And thus, says Shestov, “the only philosophy which Chekhov took seriously, and therefore seriously fought, was positivist materialism,” which says that “man, brought face to face with the laws of nature, must always adapt himself and give way, give way, give way” The human spirit can only submit. And yet in Chekhov “the submission is but an outward show; under it lies concealed a hard, malignant hatred of the unknown enemy.”
It is worth pursuing Shestov’s argument, because it is easy to mistake his meaning. He calls Chekhov “the poet of hopelessness.” This sounds like the same old accusation of pessimism and resignation that is so often leveled at Chekhov. But Shestov means something very different.
Thus the real, the only hero of Chekhov, is the hopeless man. He has absolutely no action left for him in life, save to beat his head against the stones … He has nothing, he must create everything for himself. And this “creation out of the void,” or more truly the possibility of this creation, is the only problem which can occupy and inspire Chekhov. When he has stripped his hero of the last shred, when nothing is left for him but to beat his head against the wall, Chekhov begins to feel something like satisfaction, a strange fire lights in his burnt-out eyes, a fire which Mikhailovsky did not call “evil” in vain.
Shestov is right to state the paradox in the most extreme terms. Chekhov, who admired men of action, has no action left except to beat his head against the wall. It is hardly a scientific way to proceed. But then, readily as he acknowledged his debt to science, it is precisely science that has “robbed him of everything.” His only hope lies in utter hopelessness. Anything else would be a lie or a form of violence, a general idea or a utopia at gunpoint. And it is here, in this “void,” that Chekhov begins “seeking new paths.”
Like Hamlet, he would dig beneath his opponent a mine one yard deeper, so that he may at one moment blow engineer and engine into the air. His patience and fortitude in this hard, underground toil are amazing and to many intolerable. Everywhere is darkness, not a ray, not a spark, but Chekhov goes forward, slowly, hardly, hardly moving … An inexperienced or impatient eye will perhaps observe no movement at all. It may be Chekhov himself does not know for certain whether he is moving forward or marking time.
That is how Chekhov formulates the question. In a conversation with Ivan Bunin, he mentioned that his own favorite among his stories was “The Student,” and wondered how people could call him a pessimist after that. The story is one of his shortest. It interweaves the student’s grim thoughts about poverty and hunger and the surrounding emptiness and darkness—“all these horrors had been, and were, and would be, and when another thousand years had passed, life would be no better”—with his sudden recollection of Peter’s denial of Christ. He tells the story to an old widow and her daughter, and they both begin to “weep bitterly,” as Peter wept after his betrayal. The student goes on his way. “A cruel wind was blowing, and winter was indeed coming back, and it did not seem that in two days it would be Easter.” He begins thinking about the widow: “If she wept, it meant that everything that had happened with Peter on that dreadful night had some relation to her …” And joy suddenly stirs in his souclass="underline" “The past, he thought, is connected with the present in an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of the other. And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of the chain: he touched one end, and the other moved.” The student’s thoughts are given only the slightest shade of irony, just enough to call his youthful “anticipation of happiness, an unknown, mysterious happiness” into question without demolishing it. That happiness remains, along with the tears of Peter and of the two women, along with the cold wind, the surrounding darkness, and the promise of Easter. “In his revelation of those evangelical elements,” writes Leonid Grossman, “the atheist Chekhov is unquestionably one of the most Christian poets of world literature.”
The old professor of “A Boring Story,” who knows that he has only six months to live, finds something strange happening to him, despite his faith in science and indifference to “questions about the darkness beyond the grave.”
In the midst of a lecture, tears suddenly choke me, my eyes begin to itch, and I feel a passionate, hysterical desire to stretch my arms out and complain loudly I want to cry in a loud voice that fate has sentenced me, a famous man, to capital punishment, and that in six months or so another man will be master of this auditorium. I want to cry out that I’ve been poisoned; new thoughts such as I have never known before have poisoned the last days of my life and go on stinging my brain like mosquitoes. And at such times my situation seems so terrible that I want all my listeners to be horrified, to jump up from their seats and, in panic fear, rush for the exit with a desperate cry.
His stifled protest and hysteria have little in common with the dignity with which the bishop dies in almost the last story Chekhov wrote. But are the two men not essentially alike? The one belongs to the hierarchy of science, the other to the hierarchy of the Church, but life, which is given to us only once (how often Chekhov repeats that trite phrase!), is being taken from both of them, senselessly and ineluctably Each of them is isolated from his family and friends in this incommunicable and incomprehensible experience. The bishop “goes to the Lord’s Passion,” to read the Gospel accounts of the crucifixion on Good Friday, and dies on Holy Saturday, before the bells joyfully announce the resurrection. What happens to him is the same as what happens to the old professor. By very different means, with opposite tonalities, both stories reveal the infinite value of what is perishing. Through the forms Chekhov finds to express this living contradiction, the world begins to show itself in a new way.
RICHARD PEVEAR
* Quotations of Chekhov’s letters, unless otherwise noted, are from Letters of Anton Chekhov, selection, introduction, and commentary by Simon Karlinsky, trans. by Michael Henry Heim in collaboration with Simon Karlinsky, New York, 1973.
* “Chekhov at Large” (1944), in Chekhov: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. R. L. Jackson, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1967.
** See the chapter on Chekhov in his History of Russian Literature.
* “Chekhov as Naturalist” (1914), in Chekhov, ed. R. L. Jackson.
* Trans. by Elizabeth Henderson, in Chekhov, ed. R. L. Jackson.
** According to the memoirs of his brother Mikhail, Chekhov sometimes swam off the ship with a towline and in that way once happened to observe the movements of a shark and a school of pilot fish. He also witnessed the burial of two men at sea: “When you see a dead man wrapped in sailcloth flying head over heels into the water … you grow frightened and somehow start thinking that you are going to die too and that you too will be thrown into the sea” (letter of Suvorin, December 9, 1890).
TRANSLATORS NOTE
No one who makes a one-volume selection of Anton Chekhov’s stories can help being painfully aware of what has been left out. Our selection represents all periods of Chekhov’s creative life, from his first sketches to his very last story We have included short pieces from different periods (it is interesting to see Chekhov return to the extreme brevity of his earliest work in “At Christmastime,” written in 1900), and the most important of the longer stories, those of thirty-five to fifty pages. We have not included any of the “novelized stories” of eighty to a hundred pages—“The Steppe,” “My Life,” “The Duel,” “Three Years”—thinking they would go better in a separate volume. As for the rest of the collection, it is meant to show the best of Chekhov’s work in all its diversity.