This great kindness pervades Chekhov's literary work, but it is not a matter of program, or of literary message with him, but simply the natural coloration of his talent. And he was adored by all his readers, which practically means by all Russia, for in the late years of his life his fame was very great indeed. "Without this phenomenal sociability of his, without his constant readiness to hobnob with anyone at all, to sing with singers and to get drunk with drunkards; without that burning interest in the lives, habits, conversations, and occupations of hundreds and thousands of people, he would hardly have been able to create that colossal, encyclopedically detailed Russian world of the 1880s and 1890s which goes by the name of Chekhov's Short Stories."
" 'Do you know how I write my short stories?' he said to Korolenko, the radical journalist and short-story writer, when the latter had just made his acquaintance. 'Here's how!'
"'He glanced at his table,' Korolenko tells us, 'took up the first object that met his eye—it happened to be an ash tray—
placed it before me and said: 'If you want it, you'll have a story to-morrow. It will be called "The Ash Tray." ' "
And it seemed to Korolenko right then and there that a magical transformation of that ash tray was taking place: "Certain indefinite situations, adventures which had not yet found concrete form, were already beginning to crystallize about the ash tray."
Chekhov's health which had never been strong (and which had suffered in consequence of the hardships of his trip to Sakhalin) soon made it imperative for him to seek a milder climate than that of the Moscow region. He had tuberculosis.
He went away, first to France, but then settled down in Yalta, in the Crimea, where he bought a country-house with an orchard. The Crimea in general, and Yalta in particular, are very beautiful places, with a comparatively mild climate. There Chekhov lived from the late eighties to almost the very end, leaving Yalta but rarely to visit Moscow.
The famous Moscow Art Theatre, founded in the nineties by two amateurs—one an amateur performer Stanislavski, the other a man of letters Nemirovich-Danchenko—who both were endowed with an extraordinary talent for stage-management, was famous before it began the production of Chekhov's plays, but it is nevertheless true that this theatre truly "found itself" and reached a new height of artistic perfection through Chekhov's plays which it made famous.
"Chaika," the Seagull, became a symbol of the theatre: a stylized reproduction of a seagull came to stay on the theatre's curtain and programs. The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters all became triumphs for the theatre as well as for the author. Mortally sick with consumption, Chekhov would appear for the first performance, listen to the passionate acclaim of the audience, enjoy the success of his play, and then, sicker than ever, return to his Yalta retirement. His wife, Miss Knipper, one of the leading, I can even say the leading actress of the theatre, came sometimes to him in the Crimea on short visits. It was not a happy marriage.
In 1904 a very sick man, he thus put in an appearance at the first performance of The Cherry Orchard. He had not been expected by the public and his appearance provoked thunderous applause. Then he was feted by the elite of Moscow's intelligentsia. There were endless speeches. He was so weak from sickness and it was so perceptible that cries arose in the audience, "Sit down, sit down. . . . Let Anton Pavlovich be seated."
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Soon after he made his last trip in search of cure, this time to Badenweiler in the German Black Forest. When he got there he had exactly three more weeks to live. On the 2nd of July, 1904, he died far from his family and friends, amidst strangers, in a strange town.
A difference exists between a real artist like Chekhov and a didactic one like Gorki, one of those naive and nervous Russian intellectuals who thought that a little patience and kindness with the miserable, half savage, unfathomable Russian peasant would do the trick. One may compare Chekhov's story "The New Villa."
A rich engineer has built a house for himself and his wife; there is a garden, a fountain, a glass ball, but no arable land—the purpose is fresh air and relaxation. A couple of his horses, splendid, sleek, healthy, snow-white beasts, fascinatingly alike, are led by the coachman to the blacksmith.
"Swans, real swans," says the latter, contemplating them with sacred awe.
An old peasant comes up. "Well," he says with a cunning and ironic smile, "white they are, but what of it? If my two horses were stuffed with oats, they would be quite as sleek. I'd like to see those two put to plow and whipped up."
Now, in a didactic story, especially in one with good ideas and purposes, this sentence would be the voice of wisdom, and the old peasant who so simply and deeply expresses the idea of a modus of life regulating existence would be shown further on as a good fine old man, the symbol of the peasant class consciousness as a rising class, etc. What does Chekhov do? Very probably he did not notice himself that he had put into the old peasant's mind a truth sacred to the radicals of his day. What interested him was that it was true to life, true to the character of the man as a character and not as a symbol —
a man who spoke so not because he was wise but because he was always trying to be unpleasant, to spoil other people's pleasures: he hated the white horses, the fat handsome coachman; he was himself a lonely man, a widower, his life was dull (he could not work because of an illness that he called either "gryz' " (hernia) or "glisty" (worms). He got his money from his son who worked in a candy-shop in a big town, and all day long he wandered about idly and if he met a peasant bringing home a log or fishing, he would say, "That log is rotten" or "In this weather fish don't bite."
In other words, instead of making a character the medium of a lesson and instead of following up what would seem to Gorki, or to any Soviet author, a socialistic truth by making the rest of the man beautifully good (just as in an ordinary bourgeois story if you love your mother or your dog you cannot be a bad man), instead of this, Chekhov gives us a living human being without bothering about political messages or traditions of writing.* Incidentally, we might note that his wise men are usually bores, just as Polonius is.
The fundamental idea of Chekhov's best and worst characters seems to have been that until real moral and spiritual culture, physical fitness and wealth, come to the Russian masses, the efforts of the noblest and best-meaning intellectuals who build bridges and schools while the vodka pub is still there, will come to naught. His conclusion was that pure art, pure science, pure learning, being in no direct contact with the masses, will, in the long run, attain more than the clumsy and muddled attempts of benefactors. It is to be noted that Chekhov himself was a Russian intellectual of the Chekhovian type.
No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has, characters who can often be summed up by the quotation from his story "In the Cart": "How strange, she reflected, why does God give sweetness of nature, sad, nice, kind eyes, to weak, unhappy useless people — and why are they so attractive?" There is the old village messenger in the story "On Official Business" who tramps through the snow miles and miles on trifling and useless errands which he neither understands nor questions. There is that young man in "My Life" who left his comfortable home and became a