Table of Contents
Title Page
ANTON CHEKHOV
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
NOTES
READING GROUP GUIDE
THE MODERN LIBRARY EDITORIAL BOARD
Copyright Page
ANTON CHEKHOV
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born on January 17, 1860, in Taganrog, a small provincial port in southern Russia located on the Sea of Azov. His grandfather had been a serf who for 3,500 roubles had purchased the family’s freedom. Chekhov’s domineering father was a lower-middle-class bigot: a petty merchant who kept a grocery store, bullied his wife, and beat his six children. Although Anton Pavlovich’s early life was monotonous and oppressive (“In my childhood there was no childhood,” the writer recalled), he found his own strange way of compensating for the dismal atmosphere. Possessing a natural gift for clowning and mimicry, the boy delighted schoolmates with hilarious imitations of virtually everyone in the village.
Chekhov was sixteen when the family business failed and his father escaped debtor’s prison by fleeing to Moscow. The young man’s mother and siblings soon followed, but Anton Pavlovich remained behind to complete his education at the Taganrog Secondary School; three years later, in 1879, he joined them in Moscow and entered the medical faculty of Moscow University. During his university years Chekhov became the family’s chief breadwinner: He supported them by writing stories, sketches, and parodies for humor magazines. All his early works were signed with pseudonyms, most frequently “Antosha Chekhonte.” He completed medical school in 1884 and practiced medicine intermittently for several years while continuing to write. “Medicine is my lawful wife,” Chekhov wrote to a friend, “and literature is my mistress. When I get fed up with one, I spend the night with the other. Though it is irregular, it is less boring this way, and besides, neither of them loses anything through my infidelity.”
All the while, Chekhov’s fiction continued to grow in depth and range. He published his first volume of stories, Motley Stories, in 1886; a year later he brought out his second collection, In the Twilight, for which he was awarded the Pushkin Prize for distinguished literary achievement by the Russian Academy. Fellow countryman Vladimir Nabokov perfectly explained Chekhov’s appeaclass="underline" “What really attracted the Russian reader was that in Chekhov’s heroes he recognized the Russian idealist . . . a man who combined the deepest human decency of which man is capable with an almost ridiculous inability to put his ideals and principles into action; a man devoted to moral beauty, the welfare of his people, the welfare of the universe, but unable in his private life to do anything useful; frittering away his provincial existence in a haze of utopian dreams; knowing exactly what is good, what is worth while living for, but at the same time sinking lower and lower in the mud of a humdrum existence, unhappy in love, hopelessly inefficient in everything—a good man who cannot make good. This is the character that passes—in the guise of a doctor, a student, a village teacher, many other professional people—all through Chekhov’s stories.”
Despite the success of his literary career, Chekhov felt guilty about neglecting medicine. Moreover, he still owed a dissertation to obtain a full M.D. Partly to discharge this debt, partly for the sake of adventure, Chekhov in 1890 undertook an exhausting—and at times dangerous— six-thousand-mile journey (prerailroad) across Siberia to Sakhalin Island. There he made a thorough study of social, economic, and medical conditions, both of the Russian settlers (mostly convicts) and of native populations. Upon his return (by sea, via the Suez Canal) from this “descent into hell,” circumstances quickly forced him back into medicine and public health service—first the terrible famine in 1891 and then the cholera epidemic that followed. In 1892 Chekhov bought a six-hundred-acre country estate near the village of Melihovo, where for the next five years he served as doctor to the local peasants and even helped build schools, while his literary output continued unabated.
The turn of the century witnessed a dramatic new phase in Chekhov’s career. Between 1896 and 1903 he wrote the plays that established his reputation as one of the great dramatists of modern times: The Seagull (1896), Uncle Vanya (1897), Three Sisters (1901), and The Cherry Orchard (1904). However, in 1897 a massive pulmonary hemorrhage forced him finally to acknowledge that he was stricken with tuberculosis, an illness he had long concealed. For the remainder of his life, Chekhov was virtually a semi-invalid; he lived mostly in a villa at Yalta, his “warm Siberia” where he met Tolstoy and Gorky. In 1901 Chekhov married Olga Knipper, an actress with the Moscow Art Theater who had played the role of Irina in The Seagull.
Chekhov’s last public appearance took place at the Moscow premiere of The Cherry Orchard on January 17, 1904, the playwright’s forty-fourth birthday. Shaken with coughing, he was hardly able to stand and acknowledge a thunderous ovation. In June Chekhov was rushed to a health resort at Badenweiler in the Black Forest, where he died of consumption on July 2. His body was transported back to Moscow in a refrigerating car used for the transportation of oysters— a quirk of fate that no doubt he would have been amused to jot down in his notebook.
INTRODUCTION
Aleksandar Hemon
I used to have a teacher in college who would start his class on Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina by saying: “Those who do not like Tolstoy are likely to end up under the gallows.” It was hard not to pay attention in class after that. What he meant, I’ve come to believe, is that if you don’t care about Tolstoy’s characters—shaped lovingly and carefully, with Tolstoy’s generous understanding of what it means to be human—you do not care about human life. And if you don’t care about human life, you will one day take it. My teacher’s statement implied that literature has a lasting moral dimension, and that readers’ morality is defined in relation to the books they read.
I have started my classes on Chekhov by paraphrasing my teacher: “Those who do not like Chekhov are likely to end up under the gallows.” My American students, needless to say, were vastly unimpressed. Though capable of discussing in detail and at length “the worst movie ever made,” they at first had a hard time making a leap of imagination and understanding the undertaker, say, from Chekhov’s “Rothschild’s Fiddle.” Chekhov’s ability to write in a deceptively simple way about complicated lives baffled them. Nevertheless, most of my students eventually responded to Chekhov in ways that surprised me and provided pleasure for them. And I’m happy to report that none of them is anywhere near the gallows, and that their chances of avoiding execution seem pretty good. Naturally, I’d like to think that my teaching converted them, but the fact is that what converted them was Chekhov himself and, more than anything, Chekhov’s kindness.
The kindness of Chekhov the man is well documented. Nabokov talks about it at length in Lectures on Russian Literature.1 Suffice it to mention Chekhov’s working alone as a district doctor, without any assistant, taking care of twenty-five villages during a cholera epidemic, or that he treated more than a thousand sick peasants a year at his home for free, supplying them all with medication. But I’m talking about the kindness of Chekhov the writer, which according to Nabokov “pervades Chekhov’s literary work, but it is not a matter of program, or of literary message with him, but simply the natural coloration of his talent.”2 Chekhov’s kindness is, I dare suggest, structural, and The Duel is a superb example.