In January he began what would be his longest published work, Sakhalin Island, an intentionally dry sociological dissertation, which was completed and appeared serially in Russian Thought only in 1893–94. After his look into the inner abyss in ‘‘A Boring Story,’’ he had turned and gone to the worst place on earth, as if to stifle his own metaphysical anguish by plunging into the physical sufferings of others. ‘‘Sakhalin,’’ writes Donald Rayfield, ‘‘gave Chekhov the first of his experiences of real, irremediable evil . . . in Sakhalin he sensed that social evils and individual unhappiness were inextricably involved; his ethics lost their sharp edge of blame and discrimination.’’
That experience is reflected, though only indirectly, in The Duel, which Chekhov worked on alternately with Sakhalin Island during the summer of 1891. It is his longest work of fiction. The duel it dramatizes, before it becomes literal, is a conflict of ideas between the two main phases of the Russian intelligentsia in the nineteenth century, the liberal idealism of the 1840s and the rational egoism of the 1860s, in the persons of Laevsky, a self-styled ‘‘superfluous man’’ (a type christened by Ivan Turgenev in 1850), and von Koren, a zoologist and Social Darwinian with an appropriately German name. The one talks like a book (or a small library); the other is so dedicated to science that he decides to participate actively in the process of natural selection. Laevsky and von Koren demolish each other in words behind each other’s backs, before they face each other with loaded pistols. But it is rather late in the day for dueling, the clash of ideas has grown weary, the situation has degenerated, and the whole thing is displaced from the capitals to a seedy resort town on the Caucasian coast, where the Russians appear as precarious interlopers among the native peoples.
The Duel verges on satire, even farce, but pulls back; it verges on tragedy but turns comical; it ends by deceiving all our expectations. The closing refrain – ‘‘No one knows the real truth’’ – is first spoken by von Koren, then repeated by Laevsky. Chekhov enters all his characters’ minds in turn. No single point of view prevails.
In The Duel, Chekhov’s art becomes ‘‘polyphonic,’’ though not in the Dostoevskian sense. It does not maintain the independence of conflicting ‘‘idea-images’’ or ‘‘idea-voices’’ in ‘‘a dialogic communion between consciousnesses,’’ to use Mikhail Bakhtin’s terms in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. As Bakhtin writes:
The idea [in Dostoevsky] lives not in one person’s isolated individual consciousness – if it remains there only, it degenerates and dies. The idea begins to live, that is, to take shape, to develop, to find and renew its verbal expression, to give birth to new ideas, only when it enters into genuine dialogic relationships with other ideas, with the ideas of others. Human thought becomes genuine thought, that is, an idea, only under conditions of living contact with another and alien thought, a thought embodied in someone else’s voice, that is, in someone else’s consciousness expressed in discourse. At that point of contact between voice-consciousnesses the idea is born and lives. In Chekhov it is exactly the opposite: the idea enters into no relationship with the ideas of others; each consciousness is isolated and impenetrable; there is a polyphony of voices but no dialogue; there is compassion but no communion. Chekhov became the master of this protean, quizzical form of narrative, with its radical undercutting of all intellectual positions. The Duel begins and ends at sea.
The Story of an Unknown Man is one of the less well-known of Chekhov’s works. The title has been mistranslated into English as An Anonymous Story . In fact, the first-person narrator, far from being anonymous, has not just one name but two. But though he began with commitment to a revolutionary cause, and ends saying: ‘‘One would like to play a prominent, independent, noble role; one would like to make history,’’ he knows he is fated to do nothing, to pass from this world without leaving a trace, to remain ‘‘unknown.’’ Chekhov began work on the story in 1888, at the same time as The Steppe, but gave it up as too political. In the version he finished four years later, the politics have thinned out to almost nothing. The narrator, based on an actual person, is a former naval officer turned radical, who gets himself hired as a servant in the house of a rich young man named Orlov in order to spy on his father, a well-known elder statesman. At one point he even has a chance to assassinate the old man, but nothing comes of it. The result of all his spying is not action but total inaction. The ideas and ideals that are mentioned never get defined and play no part in the story. There is talk of freedom, of Turgenev’s heroes, but it all borders on absurdity, as do Orlov’s feasts of irony with his cronies. What interested Chekhov was the ambiguous position of the ‘‘servant,’’ who lives as if invisibly with Orlov and his mistress, is there but not there, overhears their most intimate conversations and quarrels, becomes involved in their lives to the point of falling in love with the rejected lady, and all the while is not what he seems.
Central to the story is the passionate and transgressive letter in which the ‘‘servant’’ exposes himself to Orlov, denouncing his own life as well as his unsuspecting master’s. He knows that he himself is terminally ill, and this ineluctable fact has altered his radical ideas or simply done away with them. His letter ends as a plea for life:
Why are we worn out? Why do we, who start out so passionate, brave, noble, believing, become totally bankrupt by the age of thirty or thirty-five? Why is it that one is extinguished by consumption, another puts a bullet in his head, a third seeks oblivion in vodka, cards, a fourth, in order to stifle fear and anguish, cynically tramples underfoot the portrait of his pure, beautiful youth? Why is it that, once fallen, we do not try to rise, and, having lost one thing, we do not seek another? Why?
Chekhov’s depiction of the dissolution of society goes beyond and even against the politicaclass="underline" it is an exploration of human deception and betrayal, of human insubstantiality. The dying man cries out: ‘‘I want terribly to live, I want our life to be holy, high, and solemn, like the heavenly vault.’’ But his life turns out to be tawdry, mean, empty. In his final conversation with Orlov, he poses an unanswerable question: ‘‘I do believe in the purposefulness and necessity of what happens around us, but what does that necessity have to do with me? Why should my ‘I’ perish?’’ At which point the unhearing Orlov shows him to the door.
Though he denied it, Chekhov constantly drew on his own life for his fiction. That is especially true in his portraits of women. They were sometimes quite vindictive and brought pained or angry protests from their real-life counterparts. Others are more complex and compassionate, as in the last two short novels in this collection, which, like so many of his briefer works, are love stories, or stories about the failure to love. The two heroines of Three Years, the young beauty Yulia Sergeevna and the edgy, unattractive intellectual ‘‘new woman’’ Rassudina (her name comes from the Russian rassudok, ‘‘reason’’), were drawn in part from two women, Lika Mizinova and Olga Kundasova, who loved Chekhov all their lives. There are other autobiographical elements in the story. The mercantile milieu of the hero’s childhood, the strictly religious father, the beatings, the gloom of the warehouse, are Chekhov’s experience. Minor characters and incidents also come from Chekhov’s circle and his life in Moscow.