Chekhov’s “impressionism” was not simply a literary manner: it corresponded to something much deeper in his perception of the world. The fragmentation of the picture into “separate brushstrokes” and the vagueness of the general outline reflect an inner state, perhaps best described by the old professor in “A Boring Story” (1889). This famous doctor, teacher, and man of science discovers something of a disturbingly non-scientific sort at the end of his life:
… in all the thoughts, feelings, and conceptions I form about everything, something general is lacking that would unite it all into a single whole. Each feeling and thought lives separately in me, and in all my opinions about science, the theater, literature, students, and in all the pictures drawn by my imagination, even the most skillful analyst would be unable to find what is known as a general idea or the god of the living man.
The professor’s dilemma amounts to a commentary on Chekhov’s artistic method. Like his hero, Chekhov refused to substitute a false god for the absent “god of the living man.” In his revolt against general ideas, according to the philosopher Lev Shestov, he “finally frees himself from ideas of every kind, and loses even the notion of connection between the happenings of life. Herein lies the most important and original characteristic of his creation.” Shestov’s essay “Creation from the Void,” written in 1908 and still one of the most penetrating discussions of Chekhov’s art, contains the following description of the spiritual condition of that time:
To calculate beforehand is impossible. Impossible even to hope. Man has entered that stage of his existence wherein the cheerful and foreseeing mind refuses its service. It is impossible for him to present to himself a clear and distinct notion of what is going on. Everything takes on a tinge of fantastical absurdity. One believes and disbelieves—everything.
This was the condition within which, and against which, Chekhov worked. He was more acutely aware of it than most of his contemporaries, which is why we still read him with a sense of immediacy.
Chekhov came to literature by an unlikely path. He was born in 1860, in the town of Taganrog on the Sea of Azov. His grandfather was a serf, but bought freedom for himself and his family even before the emancipation of 1861. His father was a grocer. The family— there were three more brothers and a sister—was a very close one, and Chekhov always had the greatest respect for his parents, who were simple people, pious and not very educated. When he was seventeen, he wrote to his younger brother Mikhaiclass="underline" “Our parents are the only persons in the world for whom I will never stint in anything. If something becomes of me, it will be the work of their hands. The unlimited love they bear for their children is enough to put them beyond all praise and to cover up the faults provoked in them by a thankless life.” He never separated from them, supported them as soon as he could, and in 1892, when he bought the small estate of Melikhovo, south of Moscow, brought them there to live with him, together with his sister and younger brother. Such family closeness was rare (“extremely rare,” according to D. S. Mirsky) among the intelligentsia, but not among the peasants from whom Chekhov came.
From 1867 to 1879, he attended the Greek school in Taganrog, where he received an Orthodox religious education. His upbringing was also religious; he and his brothers sang in the church choir, conducted by their father; they read the Epistles and Psalms in church, served as altar boys and bell ringers. He looked back on the experience as rather gloomy, and later lost his faith, but his familiarity with church life shows in many of his stories, and his knowledge of the services and prayers was probably more precise than that of any other Russian writer. His work is also imbued with a Christian understanding of suffering. The critic Leonid Grossman has described him as “a probing Darwinist with the love of St. Francis of Assisi for every living creature.”*
In 1876 Chekhov’s father lost his business and to escape debtor’s prison had to flee to Moscow, where his eldest son, Alexander, was studying. The rest of the family went with him, leaving the sixteen-year-old Anton to finish high school alone in Taganrog. He gave lessons to support himself, lived very poorly, but completed his studies in 1879, after which he joined his family in Moscow and entered medical school. Ten years later he gave an oblique description of the change he went through during this period of his life in a letter to Suvorin (January 7, 1889):
What aristocratic writers take from nature gratis, the less privileged must pay for with their youth. Try and write a story about a young man—the son of a serf, a former grocer, choirboy, schoolboy and university student, raised on respect for rank, kissing priests’ hands, worshipping the ideas of others, and giving thanks for every piece of bread, receiving frequent whippings, making the rounds as a tutor without galoshes, brawling, torturing animals, enjoying dinners at the houses of rich relatives, needlessly hypocritical before God and man merely to acknowledge his own insignificance— write about how this young man squeezes the slave out of himself drop by drop and how, on waking up one fine morning, he finds that the blood coursing through his veins is no longer the blood of a slave, but that of a real human being.
To support his medical studies, and his family, Chekhov followed his brother Alexander’s example and began to contribute brief sketches and stories to popular magazines, signing his work in various camouflaged ways, most often with the nickname “Antosha Chekhonte,” bestowed on him by one of his teachers in Taganrog. He finished medical school in 1884, and though he never finally set up as a doctor, he always remained faithful to medicine and acknowledged that he owed a great deal to his study of the natural sciences and his acquaintance with the scientific method. “Both anatomy and belles-lettres are of equally noble descent,” he once wrote to Suvorin, “they have identical goals and an identical enemy—the devil—and there is absolutely no reason for them to fight … Goethe the poet coexisted splendidly with Goethe the naturalist.” During his years in Melikhovo, he organized clinics and gave free treatment to hundreds of peasants from the district. He helped to fight the cholera epidemics of 1891 and 1892, and worked for famine relief during the same period. He also built a school in Melikhovo in 1892, which came out so well that he was asked to build two more in neighboring villages during the next three years. He also built a bell tower for the village church. He donated thousands of books to the library in Taganrog and helped to set up a marine biology station in Yalta, where he lived after 1898. In practical matters, Chekhov was an enormously active man, and one can sense from his letters the relief he felt in taking up such work. Literature, his mistress, was a more ambiguous affair.
As early as 1888, he wrote to Suvorin expressing his admiration for men of action, in particular the explorer N. M. Przhevalsky:
I do infinitely love people like Przhevalsky. Their personality is a living document which shows society that beside the people who argue about optimism and pessimism, who, out of boredom, write trivial stories, unnecessary projects, and cheap dissertations, who lead a depraved existence in the name of denial of life, and who lie for the sake of a hunk of bread—beside the skeptics, mystics, psychopaths, Jesuits, philosophers, liberals, and conservatives—there are still people of another order, people of heroic action, of faith and a clear, conscious goal.*
It was in this same spirit that Chekhov decided, in 1890, to travel to Sakhalin Island, off the far eastern coast of Russia, to study conditions in this place that had been founded as a penal colony and to take a census of the population. “I owed a debt to medicine,” he explained. The trip took him across the whole of Russia. He spent several months on the island, interviewed hundreds of people, took voluminous notes, and returned by ship via Hong Kong, Singapore, and Ceylon—an experience reflected in the story “Gusev.”** The result of the trip was the documentary book Sakhalin Island (1893), which in turn resulted in certain reforms in the treatment of prisoners and the administration of the colony. Later Chekhov also sent shipments of books to the island’s library.