Some of the themes Chekhov chose in his last period were sure to capture the attention of readers concerned with social issues. ‘Peasants’ (1897), for example, focuses on the brutality of peasant life, whose locus of evil is the tavern, where the men spend on vodka the last of their meagre earnings, and from where they come home drunk to beat their wives. Nikolay, who has returned from the city with his wife, Olga, and his daughter, Sasha, to his parents’ house because he had fallen sick, realizes from his supine position over the stove that the peasants’ misery is to a great extent their own fault. Olga, too, in a reported thought actually beyond her mental powers, comes to question: ‘Who maintains the pubs and makes the peasants drunk? The peasant. Who embezzles the village, school and parish funds and spends it all on drink? The peasant. Who robs his neighbour, sets fire to his house and perjures himself in court for a bottle of vodka? Who is the first to revile the peasant at district council and similar meetings? The peasant.’
When a house burns, the villagers are incapable of taking any meaningful action, and the fire would blaze out of control if the neighbouring landowner’s son, watched admiringly by his two pretty sisters, did not put it out with the help of his husky men. The authorities are present only to collect taxes and rates, taking away a family’s basic necessity, the samovar, in lieu of payment. Most peasants are illiterate, and when little Sasha, the only literate member of the family since she had been going to school in the city, reads from the Bible to them, they are moved to tears by Old Church Slavonic words that they do not understand. In general, they have no idea what their Russian Orthodox faith means, and when they pray to icons, they resemble pagans worshipping idols.
Here was a story to shock anyone who believed in the redeeming qualities of the Russian peasant. Leo Tolstoy protested that ‘Peasants’ was a libel against the simple Russian people, whom Chekhov did not know. (A groundless accusation, as we have seen.) An opponent of populism gleefully remarked that the story demonstrated the absurdity of the narodniks’ sentimental illusions. Such a reading, however, assigns too simplistic motives to a complex narrative. If it were merely a polemical piece of writing, how could we interpret, for instance, the role of the holy icon, carried from village to village, that moves the peasants to rise above their stuck-in-the-mud physical misery to at least a momentary spiritual awakening and to a feeling, in the teeth of all evidence, that there is a higher power that will protect them? The lyrical force the narrator lends to such scenes runs counter to the general tonality of the story. Most strikingly incongruous is the description of Olga and Sasha returning to the city, after Nikolay’s death, in the best of moods, even though they have to beg for alms, and even though it should be clear to them what eventual fate will await the penniless young girl in the city. (Not only do the incomplete Chapters X and XI point towards that fate, but Chekhov actually jotted down in a notebook that Sasha would take up prostitution.) The paragraph depicting mother and daughter cheerfully marching forth is as jarring as the ending of ‘The House with the Mezzanine’.
Peasants get their share of scorn also in the longest novella of Chekhov’s late period, ‘My Life’ (1896), but here the main targets of the narrator’s censure are a provincial town’s gentry, bureaucrats and professionals. Corruption is rampant, people draw salaries for work of doubtful value or live off their family fortunes, relying on others to work for them; and the rising entrepreneurial class ruthlessly exploits cheap labour. For an honest man like the hero of the story, Misail, the only decent thing to do is to earn his living by the sweat of his brow. It has been remarked that Misail is one of the first drop-outs in modern literature; I might add that he is relevant to our own time, for who has not seen children of well-to-do families refusing to go to college or university, preparing instead to become craftsmen?
Misail’s first-person narration rises to rhetorical heights as he indicts his social environment, but when he recounts his personal affairs his voice shifts to a deliberately flat tone, with not a ripple of self-irony – a marked contrast to the artist’s diction in ‘The House with the Mezzanine’. This is just another way Chekhov makes his reader responsible for evaluating the hero’s actions, which, as we have seen, is a signature trait of his method.
We as readers wonder why a twenty-five-year-old big, strong man lets his father slap his face. We are inclined to argue with him that, surely, he could have fended off his father’s hand or could have simply brushed him aside and walked out. Similarly, it is hard to swallow the fact that Misail allows people to taunt him on the streets, splash water on him and throw sticks at him. There is no reason why he should put up with Moisey’s theft of supplies from the larders in the house he and his new bride, Mariya, have recently restored; and why he should let the peasants rob them and even steal the building materials Mariya has generously bought to build a village school. It is not only the reader who judges: Mariya, too, watches her husband’s meekness with bewilderment, gradually losing her respect for him. The first crack in their marital relations appears when he tells her how his father beat him. It could be argued, of course, that tilling the land with Misail was only a wealthy woman’s whim and Mariya would not have lasted long on the farm in any case; yet his lack of assertiveness is certainly a contributing factor.
It appears that Chekhov the doctor has diagnosed an emotional disorder, a fundamental lack of a sense of self in his character. It is a trait that harms not only Misail himself but also those dear to him. Had he had the mettle to confront Dr Blagovo, who had seduced both his sister, Cleopatra, and his wife, he could certainly have secured financial support for his sister’s child by the doctor: his own contempt for financial gain should not have been exercised on behalf of his niece. The question arises, what caused Misail’s emotional flaw? The oppressive social environment is not a sufficient explanation. His upbringing provides a certain clue, especially if we consider that his sister shares his meekness. Or perhaps it is a genetic trait in both of them. ‘How feeble!’ says Cleopatra referring to herself before her disastrous appearance in the amateur theatricals, but she could be referring to both of them. Earlier in the story, discussing what useful work could be done in his corrupt and stultifying town, Misail says that at one time he dreamt of becoming a teacher, doctor or writer, but all that has remained a dream because he took a dislike to the Greek language and could not finish grammar school. He appreciates products of the intellect, he says, but he is not sure he has the ability to pursue mental work. One could argue that some kind of constitutional feebleness prevents him from exerting, or asserting, himself, which makes the story akin to Chekhov’s earlier ‘physiological sketches’, such as ‘The Name-day Party’. Yet ‘My Life’ is more ambiguous than that.