts to overthrow the old regime and to redress its wrongs. But the next step would inevitably be for Dr. Lvov and Lida Volchaninova to purge the individualistic Sasha, the excessively idealistic Petya Trofimov and the ideologically unstable hero of "An Unknown Man's Story" to impose their own simple-minded dogmatism on everyone else and call the results the ultimate liberation. Yes, perhaps stubborn old Nikolai Mikhailovsky, who so persistently accused Chekhov of slandering the ideals of the Russian revolutionary movement, was more perceptive and honest than the official
Soviet criticism of our day, with its compulsory eulogies of the progressive Chekhov.
While Chekhov valued and appreciated the many genuinely liberating and democratic trends that the enlightened anti-government intelligentsia of his time was helping to further, his idea of social involvement and of activism was basically different from theirs. For Chekhov's contemporaries, as for many Western commentators on Russian literature today, the standard examples of socially involved turn-of-the-century writers are Tolstoy with his defiance of the government, his excommunication from the Orthodox Church and defense of persecuted religious sects, and the young Maxim Gorky, with his support of the revolutionary movement and his fund-raising campaigns for outlawed political parties. Such actions are remembered because they are dramatic; their effect depends on dramatizing current political issues by deliberately attracting public attention to them. But in its own way Anton Chekhov's life was probably more filled with direct involvement in valid social and humanitarian activity than that of any other writer one could name. His life was one continuous round of alleviating famine, fighting epidemics, building schools and public roads, endowing libraries, helping organize marine- biologv laboratories, giving thousands of needy peasants free medical treatment, planting gardens, helping fledgling writers get published, raising funds for worthwhile causes, and hundreds of other pursuits designed to help his fellow man and improve the general quality of life around him. If Chekhov's foreign admirers usually think of his trip to the penal colony on the island of Sakhalin as the one exceptional humanitarian act of his life, it is because this trip has been misrepresented by commentators to look like an act of open political defiance, such as Western readers have traditionally come to expect of Russian writers.
There are two main reasons why Chekhov's social activism has not been sufficiently stressed by his commentators and biographers (Kornei Chukovsky's book is the only one that emphasizes this aspect of Chekhov and does it ably and forcefully). One reason is that the genuinely modest Chekhov avoided personal publicity and would select causes not likely to attract sensation-seeking journalists. But the more important reason is that the basic outlook of the Russian liberal intelligentsia was derived from the field of the social sciences, humanities and, in some important instances, religion, while Chekhov's continuous commitment to medicine and the biological sciences in general gave him an entirely different set of priorities, both in his life and in literature. For his Russian contemporaries, Chekhov's efforts to prevent a cholera epidemic, his involvement in census taking both on Sakhalin and at his own estate of Melikhovo, his concern for the mistreatment of the Tatars, Gilyaks and Ainus, his alarm over the disappearance of wildlife were simply not as interesting as Tolstoy's or Gorky's open defiance of the tsarist government. This attitude is still evident in various Western biographies, television programs and biographical plays, which project the same tired stereotypes of the dynamic activist Gorky contrasted with the withdrawn, sad and resigned Anton Pavlovich Chekhov. But perhaps we are at long last ready to perceive the true value of Chekhov's wider-ranging and, in the long run, more realistic humanitarian concerns, which are focused on the physical and biological realities of man's existence and future rather than on the topical political passions of a particular decade.
Chekhov himself was well aware of the paramount importance of his training in the biological sciences for his general outlook and for his formation as a literary artist (Letter 130). This training and his constant reading of Darwin, of books by travelers and explorers such as Nevelskov and Przhevalskv, and of Russian biological scientists enabled him to bring to Russian literature dimensions and methods that were very much at odds with most of its previous assumptions. Instead of starting from a preconceived moral, sociological or religious position, Chekhov begins with scrupulously unbiased observations of the life around him, and he refrains from deriving sweeping social generalizations from an insufficient body of observable facts. Whereas the attempts of Chekhov's French contemporaries, especially Zola and Maupassant, to apply the methodology of the biological sciences to literary art sometimes reduced their peasant and proletarian characters to the level of laboratory animals subjected to vivisection, Chekhov's unfailing humanity and compassion led him to an approach closer to that of a doctor observing his patients for symptoms. However, Chekhov refrained from prescribing a cure—his vocation as a writer did not entitle him to prescribe panaceas for humanity's ills, something that all too many Russian novelists and especially critics have had no qualms about doing.