There is something akin to Sasha’s preaching in the conclusion Ivan Ivanych draws from the tale of his brother’s paltry life in ‘Gooseberries’ (part of the 1898 ‘Little Trilogy’, together with ‘Man in a Case’ and ‘About Love’). Disgusted by the pettiness of Nikolay’s goal as well as achievement – the acquisition of a little estate with a gooseberry patch on it – Ivan goes around preaching that people should wake up and seek meaningful lives; but there is no indication that he has led one or helped anybody to achieve it. An important structural component of ‘Gooseberries’, also found in several other works, is the tension between ‘waiting’ (zhdat ’) and ‘living’ (zhit’). Nikolay postpones living – he scrapes and saves, marries out of calculation, missing personal happiness during his best years – until he comes into possession of a scrubby expanse of land on the banks of a river so polluted by a neighbouring brickworks and factory that its water is the colour of coffee. But Nikolay’s vociferous critic, Ivan himself, confesses that ‘I only feel sick at heart, irritable and exasperated’ – in other words, also postpones action, pleading the impotence of old age, and urges another man, Alyokhin, to engage in a meaningful life.
What about the doers, rather than preachers, who also appear in some of the stories? Nobody could be more useful than Lida of ‘The House with the Mezzanine’, yet, with her inability to soften enough to show affection, and with her tyranny over her mother and sister, she turns out to be a negative character. Varvara of ‘A Visit to Friends’ (1898) does enormous good working as a physician in a remote rustic region, but in the process she loses weight, feels exhausted, and talks of clairvoyance. One is reminded of Dr Astrov in Uncle Vanya (1899). (Indeed, many of the themes treated in the stories resurface in the plays.) Characteristically, the younger Nadezhda, as though not noticing Varvara’s fatigue, talks of wanting to work. Here the device for conveying incongruities is juxtaposition, with no comment by the narrator.
Apart from useful work, love might bring meaning to life, but happiness in love, like social progress, can only be achieved ‘somewhere else’. Anna Alekseyevna (Luganovich’s wife) of ‘About Love’ is the one bright colour in Alyokhin’s dreary life, but she is married to his friend, and although she clearly displays affection for him, he does not dare to reveal his love until the very last moment, when the Luganoviches are moving away, and Anna, very sick, is leaving for the Crimea. Adulterous love is consummated in ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ (1899), but despite the happy moments it brings to Gurov and Anna, they feel in the last scene like ‘two birds of passage, male and female, caught and forced to live in separate cages’. The less attainable happiness is, the more lyrical force is attached to the longing. One of the major stories of Chekhov’s late period, ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ is constructed with a full array of techniques characteristic of its author. Gurov’s prophetic thought, that ‘every affair, which at first adds spice and variety to life and seems such a charming, light-hearted adventure, inevitably develops into an enormous, extraordinarily complex problem… until finally the whole situation becomes a real nightmare’, appears to be fulfilled as the two lovers realize the depth of their feelings. But since this thought preceded Gurov’s acquaintance with Anna, the reader rightfully wonders whether their liaison, ‘an enormous, extraordinarily complex problem’ as it is, will eventually be dissolved, and the hero will be ready for a new adventure. When Gurov tries to tell an acquaintance of his what a charming woman he has met in Yalta, the response, ‘You were right the other day – the sturgeon was off!’, also puts Gurov’s love in the perspective of banal stories about amorous adventures that do not require much attention. When we finally realize – with the aid of devices such as the symbolic inkstand with a headless rider at the hotel and the grey fence across the street from von Diederitz’s house – that the lovers are suffering in earnest, the effect is all the more striking.
When there is the potential of a happy union between an unmarried man and an available woman, nothing transpires. Podgorin’s failure to propose to Nadezhda in ‘A Visit to Friends’ introduces us to another Chekhovian technique. First Podgorin likes Nadezhda, but bristles at the thought that her family is expecting him to marry her. Then she asks him to help her find some work in Moscow. This request – evidence in his eyes that she is not just a provincial miss waiting to get married, but a woman seeking an independent life – touches him so much that he asks himself, ‘Well, why don’t I marry her then?’ He eventually decides not to marry her, at the same time forgetting her request for help.
The failure to respond to what another character says – so common in Chekhov’s plays – is also an essential device in ‘The Bishop’ (1902). When his mother tells the Most Reverend Pyotr that his brother-in-law Ivan has died, leaving behind four small children unprovided for, Pyotr responds by asking her about his brother, Nikanor. Further, tired of all the formal respect people – even his mother – show him, the bishop finds comfort only in talking with his eight-year-old niece, Katya, because she treats him in a natural way. Having told him once more about her father’s death and her mother’s desperate struggle to make ends meet, the sobbing child asks him for some money. As a bishop, he can certainly afford to be generous, and he agrees to help. Aware of his state of health, he could hand some money over or send for some there and then, but, even though he is sobbing along with the little girl, he postpones help till Easter Sunday. He dies, ironically, on the eve of Easter, and Katya will go home empty-handed.
One character’s inattention to another’s needs finds its analogy in the narrator’s neglect of what the reader expects of him. We have seen the reader’s frustration over the lack of explanation at the end of ‘The House with the Mezzanine’, and the narrator’s insensitive silence about Podgorin’s disregard of Nadezhda’s plea in ‘A Visit to Friends’. This technique is employed with particular force in one of Chekhov’s most carefully crafted stories of his last period, ‘In the Ravine’ (1900).
With its large cast of characters paralleling and contrasting one another, ‘In the Ravine’ resembles a condensed novel. Grigory Tsybukin and his daughter-in-law Aksinya have greed and shrewdness in common; what differentiates them is that Aksinya lacks family feeling, which makes her unmerciful and invulnerable, while Grigory loves at least his elder son, Anisim, whose downfall leads to his own disintegration. A combination of cleverness and ruthlessness allows Aksinya to triumph even in downright crime, while Anisim, who is just as greedy and ruthless, is caught by the law because he is less clever. All three women in the household are beautiful and come from humble backgrounds – the Tsybukins can afford to marry whom they want – but they could not be more different. Aksinya immediately learns the practices of dishonest trading, outdoing her father-in-law. Barbara, with her gentleness and piety, relieves to some extent the oppressive gloom of pervasive immorality, but with her almsgiving she willy-nilly becomes the family’s publicity agent, polishing its image in the eyes of the villagers. Lipa – resembling Misail of ‘My Life’ – simply cannot grasp the concept that you can live at the expense of other people’s work, and she remains a manual labourer, scrubbing the floors and sleeping in the barn. A character parallel to her is the carpenter Yelizarov, who argues that a man earning his living by his manual skill is more respectable than a wealthy merchant.