A man of a sober and naturalistic temper, Chekhov was dogged by the thought that our condition in this uncomfortable world is a baffling one. He liked to say that there was no understanding it. And, indeed, his writings heighten that sense of the mystery of life which is one of the effects of all authentic literature. At the same time they tend to discourage the view that exist- ence is a meaningless play of chance forces. In "A Tedi- ous Story," a work of his early maturity and one of the most somber pieces to have come from his pen, an old professor discovers to his deep distress that there is nothing in his thoughts and feelings that could be called "a general idea, or the god of living man." Chekhov's writings pay covert homage to such a life-giving idea. In the semblance of the image of beauty, of the impulse toward justice, of the ideal of saintliness, it glimmers through the daily commonplace. His men and women sometimes reach out for something "holy, lofty and majestic as the heavens overhead." On a few occasions he allows his characters intuitions tinged with mysti- cism. Thus "The Black Monk" is concerned, however ambiguously, with madness as the gateway to trans- cendental reality, and the examining magistrate in "On Official Business" is haunted by the thought that noth- ing is accidental or fragmentary in our existence, that "everything has one soul, one aim," that individual lives are all parts of an organic whole.
Like the student in "A Nervous Breakdown," Che- khov had a "talent for humanity"—a generous compas- sion that went hand in hand with understanding and with a profound regard for the health of body and soul. Asked to give his opinion about a story dealing with a syphilitic, he wrote to the author that syphilis was not a vice but a disease, and that those who suffer from it needed not censure but friendly care. It was a bad thing, he went on to say, for the wife in the story to desert her husband on the ground that he had a con- tagious or loathsome illness. "However," he concluded, "she may take what attitude she likes toward the mal- ady. But the author must be humane to the tips of his
fingers." Chekhov lived up to this precept.
Next to his humanity, his supreme virtue is his can- dor. He is no teller of fairy-tales, no dispenser of illusory solaces or promises. He does not tailor his material to fit our sense of poetic justice or to satisfy our desire for a happy ending. In his mature years he clung to the con- viction that a writer was not an entertainer, not a con- fectioner, not a beautician, but a man working under contract who was bound by his conscience to tell the whole truth with the objectivity and the indifference to bad smells of a chemist. At the same time he was plagued, as has been seen, by a feeling of his insuffi- ciency. He lived, he protested, in "a flabby, sour, dull time," and he had, like the rest of his generation, no goals toward which to lead his readers, no enthusiasm with which to infect them. And so he assigned to him- self the modest role of a reporter, a witness, a man who, without presuming to solve any problems, merely posed them or recorded, to the best of ability, the way others posed them.
He was indeed an incorruptible witness, but he did not remain in the witness box all the time. Implicit in his writings is a judgment against cruelty, greed, hypocrisy, stupidity, snobbery, sloth—all the slavish traits he had been at pains to squeeze out of himself, against what- ever degrades man and prevents him from achieving his full stature. Notwithstanding his protestations of objec- tivity, and though his attitude toward evil was not so much active hatred as abhorrence, there is indignation and indictment in his pages, a thinly veiled criticism of life. He even succumbs to the Russian weakness for preachment. There is no doubt that eventually he came to expect a corrective influence from his plays and stories. By telling the truth, he said to himself, he would help men to live more decently. "Man will become bet- ter when you show him what he is like," runs an entry in his notebook. One need not have faith in human per- fectibility to acknowledge that there is something liber- ating and exalting in a frank facing of man's estate.
Just before the recent war so competent an observer as Somerset Maugham remarked: "Today most young writeis of ambition model themselves on Chekhov." Un- questionably the Russian's influence has helped to direct public taste in the English-speaking countries toward the acceptance of a rather shapeless kind of short narra- tive implying the forlornness of man, morally flabby creature that he is, in a world he never made. There is, of course, bound to be a reaction against this trend, and it is to be expected that the conventional story of a less quietist and more optimistic tenor, which has never lost popularity with the general, will again be prized by both craftsmen and critics. But whatever the vicissitudes of literary fashion, men are likely to keep returning to a writer who, in addition to his other virtues, came as close as any of his fellows to being humane to the tips of his fingers.
Notable Dates in the Life of Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
1860 January 17/29: Anton is born in Taganrog.
1869 Admitted to the local gimnaziya.
1876 The family moves to Moscow, leaving him behind.
S^mer: Graduates from the Taganrog gimnaziya. Autumn: Joins the family in Moscow and enrolls in the medical department of the university.
March: Breaks into print with a short h^orous piece.
1880-81 Writes a full-length play, first published in 1923 and translated into English under the title, That Worthless Fel1ow Platonov.
Completes his studies and takes up the practice of medicine, continuing to live in Moscow with the family. The Tales of Melpomene, first collection of short stories.
January: Motley Tales, a book of stories. February: Starts contributing short stories to the daily, Novoye vremya.
Apriclass="underline" Shows alarming symptoms of lung trouble. Apriclass="underline" Revisits Taganrog and neighboring to^s. Summer: Twilight and Innocent Words, coUections of stories.
1884 1886 J887
November 19/December 1: First performance of Ivanov in Moscow. 1888 January: Visits his friend Suvorin in the Crimea and travels in the Caucasus.
March: For the first time makes the pages of a monthlv with his long tale, "The Steppe." December: Awarded the Pushkin prize by the Academy of Sciences.
January 31/February 12: A revised version of Ivanov opens at the Alexandrinsky Theater in Len- ingrad.