Gorky's Tolstoy, Gorky's Chekhov - He was wonderfully sympathetic at that moment.

Gorky’s Tolstoy and Other Reminiscences (2008) is translator and editor Donald Fanger’s replacement for an older collection titled Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Andreyev.  The Tolstoy section dates from 1919 and made it into English in 1920.  Gorky was a celebrity author.

Is something wrong with the old translations?  Fanger says no, but the old texts were incomplete.  These are the first English translation of the complete texts.  Fanger added some additional biographical portraits of writers and other oddballs Gorky knew, as well as four portraits of Gorky, by Khodasevich and Zamiatin and so on, plus plenty of commentary and notes.  The whole thing is still under three hundred pages.

This is a useful book.

It is easy to find the “Lev Tolstoy” section described as “like a novel.”  I don’t know what novels these folks were reading.  The “Leonid Andreyev” portrait is much more like a novel.  The long night where a drunken Andreyev wants to pick up girls while Gorky tries to get him sobered up, that scene appears in a lot of novels.

The Tolstoy memoir is all anecdote and talk from about six months in 1901 and 1902.  The old literary celebrity enjoying the company of the young one.

Suddenly a hare started under our feet.  L. N. jumped up in excitement, his face flushed, and whooped like some ancient animal-hunter.  Then he looked at me with an indescribable smile and laughed a wise, very human little laugh.  He was wonderfully sympathetic at that moment.  (69)

That is not always the case.  “The subjects he talks about most often are God, the peasant, and woman” – just the subjects to drive Gorky crazy.  “About literature he speaks seldom and grudgingly, as if literature were something alien to him” (35).  Still:

One evening, at dusk, squinting, his eyebrows twitching, he read us a version of the scene in “Father Sergius” where the woman goes to seduce the hermit.  He read it clear through, raised his head, closed his eyes, and said with great clarity:

“The old man really could write!”

He said it with amazing simplicity – his delight at the beauty of what he’d written was so sincere – that I will always remember the thrill I felt then, a joy I could find no words for, and one that cost me an enormous effort to control.  (64)

“Lev Tolstoy” is immensely humanizing, remembering that humans are strange beasts.  The subject of “Anton Chekhov,” by contrast, is a saint, a member of a higher species.  In his presence, people’s falseness, posturing, and vulgarity drop away.

He had fine eyes.  When he smiled they became warm and caressing, like a woman’s.  And his laughter, almost soundless, was somehow particularly fine.  Laughing, he was enjoying the laughter, rejoicing.  I don’t know anyone else who could laugh so – if one could put it that way – “spiritually.”  (103)

When Tolstoy praises Chekhov’s story “The Darling” – “with real emotion. There were tears in his eyes” – Chekhov responds with:

For a long time he said nothing.  Finally, with a sigh, he murmured in embarrassment:

“It’s got misprints in it…”  (105)

The portraits are also self-portraits, by contrast, Gorky’s differences from and exasperations with Tolstoy, Andreyev, and Blok revealing his own character.  But he was mostly interested in other people more than himself.  This was true in his own childhood memoir, and even more so here.

What an enjoyable book.

Tolstoy's "Father Sergius" & it's Chekovian interlude - Unkindly relations between people caused her actual physical suffering

Leo Tolstoy I think of as almost beyond influence, and the older Tolstoy would seem particularly settled in style, yet reading his novellas of the 1890s, “Master and Man” (1895) and “Father Sergius” (finished 1898, published 1911) I saw traces of Anton Chekhov.  The first could almost have been by Chekhov; the second is unmistakably Tolstoy but takes a Chekhov-like turn in its last episode, as if the title character must journey through a Chekhov story to reach his goal.  Maybe this is all an illusion, caused by the lingering flavor of Chekhov.  Tolstoy has a strong taste, too, though, right?

“Father Sergius” is the most bearable of a kind of lust trilogy, along with ethically dubious “The Kreutzer Sonata” and “The Devil” (both 1889).  In this case, the title character is a monk, a vowed celibate, so his struggles with lust are an ordinary part of his vocation, less important, usually, than – a part of – his struggles with pride.  He enters the convent in large part out of pride; he becomes a hermit out of pride; he becomes a miracle worker, healing the sick, which leads to more pride.   His constant lunges at humility control his pride, but are also perhaps sources of pride.

The most memorable scene is one of Father Sergius’s struggle with lust.  A rich woman tries, on a dare, basically, to seduce the monk, and in his struggles with lust he – if this story were really written alongside “The Kreutzer Sonata” he would murder her – he does something similarly shocking, but only to himself.  As for the shocked woman, “[a] year later she entered a convent as a novice” (Ch. III).

In a later moment of suicidal despair, Sergius for some reason remembers a girl he knew and bullied as a child, Pashenka.  As an act of contrition he makes a pilgrimage to visit her, an ordinary woman.  “She presented herself to him as a means of salvation” (Ch. V).  How a poor grandma who gives music lessons to get by can save him is a puzzle, but he cuts his hair and tramps “as a beggar” to her home, confesses his sins, and then – well, it is still a puzzle.

This is the Chekhovian section, Chapter VI.  “Unkindly relations between people caused her actual physical suffering.”  But she is no saint:

“Mamma!” – her daughter’s voice interrupted her – “Take Mitya!  I can’t be in two places at once.”

Praskovya Mikhaylovna shuddered, but rose and went out of the room, stepping quickly in her patched shoes.  She soon came back with a boy of two in her arms, who threw himself backwards and grabbed at her shawl with his little hands.

“Shuddered” is a tough, fine touch.  Grandma can’t have one minute alone with the holy man.  It is not exactly that this episode sounds like Chekhov, but rather that I can imagine the story from the family’s point of view – the day the famous monk dropped by – that would be the Chekhov story.

The monk’s story is that he is somehow converted to ordinary life.  “’I lived for men on the pretext of living for God, while she lives for God imagining that she lives for men.’”  It is hardly clear that this is true, but it sets Sergius on a new path.  “And little by little God began to reveal Himself within him.”  I suppose this gets him where he wants to go.

The quotations are from the Maude translation, in Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy.

Abraham Cahan brings Chekhov to the Lower East Side - A nightmare of desolation and jealousy choked her

I ended 2016 with some of Chekhov’s last stories, astounding things.  Make sure your collection has both “Peasants” and “In the Ravine.”  Maybe you’ll need more than one book.  That’s fine.  Read them together, and write a blog post; it will likely be among your best.  I don’t have anything else to say about these stories, but you will.  I look forward to reading it.

I will do something easier and write about imitation Chekhov.  Abraham Cahan, the titanic Yiddish-language journalist, was a champion of Chekhov’s in the United States, long before Chekhov was translated.  Cahan’s first book of English-language fiction, Yekl, A tale of the New York Ghetto (1896) was pretty good, but he is sharper and sadder in his second, The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories of Yiddish New York (1898), and maybe one reason is that he lets himself imitate the best.

In “The Imported Bridegroom,” Flora is assimilating quickly – “She sat in her rocker, in front of the parlor stove, absorbed in Little Dorrit” – “the only girl of her circle who would read Dickens, Scott or Thackeray.”  Her father returns to Russia to visit the graves of his parents, and in a fit of piety buys his daughter a husband, a great scholar, a prodigy.  The bidding scenes are worth seeing – the bridegroom, a rare and valued specimen, is sold at auction.

Flora wants to marry a doctor, not a Talmudist; the father wants a son-in-law to say Kaddish; the prodigy is maybe not as interested in the Talmud as he first appears, not once he learns English and discovers the Astor Library.  Yes, he will study to be a doctor, and Flora gets her husband, but by the end of the story the prodigy is already moving on, now to socialism.  The ending could be from Chekhov:

A nightmare of desolation and jealousy choked her – jealousy of the Scotchman’s book, of the Little-Russian shirt, of the empty tea-glasses with the slices of lemon on their bottoms, of the whole excited crowd, and of Shaya’s entire future, from which she seemed excluded.

The short stories in the book share some of the themes – “A Providential Match,” “A Sweatshop Romance” – and settings.  Hopes are dashed; people discover they are weaker than they had realized.

In “A Ghetto Wedding,” a grindingly poor couple have a lavish wedding in the hope that they will come out ahead on the gifts.  It does not work out.  It is a painful piece of comedy.  They cannot even take a cab to their new, empty apartment.  They are almost assaulted on the street.  Only the author is still with them at the end of the story, giving them this final little gift:

A gentle breeze ran past and ahead of them, proclaiming the bride and the bridegroom.  An old tree whispered overhead its tender felicitations.

Yes, the book ends with one of Chekhov’s sentient trees, another gift from one writer to another.

Please do not bother me with practicalities - The Wuthering Expectations Best Books of 2016 - falling in love with war again

The best books of 2016, meaning that I read.

1.  Among recent books, Christopher Logue’s War Music, the English poet’s from-the-foundation anachronistic reconstruction of The Iliad.  The renovation has been ongoing since the 1950s, but is now complete, by the sad reason of Logue’s death in 2011.  A sample, which begins with Zeus talking to his daughter Athena, and suddenly shifts:

    And giving her a kiss, He said:

    ‘Child, I am God,
Please do not bother me with practicalities.’

    Hector and Agamemnon.  Slope sees slope.
    Drivers conducting underbody maintenance.  (p. 123)

Funny, brutal, tough, with armies that “Moved out, moved on, and fell in love with war again” (82).  Quite likely gibberish without a pretty decent knowledge of Homer.  That the book is a fragment only roots it more firmly in its epic tradition.

2.  I completed a re-read – mostly “re-” – of Anton Chekov’s short stories in the thirteen-volume Constance Garnett translation.  Paying some non-neurotic, I hope, attention to chronology, I was mostly past the earlier, shorter, simpler stories; however good that stuff can be, this year it was “The Steppe” (1888) and “Ward No. 6” (1892) and so on, ending last week with “Peasants” (1897), “The Lady with the Dog” (1899), and “In the Ravine” (1900), examples of the greatest fiction ever written.

I guess the plays will have to wait for next year’s list.

3.  This was the year I took Oscar Wilde seriously, reading his short fiction, novel, plays, a volume of criticism, and a 1,200 page book of letters – not everything he wrote, but a lot, and with the exception of The Importance of Being Earnest, which even Wilde saw as a freak, none of these books were as interesting on their own as they were together.  The meta-story of Wilde as artist, prisoner, and exile was a great story.

I had a similar experience with Mark Twain, where even some pretty trivial pieces became more interesting as part of the Mark Twain story.  And then once in a while he writes a masterpiece, just to keep my attention.

4.  The most famous books I read for the first time were The Return of the Native and Tess of the d’Urbervilles, The Bostonians and What Maisie Knew, Pudd’nhead Wilson and Life on the Mississippi, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Hound of the Baskervilles, and to get away from English, Nana and La Regenta (famous in Spain, anyways – many thanks to everyone who gave a shot at the readalong).

None of these are among my favorites, exactly, but finally, finally.

5.  Similarly, I finally read The Education of Henry Adams – “greedily devoured it, without understanding a single consecutive page” (Ch. 31), as Adams says about his own reading.  This would have been the perfect book with which to close out a 19th century book blog, but I did not know enough to plan that well.  Maybe I’ll write about this book next year.

6.  As for poetry, I spent the year cramming poems of the 1910s (and earlier, and sometimes later) down my gullet like I was a goose fattening my own liver.  Stefan George, Stephen Crane, Walter de la Mare, Ezra Pound, G. K. Chesterton, T. S. Eliot, H. D., Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Frost, Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas, and many more.  Four books by Edwin Arlington Robinson.  Four books by Vachel Lindsay.  So much great, good, bad, crazy poetry.  Welcome to Modernism.  The movement from poet to poet and from year to year was as exciting as almost anything an individual poet was doing.  Finishing one book, however good, I moved to another.  I wanted to see what happened next.  I still do.

There is no way my poetry-liver is absorbing these poems well.  I feel like an undergraduate again, tearing through the poetry section of my Norton Anthology of American Literature – what is this – what is this?  Absolutely terrific fun.

Wuthering Expectations will be on a holiday break for a couple of weeks, and back in early January for more good books.

I’m a gull. No, that’s wrong - Chekhov's Seagull - Empty, empty, empty. Ghastly, ghastly, ghastly.

I had never seen or read Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull (1896), for no good reason, but now I have read it.  Now as of a few minutes ago.  It is hard for me to understand how radical the play was.  A writer, an actress, a doctor, etc., mill around a country estate.  They talk about art and talent quite a bit, talent more than art.  They fall in love with each other in combinations unlikely to bring much happiness.

MEDVEDENKO.  How come you always wear black?

MASHA.  I’m in mourning for my life.  I’m unhappy.

I understand that part of the revolutionary effect of the play came from Konstantin Stanislavky’s direction, which made the play slow, atmospheric, and symbol-heavy.  Played differently, though, the way I have become used to seeing Chekhov, those lines, the first lines of the play, are hilarious.  The first laugh of the play.

NINA.  Chilly, chilly, chilly.  Empty, empty, empty.  Ghastly, ghastly, ghastly.

Those are from the horrible, “decadent,” abstract play within the play from Act I, a play so bad that the playwright becomes offended when his mother laughs at it.

ARKADINA.  He told us beforehand that it was a joke, so I treated his play as a joke.

SORIN.  Even so…

ARKADINA.  Now it turns out that he wrote a masterpiece!  Pardon me for living!

I felt like Chekhov was constantly anticipating me.

One of these miserable people, a young woman who wants to get out of the boonies, as an actress, or anything, takes the shooting of a gull – the sad corpse of the thing is hauled around onstage – imagine the ragged old gull in the prop closet of theater companies around the world – as symbolic of something in her life.  What does the gull symbolize?  By God, she is going to make it symbolize something if she has to martyr herself to the symbol.

NINA.  I’m a gull.  No, that’s wrong…  Remember, you shot down a gull?  By chance a man comes along, sees, and with nothing better to do he destroys…  Subject for a short story.  That’s wrong… (Rubs her forehead)  (Act IV, ellipses in original)

Never mind exactly what the gull means.  If it were not the gull, something else would serve as the symbol.  The important thing is to live symbolically, which may be miserable but is not so dull.  In the same act, most of the other characters play Bingo, onstage.  “The game’s a bore, but one you get used to it, you don’t mind,” says one character.  Another spends most of the scene shouting out random numbers.  “Seven!  Ninety!”  All right, this really is getting close to a recognizably avant garde theater.  Do what you can to get out, you poor characters.

Wonderful stuff.  In the middle of writing the world’s greatest short stories, Chekhov was also able to do this.

Laurence Senelick is the translator and more importantly editor of the Norton Critical Edition, pointing out the context of every stray fragment of a song and also identifying his own shocking mistranslations and substitutions, replacing “Lovelace” with “Casanova” and so on.

Art for an audience of one - Chekhov's "Rothschild's Fiddle" and "Easter Eve"

How many Chekhov stories are the saddest Chekhov story?  So many candidates.  “Rothschild’s Fiddle” (1894) is one of them.  It is unusual in that it feels like a Yiddish story, from the title on.  It is also one of the small number of Chekhov stories about artistic creation.

“Yakov made good, solid coffins.”  He also occasionally plays fiddle with a Jewish wedding band, even though he hates Jews, especially the musician Rothschild, who makes everything sound so sad.  Yakov, who always thinks in terms of money, of loss and gain, spends the first half of the story watching his wife die, and the second half dying himself.

He is a narrow man, but his wife’s death and his illness make him more reflective, even if he has trouble escaping his favorite metaphor:

As he went home afterwards, he reflected that death would be nothing but a benefit; he would not have to eat or drink, or pay taxes or offend people, and, as a man lies in his grave not for one year but for hundreds and thousands, if one reckoned it up the gain would be enormous.  A man’s life meant loss; death meant gain.

But finally something changes:

Thinking of his wasted, profitless life, he began to play, he did not know what, but it was plaintive and touching, and tears trickled down his cheeks.  And the harder he thought, the more mournfully the fiddle wailed.

Rothschild hears and is moved by the melody.  The fiddle, and the song, become his.  “[T]he merchants and officials used to be continually sending for Rothschild and making him play it over and over again a dozen times.”

“Rothschild’s Fiddle” reminded me of an earlier story of Chekhov’s where art had found its ideal audience of a single person.  In “Easter Eve” (1886 – yes, another holiday publication) the Chekhov-like narrator, visiting a monastery for Easter services – people are mostly there to have their Easter cakes blessed – meets a low-ranking monk, stuck ferrying guests across the river, who tells him of a local genius, the monk Nikolay, who when he lived wrote hymns of praise of great beauty, although no one cared, no one but this one monk:

“And he cared for me more than anyone, and all because I used to weep over his hymns.  It makes me sad to remember.  Now I feel just like an orphan or a widow.  You know, in our monastery they are all good people, kind and pious, but… there is no one with softness and refinement, they are just like peasants.”  (ellipses in original)

The service makes the narrator “unbearably sore on [the ferryman’s] account.”  The one person most sensitive to the beauties of the Orthodox service is forced to miss it.  He imagines the dead hymn writer going out at night “to call to [the ferryman] over the water,” imagines how the poet “filled his hymns with flowers, stars and sunbeams.”

Chekhov himself wrote popular magazine fiction, more popular in 1894 than 1886, but still.  Do these lovely stories depict an ideal for Chekhov, or something he would have done if he had not had to write for money?  Or are they something he is doing, by depicting the thing he does not normally do?  He can create the melancholy, beautiful artistic effect and share it with more than one reader.

“Rothschild’s Fiddle” is in Constance Garnett’s The Chorus Girl & Other Stories.  “Easter Eve” is in The Bishop & Other Stories.  I do not notice any personified trees in the former (edit: see comments, it's there), but in the latter: “It seemed to me that the trees and the young grass were asleep.”

enchanting, marvelous, and full of lofty meaning - Chekhov in 1894

When I last wrote about Anton Chekhov, I was looking at some stories from 1892 and 1893, a period when Chekhov was writing with extraordinary mastery but was nevertheless nervous about Leo Tolstoy’s hectoring orders to write moral, Tolstoyan stories.  I don’t know how Tolstoyan the resulting stories were, but they’re sure good.

Now I have haphazardly made it all the way to 1894.  I assume Chekhov is still working out his Tolstoy anxiety, based on “The Student,” a short one, a throwback to an earlier Chekhov.  Constance Garnett’s version is in The Witch & Other Stories.  It is a Good Friday story.

At first the weather was fine and still.  The thrushes were calling, and in the swamps close by something alive droned pitifully with a sound like blowing on an empty bottle.  A snipe flew by, and the shot aimed at it rang out with a gay, resounding note in the spring air.  But when it began to get dark in the forest a cold, penetrating wind blew inappropriately from the east, and everything sank into silence.

This is the opening, the masterful touch being the shot, the implied human hidden in the landscape.  He is a seminary student who becomes infected by the pathetic fallacy (“the cold that had suddenly come on had destroyed the order and harmony of things…  the lapse of a thousand years would make things no better”).  He stops at a peasant’s house to warm himself.  At the fire, he thinks of Peter in the garden at Gethsemane.  He tells the story if Peter’s denial of Christ, which deeply moves the peasants.  “The old woman had wept, not because he could tell the story touchingly, but because Peter was near to her,” thinks the seminarist.

The student’s connection to the order of things is restored, “and the feeling of youth, health, vigour – he was only twenty-two – and the inexpressible sweet expectation of happiness, took possession of him little by little, and life seemed to him enchanting, marvelous, and full of lofty meaning.”

Few Chekhov stories end this way.  Many end in the exact opposite way.  But for a holiday, Chekhov can allow his character some joy.

A few months earlier, Chekhov had published “The Black Monk,” in which a professor has a recurring vision of the title character, “like a whirlwind or a waterspout, a tall black column.”  The monk even gives him advice.  Whether a hallucination or a mystical gift, as long as the professor takes the black monk seriously, his life goes well.  When he rejects the monk as the symptom of illness, his happiness disappears, too.

The sullen pines with their shaggy roots, which had seen him a year before so young, so joyful and confident, were not whispering now, but standing mute and motionless, as though they did not recognize him.  (Ch. 8)

More of Chekhov’s sentient trees, one of his favorite themes.  The idea of personified nature is entirely a human projection or creation, but it is also a manifestation of happiness, of health, as is the monk, oddly, even if it is also the result of mental illness, some kind of unconscious defense mechanism.  The monk only reappears at the professor’s death, as do those pines, returned to life, “which was so lovely.”  His death is ugly, yet “an unspeakable, infinite happiness flooded his whole being” (Ch. 9).

It is endings like this, the ironic capper of one of Chekhov’s harshest, most unpleasant stories, that make me nervous about the end of “The Student.”  Good luck, kid.

And it seemed to him that nothing could ever set it right. - now there's a Chekhovian line

Once I start looking for correspondences between Chekhov and Tolstoy, they become too easy to find.  Such rich writers give me a lot to mess with.  “’Anna on the Neck’” features a young woman named Anna who is married to a much older, ambitious civil servant.  The “Anna” of the odd title refers to a medal he wants to earn, if necessary by means of his lovely wife flattering a superior officer.  Is there some kind of parody of Anna Karenina here, the alternate timeline life of young Anna K.?  Probably not!  Anyway, this story has a happy ending for Anna.  Happiness turns out to be a nightmare, a destruction of principles, an effacement of the self.  Chekhov must have shaken off his Tolstoy anxiety by this point.

A minor, maybe, story of Chekhov’s called “Neighbours,” from earlier in his Tolstoyan phase (1892), is a nice example of his inability to be anyone but himself.  Constance Garnett’s version in in The Duel & Other Stories.  The story is about the impossibility of living a life based on abstractions.  Or perhaps it is about living with inevitably irreconcilable principles.

Pyotr Mihalitch Ivashin was very much out of humour: his sister, a young girl, had gone away to live with Vlassitch, a married man.  To shake off the despondency and depression which pursued him at home and in the fields, he called to his aid his sense of justice, his genuine and noble ideas – he had always defended free love! – but this was of no avail, and he always came back to the same conclusion as their foolish old nurse, that his sister had acted wrongly and that Vlassitch had abducted his sister.  And that was distressing.

I wish every story summarized itself so cleanly in its opening paragraph.

After much dithering, he rides off to confront his neighbor – a duel, maybe, or a horsewhipping – but once at their home, setting aside his timidity, he is reminded that he likes Vlassitch, likes his sister, and sees them both as essentially human.  The couple can’t marry, for example, because Vlassitch is already married to a woman he was trying to save from a worse fate, “a strange marriage in the style of Dostoevsky,” regrettable, now, but an act of compassion.  His sister was hardly abducted, and has plunged into her freely chosen role as Vlassitch’s wife and homemaker.

“It’s a charming house altogether,” she went on, sitting opposite her brother.  “There’s some pleasant memory in every room.  In my room, only fancy, Grigory’s grandfather shot himself.”

A passage worthy of Uncle Vanya, there.  The brother ends up in a state of “spiritual softening,” unwilling to do anything that will bring additional unhappiness to the couple – “he had a deep conviction that they were unhappy, and could not be happy, and their love seemed to him a melancholy, irreparable mistake” – although the truth is that he is the one who is unhappy, not the couple.

And thinking about his life, he came to the conclusion he had never said or acted upon what he really thought, and other people had repaid him in the same way.  And so the while of life seemed to him as dark as this water in which the night sky was reflected and water-weeds grew in a tangle.  And it seemed to him that nothing could ever set it right.

The End.  Poor sap.

“Neighbours” has a beautiful pair of pagan trees, so I will add them to my collection:  “Near the dam, two willows, one old and one young, drooped tenderly towards one another.”

I’ll be on vacation much of next week.  Back on Thursday, let’s say, for a couple of posts on Antonio Machado, let’s say.  Spanish Literature Month.

"Dear storm!" - the Chekhovian dialectic - "But what am I to do to make my character different?"

“Now that’s from Chekhov’s Tolstoyan period,” says Scott Bailey, again and again – he said it yesterday – and I used to think, “What is he talking about?  These are Chekhov stories, Chekhov, Chekhov!”  But that was based on reading them years ago.  Reading them now, the Tolstoyan anxiety is pretty obvious.  But by the early 1890s, Chekhov had developed a strong personal style, so whatever his intentions, his writing remains deeply his own, in style and ethics.  He has become such a great artist that he can’t write like anyone else.

My understanding is that the source of the anxiety was conversations with Tolstoy himself, who was brazenly projecting his own artistic conflicts onto poor, innocent Anton.  Write about big ethical problems; write to reform people.  Chekhov, who was moving fast, soon moved on to other problems, certainly by “Peasants” (1897).  Poor Tolstoy never got so far.

Chekhov’s Tolstoy appears to me to reduce to two stories, The Death of Ivan Ilych and the Levin half of Anna Karenina.  For several years he attacks from various angles.  Chekhov had good taste.  What is a good life? What is the point of life given the certainty of death?  Big, big questions, the kind that reduce most writers to trivialities.

“The Duel” (1891) and “The Wife” (1892) show how Chekhovian impulses defeat Tolstoyan intentions.  The narrator of “The Wife” wants to do good, to fight famine and feed the poor, in between writing a “History of the Railway.”  He is hindered, though, by the fact that he is intensely annoying.  No one wants his help; they barely even want his money.  He is that much of a pest and egotist.

“Do you remember, Ivan Ivanitch, you told me I had a disagreeable character and that it was difficult to get on with me?  But what am I to do to make my character different?”  (Ch. 6)

His friend can only answer “I don’t know.”  The story ends with a kind of progress – the narrator becomes reconciled to his weakness.  “Now I feel no uneasiness.”  His wife feeds the peasants while he writes his history.  Described like this, the story almost sounds like a self-parody.  Maybe I have described it incorrectly.

“The Duel” features a self-created Superfluous Man, a hilarious character, a lazy, lazy man who blames his weaknesses on the tenor of the times, on Turgenev, basically.  If the men of his class are superfluous, nothing is his fault.  The fact that he is latching onto a thirty-year-old political argument to justify his behavior is part of the joke.

A duel with a rationalist leads him to reform his life.  He races through the stages of The Death of Ivan Ilych in an evening, although since Chekhov is a pagan, his religious turn looks like this:

“The storm!” whispered Laevsky; he had a longing to pray to some one or to something, if only to the lightning or the storm-clouds.  “Dear storm!”  (Ch. 17)

He changes his life.  “When he went out of the house and got into the carriage he wanted to return home alive.”

All of these stories are filled with debates and discussions, perhaps too much, but Chekhov’s method is a dialectical humanism.  Many sides of an argument are represented; many sides contain truths; many truths are irreconcilable.  The arguments often disintegrate.  The doctor in “Ward No. 6” spends many pages arguing about the meaning of life, but with a madman, the only person in town who will indulge such topics.  The madman is often in the right, but he is not exactly reliable.  Hey, maybe this story is also about Chekhov’s relations with Tolstoy.

"So this is real life" - Chekhov's delicately grim "Ward No. 6"

Mark Twain, Anton Chekhov, both kind of dark.  I could use that as a transition from Twain to Chekhov.  Twain moves in an anti-humanist direction; Chekhov is always firmly humanist.  There we go.

I have noted that when Constance Garnett compiled her thirteen volumes of Chekhov stories, she at times followed a thematic scheme – a series of stories about children or what have you.  Garnett’s idea for The Horse-Stealers & Other Stories, Vol. 10, seems to have been to showcase Chekhov at his grimmest.

This book houses the long 1892 story  “Ward No. 6,” one of Chekhov’s greatest works, from a period that is entirely great.  Why this one is not as well-known as “The Lady with the Little Dog” – eh, why ask this question.

Ward No. 6 is a “lodge,” a ruined shack behind a provincial Russian hospital.  It houses, as the story begins, five mentally ill patients, the refuse of Russian society, with ailments far beyond the capacity of the medicine of their time, and a caretaker who treats them cruelly.

The hospital is run by Dr. Andrey Yefimitch Ragin, “a strange man in his way,” educated and thoughtful enough to be horrified by the conditions of his own corrupt and filthy hospital but with a character too weak to do anything of consequence.  He “had two cupboards of instruments put up,” and that is about it.  “[H]e had no strength of will nor belief in his right to organize an intelligent and honest life about him.”

Chekhov slowly, gently, lovingly, spends the story grinding the doctor down to a fine powder, finally putting him in Ward No. 6 with his former patients.  His view:

Andrey Yefimitch walked away to the window and looked out into the open country.  It was getting dark, and on the horizon to the right a cold crimson moon was mounting upwards.  Not far from the hospital fence, not much more than two hundred yards away, stood a tall white house shut in by a stone wall.  This was a prison.

“So this is real life,” thought Andrey Yefimitch, and he felt frightened.

The moon and the prison, and the nails on the fence, and the far-away flames at the bone-charring factory were all terrible.  (Ch. 18)

A prison!  I feel as if a parallel Chekhov story is taking place there, with the indifferent warden finding himself locked in a cell.  The bone-charring factory!  Perhaps Chekhov is laying it on a little thick.

The death of Andrey Yefimitch is written with great delicacy.

And what if it [immortality] really existed.  But he did not want immortality, and he thought of it only for an instant.  A herd of deer, extraordinarily beautiful and graceful, of which he had been reading the day before, ran by him; then a peasant woman stretched out her hand to him with a registered letter…  (Ch. 19, ellipses in original)

Then the story ends with a viewing of the corpse that owes a debt to Cormac McCarthy.  That letter has attracted much commentary.  It is not mentioned elsewhere in the text, and is a little insoluble mystery, although I have a guess about it, based more on gaps in the text.

The basic irony of “Ward No. 6,” the bad doctor who becomes a patient, could hardly be more blunt.  Everything else, though, artistically, ethically – what subtlety.

colours for which it is hard to find a name in human speech - Chekhov gives a character a gift

“The Beauties,” the 1888 story that followed “The Steppe,” is where Scott Bailey says to go next.  The nine year-old boy from “The Steppe” seems to have become the teenager in “The Beauties.”  He has transformed his personifications of nature, which, please remember, often involved plants coming to life in wind storms, in a natural direction, onto beautiful women:

It was that butterfly’s beauty so in keeping with waltzing, darting about the garden, a laughter and gaiety, and incongruous with serious thought, grief, and repose; and it seemed as though a gust of wind blowing over the platform, or a fall of rain, would be enough to wither the fragile body and scatter the capricious beauty like the pollen of a flower.  (289, The Bishop & Other Stories)

An earlier passage in the story is like a one page compression of “The Steppe,” but filtered through the boy’s matured sensibility – “crimson, orange, gold, lilac, muddy pink; one cloud is like a monk, another like a fish, a third like a Turk in a turban” and so on (281).  It is all color and metaphor now.

Not in “Gusev,” though, published two years later.  Gusev is a peasant soldier discharged for illness.  He had been in the far East service and is returning by ship, via the Pacific and Indian Oceans.  He will not make it home.  He is in the company of other sick men who will, like him, die at sea.

The story first appears to be about a conflict between reason and superstition.  Gusev is the latter:

Suppose the fish [that sank a ship] were as big as a mountain and its back were as hard as a sturgeon: and in the same way, supposing that away yonder at the end of the world there stood great stone walls and the fierce winds were chained up to the walls…  if they had not broken loose, why did they tear about all over the sea like maniacs, and struggle to escape like dogs?  If they were not chained up, what did become of them when it was calm?  (146, The Witch & Other Stories, ellipses in Garnett)

His poor companion, educated, dying, is driven nuts by this peasant nonsense.  He dies; Gusev thinks of home (“He still sat dreaming of the frost”); Gusev hopes he will live long enough not to be buried at sea.  “The sea has no sense and no pity”( 161).

Like in “The Beauties,” whatever metaphorical leaps Gusev might make, the story stays grounded in the kind of humanism I associate with Chekhov.  What a surprise, then to follow the sailcloth-wrapped body of Gusev into the ocean, down many miles (“It was said to be three miles to the bottom”).  Here comes a school of harbor pilot fish; here comes a shark.  “The harbour pilots are delighted, they stop to see what will come next” (165).  If I had been asked which  great Russian author wrote about the delight of a school of fish, it would be a long time before my guessing got to Chekhov, yet here it is.

The narrator – as omniscient as any I know – decides to surface and look at the clouds:

one cloud like a triumphal arch, another like a lion, a third like a pair of scissors…  From behind the clouds a broad, green shaft of light pierces through and stretches to the middle of the sky; a little later another, violet-coloured, lies beside it; next that, one of gold, then one rose-coloured…  The sky turns a soft lilac.  Looking at this gorgeous, enchanted sky, at first the ocean scowls, but soon it, too, takes tender, joyous, passionate colours for which it is hard to find a name in human speech.  (165, all ellipses in Garnett)

Gusev, it turns out, was correct; he was not superstitious but perceptive.  The physical world in which he lives is personified, capable of emotion and willed action, even if the will is supplied by the author, the boy from “The Steppe” and “The Beauties” grown into the world’s greatest short story writer, seen here giving a gift to one of his characters.  The world is not indifferent to his suffering.

Chekhov makes the plants dance

This passage of “The Steppe” grabbed me – remember that the story is from the perspective of a boy traveling on the Russian prairie:

But at last, when the sun was beginning to sink into the west, the steppe, the hills and the air could bear the oppression no longer, and, driven out of all patience, exhausted, tried to fling off the yoke.  A fleecy ashen-grey cloud unexpectedly appeared behind the hills.  It exchanged glances with the steppe, as though to say, “Here I am,” and frowned…  [wind comes up]  Prickly uprooted plants ran stumbling and leaping in all directions over the steppe, and one of them got caught in the whirlwind, turned round and round like a bird, flew towards the sky, and turning into a little black speck, vanished from sight.  After it flew another, and then a third, and Yegorushka saw two of them meet in the blue height and clutch at one another as though they were wrestling.  (185-6)

This is not exactly a description of what Yegorushka sees, but a personification.  Is he the one who imagines that the steppe itself has lost patience, or that the cloud frowns, or that those magical plants have limbs and volition?  I love those dancing plants.  They return 90 pages later, when a real storm hits:

The tattered, ragged look of the storm-cloud gave it a drunken, disorderly air…  By now, most likely, the whirlwind eddying round and lifting from the earth dust, dry grass and feathers, was mounting to the very sky; uprooted plants must have been flying by that very black storm-cloud, and how frightened they must have been!  But through the dust that clogged the eyes nothing could be seen but the flash of lightning.  (273-4)

So Yegorushka sees nothing but is remembering the plants from the day before, wondering what had happened to them, where they have gone.  I have a hint here about the significance of the incidents of the story.  It is not just that the boy has a series of experiences, but that he imaginatively acts on them.

Maybe.  In “The Horse-Stealers,” a man is being robbed – his horse stolen – during a blizzard:

White clouds were floating about the yard, their long tails clinging to the rough grass and the bushes, while on the other side of the fence in the open country huge giants in white robes with wide sleeves were whirling round and falling to the ground, and getting up again to wave their arms and fight.  And the wind, the wind!  The bare birches and cherry-trees, unable to endure its rude caresses, bowed low down to the ground and wailed: “God, for what sin hast Thou bound us to the earth and will not let us go free?”  (18, The Horse-Stealers & Other Stories)

This is a little – a lot – too much to credit to a character 1) busy with other things and 2) so distinctly unimaginative.  “The Horse-Stealers” is the most frightening Chekhov story I know.  This fellow stares evil in the face and his only response is to feel ashamed that he does not have the strength of character to be evil himself, because it seems like evil would be fun, more fun than his miserable life, at least.  And this is in a world where the trees are Orthodox believers, at least.

The next step is “Gusev,” right?  So I’ll write about “Gusev” next.  Chekhovian metaphysics.

this unknown land in the company of terrible peasants - Chekhov crosses the steppe

You cannot go over the road past the fence
Without trampling the universe.  (Boris Pasternak, “Steppe,” 1917, tr. Jon Stallworthy and Peter France)

Or at least seeing the universe, which is a possible summary of Anton Chekhov’s 1888 novella The Steppe.  Yegorushka, “a boy of nine with a sunburnt face, wet with tears,” is crossing the steppe with his uncle and an elderly priest.

It is a one-way trip for Yegorushka, thus the tears.  The men, including the priest, are selling wool, but the boy is going to a new school, far from home.  In the middle of the story, the uncle, for obscure reasons, hands the boy over to the wool-carters, who are traveling in the same direction, allowing Chekhov to mix the boy with characters of a different social class and some different incidents.

Not that there is much in the way of drama in The Steppe.  Yegorushka sees, feels, thinks.  He comes down with a fever near the end, but recovers.  When his uncle and the priest leave him at the end of the story (“something whispered in his heart that he would never see the old man again”) the boy

felt that with these people all that he had known till then had vanished from him for ever.  He sank helplessly on to the little bench, and with bitter tears greeted the new unknown life that was beginning for him now….

What would that life be like?  (302, ellipses Garnett’s)

The implication is that the events of the trip across the steppe are somehow significant, not symbolic but rather part of a web of associations or memories with either the boy’s past life or new life.  Or they are just a series of experiences, which I experience along with Yegorushka.

The travelers go past a prison, and memories stir.  Then a cemetery:

… white crosses and tombstones, nestling among green cherry-tree and looking in the distance like patches of white, peeped out gaily from behind the wall.  Yegorushka remembered that when the cherries were in blossom those white patches melted with the flowers into a sea of white; and that when the cherries were ripe the white tombstones were dotted with splashes like bloodstains.  (163)

Yegorushka’s grandmother is buried there.  He is still in familiar territory – old experiences, old memories.  But he is in a heightened, receptive emotional state.  Everything potentially means something, the distant windmill that is for hours the only interruption of the prairie, the marmots and birds, the storm, the peasants working or traveling, many of whom have their own little stories inset into the larger story, stories that could be independent Chekhov stories if the point of view were swiveled away from the boy.  But this way, these stories become Yegorushka’s stories.  Or not.  Maybe he forgets them.  Who knows?

And these men and the shadows round the camp fire, and the dark bales and the far-away lightning, which was flashing every minute in the distance – all struck him now as terrible and unfriendly.  He was overcome with terror and asked himself in despair why and how he had come into this unknown land in the company of terrible peasants? (270)

I’m not sure I have given a hint about what kind of masterpiece The Steppe is.  Tomorrow, a different approach.  Just ignore this post.

I read and quoted the Constance Garnett version found in The Bishop & Other Stories.

It’s like living in Australia - Chekhov's Ivanov

Last night I read Anton Chekhov’s Ivanov, the first of his major plays.  The most minor of his major plays.  His only minor major play.

It was written in two weeks in 1887 and performed three weeks later.  I like that pace.  Chekhov rewrote the play from scratch in 1888, made major revisions in 1889, and tinkered with it occasionally thereafter.  I read the final version, I think.  Whatever is in the Norton Critical Edition, tr. Laurence Senelick.

Chekhov was beginning his great period about this time, with “A Dreary Story” and “The Steppe” and so on.  He did not write a play as good as his best stories on his first try.  He still depends on some stagey stuff that he will squelch soon enough, although some of the stagey stuff is pretty funny.  This is how the play begins:

IVANOV is sitting at a table, reading a book.  BORKIN, wearing heavy boots and carrying a rifle, appears at the bottom of the garden; he is tipsy; after he spots IVANOV, he tiptoes up to him and, when he has come alongside him, aims the gun in his face.  (I.1.)

You can tell that Chekhov is a beginner, because he has not yet formulated his famous “Chekhov’s gun” principle. This rifle, introduced in the first act, never goes off!  It is a different gun that is fired in the last act.  But not this one.  Totally different thing.

Maybe this opening does not look so funny, but the play is in tone a comedy, even if some of the events are pretty grim.  It is Chekhov, is what I am saying.

A Superfluous Man has fallen out of love with his wife, who is dying of tuberculosis, something she only learns when her husband blurts it out at the end of Act III.  The wife’s doctor is in love with her.  Chekhov’s doctors are always questionable figures.  A young neighbor is in love with the husband, making a love rectangle.  Aside from her feelings for the protagonist, she is the only sensible person in the play.

The comic supporting cast is excellent , like the young neighbor’s mother, a wealthy miser who resents her guests:

The Count didn’t finish his tea.  A waste of perfectly good sugar.  (II, 5)

Or the tax collector whose only subject is old games of whist, a classic bore:

KOSYKH: And suddenly, of all the bad luck, the ace of spades was trumped first round.

SHABELSKY (Grabs a revolver off the desk.[okay, this is the gun that goes off an act later])  Get out of here or I’ll shoot!

KOSYKH (Waves his hand in dismissal.)  What the hell…  Can’t a man even talk to people?  It’s like living in Australia: no common interests, no solidarity… Every man lives on his own…  (III, 3, all ellipses in original)

From the movie Country Life (1994), which is Uncle Vanya moved to Australia, I know that Kosykh is right, even though he is an idiot.  Everyone is bored, bored, bored, and it’s their own fault.

terrible truth, unutterable despair, reasonably big laughs - rambling through another volume of Chekhov stories

I did not take many notes on Volume 11 of Constance Garnett’s Chekhov stories (The Schoolmaster & Other Stories).  Not nearly as many as on Volume 12.  Maybe I have nothing to say.

The first story, “The Schoolmaster” (1886), kicks off the recurring “death and illness” theme.  An esteemed teacher attends  his fourteenth annual district banquet.  Everything is just a little bit off this time, because all of the other teachers and administrators know that the schoolmaster is mortally ill, that this will be his last banquet.

And at once on all the faces, in all the motionless eyes bent upon him, he read not the sympathy, not the commiseration which he could not endure, but something else, something soft, tender, but at the same time intensely sinister, like a terrible truth, something which in one instant turned him cold all over and filled his soul with unutterable despair.  (10)

So this book is rough going.  What relatively healthy  reader is not looking at the teacher similarly, so to speak?  Although we are likely to sympathize with his self-delusion in a way that his fictional colleagues cannot.

That sentence looked stranger even than I remembered it as I typed it out – “soft, tender.”

Oh, the next story, “Enemies” (1887), holy cow.  A doctor’s six year-old son has just died, minutes ago, when a man arrives demanding the doctor come treat his wife.  A tragedy, however ordinary, turns farcical, and becomes more absurd as the story progresses.  Chekhov is not above Maupassant-like twists – this book has a couple of good ones – although this story is more like a parody of the twist story.  No clever ending is going to bring that child back.

Look at these crows:

Then the carriage drove into dense shadow; here there was the smell of dampness and mushrooms, and the sound of rustling trees; the crows, awakened by the noise of the wheels, stirred among the foliage and uttered prolonged plaintive cries as though they knew the doctor’s son was dead and that Abogin’s wife was ill.  (23)

No pathetic fallacy is more genuinely pathetic than that of Anton Chekhov.

Luckily, Chekhov breaks the mood in the next one, “The Examining Magistrate” (1887), which is more of a genuine comic Maupassant twist ending story.  It features a doctor, a suicide, a betrayal, etc. but is nevertheless comic relief.

Lots of comedy in this book, I remind myself.  Chekhov may think that homeopathic medicine is a con, but he sets up a story so that the patients of a sincere homeopathic doctor are cheating her (“Malingerers”).  A man (“the man whose new galoshes were stolen last year,” the best joke in the book, a detail tossed out as if I will just nod along, oh yes, that fellow) accidentally drinks paraffin but has the devil’s time convincing his wife or anyone else that he has poisoned himself (“An Inadvertence”).  Another man is so afraid of being murdered by robbers that he overdoes it (“Overdoing It”).  “A Play,” in which a budding playwright reads her manuscript to a famous writer, is close to something Mark Twain might write.  “The jury acquitted him” is the last line.

I guess that last batch are mostly throwaway stories, but they make the book readable.  Thank goodness Constance Garnett had the sense not to compile the twenty most miserable Chekhov stories in one place.

Well, I had something to say.  A break from Chekhov now.  I’m sure I’ll be back to him soon enough.

the lazy fellow’s soul is filled with a sense of glory and triumph - two supposedly minor Chekhov stories

“Shrove Tuesday,” published February 23, 1887 in a St. Petersburg newspaper.  I read it in The Cook’s Wedding & Other Stories.  Pavel Vassilitch should help his son Styopa with his math homework, but it is Shrove Tuesday, so everyone if full of pancakes.  The fast begins tomorrow.  Not a great time to concentrate on fractions.  “’To be sure after pancakes, lessons are nasty to swallow.’”  The father instead tells stories about his schooldays.

“He [the teacher] would begin explaining some theory, get in a tangle, and turn crimson all over and race up and down the class-room as though someone were sticking an awl in his back, then he would blow his nose half a dozen times and begin to cry.  But you know we were magnanimous to him, we pretended not to see it.”  (133)

The house is full of cats.

The samovar is hissing and puffing out steam which throws flickering shadows on the ceiling.  The cats come in from the entry sleep and melancholy with their tails in the air.  (134)

Melancholy cats.  The story is full of similes.  Styopa “is swaying to and fro like a Chinese idol and looking crossly at a sum book” (132).  “The old-fashioned clock in the drawing-room does not strike, but coughs ten times huskily as though it had a cold” (136).

Newspapers in 1887 St. Petersburg were different than newspapers now.  Better.

“Art” (1886) is in the same volume, near the end, not about children at all but about the creation of a religious artifact, a “Jordan,” directly on top of a frozen river for an Epiphany festival at which the river will be blessed.  The characters are a regional artist who is a prima donna and a lazy drunk but who has a real talent for this form, and his almost mindless assistant.  “If he were told to stand on the river for a day, a month, or a year he would stand there” (267).  They break the ice, make a frame and pegs – “whoever gets hold of a peg after the blessing of the water will be lucky for the whole year” – and dip a large cross in the water allowing them to care a dove in the ice that encrusts it.  The artist drinks and complains, but the work gets done.

[He] pulls away the mat… and the people behold something extraordinary.  The lectern, the wooden ring, the pegs, and the cross in the ice are iridescent with thousands of colors.  The cross and the dove glitter so dazzlingly that it hurts the eyes to look at them.  Merciful God, how fine it is! (272)

I usually assume that stories about visual art are really about writing.  In this case I am less sure.  Chekov had no assistant.  He was cranking out stories like I write these blog posts, and all in his own words, and at this level!  But did Chekhov think of his newspaper stories as similarly ephemeral?

Guns are fired, the bells peal furiously, loud exclamations of delight, shouts, and a rush to get the pegs.  Seryozhka [the artist] listens to this uproar, sees thousands of eyes fixed upon him, and the lazy fellow’s soul is filled with a sense of glory and triumph.  (273)

what papa exists for is unknown - Chekhov makes it strange

Twenty-five stories in The Cook’s Wedding & Other Stories, seventeen about children in one way or another, five about animals in ways that are thematically relevant to the childhood stories, and then the last three, one a gag story about fishing, one about the creation of religious art and the other a screwy murder mystery, that as far as I can tell have nothing to do with children.  All but one story from 1883 to 1888.  The exception, “Whitebrow” (1895) is about a wolf and her cubs and her accidental adoption of a puppy – this is what I mean by thematically relevant, nothing more than that.

Given that they are almost all little – six, eight, ten-page – stories cranked out on a weekly basis for newspapers, pure ephemera, there is no reason they should even be readable anymore, much less works of art.  Hacks of genius are different than other hacks.

Some stories are from the perspective of children.  They are full of fine make-it-strange moments.  They are written for those moments.

Nurse and mamma are comprehensible: they dress Grisha, feed him, and put him to bed, but what papa exists for is unknown.  There is another enigmatical person, auntie, who presented Grisha with a drum.  She appears and disappears.  (“Grisha,” 50)

The story practically ends with a Joycean epiphany, but at the level of a child who is not yet three.

This next one rips off a classic Yiddish joke.  “I learned my name is Irving.”  Look it up; it’s a good one.

The assistant asked each one his name. and his father’s name, where he lived, how long he had been ill, and so on.  From his mother’s answers, Pashka learned that his name was not Pashka, but Pavel Galaktionov, that he was seven years old, that he could not read or write, and that he had been ill ever since Easter.  (“The Runaway,” 36)

It’s Pashka’s first trip to the hospital, one of many Chekhov compassionate but exasperated stories about the ignorance of peasants.  The child’s perspective makes the ignorance more forgivable.  Like it’s his fault.

In other stories, the point of view is that of an adult, so it is the children who look strange.  In “Home,” a father knows he should punish his son for smoking (the boy is seven).  But although an educated and kind man he does not quite understand his son:

From daily observation of his son the prosecutor had become convinced that children, like savages, have their own artistic standpoints and requirements peculiar to them, beyond the grasp of grown-up people…   Thus he [the boy] would depict the sounds of an orchestra in the form of smoke like spherical blurs, a whistle in the form of a spiral thread…  To his mind sound was closely connected with form and colour, so that when he painted letters he invariably painted the letter L yellow, M red, A black, and so on. (74, first set of ellipses mine, second Chekhov’s, or Garnett’s)

In other words, the boy has synesthesia.  He is Vladimir Nabokov, twelve years before his birth.  Nabokov’s colors were different – L white, M pink, etc.  I can’t remember Nabokov mentioning this story, but internet research tells me that Tolstoy especially liked it.  The father solves the problem by telling a moralistic story – “[t]his ending struck Yevgeny Petrovitch as absurd and naïve, but the whole story made an intense impression on Seryozha” – how Tolstoy must have agreed – but then ends on am impressionistic detail that would have made me date the story much later if I were guessing.  This is a great one.  Now usually translated as “At Home,” I think.

Constance Garnett reorganizes Chekhov

The basic Chekhov chronology is that for several years he wrote lots of very short stories, sometimes two stories a week, but once he became famous enough to be paid well he started writing fewer but longer stories.  So in 1886 he published 55 stories and in 1889 three.  But he also became a more complex artist.  Those three are all masterpieces.  The later stories are pretty much all masterpieces.

When Constance Garnett turned to Chekhov she translated 201 of his stories, somewhat less than half of what was available to her.  She translated almost everything from 1888 on, the bulk of the material from 1885 to 1887, a little bit from 1883 and 1884, and one story from 1880 to 1882.  Then she assembled her Chekhov in thirteen volumes, in her order.  What a job she did.  The first two or three volumes are to me the epitome of Chekhov, just perfect; then for several volumes Garnett roughs him up a little, lets him get stranger.  All of this is still mostly the great, later stories with a few earlier pieces mixed in.

Around volume 9 or 10, though, Garnett is running out of late ones, except for a few she has carefully saved, while she still has a hundred of the little 1883 to 1887 stories.  She organizes them thematically, so that volume 10 is especially dark – Chekhov on horror, murder and madness – with “The Horse-stealers” (1890) and “Ward No. 6” (1892) leading off the theme in the late style.  Volume 11 has more than its share of illness and doctors.  And volume 12, most remarkably, is almost all about children, and if not children, dogs.  The only late ringer, “Whitebrow” (1895) is about dogs.  And a wolf; it is from the perspective of a wolf.

Volume 12 is The Cook’s Wedding & Other Stories.  I has not read it as a book until recently.  I had dipped in, since it is the home of some of my favorites, like “Vanka” and “Oysters.”  But I had not realized what Garnett was doing with her anti-chronological organization, how clever and effective it was, even with more minor Chekhov.  Taken as a whole, Volume 12 does not seem so minor.

Other Chekhov collections are good, too.  It is hard to find fault with The Portable Chekhov, where you can read “The Lady with the Pet Dog” (Garnett Vol. 3) right after “Gooseberries” (Vol. 5) and just after “In the Ravine” (Vol. 6), all in one place, which is great; whatever Chekhov you read do not miss “In the Ravine,” right?  Owning just The Portable Chekhov is wiser, I suppose.

But those thirteen books Garnett assembled, what a treasure chest.

I also recently read Volume 11, The Schoolmaster & Other Stories, as well as Volume 12, and what I plan to do is write a little about the contents of these two books, but I guess I am getting my little tribute to Constance Garnett, not just as a translator but as an anthologist, out of the way first.

Are you happy? No. - acting in Uncle Vanya

Does this look like much?  It’s from Chekhov's Uncle Vanya (1897), and is part of a reconciliation scene between Sonya and her young step-mother Elena:

SONYA:  Come, peace, peace!  Let’s forget it.

ELENA:  You mustn’t look like that – it’s not becoming.  You must believe in everyone, otherwise it’s impossible to live. (Pause)

SONYA:  Tell me honestly, as a friend – are you happy?

ELENA:  No.

SONYA:  I knew that.

The question is: what to do with that “No”?  Is Elena earnest, sad, defeated, defensive?  How about Sonya, in her answer?

I have seen two stage productions of Uncle Vanya,  a flawless actor’s holiday at the Steppenwolf Theatre (2001), the other a cluttered and mis-paced 2007 Court Theatre version (no complaints about the acting, though).  In both productions, the actresses played this scene in exactly the same way.  They replicated what Julianne Moore and Brooke Smith did in Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), which can be seen here at about 2:40, although the whole seven minutes is choice.  Excuse me – I am going to watch it again.

For most of the above dialogue the camera is over Sonya’s shoulder, so we only see Elena’s face, and her reaction to Sonya’s fumbling question, her genuine curiosity.  “Are you happy?” – and Moore breaks into an enormous smile.  She might even be about to laugh, but exercises restraint.  Sonya – now the camera moves to her face – also smiles, broadly, happily.  “I knew you weren’t,” matter of fact.  Both actresses laugh, shaking their shoulders.

Sonya was genuinely anxious that her step-mother was happy, and is genuinely relieved that she is not.  Elena has already moved beyond happiness.  Her admission is old news, perhaps upsetting at some point in the past, but now something that can be treated ironically.  Now the two women can be unhappy together, which makes them happy.  Happier.

Vanya on 42nd Street is a showcase of interpretation via acting, full of actorly surprises, but for some reason this one stands out as a favorite, perhaps just because I have now seen live actors duplicate it twice, as if it is the standard interpretation of the lines, as if there is no other real choice.  Or perhaps I am just enjoyably amazed at seeing how much an actress can do with the word "No."

Sometime I would like to write about Sonya’s monologue at the end of Uncle Vanya, the “We shall rest” speech, with its “life that is bright, beautiful, and fine.”  It looks like it should ruin the play, just upend everything.  I think of it as an Alpine challenge for the actress, but every time I have seen the play it turns out to be a triumph.  Brooke Smith’s version is on Youtube here.

When reading a play, I have the book and my imagination, but I also have a lot of other people helping me out.

The translation is by Ann Dunnigan, found in an old Signet Classics paperback titled Chekhov: The Major Plays.  The Vanya on 42nd Street version is by David Mamet.

His reading suggested a man swimming in the sea among the wreckage of his ship - Chekhov introduces ideas to his fiction

“The Bet,” a Chekhov story from 1889, was suggested to me by mel u of The Reading Life.  I had not read it; that was easy to change.   Mel is right that the story is a good one, but it is also an unusual Chekhov story, one that encapsulates the evolution of Chekhov’s art.

A rough recap:  In 1886 and 1887 Chekhov published a story a week in newspapers.  I have been wandering through these stories recently.  They are typically short single episodes, often character studies or anecdotes or sketches or jokes.  Read in handfuls, they create an interestingly varied and large Chekhovian Russia, and are valuable for that reason alone, aside for the occasional fine images, sentences, and scenes.

At some point in 1887, these stories had become popular enough that Chekhov could up his fee substantially.  He began to write fewer but longer stories, so 1889 features only three stories:  “The Princess,” about which I remember nothing, the much-translated and anthologized “A Dreary Story,” the title could be attached to most Chekhov stories, and “The Bet.”  Chekhov was likely paid more for these three stories than for the 55 or more from 1886.  Literary biographers should include appendices detailing the income of their subject, broken down by year and source, adjusted for inflation, if necessary.

“The Bet,” although “realistic” in a strict sense – no supernatural business – is a moral fable.  An overheated argument about capital punishment leads to a bizarre bet:  two million rubles on the side that lifetime imprisonment is worse than death up against fifteen years of voluntary solitary confinement to prove that life is always preferable to death.

Chekhov works the plot so that both men succeed and both men are destroyed.  One could argue the point, though, because the most surprising feature of the story is the introduction of ideas.  The prisoner is forbidden human contact, but allowed books.  He spends a year with light novels, the moves on to classics, and then to languages and philosophy, then to the Gospels and theology, then to everything:

At one time he was busy with the natural sciences, then he would ask for Byron or Shakespeare, .  There were notes in which he demanded at the same time books on chemistry, and a manual of medicine, and a novel, and some treatise on philosophy or theology.  His reading suggested a man swimming in the sea among the wreckage of his ship, and trying to save his life by greedily clutching at one spar and then at another.

Now that hits a little too close to home.  All of the prisoner’s study and reading have led him to conclude that all is meaningless in the face of death and entropy.  “I despise your books, I despise wisdom and the blessings of this world…  death will wipe you off the face of the earth as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor…”  He renounces all earthly and all unearthly things.

The banker, the man who put up the two millions, is the recognizably Chekhovian character, the true subject of the story.  How he reacts or changes in the face of his prisoner’s newfound wisdom, how the story really ends, is the return to the Chekhov I recognize.  The prisoner is an intruder from Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, a parody of the Underground Man and Anna Karenina’s Levin.  I see more clearly some of my attraction to Chekhov – we are both skeptical of the place of ideas as such in fiction.

Good stuff, mel, thanks!  I am, by the way, using Constance Garnett’s translation.