My visit to Moscow coincided with the celebration of Victory Day—the fifty-fourth anniversary of the Allied victory over the Nazis. Russia, which lost 27 million people in World War II, was far more absorbed by this occasion than by the current move to impeach President Yeltsin, with which the Western press was intensely involved. In Red Square there was a military parade followed by an evening celebration; thousands of people poured into the square, as if on their way to a rock concert; there were police barricades and a line of portable toilets. I joined the crowd, which was being channeled through a narrow arcade that led to an even narrower street, but when I reached an intersecting street leading away from the square I veered off, giving in to a fear aroused by the thought of the terrible disaster (mentioned in several of the Chekhov biographies) in Khodynka Field in Moscow in the spring of 1896, when nearly two thousand people were crushed to death during a distribution of gifts marking the coronation of Nicholas II.
Earlier in the day, while eating a late lunch in the nearly empty dining room of the Hotel Metropole—a vast hall with an elaborately painted ceiling, marble columns with gilded capitals, ornate chandeliers, potted palm trees, and a central fountain from which a putto and a goose rose—I became aware of a thin old man with a great many medals pinned to his dark jacket, who sat at a table near the fountain. He had finished eating, and was smoking. He was not in uniform; under the jacket was a sweater vest and a shirt and tie. His intelligent face was weary and watchful. He was perhaps the most distinguished-looking man I have ever seen in my life. A bouquet of flowers lay on his table, still in a plastic wrapper, like the bouquets fans bring to the stage at recitals. At a long table near the far wall a group of ten or twelve men and women were reaching the end of a celebratory lunch. From time to time they would rise and give a toast: “Na zdorov’e! Na zdorov’e!” Some of the men were in uniform and several wore medals. I wondered why the man with the intelligent face was sitting alone. Had he deliberately separated himself from the others, like Kutuzov separating himself from the deluded military strategists on the eve of the battle of Borodino, or was it an accident that he and they were in the same dining room? On a raised platform a pianist, who looked like Philip Larkin, played American show tunes. The intelligent man sat smoking in a relaxed contemplative attitude. A large tall man appeared at his table and bowed over his hand, almost kissing it; then the two men embraced. At the table of twelve, the toasts had ended and drunken singing had begun. Philip Larkin finished playing and joined the intelligent man at his table.
When I went to pay my bill at the Metropole, there was ahead of me at the cashier a tall, expensively dressed man of around sixty, with a large handsome head, who was in a state. Two young women behind the counter were anxiously looking for his passport. “It’s a diplomatic passport with a blue cover,” he said exasperatedly. He spoke English with a British accent. “Do you understand? A diplomatic passport. Blue cover.” One of the young women continued to shuffle unhappily through a pile of passports (Russian hotels still adhere to the practice most European countries have abandoned: keeping guests’ passports for a day or two for inspection by the police), while the other went through a ledger line by line. “They have lost your passport?” I asked. “Yes,” he said testily. The young women continued their search. The air was extremely tense. Suddenly, a tall, handsome older woman, wearing a stylish raincoat and a silk scarf with a designer’s name on it, appeared at the man’s elbow, took in the situation, and said in English, with a slight German accent and a great air of authority, “Go upstairs, Henry, and look in your luggage.” Henry obeyed and disappeared into an elevator. The woman—the baroness, as I thought of her—waited for Henry at the side of the counter, while I paid my bill; when my credit card failed to register and I had to produce another, she made a sympathetic comment. The smell of her good perfume wafted toward me. Henry reappeared. Yes, he had found the passport. He was flustered, but he did not apologize to the clerks he had frightened. This was a man of obviously flawed character. What would Chekhov have made of him? Mincemeat, probably. There is a frequently reproduced portrait of Chekhov by an artist named Joseph Braz that is remarkable for its complete failure to capture Chekhov’s likeness. (Chekhov said it made him look as if he were sniffing horseradish.) There is an equally inaccurate conception of Chekhov as a writer who condemns no one and “forgives” his characters all their sins. In fact, Chekhov was entirely unforgiving of any of his characters who were cruel or violent—the sadistic Nikita of “Ward No. 6,” the infant murderer Aksinya of “In the Ravine,” the evil hypocrite Matvey of “Peasant Wives.” He was also down on a certain kind of woman he saw as selfish and predatory—Olga in “The Grasshopper,” Ariadne in the story of that name, Natasha in Three Sisters—and on a certain kind of soulless man: Ionitch in the story of that name, the father in “My Life,” the professor in Uncle Vanya. (Henry would probably find a place among the foolish and pretentious characters who appear in the early satiric stories and tend to fade from the mature work.) But the flawed characters for whom Chekhov is best known—and who have fostered the idea of his infinite tolerance—are the Laevskys and Gurovs and Ananyevs and Vanyas and Vershinins and Ivanovs, for whom Chekhov sometimes, but not always, arranges a redemptive transformation.
Chekhov’s attitude toward these good/bad guys—a singular combination of censoriousness and tenderness—derives, there is reason to think, from Chekhov’s relationship to his two older brothers. Two long letters in which Chekhov tells Nikolai and Alexander off, respectively, permit us to move in very close to this relationship.
In the letter to Nikolai (March 1886), Chekhov writes:
. . . You have often complained to me that people “don’t understand you.” Goethe and Newton did not complain of that. Only Christ complained of it, but He was speaking of His doctrine and not of Himself. People understand you perfectly well. And if you do not understand yourself, it is not their fault.
I assure you as a brother and as a friend I understand you and feel for you with all my heart. I know your good qualities as I know my five fingers; I value and deeply respect them. . . . You are kind to the point of softness, magnanimous, unselfish, ready to share your last farthing; you have no envy nor hatred; you are simplehearted, you pity men and beasts; you are trustful, without spite or guile, and do not remember evil. You have a gift from above such as other people have not: you have talent. This talent places you above millions of men, for on earth only one out of two million is an artist. Your talent sets you apart: if you were a toad or tarantula, even then, people would respect you, for to talent all things are forgiven.