However understated, and however much the reader has to look between the lines to discover it, Chekhov’s ultimate concern is spiritual. The crisis of faith that he documents may legitimately be seen as the theme of nineteenth-century Russian literature, as it grapples with the imported values of western culture and politics, and as the industrialization and westernization of the country led to a questioning and rejection of traditional religious values. It is precisely this crisis that is central to the story ‘Murder’. Here we see the journey of the murderer Yakov from a stifling and stultifying preoccupation with the form of religion that leads to the murder of his cousin, to a new faith – religion’s true spiritual content. Buried in the text are clues pointing back to two other key texts in Russian literature – Dostoyevsky’s The Devils (in Russian Besy) and Pushkin’s poem of the same name that Dostoyevsky used as an epigraph to his own work. Chekhov could rely on his readers’ knowledge of the previous works to evoke certain echoes. Essentially, Pushkin’s poem describes the situation of a young man who is lost in a snowstorm. Enough clues are built into the description of Matvey’s return to the inn to create a resonance between the poem and the story; this is then maintained by the repeated use of the word besy. In using Pushkin’s poem as an epigraph to his novel, Dostoyevsky had seized upon the latent potential of the poem to serve as a metaphor for the spiritual crisis of the young Russian lost in a world without faith, and document its consequences in terms of Stavrogin’s sexual debauchery and Pyotr Verkhovensky’s disdain for human life. The howling of the storm, that Pushkin had likened to the wailing of demons or devils, thus assumes an enormous symbolic significance.
At the same time, there are crucial differences between Chekhov’s story and the two preceding texts. In part, they are class differences. Chekhov describes, not the milieu of a young Russian officer who has hired a coach, nor that of the provincial aristocracy we find in Dostoyevsky’s story, but rather the world of the impoverished innkeeper who has been displaced by the advent of the railway, his cousin, the victim of an industrial accident, and the owner of a railway buffet who has fallen on hard times. There is a gritty reality to Chekhov’s descriptions of a milieu he knew only too well. Moreover, the last part of the story takes place on Sakhalin Island and is the direct result of his observations of the life of the prisoners there. Chekhov simply describes this reality – unsentimentally, with an eye to the telling detail, without any attempt to sugar the pill and gloss over his characters’ faults. Ironically, in the slight format of a short story, he achieves something that eluded Dostoyevsky in vastly organized novel after novel (e.g. Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment) – namely a convincing description of the spiritual renewal of one man. One might call this the holy grail of nineteenth-century Russian literature.
The topography of Chekhov’s work is largely located in two areas of Russia. The first of these is the south of Russia, initially the southern steppe around the town of Taganrog, where he was born and grew up; typical steppe landscapes with their two dominant features – the coal mine and the cherry orchard – are found in numerous works, not only of his early period. In the last years of his life the advanced state of his tuberculosis forced him to return south to seek a milder climate, this time in Yalta on the Crimean peninsula, but even before that Crimean landscapes began to occur in his work (e.g. in the final episode of ‘The Black Monk’). The second region of Russia that figures largely in his work is Moscow, where he moved in 1879. His Muscovite experiences give rise to the many sketches of the country estates around that city and their denizens, the impoverished gentry, and also, of course, to the different areas in the city itself, as in ‘Three Years’. Chekhov did not speak any foreign language fluently, and only went abroad to Western Europe (Italy and France) for the first time in early 1891, so that foreign scenes are almost totally absent from his work. The story ‘Ariadna’ is an exception; evidently the scenes that take place in Italy and the Adriatic coast were based on experiences gained during his 1891 trip. Shamokhin’s comments on the Adriatic resorts no doubt reflect Chekhov’s own sentiments. The Russian film director Nikita Mikhalkov used material from ‘Ariadna’ for his film Dark Eyes (Ochi chornye), starring Marcello Mastroianni.
The story that the hero Shamokhin tells seems very much to conform to the view of women and sex reflected in Chekhov’s work in general. Chekhov once remarked of sex that it was either the vestige of something that was wonderful in the past, or else the beginning of something that might be wonderful one day. Shamokhin’s idealistic view of love comes up against several snags. First, there is the fact that Ariadna, far from appreciating his idealistic love, instead falls for the sheer animal sexuality of Lubkov. Lubkov’s technique might be described as ‘full frontal attack’, with no consideration of any abstraction such as love. His cynicism about women can be compared to that of Panaurov in ‘Three Years’ or Lysevich in ‘A Woman’s Kingdom’. Both Lubkov and Panaurov leave a trail of abandoned women and children behind them. It must be said, on the other hand, that the cold and narcissistic Ariadna, however beautiful she might be, hardly deserves the adulation that she harvests. Her seduction and abandonment is an appropriate response to her lack of redeeming qualities. She will presumably continue to drift from one dependent relationship to another. Shamokhin has chosen as an object for his infatuation a woman who conforms to and confirms his idea of women’s worthlessness.
Lubkov’s and Panaurov’s parasitical relationships to their friends are totally of a piece with their cynical approach to women. The reader cannot help but be astonished by the way in which such individuals take advantage of their friends’ unstinting and uncomplaining generosity with money (it being the Russian habit unashamedly to ask for a loan that clearly cannot be repaid). We read wide-eyed how Shamokhin again and again lends Lubkov money that he will clearly never see again. Shamokhin seems totally without willpower – to say no to either Ariadna or Lubkov, despite his critical attitude to both and disgust at their lifestyle, a lifestyle that he ends up sharing. His total disdain for money and willingness to incur endless debts to support first his wastrel friend and then Ariadna remind us that Russian attitudes to money and financial matters have historically been very different from those found in the West. The story that Shamokhin recounts of his relationship to Ariadna and Lubkov is subtly ironized by the device of the author/narrator to whom he tells his story and who finally is totally bored by it and falls asleep. We realize that Shamokhin’s ultimate need is to tell in as much embarrassing detail as he can the story of his own abasement.