But had given it up. We may assume that Gurov had abandoned his career as an opera singer because he wasn’t good enough. “You can do nothing . . . if God hasn’t given you the gift.” God does not give the gift freely or often: the untalented will always be with us. The gift’s uneven distribution within Chekhov’s own family may have instilled in him his special sympathy for the have-nots of art. His brother Alexander was the conspicuous example of the failed artist whose failure was out of his hands—whose chronic whining and feeling of being cheated by life was understandable, and perhaps even fitting, in the light of his incurable talentlessness. Chekhov never wrote directly about Alexander (or any of his siblings), but in two stories he touches on the plight of the untalented in a way that may owe something to his brother’s bitter situation. In “Ionitch,” (1898) a young woman named Ekaterina, who has dreams of being a great pianist, returns from her studies at a conservatory knowing that “there was nothing special about me”—that she is just a provincial girl who plays the piano like other provincial girls. Faute de mieux, she tries to rekindle the interest of the district doctor she rejected during her time of grandiose ambition, but she fails, and a light goes out in her soul. At the end of the story, “she has grown visibly older, is constantly ailing, and every autumn goes to the Crimea with her mother.” Similarly, in “A Dreary Story” a trusting and charming young woman named Katya goes off to pursue a career as an actress, only to return home in the bitter knowledge that she has no talent. She, too, suffers a disappointment in love, and when we last see her she, too, is like a delicate flower that has been trampled on. The salvation through prosaic work that characters like Laevsky and Sonya and Asorin find seems to be out of the reach of those who mistakenly aspire to become artists. (In The Seagull, Nina, who in many ways resembles Katya, and has similar trying adventures in art and love, finally succeeds in becoming an artist, because she does have the gift. Both Katya and Nina are believed to be based on Lydia Mizinova, one of the women with whose affections Chekhov trifled, and whose ambitions as a singer were not realized.) Chekhov’s sympathy for the artistically underpowered does not extend to the pretentious. He had little patience with those who, in the face of the glaring evidence of their ordinariness, believe themselves to be exceptional. In “The Grasshopper” (1892), Chekhov draws a mordant portrait of a pretty young dilettante named Olga Ivanovna, married to a modest but highly regarded doctor and scientist named Osip Stepanitch Dymov, who fancies herself an artist and avidly collects celebrities in the art, literary, and theatrical worlds. She patronizes her husband and drifts into an affair with one of the artist celebrities, a painter named Ryabovsky. Only when it is too late—when her husband is dying of diphtheria, contracted from a patient—does she realize that it is Dymov who is the great man, and she and her celebrities are pathetic nonentities. There is a scene no one but Chekhov could have written, in which Dymov, bearing a package of caviar, cheese, and white salmon, arrives at his rented summer cottage looking forward to a nice evening with his wife, whom he has not seen for two weeks. He finds Olga not at home and the cottage overrun with her artistes. When she finally appears, she sends the tired and hungry Dymov back to the city for a pink dress she wants to wear to a wedding the next day. Dymov obediently gets back on the train and the artistes eat the caviar, cheese, and white salmon. Olga is one of the most flawed, though by no means most hateful, of Chekhov’s women. She is foolish rather than malevolent—a goose rather than a snake. As Dymov lies dying, she achieves a tragic understanding of her weakness and of her missed opportunities: “She seemed to herself horrible and disgusting,” and “she had a dull, despondent feeling and a conviction that her life was spoilt, and that there was no setting it right anyhow.”
Twelve
In a first-class compartment of the train bearing me from St. Petersburg to Moscow—the Petersburg-Moscow Express, on which Anna Karenina traveled, carrying her red bag—I looked out the window at a rain-drenched landscape of birches and evergreens and occasionally glanced at the fat young man who lay sleeping on the seat opposite, less than two feet away. He slept for almost the entire five-hour journey, waking only to eat a meal brought by a woman attendant. As he ate, he did not once meet my gaze, and I had the feeling that his long sleep was in part or perhaps even wholly induced by a profound, helpless bashfulness.
As a literary pilgrimage this one, of course, was even more absurd than the trip to Oreanda. Anna’s first-class compartment could not have been anything like the one the fat young man and I occupied, about which there was nothing first-class. Its furnishings were cheap and ugly relics of the Soviet period. The food, served in plastic containers, was gray and inedible. And yet there was a feeling here of something comfortable and familiar. Outside it was raw and wet; here it was warm and cozy. My seat—a high, narrow banquette equipped with a mattress covered with a printed cloth, and a plump large pillow—was agreeable to curl up on. It resembled the high bed on which the engineer Asorin naps, in the warm, cozy house of Bragin, after his transformative dinner. In his stories, Chekhov liked to contrast the harsh weather of God’s world with the kindlier climate of man’s shelters from it. He liked to bring characters out of blizzards and rain storms into warm, snug interiors. In “Gooseberries,” Burkin, a schoolteacher, and Ivan Ivanovitch, a veterinarian, have got caught in a downpour while out walking, and arrive drenched and muddy and cross at the house of a landowner named Alehin, who lives alone and welcomes them gladly. After bathing, “when the lamp was lighted in the big drawing-room upstairs, and Burkin and Ivan Ivanovitch, attired in silk dressing gowns and warm slippers, were sitting in armchairs; and . . . [the servant] lovely Pelagea, stepping noiselessly on the carpet and smiling softly, handed tea and jam on a tray,” Ivan Ivanovitch tells the story that gives “Gooseberries” its name.
“Gooseberries” is the second in a series of three loosely connected stories-within-stories (the outer stories have the same main characters) that Chekhov wrote in the summer of 1898—stories, as it develops, that do not celebrate the hearth but, on the contrary, constitute a three-part parable about the perils of staying warm and safe, and thereby missing what is worthwhile in life, if not life itself. In each instance the pleasant outer story of safe refuge has an ironic relationship to a disturbing inner story of wasted life. Chekhov hated to be cold and loved to be warm, but he knew that the payoff was in the cold. This is why he went to Sakhalin. This is why when he was in lush, semitropical Yalta he longed for the austere, icy Moscow spring.