Chekhov had begun his career in the 1880s by writing short pieces, mostly humorous, for popular magazines and newspapers. ‘The Two Volodyas’ is a minor story that harks back to this earlier phase. As in ‘The Grasshopper’, the central figure is a young woman who has married foolishly and has a brief affair with another man. Here, too, the point of the story is the moment of recognition, when the young woman realizes her error and is left to face the truth – that she is empty-headed and mediocre, and now must face alone the truth of her own worthlessness. To intensify the effect, Chekhov introduces the figure of the young nun Olga. Olga too has undergone a change – a spiritual one that is signalled by the change in her appearance. Ironically, if in ‘The Grasshopper’ Olga is the name of the foolish heroine, here the latter is called ‘Sophia’ (meaning ‘wisdom’). Another common motif of Chekhov’s stories to be found here is the sound of the church bells, a reminder of the deep presence of at least the formal aspects of religion in Chekhov’s life.
Chekhov was born in 1860, on the eve of the reforms that liberated the Russian serfs, and his life covered a period of intense social and economic transition in the country. These included the construction of the railways, a frequent motif in his stories, industrialization, with all the social ills and factory accidents that accompanied it, and the urbanization of the peasant population, which had begun to drift to the towns and cities in search of employment. Overcrowded tenements, prostitution and disease were among the undesirable byproducts of this process. The process of industrialization had created another new phenomenon – people from humble backgrounds who had become rich and moved up the social hierarchy. Himself from a family of liberated serfs, Chekhov had gone through the agonizing process of learning to be at ease socially, and knew at first hand the difficulties caused by social displacement. Such is the plight of the heroine in the tale ‘A Woman’s Kingdom’.
In the figure of Anna Akimovna in ‘A Woman’s Kingdom’ Chekhov explores one of the undeveloped topics of ‘The Black Monk’, namely the situation of an only daughter who inherits the family enterprise. The father–daughter relationship, and the fate of the daughter of a deceased father, are key, related themes in Chekhov’s oeuvre. Anna, unlike Tanya, is in a more complex situation in that she has to deal with the additional problem of social displacement, on top of the questions of financial management and social responsibility that being the owner of a factory or other enterprise entails. It would be wrong to see Chekhov’s treatment of Anna’s inadequacy as an indictment of women, even though the last word of the original story is dury – ‘silly geese’ – for the word comes from her lips, and expresses her own realization that women are foolish to seek happiness in men. In any case many of Chekhov’s male characters are in their own way as inadequate and feckless. Chekhov’s concern is simply to uncover the psychological quandary that lies at the root of her actions or lack of them. Anna has had the ownership of the factory thrust upon her by fate, and finds herself living in a strange double world. On the one hand there is the traditional Russian world of the merchant class, with its traditional food and beverages – the ‘downstairs’ world of her aunts and maids and cooks and hangers-on; and then there is the westernized world of the lawyer Lysevich, with his reading of western literature (Maupassant!), and his partiality to wine and French food.
Chekhov depicts Anna Akimovna’s inner feelings with delicacy and understanding, especially the contradiction between her social displacement and her natural search for a mate. As often happens in Chekhov this, the central question of the text, is left unresolved. What kind of husband would be appropriate for her, considering the double world she lives in? Her attraction to Pimenov is natural, given her own background and the strong masculine qualities that he exudes; moreover, as a worker like her father, he would be able to provide the strength and direction the enterprise needs: stop the director from defrauding the company, send the blood-sucker Lysevich packing – in a word, save the factory. But then Anna tries to imagine Pimenov in her world, and immediately the attraction is lost. Moreover, the advice she gets from different quarters is contradictory: some recommend a husband from the nobility, others recommend a worker, while others recommend debauchery. Anna’s problem is that she has too much – too much money, too much femininity to lavish on a potential partner, too many choices.
Philanthropy is an important secondary theme in the story. As Anna recalls, the Russian merchants prefer to give their money to the indigent rather than their own workers. While this idea is not explained directly, the perspicacious reader might suspect that it is because they relish the servile expressions of gratitude that such charity evokes. To salve her own conscience, Anna decides to give the fifteen hundred roubles that have fallen into her lap to an out-of-work bureaucrat, Chalikov, chosen at random. The picture of misery evoked by Chekhov in his depiction of the Chalikov household is subtly nuanced and unsentimental, and is realized from the perspective of Anna herself. Anna is too honest with herself to accept the insincere expressions of gratitude and self-abasement that her generosity evokes. Disgusted by Chalikov’s self-abasement, she quickly renounces her idea of giving all the money to him: however much he receives, he will simply drink it. Chalikov wallows in self-pity and finds solace in vodka and in beating his wife and children. No charity will change that. Eventually the fifteen hundred roubles end up in the hands of the lawyer Lysevich, who will squander them. The Chalikov episode is suggestive of Chekhov’s view of the hopelessness of out-and-out charity, its inability to change circumstances. At the same time, the portrait of Chalikov’s shiftlessness and self-pity serves as a background for the contrasting image of Pimenov – the intelligent and industrious factory-worker, who has both her father’s and her picture on his table and who, for his pains, will receive nothing. Chekhov’s indictment of human attitudes is, as usual, understated and merciless.
Chekhov’s art at its best constitutes an intense condensation of motifs and themes into a poetic whole. ‘The Student’ is perhaps the finest example of this, and indeed this was the opinion of the author himself. Among the typically Chekhovian images that we find in this work are the hunter, the sound of the birds (i.e. the hunter’s prey…), the sudden springtime frost and the light of the fire. However, we find in it a new theme too, and one that was to light the way to certain key works of Russian literature in the century to come. It is the notion of the interconnectedness of history – the continuous chain of events that links the past to the present. The events from the Gospel that the theology student Ivan Velikopolsky recounts to the two widows acquire an unsuspected immediacy and relevance, to the point that the two widows, mother and daughter, react – the mother Vasilisa by smiling and bursting into tears, and the daughter by turning red. The English reader is tempted to compare the situation to Eliot’s ‘even now, in sordid particulars, / The eternal design may appear’. More relevant for Russian literature is the immediacy with which the retelling of the Gospel speaks to a suffering people; this was to become the leitmotif of two central works of twentieth-century Russian literature, Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita and Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago.