None of the major literary figures of his time who were Chekhov's friends and who loved him as a writer ever accepted this reductionist concept—not Lev Tolstoy, not Nikolai Leskov, not Ivan Bunin. But Kon- stantin Stanislavsky was certainly influenced by it in everything he wrote about Chekhov, and so were some of Chekhov's close personal friends, whose reminiscences occasionally reflect the prevailing critical views at the turn of the century, rather than their own memories and observations. Basically, the image of Chekhov as the melancholy bard of a vanishing Russia represents the final success of Russian nineteenth-century critics in their determined effort to label and pigeonhole a major writer who did not fit their traditional and simplistic recipes for classifying writers. And, of course, Stanislavsky's drawn-out, elegiac productions of Chekhov's plays, with which Chekhov disagreed and which he disliked but which set the pattern for later generations, also served to contribute to that particular image.
Chekhov's quarrel with the critical establishment of his time is one of the central facts of his literary biography. The issues debated and the positions taken are enormously important, and they touch the very mainsprings of Russian cultural life both in nineteenth-century Russia and in the present-day U.S.S.R. The circumstances of Chekhov's advent as a serious writer have almost no precedent in Russian or any other literature. His acclaim by the reading public of the 1880s and '90s, the recognition of his talent by the finest older writers of his time were accompanied by a steady stream of jeremiads by leading literary critics, lamenting Chekhov's lack of human concern and of moral principles, warning their readers that this writer was dangerous and that by writing the way he did he was betraying the humanitarian traditions of his native literature. When fifteen years of this sort of attack failed to halt the spread of Chekhov's reputation, a new generation of critics managed to reduce the complexities of Chekhovian concern and compassion to their own moaning and melancholy level and thus at last to co-opt him into the very tradition to which he was so alien and so opposed. His second co-optation came in the 1930s and '40s, when orthodox Stalinist Soviet critics like Vladimir Yermilov created the even more false and fraudulent image of the optimistic, quasi-revolutionary Chekhov, whose main aim in writing what he wrote was to indict the bourgeoisie and the ruling classes. To understand the causes for all this requires at least a minimal glance at the Russian cultural history of the past century and a half.
The epoch of the Great Reforms of the 1860s looms particularly large in forming Chekhov's attitudes and the attitudes of his detractors, and it frequently comes up in his correspondence. Chekhov was a small child when the reforms took place, but their impact on his life was crucial. Most of the important Russian writers of the nineteenth century were born into families which, whether affluent or impoverished, belonged to the nobility. Anton Chekhov, on the other hand, was born into a family of emancipated serfs. Ilis grandfather, his father, his uncles had all known existence as human chattels owned by other men. The future writer was slightly more than one year old when Emperor Alexander II, reacting to Russian defeat in the Crimean War, initiated the most sweeping of his several major reforms, the emancipation of all serfs. With one stroke of the tsar's pen, some fifty-two million slaves became free human beings. Other reforms, almost as momentous, followed. Trials by jury replaced the horrors of the archaic judicial system based on written procedures kept secret from the parties to the case and under which the court was not even required to inform the accused of the exact nature of the charges. A network of semi-autonomous, elective local administrative units called zemstvos was instituted and given considerable powers to establish schools and hospitals, to build roads and to provide veterinary and insurance services at the local level. Under the zemstvo system, tsarist Russia was one of the first countries in the world to offer its citizens free medical, dental and surgical care in its village hospitals. Anton Chekhov was frequently involved in the zemstvo system and its hospitals in one capacity or another, and many of his stories and private letters contain fascinating insights into the workings of this often-forgotten institution.
There was a great deal that went wrong with the implementation of the reforms of Alexander II, and it has become customary in the West to dismiss them as partial solutions that did not change the basically oppressive system. But their results on the local level, as seen and described by Chekhov, brought an increase in freedom to millions of formerly enslaved human beings and provided them with better education and medical care and with a chance of getting a fair trial in the courts. Chekhov was not one to dismiss or to ridicule this kind of achievement.
But the epoch of the sixties left Russia with another legacy, one that directly affected literature. For all his reforming, Alexander II did not authorize anything resembling real freedom of the press or any sort of open criticism of the government, even when it came from a loyal opposition, such as had by then become customary in most Western European monarchies. And, as most of the literate segment of society realized, many aspects of life in post-reform Russia deserved to be criticized. Many articulate people wanted to express their disapproval in something more durable and widely disseminated than an illegal anti-government leaflet. In the liberalized atmosphere of the 1860s a very special kind of literary criticism was developed to deal with this predicament.
The precedent for this sort of criticism and for many of its basic methods had already been established in the 1840s by the fiery Romantic critic Vissarion Belinsky. To outwit the censor, Belinsky was the first to exploit the device of pretending to criticize the reality depicted in a work of fiction while actually telling his readers what he thought of the state of affairs in the country. It was also Belinsky who began the practice of distorting the content and the meaning of a work of literature or even the stated social views of a given writer when he felt it necessary for the purpose of his political sermon. Thus, in his influential series of articles on Gogol, Belinsky turned that most fantastic and surrealistic of Russian writers into a photographic realist, because such an approach enabled him to use Gogol's work for an indictment of existing Russian customs; furthermore, Belinsky managed to read into Gogol's stories and plays a subversive, anti-government message, which the politically conservative Gogol had never intended and which horrified him. All objective facts notwithstanding, Belinsky's image of Gogol prevailed in Russian criticism until the end of the nineteenth century, and although the Symbolist and Formalist critics of the first three decades of our century did brilliant work in establishing and asserting the full complexity and uniqueness of Gogol's genius, the simplistic Belinskian view has been forcibly revived in the Soviet Union in recent decades and has remained compulsory there ever since.
Despite Belinsky's excesses and his ruthless hounding of several fine writers who to this day have lesser reputations than they deserve merely because Belinsky could not find suitable texts for sermons in their work, his love for literature was genuine, and it earned him the friendship and respect of such men as Turgenev, Herzen and the young Dostoyevsky. His successors of the 1860s, the men who set the tone for all Russian literary criticism in Chekhov's time—Nikolai Chernyshevsky and his two young disciples, Nikolai Dobrolyubov and Dmitry Pisarev—were social critics who were forced to write about literature and art because that was the only way they could get around the censor.