As the narrative closes we see Misail working as a house-painter, no longer despised but accepted by the town for what he is. He is bringing up his orphaned niece. The Tolstoyan principle of ‘Resist not evil by force’ seems to have worked: despite the corrupt environment, his honesty has earned him respect and he is engaged in useful work. We get a foretaste of this denouement as early as chapter XV: much as the peasants had stolen and cheated, the village school has nevertheless been built and is ready to open for the school year. Misail has benefited the peasants not by force but by perseverance and moral example. The readers are left to puzzle out for themselves whether ‘My Life’ is a piece of ‘critical realism’, a study of a psychologically flawed character, a mockery of Tolstoyan principles, or indeed an endorsement of them.
A similar provincial town is the setting for the 1898 story ‘Ionych’. Its hero, Dmitry Ionych Startsev, could be a very useful member of society working as a physician, appointed by a zemstvo to a village. Why does he become, under our eyes, a greedy moneybags who largely neglects his duties in the village in order to look after the wealthy in the nearby town? Chekhov insinuates that the stifling environment is to blame. A town where the most educated, interesting family is that of the Turkins is no place for a man of intellect and sensitivity to fulfil his potential. Chekhov’s main device employed to convey the monotony of the town’s life is repetition. The Turkins’ at-home gatherings always begin with Vera Iosifovna’s interminable readings from her novel in progress, which she does not even attempt to publish; they continue with the daughter’s, Yekaterina’s, forceful banging away at the piano; their highlight is a lavish dinner, over which Ivan Petrovich tells the same anecdotes and tosses out the same witticisms; and they conclude with the lackey, Peacock, striking a pose at his master’s command and exclaiming, ‘Die, wretched woman!’ The only two people who undergo change against the backdrop of the inert town are Yekaterina and Ionych. Her midnight assignation with him in the cemetery, redolent of Gothic Romanticism even though it is only a prank, betrays that she is not above her environment; and her decision to go away to the Conservatoire to study the piano professionally is witness to her inflated ego. One is reminded of ‘The Grasshopper’, whose heroine seeks to brush shoulders with greatness through art, not realizing, until it is too late, that a physician’s prosaic work can be far more elevated. Yet she does go away, seeking change. The changes in her and Ionych are conveyed through repetition with slight modifications. We see him travelling back and forth between village and town at first on foot, then in a carriage and pair, and ultimately by carriage with ‘three horses abreast’, while he himself grows in size in proportion to his equipage. In Yekaterina’s case the modification is that, although she plays just as badly after four years at the Conservatoire, by now she is aware of it.
Several questions arise. Did Ionych lose his human worth because he had been thwarted in love? Would reciprocated love have steered him in the right direction? If that is the case, was it personal misfortune, rather than the social environment, that crushed him? Or would he have become what he was, married or not? Should he as an individual be responsible for his behaviour regardless of his circumstances? Was Yekaterina’s decision to go to the Conservatoire motivated just by a silly girl’s vain ambition? Or was she genuinely seeking change, trying to escape her environment? Did the experience, leading her to the conclusion that her piano playing is as gifted as her mother’s writing, mature her enough to make her potentially a fit companion for an intelligent and useful man? Could Ionych be blamed for not responding to her belated offer of affection? As is usual with Chekhov, there are no clear answers; and a half-hidden poetic streak running through the texture disturbs the general mood. Peacock’s exclamation, ‘Die, wretched woman!’ which his melodramatic mistress must have taught him, turns out to be prophetic for Yekaterina, who will end up in the cemetery, the very place where she had jestingly sent Ionych.
One of the most persistent demands made on Chekhov by the populists was that he point at positive solutions to social problems or personal quests. His very last story, ‘The Bride’ (1903), has been interpreted by some as doing just that. Its heroine, Nadya, who might have remained stuck in the mire of stale provincial life with the slothful Andrey, makes a clear break, going away to study in St Petersburg. Perhaps she represents a new generation that will ring in change. Several troubling questions arise, however, in the course of the narrative. Her distant cousin Sasha, who incites her to tear herself away from home, has been to university himself, but is doing nothing worthwhile with his degree. For that matter, Andrey is a university graduate, too, but he does nothing except talk about how nice it would be to buy a small farm and work on it. Further, just as we were not told in ‘The House with the Mezzanine’ what Zhenya read so avidly, we are denied the information about what Nadya is studying and what she is planning to do with her education. It is as though ‘breaking away’ alone mattered, never mind what for. This impression is reinforced when we hear that Sasha is on his way to a cruise on the Volga with a friend and his wife, hoping to persuade her to take up studies and wanting ‘her life to be transformed’. Here the device of repetition with a slight modification diminishes in size the inspirational figure of Sasha, who, we thought, had been personally concerned with the future of his dear young relation. Perhaps his proselytizing was just a hobbyhorse. Nadya herself finds him grey and uninteresting when she visits him in Moscow on her way home after her first year away. Seeing how sick he is, she should insist on bringing him home for the summer and looking after him, but she lets him go with his friends, as though being less inspired by him also meant having less affection for him.
The final, most important ambiguity of the narrative, however, is Nadya’s narrated thought as she leaves her native town once more, this time, ‘for ever, so she thought’. The phrase could be interpreted as Nadya’s delusion about her future, which in fact held in store for her an eventual return to her town, defeated. One only needs to recall Yekaterina’s return to her parents’ house in ‘Ionych’. There are, however, other implications, too. At the beginning of the story it seems to Nadya that ‘somewhere else, beneath the sky, above the trees, far beyond the town, in the fields and forests, spring was unfolding its own secret life, so lovely, rich and sacred’. This refers to the impossibility of achieving personal happiness here and now. The same seems to apply to socially useful life, too: if Nadya is to make a contribution to the welfare of her nation, she has to do it somewhere else, not here. But if her provincial town is so backward, who should set it on the path of progress if not the native who has the capacity to come back and put her education to good use? Complaints about one’s milieu are almost always ironic in Chekhov, with the implication that the person who complains should get down to making improvements. It is characteristic that Sasha, waxing lyrical about the town’s bright future, does not propose to settle there and make a contribution to it.