Of the works in the present volume Doctor Startsev comes nearest to conveying such an author's message. It is typical of Chekhov in pillorying the futility of existence in the Russian provinces: a favourite theme.
The town of S , in which the story is set, is yet another of those
anonymous Chekhovian provincial backwaters where the inhabitants do nothing but eat, drink, sleep, play cards, gossip, ill-treat their servants, indulge in frivolous litigation .. . and engender children who will continue the eating, drinking, sleeping, card-playing, ill-treating and litigating processes. Their futility is only further emphasized by such pathetic cultural activities as they can contrive: Mrs. Turkin's novels, her daughter's piano-playing, her husband's 'wit' and the posturings of their servant Peacock. What, indeed, 'could be said of a town in which the most brilliant people were so dim'?
Doctor Startsev is much more than a mere denunciation of provindal Russia. It is one of those many stories in which Chekhov shows worth-while human values succumbing to trivial vulgarity and petty everyday material cares—to what the Russians call poshlost. These perils can surface just as easily in the Russian countryside or St Petersburg as in the to^n of S . They can also appear in Moscow,
as The Butterfly shows. On Chekhov's characteristic use of symbolic consumables to stress his approval and non-approval of his characters this particular story provides an eloquent commentary, especially in the use made of food: the approved Dymov never seems to get anything to eat or drink, while his non-approved wife, her lover and their artistic friends are tainted by numerous food associations from caviare and grouse to wine and cabbage stew. Similarly, in Ward Number Six, the discredited Doctor Ragin is for ever nibbling gherkins and swilling vodka and beer.
It is, incidentally, often Chekhov's women who drag down the more idealistic men to the level of poshlost and vulgar domesticity— especially by the non-approved activity of makingjam. The Professor's wife inA Dreary Story with her tendency to fuss about food and money; Ariadne, who has to be served with roast beef and boiled eggs in the middle ot the night; Zinaida in An Anonymous Story, with her frills and fusses and copper saucepans ... all these are typically female intruders on a male world comparatively unmaterialistic.
And yet Chekhov himself enjoyed his food, his drink, and even his female company—at least until his later years, when illness made inroads on his appetites. Nor, despite the high-minded implications of many of his stories, was he any philosophical idealist He was, rather, a materialist with a straightforward, typically Victorian belief in human progress: to which we must hasten to add that this belief tended to sag and recede at times—and that it was in any case no 'burning faith', as some memoirists and critics have maintained. By training a scientist, Chekhov on the whole contented himself with observed fact, and if he showed any passion in his thinking it was in rejecting metaphysical and religious speculations. Similarly, he avoided the extravagances of artistic experimentation and 'modernism' which (one would hardly suspect from his own work) were coming into fashion during his mature years as a writer. Nor did he hold fanatical political views such as have been so tediously and catastrophically fashionable among Russian intellectuals of his own and other periods. Still less, though, would it be fair to repeat the criticism often levelled at Chekhov during his lifetime: that he was a-political, a-philosophical, and lacked principles of any kind. The accusation infuriated him, and he rightly thought it ill-founded. Chekhov held a variety of convictions, they fluctuated as his life developed, they were often mutually inconsistent—in other words, they resembled the views or convictions of many another educated and intelligent man who has never sought to work out an all-embracing system of belief. To claim that his views on life are all-important to his writings is as misleading as to maintain that they have no bearing on his work at all. In discussing such matters critics would do well to cultivate the restraint and common sense of the man whom they often misrepresent.
Chekhov's stories are by no means as shapeless as is commonly suggested. In the present volume The Butterfly, Ward Number Six and Doctor Startsev all have a well-defined plot, constructed with considerable balance and symmetry, and culminating with the death—actual or spiritual—of a main character. By contrast, other stories do indeed fizzle out in accordance with the formula so often applied to Chekhov: 'life goes on. . . .' One such tale is Neighbours, where the very pointless- ness of the action or non-action is the main point of a saga which also hinges on a characteristic ironical twist: the man who so eloquently denounces his sister's ineffectual lover is his spiritual twin, being just as futile as the object of his tirades.
As the superb harangues in this story so richly illustrate, Chekhov by no means always depends on mere hints and pregnant silences. The eloquent over-statement of a case is often as important to the characterization of his figures as is the frequent use of deadly understatement. A Dreary Story is all harangue—and nowhere is its submerged irony more telling than in the passages where the Professor so violently carps at a university colleague . . . for continually carping at his university colleagues.
Arrivals, departures and journeys seem to have had a particular significance for Chekhov, almost every one of whose mature stories offers such a change of scene. One function of these episodes, without which no story or play of Chekhov's seems complete, is to extend a work's frame of reference by taking it temporarily out of its immediate spatial context. The same function is also performed in a different way by the frequent evocation of distant noises such as bands playing, church bells or drunken shouting. Similarly, Chekhov will extend his temporal frame of reference by constant harkings back to the past: often to the period when one or other of the characters was a child. ('Long ago, when he had been a small boy, his mother had.. . .') The same function is also performed by the many occasions on which characters look forward—hopefully, but often so pathetically—to the future when everything is somehow going to be wonderful, and when those of them who have never yet done a stroke of work will—they unconvincingly predict—devote their days to honest toil. ('Life in X years will be wonderful. . . .')
Illusions about the future, regrets for the past, high hopes collapsing among jam jars, fried onions and copper saucepans, the incongruities and inconsistencies of human beings, their mannerisms, their selfishness and their unselfishness, their tendency to say far too much or far too little, their inability—whether silent or garrulous—to communicate effectively with each other . . . these are some of the elements which make up Chekhov's thematic arsenal. His artistic aim—as he himself kept repeating—was simply to reflect the world as he saw it. And though life could never, in his portrayal, be fated to a single all- embracing pattern, it was not altogether lacking in patterns and parts of patterns either. An observer rather than an inventor, dependent on watchful personal experience rather than on a fertile creative imagination, he had the knack of noticing ordinary aspects of human behaviour such as had existed—but existed unrecorded—ever since civilization began. Chekhov observed and registered, often embedding in his record some strong implicit bias of his ownwn, while yet leaving the reader unharassed by overt homilies and exhortations.