By the end of the story we realize that the whole complicated matrix of analogies and contrasts – there are more than I have mentioned – is employed to illuminate the central heroine, Lipa, and the central event, the murder of her baby. When Anisim first comes to meet his prospective bride, her mother, Praskovya, is so numb with fright that she hides in the kitchen and takes no part in deciding her child’s fate. This anticipates Lipa’s inability to defend her baby. Prior to drawing up the deed to transfer Butyokhino to little Nikifor, Grigory tells Lipa to ‘look after’ his grandchild, and after the murder he reproaches her, ‘you didn’t look after my grandson’. Barbara, too, mutters, laying the dead baby out, ‘Her one and only child and still she couldn’t look after it, the stupid girl!’ Is this a just reproach? In order to answer the question we need to take a close look at the scene of the murder.
Lipa is in the kitchen doing the laundry when Aksinya rushes in after the family row over Butyokhino. There is no one else there except for Nikifor, placed on a bench next to a pile of unwashed clothes so as not to hurt himself in case he should fall. At the moment Aksinya appears Lipa has just ‘reached out for the large ladle of boiling water’ standing on the table. Aksinya yells at Lipa that she, a convict’s wife, has no business touching her, Aksinya’s, blouse. ‘Lipa was stunned, looked at her and did not seem to understand. But when she suddenly saw how Aksinya was looking at her and the baby, she did understand and she went numb all over.’ Aksinya grabs the ladle, pours the water on the child, after which: ‘A scream rang out, the like of which had never been heard in Ukleyevo and it was hard to believe it came from such a frail little creature as Lipa.’
Several details are worth noting here. One is that Lipa’s hand was just reaching for the ladle when Aksinya came in: consequently, she could have seized it before her adversary, and given her ‘large arms, just like a man’s’, resembling ‘two huge crab’s claws’, which have been emphasized before, she could at least have put up a fight, weak as she otherwise was. Another important detail is that having understood the meaning of the look Aksinya turned on the child, Lipa grows numb all over with fright, not even thinking that she might resist the aggressor. One is reminded, once more, of Praskovya sitting in the kitchen, numb with shyness, while her child’s fate was being decided. Finally, it is essential to note that not only has Lipa failed to defend her child, but she does not even try to take him to the hospital or summon any other kind of help for him; she just remains in the kitchen until the cook comes back. If this is a didactic tale, it amounts to a satire on the Tolstoyan dictum ‘Resist not evil by force.’ If you do not resist evil, it simply triumphs.
The narrator of ‘In the Ravine’ seems to be so outraged by the murder and by Lipa’s passivity that he cannot go into any further details. The chapter following the scene of murder opens with a matter-of-fact statement about Nikifor’s death; then the narrator launches into a long lyrical description of Lipa’s journey home, with the dead baby in her arms. We are impatient to come to some understanding of Lipa’s extraordinary behaviour during the murder and we are thirsting for news about Aksinya’s arrest and trial, but we are treated instead to the sounds of the cry of a bittern, of the croaking of frogs, and of Nature’s voice saying, ‘We only live once.’ It seems as though slices of life were given as they came to hand. We are reminded of the narrator’s refusal to foreground the essential in ‘The House with the Mezzanine’, but here the inappropriately placed lyricism is more jarring than any previous passage in Chekhov.
It is hard to imagine that the emotional pitch of the story could be raised even higher after the murder scene, but Chekhov succeeds in doing so when Lipa finally arrives home. Her in-laws’ reproach, that she ‘didn’t look after’ her child, is justified in the sense that she had indeed failed to defend Nikifor from the murderer, but it also makes us realize that she did not tell anybody about the murder. Grigory and Barbara, having no idea of what actually happened, are reproaching her for what they think was an accident. Aksinya has not been accused and will not be accused. This implicates not only the meek Lipa, but also Yelizarov, the only person close enough to her to get the true circumstances of the child’s murder out of her, if only he had paid attention to the matter. Aksinya soon orders Lipa from the house, calling her a ‘convict’s bird’. If we as readers and participants felt like throwing ourselves between the baby and the ladle in the murder scene, now we want to shout at Aksinya that she should be driven out and sent to prison. The reason why Chekhov can involve us in the situation so powerfully is that his narrator refrains from comment. If he explained that Lipa was too downtrodden a creature to dare raise an accusing finger, or that she didn’t think the corrupt police would arrest the influential Aksinya (which would probably not be the case even if the police were willing to shut their eyes to some of her lesser crimes), then, maybe, we would come to at least a partial understanding and reconciliation, but his silence farouche produces a most powerful shock.
The Chekhovian techniques I have mentioned, without attempting an exhaustive list, show a writer who has clearly moved beyond nineteenth-century realism. It is not an exaggeration to claim that he is among the most influential initiators of the modern short story, not only in Russia but far beyond its borders. Critical works have demonstrated his influence on various authors in the Bloomsbury group, on Hemingway and Faulkner, on the existentialists, and more recently on practitioners of minimalist prose. But his impact on individual writers, important as it may be, is not as significant as the ubiquitous presence of his literary devices, so pervasive that they seem ingrained in the modern short story.
FURTHER READING
Gordon McVay (tr.), Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters (London: Folio Society, 1994), the best selection and translation of letters.
Brian Reeves (tr.), The Island of Sakhalin (Cambridge: Ian Faulkner, 1993).
Bowdlerized sections of letters restored in Donald Rayfield, ‘Sanitising the Classics’, in Comparative Criticism, 16, Cambridge (1994), pp. 19–32.
SECONDARY LITERATURE: GENERAL BOOKS
Cynthia Carlile, Sharon McKee and Andrei Turkov, Anton Chekhov and His Times (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1995).
Toby W. Clyman, A Chekhov Companion (Westport/London: Greenwood Press, 1985), a very valuable if expensive collection of essays, with extensive bibliography.
P. Debreczeny and T. Eekman (eds), Chekhov’s Art of Writing: A Collection of Critical Essays (Columbus: Slavica, 1977) – among many fine contributions a notable essay is T. Winner’s ‘Syncretism in Chekhov’s Art: A Study of Polystructured Texts’, pp. 153–66.
Thomas Eekman (ed.), Critical Essays on Anton Chekhov (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989), 208 pp.
W. Gerhardie, Anton Chekhov: A Critical Study (London: MacDonald, 1974), ‘Bloomsbury’ Chekhov, but well informed.
Michael Henry Heim and Simon Karlinsky (trs. and eds.), Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1973).
Ronald Hingley, A New Life of Anton Chekhov (London: Oxford University Press, 1976).
R. L. Jackson, Chekhov: A Collection of Essays: 20th-Century Views (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1967).