These dreams, in their atmosphere of dread and uncanniness, put one in mind of the novels of Dostoevsky and the paintings of Edvard Munch, and hint at anxieties of which Chekhov preferred never to speak. Chekhov’s biographers regularly note his reserve, even as they attempt to break it down. With the opening of the Soviet archives, hitherto unknown details of Chekhov’s love life and sex life have emerged. But the value of this new information—much of it derived from passages or phrases cut out of Chekhov’s published letters by the puritanical Soviet censorship, and absurdly said to make him “more human”—is questionable. That Chekhov was not prudish about or uninterested in sex is hardly revealed by his use of a coarse word in a letter; it is implicit in the stories and plays. Chekhov would be unperturbed, and probably even amused, by the stir the restored cuts have created—as if the documentary proof of sexual escapades or of incidents of impotence disclosed anything essential about him, anything that crosses the boundary between his inner and outer life. Chekhov’s privacy is safe from the biographer’s attempts upon it—as, indeed, are all privacies, even those of the most apparently open and even exhibitionistic natures. The letters and journals we leave behind and the impressions we have made on our contemporaries are the mere husk of the kernel of our essential life. When we die, the kernel is buried with us. This is the horror and pity of death and the reason for the inescapable triviality of biography.
The attentive reader of Chekhov will notice a piece of plagiarism I have just committed. The image of the kernel and the husk comes from another famous passage in “The Lady with the Dog,” in the story’s last section. Gurov, after parting with Anna at the end of the summer and returning to his loveless marriage in Moscow, finds that he can’t get her out of his mind, travels to the provincial town where she lives with the husband she doesn’t love, and is now clandestinely meeting with her in a hotel in Moscow, to which she comes every month or so, telling her husband she is seeing a specialist. One snowy morning, on his way to the hotel, Gurov reflects on his situation (all the while conversing with his daughter, whom he will drop off at school before proceeding to his tryst):
He had two lives: one, open, seen and known by all who cared to know, full of relative truth and of relative falsehood, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances; and another life running its course in secret. And through some strange, perhaps accidental, conjunction of circumstances, everything that was essential, of interest and of value to him, everything that made the kernel of his life, was hidden from other people; and all that was false in him, the sheath in which he hid himself to conceal the truth—such, for instance, as his work in the bank, his discussions at the club . . . his presence with his wife at anniversary festivities—all that was open. And he judged of others by himself, not believing in what he saw, and always believing that every man had his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy and under the cover of night. All personal life rested on secrecy, and possibly it was partly on that account that civilized man was so nervously anxious that personal privacy should be respected.
“The Lady with the Dog” is said to be Chekhov’s riposte to Anna Karenina, his defense of illicit love against Tolstoy’s harsh (if ambivalent) condemnation of it. But Chekhov’s Anna (if this is what it is) bears no real resemblance to Tolstoy’s; comparing the two only draws attention to the differences between Chekhov’s realism and Tolstoy’s. Gurov is no Vronsky, and Anna von Diderits is no Anna Karenina. Neither of the Chekhov characters has the particularity, the vivid lifelikeness of the Tolstoy lovers. They are indistinct, more like figures in an allegory than like characters in a novel. Nor is Chekhov concerned, as Tolstoy is, with adultery as a social phenomenon. In Anna Karenina, the lovers occupy only a section of a crowded canvas; in “The Lady with the Dog,” the lovers fill the canvas. Other people appear in the story—the crowd at the Yalta harbor, a Moscow official with whom Gurov plays cards, the daughter he walks to school, a couple of servants—but they are shadowy figures, without names. (Even the dog is unnamed—when Gurov arrives at Anna’s house, and sees a servant walking it, Chekhov makes a point of noting that “in his excitement he could not remember the dog’s name.”) The story has a close, hermetic atmosphere. No one knows of the affair, or suspects its existence. It is as if it were taking place in a sealed box made of dark glass that the lovers can see out of, but no one can see into. The story enacts what the passage about Gurov’s double life states. It can be read as an allegory of interiority. The beauty of Gurov and Anna’s secret love—and of interior life—is precisely its hiddenness. Chekhov often said that he hated lies more than anything. “The Lady with the Dog” plays with the paradox that a lie—a husband deceiving a wife or a wife deceiving a husband—can be the fulcrum of truth of feeling, a vehicle of authenticity. (Tolstoy would argue that this is the kind of self-deception adulterers classically indulge in, and that a lie is a lie.) But the story’s most interesting and complicated paradox lies in the inversion of the inner-outer formula by which imaginative literature is perforce propelled. Even as Gurov hugs his secret to himself, we know all about it. If privacy is life’s most precious possession, it is fiction’s least considered one. A fictional character is a being who has no privacy, who stands before the reader with his “real, most interesting life” nakedly exposed. We never see people in life as clearly as we see the people in novels, stories, and plays; there is a veil between ourselves and even our closest intimates, blurring us to each other. By intimacy we mean something much more modest than the glaring exposure to which the souls of fictional characters are regularly held up. We know things about Gurov and Anna—especially about Gurov, since the story is told from his point of view—that they don’t know about each other, and feel no discomfort in our voyeurism. We consider it our due as readers. It does not occur to us that the privacy rights we are so nervously anxious to safeguard for ourselves should be extended to fictional characters. But, interestingly, it does seem to occur to Chekhov. If he cannot draw the mantle of reticence over his characters that he draws over himself—and still call himself a fiction writer—he can stop short of fully exercising his fiction writer’s privilege of omniscience. He can hold back, he can leave his characters a little blurred, their motives a little mysterious. It is this reticence that Shcheglov and Suvorin were responding to in their criticism of “Lights.” Chekhov’s replies, with their appealing expressions of epistemological humility and journalistic detachment, skirt the issue, put his interlocutors off the scent of his characters’ secrets. In a story called “Difficult People,” written in 1886, we can see the shoot from which Gurov’s meditation on double life is to grow. A dreadful row has taken place at a provincial family dinner table between an authoritarian father and a rebellious son. The son storms out of the house and, full of bitterness and hatred, sets out for Moscow on foot. Then: