The pessimism of old thinkers does not take the form of idle talk, as it does with you and me, but of Weltschmerz, of suffering; it rests in them on a Christian foundation because it is derived from love for humanity and from thoughts about humanity, and is entirely free from the egotism which is noticeable in dilettantes. You despise life because its meaning and its object are hidden from you alone, and you are afraid only of your own death, while the real thinker is unhappy because the truth is hidden from all, and he is afraid for all men.
In his stories and plays, Chekhov is afraid for all men. He was only in his twenties and thirties when he wrote most of them, but like other geniuses—especially those who die prematurely—he wrote as if he were old. Toward the end of “Ward No. 6,” he veers off—as he does in other dark and terrible works, such as “Peasants” and “In the Ravine”—to rejoice for all men in the beauty of the world. There is always this amazing movement in Chekhov from the difficult and fearful to the simple and beautiful. As Ragin lies dying, Chekhov tells us, he sees “a greenness before his eyes”; then “a herd of deer, extraordinarily beautiful and graceful, of which he had been reading the day before, ran by him.”
“Life is given to us only once.” The line (or a variant) appears in story after story and is delivered so quietly and offhandedly that we almost miss its terror. Chekhov was never one to insist on anything. He didn’t preach, or even teach. He is our poet of the provisional and fragmentary. When a story or play ends, nothing seems to be settled. “Ward No. 6,” for instance, does not end with the image of the beautiful deer. Before Ragin dies another thought passes through his mind: “A peasant woman stretched out her hand to him with a registered letter. . . . Mihail Averyanitch said something, then it all vanished, and Andrey Yefimitch sank into oblivion forever.” The registered letter—there is a bit of theatricality in its not being an ordinary letter—glints with meaning. What does it say? Who sent it? The ending of “Ward No. 6” inevitably evokes (and was surely influenced by) the ending of “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” but Chekhov declines to report the mystical experience that Tolstoy confidently reports his hero to have had. Chekhov enters the dying Ragin’s mind, but emerges with the most laconic and incomplete of reports. Tolstoy’s audacious authorial omniscience gives him his position as the greatest of the nineteenth-century Russian realists. Chekhov’s experiments with authorial reticence—equally audacious in their way— point toward twentieth-century modernism.
Thirteen
In my room at the Hotel Yalta, I tried to turn on the TV, to get the news (during a telephone call to New York, I had heard that Yeltsin was about to be impeached), but could not. I called the front desk, and was told, “There is a woman on your floor. She will help you.”
“What woman?”
“There is a woman on every floor, near the elevator. She will help you.”
I walked down the long corridor and eventually found a room where a fat, slatternly woman with long blond hair was sitting. The room was astonishing. It had been commandeered by grape ivy vines, which trailed and twined over the walls and ceiling, forming a kind of canopy and giving everything in the room a green tinge. The vines grew from two incongruously small plastic pots on a windowsill. The paucity of soil gave the plants a leggy and slightly deprived look, but in no way diminished their will to push on and cover the world with themselves. Earlier in the day, Nina and I had seen indoor plants living under the most luxurious conditions imaginable, in the conservatory of a palace built by a Prince Volkonsky—plants with glossy dark green leaves, set in large clay pots filled with dark, rich soil. But the leggy grape ivy tended by the slatternly woman belonged to the same universe of horticulture as the glossy plants tended by professional gardeners. “All Russia is a garden,” begins Trofimov’s great speech in The Cherry Orchard about his intimations of the happiness the future will bring to his country—a speech one doesn’t quite know how to listen to in the light of the catastrophe that actually befell Russia.
I told the woman my problem with the television. She nodded and went to a corner cupboard, from which she withdrew a key. She used it to lock her room before following me to my room, where she pointed out a switch I had missed. I gave her a tip, for which she thanked me profusely. I reflected that my telephone call to New York, which cost fifteen dollars, was more than a week’s pay for her—and for most of the people I had met in Russia. The comparison was the sort of trite and useless rhetoric Chekhov would sometimes put in the mouth of a character whose reformist views excited his skepticism. One such reformer is the narrator of “An Anonymous Story,” a confused revolutionary nobleman, who compares a dress costing four hundred rubles to the pitiful wages in kopecks of poor women. “An Anonymous Story” is a strange, febrile work that reads as if it had been written nonstop in the state of heightened consciousness that tuberculosis has been said to induce in artists. (In actuality, the story was set aside for several years after it was started.) It begins arrestingly:
Through causes which it is not the time to go into in detail, I had to enter the service of a Petersburg official called Orlov, in the capacity of a footman. . . . I entered the service of this Orlov on account of his father, a prominent political man, whom I looked upon as a serious enemy of my cause. I reckoned that, living with the son, I should—from the conversations I would hear, and from the letters and papers I would find on the table—learn every detail of the father’s plans and intentions.
But the story does not live up to its promise. For reasons one can attribute only to Chekhov’s own lack of enthusiasm for revolution, the narrator loses interest in his cause, becoming exclusively preoccupied with the predicament of Orlov’s beautiful young mistress, Zinaida (to whom Orlov is behaving with typical Petersburg swinishness). But the opening scenes, retailing the upper-class revolutionary’s masquerade as a servant—scenes that perhaps only someone who had himself been on both sides of the class divide could have written—have a special sardonic sparkle. Chekhov wrote easily about the upper classes—the term “Chekhovian” evokes faded nobility on decaying estates— but he evidently never forgot that he himself had not been gently reared. In a letter to Suvorin written in January 1889, he speaks of a “feeling of personal freedom” that “only recently began to develop in me,” and continues:
What writers belonging to the upper class have received from nature for nothing, plebeians acquire at the cost of their youth. Write a story of how a young man, the son of a serf, who has served in a shop, sung in a choir, been at a high school and university, who has been brought up to respect everyone of higher rank and position, to kiss priests’ hands, to revere other people’s ideas, to be thankful for every morsel of bread, who has been many times whipped, who has trudged from one pupil to another without galoshes, who has been used to fighting, and tormenting animals, who has liked dining with his rich relations, and been hypocritical before God and men from the mere consciousness of his own insignificance—write how this young man squeezes the slave out of himself, drop by drop, and how waking one beautiful morning he feels that he has no longer a slave’s blood in his veins but a real man’s.
This passage is much quoted and is generally believed to be an expression of Chekhov’s free-spiritedness. In fact, it subtly enacts what it condemns; it is itself servile, unpleasantly suggesting that the plebeian is innately inferior, that he needs to expunge some noxious substance within himself before he can rise to the level of the aristocrat. The image of squeezing is unpleasant. Chekhov writes here almost like a self-loathing Jew reassuring himself that he has passed. Nowhere else in his writings does he express such sentiments. It is a moment of anxiety that has no sequel. But it is a moment—like the “Karelin’s Dream” letter—that flares out of the genial documents of his life like an out-of-control fire glimpsed from a moving train.