Chekhov's libertarian views, his moral relativism, his recognition that there could be a variety of acceptable and valid approaches to many fundamental issues, his hatred and resentment of dividing people into categories and pinning simplistic labels on them were clearly at variance with much of the Russian culture of his day and would be most unwelcome, were they to be openly recognized, in the Soviet Union. The uniqueness of his views within the Russian intellectual tradition has led to much distortion, both deliberate and unconscious, of Chekhov's attitudes by modern Russian commentators. Remarkably few Russians who have written on Chekhov have shown the perception and acceptance of his modes of thinking that we can find in the better discussions of his work by the more understanding foreign critics. There is nothing in Russian critical literature that for empathy and penetration could be placed next to the journals of the French critic Charles Du Bos (who understood Chekhov better than any other critic who ever lived, but who refrained from writing a book on him for fear that he didn't understand him enough), "The Russian Point of View" by Virginia Woolf or "Seeing Chekhov Plain" by Edmund Wilson. Creative Russian writers and Russian poets, on the other hand, have been able to see into Chekhov with a freshness and spontaneity that seem beyond the grasp of Russian critics. So, by way of summary, three views of Chekhov by three of Russia's most outstanding twentieth-century poets are hereby offered.
In 1914, the twenty-one-year-old Vladimir Mayakovsky commemorated the tenth anniversary of Chekhov's death with a jaunty, irreverent little essay called "The Two Chekhovs." Written at a time when Mayakovsky was one of the leaders of Russian Futurism, the essay, for all its youthful desire to shock, remains to this day one of the most intelligent appraisals of Chekhov's role in Russian literature. In its level-headed insistence that Chekhov is important as an innovative literary artist rather than as a sociological phenomenon, Mayakovsky's Chekhov essay was the signal for the soon-to-develop Formalist school of Russian criticism (which was closely allied with Mayakovsky and his Futurists). Its concluding passages read:
Chekhov's language is as precise as "Hello!" and as simple as "Give me a glass of tea/' In his method of expressing the idea of a compact little story, the urgent cry of the future is felt: "Economy!"
It is these new forms of expressing an idea, this true approach to art's real tasks, that give us the right to speak of Chekhov as a master of verbal art.
Behind the familiar Chekhovian image created by the philistines, that of a grumbler displeased with everything, the defender of "ridiculous people" against society, behind Chekhov the twilight bard we discern the outlines of the other Chekhov: the joyous and powerful master of the art of literature.
In 1929, Boris Poplavsky, one of the finest poets of the Russian emigration, the author of brilliant surrealist and at times mystical poems, made this entry in his personal journaclass="underline"
Dostoeysky cannot help us live, he can only help us when we quarrel, separate, die. Tolstoy perhaps could, but how revolting is his eulogizing of bourgeois prosperity,—the Levins, the end of W. and P. Now Chekhov— yes, Chekhov can help us live, he and Lermontov.
A few pages later we read:
Chekhov teaches me to endure in my own spccial way, not to give up, to keep hoping, for there is much in Chekhov that is Roman, there is-much of some kind of "no matter what happens," of quand тёте.
And still further:
Chekhov is the most [Russian] Orthodox of Russian writers or more correctly the only Orthodox Russian writer. For what is Russian Orthodoxy if not absolute forgiveness, absolute refusal to condemn.
And in the early 1950s, Boris Pasternak's hero in Doctor Zhivago, who, like Chekhov, combined literature with medicine, wrote the lines that could not help but be the expression of the author's view as welclass="underline"
Of things Russian, I love now most of all the Russian childlike quality of Pushkin and Chekhov, their shy lack of concern over such momentous matters as the ultimate aims of mankind and their own salvation. They understood all that very well, but they were far too modest and considered such things beyond their rank and position. Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky prepared for death, worried, searched for meaning, drew final conclusions, but those two were to the end distracted by the current private interests of their artistic calling and in this preoccupation lived out their lives also as a private matter of no concern to anyone else. And now, this private matter turns out to be of general concern and, like apples removed from the tree to ripen, keeps filling of itself in posterity with ever greater sweetness and meaning.
No, these three major Russian poets did not see Chekhov as a prophet of despair, as that jigsaw puzzle's ugly and morose tapeworm. All three would have agreed with Charles Du Bos, who wondered why so many people found depressing instead of bracing Chekhov's combination of an unflinching look at life's realities with a deep compassion. Perhaps the readers of Anton Chekhov's letters selected for this volume will also come to see this supreme realist in life and in literature as Mayakovsky, Pop- lavsky, Pasternak and Du Bos were able to see him, rather than as that hazy twilight creature of created legend who has been usurping the real Chekhov's place for so long.
Simon Karlinsky
THE TAGANROG METAMORPHOSIS
The most decisive development in the spiritual and intellectual formation of Anton Chekhov took place during the least well-documented period of his life, between the ages of sixteen and nineteen. Left alone in his native city of Taganrog after his father's bankruptcy forced the rest of the family to move to Moscow, supporting himself by tutoring younger students at the school he attended, reading voraciously at the Taganrog public library, the young Anton gradually replaced the patriarchal peasant and merchant-class values in which he had been brought up with their very opposite, the intellectual and ethical values of the liberal nineteenth- century intelligentsia. Chekhov's two older brothers, Alexander and Nikolai, had gone through similar transformations somewhat earlier when they went off to study in Moscow, but Anton's spiritual metamorphosis was both less violent in its expression and more thoroughgoing than that of his brothers. Typically, Chekhov's liberation from the traditions and values of his parents did not take the form of a violent rebellion against his parents and against the entire social structure of his country, as had been the case with so many young Russians of his time. The actual process was later described by Chekhov with exemplary objectivity and precision in the much-quoted passage from his letter to Suvorin (Letter 15 in the present collection) about the young man, son of a serf, a former grocer, who rids himself of the servile thinking instilled by his upbringing, and by squeezing the slave out of himself, drop by drop, awakes one fine morning feeling that the blood flowing in his veins is no longer that of a slave but that of a real human being.