As in other works we have discussed, in this story too there is an epiphany. Velikopolsky has left his father, a parish priest, coughing at home (evidently suffering from tuberculosis); his barefoot mother is cleaning the samovar, while their twenty-two-year-old son goes shooting, hardly the most sacred Good Friday activity for a theology student from a religious family. Velikopolsky is hungry, since his family is observing the fast; his keenly felt hunger (golod) echoes the sudden drop in temperature (kholod). The student is reminded of two constants in the life of the Russian people. At the same time the two widows he encounters have just eaten and are warm because of the fire, yet there is a sense that their religious sentiments are more deeply and directly felt than his, even if they observe the outward trappings of religion less. It is through their reaction to his recounting the story from the Gospel that the student is suddenly overtaken by an intense feeling of joy: ‘… and an inexpressibly sweet anticipation of happiness, of a mysterious unfamiliar happiness, gradually took possession of him. And life seemed entrancing, wonderful and endowed with sublime meaning’. Much of Chekhov’s search seems to be precisely for a definition of happiness; here, for a moment, it is captured – and indeed one gets the strong conviction from Chekhov’s works that for him happiness can only be momentary. As a fin de siècle writer Chekhov echoes the impressionist notion that one can only capture the moment. To this, however, the story suggests two corollaries: first, that such joy is a chance occurrence, and second, that although it is momentary, it is linked to other such moments in a chain of recurrences. This is an important corrective to Ryabovsky’s flashy ‘impressionist’ philosophy of the unrepeatable moment: for Velikopolsky the present joy holds within it the promise of joy to come.
There is, moreover, another, concealed message to be drawn from the story, namely the importance of literature. The student recounts the events from the Gospeclass="underline" the widows are moved precisely by his words. That is to say, the role of Velikopolsky is analogous to that of a writer, and the story therefore has a metapoetic aspect to it. In other words, it constitutes among other things a reflection on the importance and meaning of art. One may compare Velikopolsky’s function to that of the Russian icon-painter. The icon-painter’s role is to reproduce through a miracle, an act of grace, the presence of the holy person in material form. It matters not that the end result resembles closely other icons – in fact, it is important that it should resemble them, should be the latest in a chain of miracles, a chain of moments of grace extending back in time. This is the realization that Velikopolsky has of the interconnectedness of history, of touching the two ends of a chain. Now more than ever, from the perspective of over a hundred years of bloodshed and tumult in Russia, we can see the justice of the idea that literature can provide consolation and catharsis to a suffering people through a retelling of age-old truths – the verbal equivalent of the consolation that the Russian people through history have derived from the icon.
Chekhov attempted several times to write a novel; the story ‘Three Years’ resulted from one of these attempts. The result is far from the novel form; rather it is an extended short story or ‘tale’. Chekhov’s art had moved far from the classical architecture of the Russian realist noveclass="underline" its carefully developed beginning, evolution and lengthy epilogue contrasted radically with his brevity, truncated structures and open ending (for example, the astonishing last sentence of the tale). His notion of plot was different, since for him what was important was the internal evolution of feelings, not any overt set of events, and his elliptical form focused, not on detail, as the art of, say, Tolstoy had done, but on the detail – a crucial difference. That is to say, by a process of elimination, the details that remain acquire a force they do not have in the copious descriptions typical of the realist novel. As an example, one may point to the umbrella in this story that Julia leaves at Laptev’s sister’s and which serves as the crucial element that leads to his proposal of marriage. It is of deep significance that, at the end of the tale, Julia, dressed elegantly in fashionable clothes, is holding the old umbrella, which Laptev has recently produced from the chest of drawers where he had been keeping it, and given to her. Indeed, after the mention of this detail, the declaration of love that she makes to him is almost unnecessary.
The process of writing led to a concentration on fewer characters, rather than the development of multiple plot lines that would have been necessary for a novel. Nevertheless, in this case the extended form, and especially the longer chronological extent marked by the title of the work (the phrase ‘three years’ recurs several times in the text itself), enables Chekhov to develop his themes with greater effect. The central theme is, of course, Laptev and Julia’s marriage; how it begins without love on her part, and how it is only after she has grown and changed that she begins to love him and makes her declaration. Chekhov very carefully nuances the effect by describing Laptev’s inner feelings at this declaration (he is hungry and, we infer, unaffected), and Yartsev’s apparent infatuation with Julia. The message is very Chekhovian – we should not rely on marriage as a source for happiness; Laptev recalls that the only time he had been happy was when he spent the night under Julia’s umbrella. The marriage theme is developed in other parallel lines: Polina and Yartsev’s relationship, for example, a relationship that, as Yartsev stresses, has nothing to do with love (an affirmation we might do well to question); and the outrageous behaviour of Panaurov towards women.
The growing maturity of Julia is reflected in her relationship with her father-in-law. In this figure we see the other profoundly Chekhovian theme, a theme that is related to that of marriage, namely that of fatherhood. Laptev recalls with bitterness his upbringing, especially the beatings he received from his dictatorial father (in a passage that surely has autobiographical overtones). Like Anna Akimovna in ‘A Woman’s Kingdom’, Laptev and his brother Fyodor have made the wrenching social transition from being the grandchildren of a serf to inheriting a family business worth millions. Their father, although wealthy, had retained the patriarchal ways and the dictatorial manners of a peasant family head. The situation of Lida and Sasha, Laptev’s nieces, and the loss of their father Panaurov to another woman also speak of the theme of fatherhood (and its concomitant, abandonment or orphanhood). It is predictable that Panaurov would eventually abandon his second wife, and also that he would even try to flirt with Julia and encourage her to acquire a lover. Panaurov’s attitude to both marriage and fatherhood is totally cynical, and his shameless sponging off his brother-in-law Laptev simply confirms his spinelessness. At the end Laptev, although he and Julia have lost their own child, has become a father – to his sister’s children, Lida and Sasha. This is part of his becoming a man, as is replacing his autocratic father at the head of the family business and taking over the reins.
As we have come to expect in Chekhov’s work, the secondary characters are drawn with carefully chosen, often devastating detail that ‘rubs the reader’s nose’ in reality. For example, there is the carefully noted fact that Panaurov’s second wife has the beginnings of a moustache. We learn that Laptev’s brother Fyodor is seriously ill, and that his flowery manner of speech and flippant manner hide a deep unhappiness; tellingly, it is Julia who consoles him when he breaks down. Yartsev is a typical member of the Russian intelligentsia; Chekhov first mocks his literary strivings – again the detail that he signs his articles with a single letter ‘Ya’ (‘I’) reads as ironical, a literary cliché – so that when we learn that his belief in science is matched by his optimism that ‘we’re on the threshold of some fantastic triumph’ we know to take it with a huge pinch of salt. Yartsev’s boosterism contrasts totally with Laptev’s feelings of resignation: ‘I feel as if our life’s over and that some dull half-life is just beginning.’ Such details might be multiplied many times over: what is important is that the reader becomes attuned to Chekhov’s carefully modulated irony.