Sherbinin points out in her book Chekhov and Russian Religious Culture that “Chekhov was the Russian writer most conversant with the rites and texts of Orthodoxy, as jarring as such a claim might seem, given the centrality of Christian thought to the giants of nineteenth-century letters.” It is to the gloomy childhood lived under the rule of the harsh, fanatical father that Chekhov owed this preeminence. While Tolstoy was playing tennis, Chekhov was poring over Scripture or singing akathistoi. When he reached adulthood, Chekhov was, perforce, an authority on religion. His writer and artist friends would consult him on fine points of the Bible and the liturgy. The painter I. E. Repin, for example, while working on a painting of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, enlisted Chekhov’s help in determining whether there had been a moon on the night of the vigil. The mystery of how the grandson of a serf, growing up in semipoverty in an uncouth small town, became one of the world’s great writers becomes less mysterious when we take into account the extent to which his religious education prepared him for a literary career. When he began to write his powerful, elliptical stories, he had models ready to hand— the powerful, elliptical stories of the Bible. Chekhov is said to be the father of the modern short story. It might be more accurate (and helpful to contemporary writers wishing to learn from him) to think of him as the genius who was able to cut to the quick of biblical narrative. The brevity, density, and waywardness of Chekhov’s stories are qualities characteristic of Bible stories.
In a story written in 1886 called “Panic Fears,” the unidentified narrator relates three incidents of uncanniness. The second and third of them turn out to have natural explanations: a railway car with no engine speeding along a railroad track turns out to be a car that got unyoked from a train going up a hill, and a big black dog with a sinister, mythic aura wandering in the forest turns out to be just a dog who has strayed from its master. But the first mystery— a strange light glimmering in the window of a church belfry, which neither comes from within nor is a reflection of anything without—is never solved. The story’s position on the supernatural is unclear. Chekhov could be saying that since two of the three mysteries had natural explanations, the remaining one probably does, too—we just don’t know what it is. Or he could be saying that there are more things in heaven and earth than rationalism can account for. Chekhov’s allusions to religion are like the strange light. Since he was secretive about his work, what he “meant” by his repeated references to the rituals and texts of the religion he had abjured remains anyone’s guess. The Jacksonian critics are careful never to claim that they have found their way to Chekhov’s intentions. They frankly acknowledge the doubt that is the matrix of their work. But perhaps it is precisely because the whole thing is so mystifying—Does Chekhov actually believe? Are the religious allusions conscious and purposeful?—that it stimulates such audacious critical thought. Every work of genius is attended by mystery, of course; criticism can no more account for art’s radiance than the narrator of “Panic Fears” can account for the sourceless light. But the steady gaze of the Jacksonian critics gives their conjectures a special authority: they do not stray from the text; they keep their eye on the light.
Six
At the beginning of “The Student” (1894), Chekhov offers an arresting aural image: in a swamp “something alive droned pitifully with a sound like blowing into an empty bottle.” On my first night at the Hotel Yalta, lying in bed, I heard just such a sound coming in through the window, as relentlessly as a foghorn, but because Chekhov, too, had heard the call of this night creature, I went to sleep soothed and happy. The next night, when I heard the sound again, I realized that no bird or frog could be making a sound so regular and mechanical. What I was hearing was obviously coming from a piece of machinery at the swimming pools or one of the outbuildings. My imaginings thus rearranged, I found the sound irritating and could not fall asleep for a long time. Incidents from my second day with Sonia in Moscow—of a piece with the grating persistence of the sound—came to mind. This was the day of what she called “city tour”—a drive around Moscow of the sort tour buses offer, with a canned tour guide’s commentary by Sonia, which she made no effort to disguise. After an hour of what in New York would have been the equivalent of driving past the Empire State Building, the World Trade Center, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and Columbia University, I said I would prefer to receive a perhaps less global, more intimate sense of the city. For instance, could we see Chekhov’s grave, and were there any synagogues in Moscow? Sonia sighed and agreed to go to the Novodevichie cemetery, where Chekhov is buried. And, yes, there were two synagogues, though it would be inconvenient to drive to them. At the cemetery, Chekhov’s small, modest gravestone had a kind of Slavic Art Nouveau aspect and was in striking contrast to the ornate nineteenth-century monuments and the grandiose Soviet markers, many of them larger-than-life marble busts of the deceased.
In his memoir of Chekhov, Maxim Gorky fretted over the fact that Chekhov’s body arrived in Moscow from Badenweiler in a refrigerated railway car marked “Fresh Oysters.” “His enemy was vulgarity,” Gorky wrote. “He battled against it all his life. He ridiculed it, depicted it with his sharp, dispassionate pen. . . . And vulgarity took its revenge on him with a vile trick, laying his corpse—the corpse of a poet—in a railway car for ‘oysters.’ ” Other writers have said of the incident that Chekhov would have been amused by it—and also by another fortuitous slight to his corpse: at the Moscow train station, a number of people who had come to escort it to the cemetery followed the wrong coffin, that of a General Keller, which was being accompanied to the cemetery by a military band. But it is doubtful that Chekhov would have been amused. He was not amused at being dead. In a notebook he writes of looking out the window at a corpse being taken to the cemetery, and mentally addressing it thus: “You are dead, you are being carried to the cemetery, and I will go and have my breakfast.” The incidents of the car marked “Fresh Oysters” and the following of the wrong coffin were precisely the kind of incidents without consequences that had no interest for Chekhov (in his stories and plays Chekhov sometimes creates an illusion of lifelike pointlessness, but in fact every action has a point)—and are similarly without meaning for students of his life. This ended on the morning of July 3, 1904, and whatever happened thereafter is us having our breakfast.
Sonia’s initial negative response to my wish to see a synagogue—like her response to my wish to skip the Armory—presently turned into grudging aquiescence. It turned out that one of the Moscow synagogues was not all that difficult to reach. After Vladimir had parked the car a few yards from the synagogue, a rather gloomy nineteenth-century building, Sonia did not stir and said meaningfully, “I’ll stay here.” As I approached the synagogue, a group of people came toward me. I took them to be members of the congregation who had come out to greet a visitor. One of the group, whom I assumed to be its leader, came forward from the rest and looked at me eagerly. He was small and unshaven and wore a dark scruffy coat, and when he spoke to me I could not understand what he was saying. After a few moments a word that he repeatedly used became comprehensible. The word was dollari. So he and his cohorts were not, after all, characters from a Rabbi Small mystery but beggars. I was surrounded by hands reaching out for the dollar bills I was taking out of my wallet. When my dollars were gone, I gave out ruble bills, and the hands kept reaching out until my wallet was empty. The image came to mind—a horrible one—of someone feeding pigeons. I went into the synagogue, an uninviting place (I have seen such charmless synagogues in America) whose entry hall had announcements posted on its walls, like those posted in college buildings. I met no one; through a distant doorway I glimpsed a room where a stout man in a black suit and white shirt was eating. I started up a staircase, lost heart midway, and came down. Outside on the steps, the beggars were huddled over dark bundles, pulling pieces of cloth from them. They paid no attention to me. Back in the car, I saw Sonia suppress a look of triumph.