Yet, for all these examples, religion, Christianity and the Church in Chekhov's work are totally divorced from the very things they are traditionally supposed to promote in Western civilization: morality, kindness and ethical treatment of fellow human beings. There are people in Chekhov's stories who are naturally good and kind, and religious belief or going to church are not shown to affect their natural goodness in one way or the other. But the unkind and the uncharitable in Chekhov's work, the exploiters and the manipulators, can and do use religion self-righteously and with impunity to further their selfish ends. The closest we come to an out- and-out villain in Chekhov's writings is the pious, churchgoing peasant Matvei in "Peasant Women," who uses religious teachings and prayers to rid himself of the woman he has seduced, to betray her, to frame her for a crime she probably did not commit and, after her death, to exploit and terrorize her small son. Another churchgoing Christian, the shopkeeper Andrei in "The Requiem," condemns his actress daughter as a harlot and is enabled by his religious beliefs to persist in this condemnation even after his priest explains to him how wrong he is. A whole gallery of cultivated upper-class ladies in Chekhov's stories use their church-sanctioned positions as Christian wives and mothers to humiliate other human beings (the professor's wife in "A Dreary Story"), to assert their own smug superiority (Maria Konstantinovna in "The Duel") or to bludgeon another person into submission (the wife in "The Chorus Girl"). The wise old professor in "A Dreary Story" drives this point home when he remarks that "virtue and purity are little different from vice when they are practiced in the spirit of unkindness."
While Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky both believed that Christian faith was the main source of moral strength for the impoverished and ignorant Russian peasants, Chekhov's much more closely observed and genuinely experienced picture of peasant life shows nothing of the sort. In the poverty- ridden world of "The Peasants," religion and the Church do nothing whatsoever to raise the moral or ethical level of the benighted peasantry, whose religious expression takes the form of superstition or of empty and meaningless ritual (this story so contradicted everything Tolstoy believed about Russian peasant religiosity that he called it a "sin against the Russian people"). In Chekhov's most brutal and violent story, "The Murder," a family of peasant religious fanatics are led by their search for God to hate and brutalize each other and to commit a religiously motivated murder.
In a literature that had produced Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Leskov, the view that Christianity and religion in general are morally neutral is startling enough. This view is clearly subversive from the point of view of all established churches, but Chekhov's simultaneous insistence that religious experience can be tremendously enriching and rewarding when it brings consolation and spiritual profundity into people's lives sits very badly with his Soviet commentators and annotators, who are duty- bound to represent all religion as exploitative and reactionary. Chekhov's view of sex, however, is even more startling, coming as it does from a writer raised in the second half of the nineteenth century. For Chekhov, sex, like religion, is also a morally neutral quantity, whose moral and ethical implications depend on the circumstances and the attitudes of the people involved. Had Chekhov stated such a view openly and militantly in the midst of the Victorian age in which he was living, he would have been dismissed as a crackpot by almost everyone. Because of his usual gentle and subdued mode of presentation, he was able to make his point without shocking too many people—but it was at the cost of having his views in this area almost overlooked.
In the eighteenth century, and especially during the reign of Catherine the Great, Russian literature enjoyed considerable freedom in treating sexual themes. Alexander Pushkin, who was the last nineteenth-century Russian writer to have profound ties with eighteenth-century traditions, was also the last to write openly and without guilt about the joys of sexual love. Pushkin's remarkably free treatment of sexual themes (including an early poem about female masturbation and a verse epistle addressed to a homosexual friend whom Pushkin invited for a visit, with the assurance that, although he himself was not available, he would be happy to introduce the visitor to some like-minded young men) was no longer possible when the long night of Victorian repression of all sexuality descended on Russia, as it did on other European countries. The change of sexual attitudes is reflected in Pushkin's outlook as compared with that of Nikolai Gogol, who was only ten years younger. When the young Pushkin contracted gonorrhea, he informed some of his friends of the fact in a tone of puckish humor and with a touch of pride about having thus confirmed his full manhood. But when Gogol's mother, less than two decades later, mistook a skin rash described in one of his letters for a venereal disease symptom, Gogol replied in a hysterical letter that if he had had such a loathsome disease he would have banished himself from the company of all decent men and never dared to see his mother again. It is highly instructive to compare Chekhov's nonjudgmental, matter-of-fact discussion of syphilis in Letter 91 to the just-cited letters of Pushkin and Gogol. Gogol might well be a special case, obsessed as he was by fear of the exposure of his homosexuality and by his terror of sexually available women. Because of all this, he shrouded the considerable sexual content of his work in such a mist of symbols and surrealist fantasies that it took the twentieth-century sensibility to discern it at all.
By mid-century, Victorian sexual taboos were fully operative in Russian literature and in Russian culture in general. For Dostoyevsky, the whole of the sexual sphere was sinful, depraved and threatening, albeit secretly attractive and fascinating, especially in its possibilities for mutual humiliation of the partners. It was clearly the sado-masochistic aspects of sex, its potential for human degradation, that interested Dostoyevsky most of all; and also its paradoxical role as a steppingstone toward redemption, as the ordeal of Sonya Marmeladova in Crime and Punishment was meant to demonstrate. For Tolstoy, on the other hand, sexuality, and especially female sexuality, was a sin pure and simple. If at the time of War and Peace sexual relations could be justified for Tolstoy by procreation and by building up a family, for the post-conversion Tolstoy, who wrote The Kreutzer Sonata and Resurrection, all sexuality, including sex within marriage, was an abomination that could lead only to total perdition. Against this background of fear, guilt and sexual repression, Chekhov's attitudes toward sex come as a refreshing breath of sanity.
Of course, Anton Chekhov was a man of his time. He did not try to write of sexual love with the same freedom that Pushkin enjoyed and that he himself occasionally displayed in his private letters (making some of them unpublishable in Russian to this day). Nor could he permit himself the open treatment of the less-usual forms of sexuality which had been possible in the eighteenth century and became briefly possible again in the first two decades of the twentieth for certain Russian writers of the Symbolist period. But his ideal of the utmost literary objectivity prevented him from overlooking this basic human drive, from substituting the subjectively desirable in this sphere for that which actually exists, and from imposing moralizing sanctions and inflicting morally motivated penalties on his "transgressing" (i.e., sexually liberated) characters, as had been the custom in the literature of his time.