Chekhov, in turn, had a few reservations about Tolstoy’s writings. He didn’t like the characterization of Napoleon in War and Peace (“As soon as Napoleon is taken up, we get a forcing of effect and a distortion to show that he was more stupid than he actually was,” he wrote to Suvorin in 1891), and took issue with certain of Tolstoy’s pronouncements in The Kreutzer Sonata. “Tolstoy treats that which he does not know and which he refuses to understand out of sheer stubbornness, ” he wrote Alexei Pescheyev in 1890. “Thus his statements about syphilis, about asylums for children, about women’s aversion to copulation, etc., are not only open to dispute, but they actually betray an ignorant man who, in the course of his long life, has not taken the trouble to read two or three pamphlets written by specialists.” But he felt constrained to add: “And yet all these defects scatter like feathers before the wind; one simply does not take account of them in view of the merits of the novel. . . .” Chekhov had also gone through a period of belief in Tolstoy’s ideas about nonviolence and then had become skeptical of them. But, as is evident from his comments about the threat of Tolstoy’s death, he never lost his sense of Tolstoy’s artistic pre-eminence.
Earlier in the day, in the Arbat, once an elegant shopping district and now, much reduced in size, an undervisited tourist trap of souvenir shops, secondhand stores, and kitsch art galleries, Sonia had stopped before a small oil painting of a vase of lilacs.
“This is good,” she said.
“Are you going to buy it?” I asked.
Sonia shook her head. With a modest little smile, she explained that she painted herself and therefore recognized good art when she saw it. She had paused simply to register her appreciation. She painted on weekends and during vacations, specializing in still lifes and portraits.
My journalist’s portrait of Sonia as a latter-day Natasha Prozorov was taking shape. Her remarks about art contributed a nice Natashaesque touch. Of course, not everything Sonia said and did had this kind of value. In fact, most of what she said and did went unrecorded in my notebook. Journalistic subjects are almost invariably stunned when they read about themselves in print, not because of what is revealed but because of what has been left out. Journalists, like the novelists and short-story writers who are their covert models, practice a ruthless economy. The novice who wishes to be “fair” to his subjects and to render them in all their unruly complexity and contradictoriness is soon disabused. The reality of characters in fiction—and of their cousins in journalism—derives precisely from the bold, almost childlike strokes with which they are drawn. Tolstoy renders Anna Karenina through her light, resolute step, her eagerness, her friendliness and gaiety, her simple, elegant dress. He confines her thoughts and actions to a range of possibility that no person in life is confined by. Chekhov’s realism, as we have seen, is of a different order; his economy is even more stringent, his strokes even blunter. His Natasha is a figure about whom we know almost nothing in particular—she is simply a concentration of coarseness and bullying willfulness. In the first act, before she shows her true colors, appearing to be only a girl from the town who feels awkward in the house of her aristocratic fiancé, she undergoes a small mortification. Olga, the oldest sister, points out to her that her green sash doesn’t go with her pink dress, that “it looks queer.” Natasha’s taste in dress has already been deplored by Masha, in something of the way Chekhov deplored the dress of German women. But, on another level, something more serious than bad taste is at issue in Olga’s reprimand, namely, bad faith, as denoted by the color green and its association with the Serpent. (According to Chekhov’s stage directions, Olga addresses Natasha about the sash “with alarm,” suggesting that she has “recognized” Natasha.) In the story “In the Ravine,” written a year earlier, and also about the takeover of a household by a ruthless daughter-in-law, Chekhov actually describes the woman in question as a snake.
Aksinya had naive gray eyes that rarely blinked and a naive smile played continually on her face. And in those unblinking eyes, and in that little head on the long neck, and in her slenderness there was something snakelike; all in green but for the yellow on her bosom, she looked with a smile on her face as a viper looks out of the young rye in the spring at the passersby, stretching itself and lifting its head.
Aksinya is perhaps the most evil character in Chekhov. In a scene that matches, and, in its shocking unexpectedness, possibly surpasses the horror of the blinding of Gloucester, Aksinya scalds to death a baby who stands in the way of her ascendancy. Natasha comes nowhere near this level of evil-ness. She is unbearable, but she would never commit murder. Aksinya is all in green, Natasha wears only a green sash—a touch of evil. My Sonia—clearly a Natasha rather than an Aksinya—might fittingly have worn a green scarf. However, I am bound to report that she wore a red scarf (over a white angora sweater). Nonfiction may avail itself of the techniques of elision and condensation by which fiction achieves its coherence, but is largely barred from the store of mythopoetic allusion from which fiction derives its potency. Even Chekhov, when writing nonfiction, doesn’t write like Chekhov. The book he wrote reporting on a three-month visit to the prison colony of Sakhalin in the summer of 1890, for example, is a worthy and often interesting work, but rarely a moving one, and never a brilliant one.
The Island of Sakhalin isn’t an artistic failure, since Chekhov had no artistic ambitions for it. He saw it as a work of social and natural science, and he even considered submitting it to the University of Moscow medical school as a dissertation attesting to his qualifications to teach there. (The idea was broached to the dean of the medical faculty by Grigory Rossolimo, and scornfully turned down.) It ran serially in the journal Russian Thought in 1893, and was published as a book in 1895. There are occasional Chekhovian passages, but not many; it is a book largely of information. In 1897, when he was in Nice for his health, Chekhov was asked by an editor to write a story “on a subject taken from life abroad”; he declined, explaining, “I am able to write only from memory, I never write directly from observed life. I must let the subject filter through my memory, until only what is important and typical in it remains in the filter.” In the book on Sakhalin, Chekhov wrote from file cards and scholarly books and reports. His customary artist’s fearlessness gave way to a kind of humility, almost a servility, before the ideal of objectivity and the protocols of scientific methodology. Like a convict chained to a wheel-barrow (one of the punishments at Sakhalin), he drags along the burden of his demographic, geographic, agricultural, ethnographic, zoological, and botanical facts. He cannot omit anything; his narrative line is constantly being derailed by his data. In his autobiography for Rossolimo, Chekhov registered his awareness that “the principles of creative art do not always admit of full accord with scientific data; death by poison cannot be represented on stage as it actually happens.” In the Sakhalin book, the conflict between science and art is almost always resolved in science’s favor. Chekhov tells it like it is, and allows his narrative to go where his mountain of information pushes it, which is all over the place, and ultimately nowhere. Chekhov’s horror at the harshness and squalor of life in the colony, his contempt for the stupidity and callousness of the administration, and his pity for the convicts and settlers sometimes does break through the posture of scientific detachment. But in rendering the sufferings on this island of the damned, Chekhov could not achieve in three hundred pages what he achieved in a four-page passage at the end of his story “The Murder” (1895) about Sakhalin convicts in fetters loading coal onto a steamer on a stormy night.