The hero, Alexei Laptev, thirty-five years old like his author, a merchant’s son declassed by university education but, as certain scenes make clear, not educated enough, is caught between worlds. His story is a variation on the theme of Beauty and the Beast, as Vladimir Kataev has said. It begins with the lovelorn Laptev recalling
long Moscow conversations in which he himself had taken part still so recently – conversations about how it was possible to live without love, how passionate love was a psychosis, how there was finally no such thing as love, but only physical attraction between the sexes – all in the same vein; he remembered and thought sadly that if he were now asked what love was, he would be at a loss to answer.
Other definitions of nonlove are given as the story unfolds: the brother-in-law Panaurov’s (‘‘In every person’s skin sit microscopic iron strips which contain currents. If you meet an individual whose currents are parallel to your own, there’s love for you’’); Yulia Sergeevna’s (‘‘You know, I didn’t marry Alexei for love. Before, I used to be stupid, I suffered, I kept thinking I’d ruined his life and mine, but now I see there’s no need for any love, it’s all nonsense’’); Yartsev’s (‘‘Of course, we’re not in love with each other, but I think that . . . that makes no difference. I’m glad I can give her shelter and peace and the possibility of not working, in case she gets sick, and it seems to her that if she lives with me, there will be more order in my life, and that under her influence, I’ll become a great scholar’’). But Laptev finds that he has simply fallen in love, passionately and absurdly, sitting all night in ecstasy under a forgotten parasol.
The decay of the Moscow merchant class, which some critics take to be the real subject of the story, is a secondary theme, sketched in broad strokes; extensive sociological documentary in the manner of Zola was not Chekhov’s way. At the center of the story is Yulia Sergeevna. She is a provincial girl, she rarely speaks, she has no fashionable ideas, and she can hardly even explain why she accepted Laptev’s proposal without loving him. Chekhov follows this exchange of love and nonlove and its surprising reversals over the three years of the story.
Three Years is filled with striking details, a complex interweaving of impressions, including visionary moments such as Yartsev’s dream of a barbarian invasion and an all-engulfing fire (Russia’s past or her future?), and Laptev’s meditations in the lunar solitude of the garden, when he recalls his far-off, cheerless boyhood in that same garden, hears lovers whispering and kissing in the next yard, and is strangely stirred:
He went out to the middle of the yard and, unbuttoning his shirt on his chest, looked at the moon, and he fancied that he would now order the gate to be opened, go out and never come back there again; his heart was sweetly wrung by the foretaste of freedom, he laughed joyfully and imagined what a wonderful, poetic, and maybe even holy life it could be . . .
But the final moment of near-revelation is not an imaginary one. It is the last image Chekhov grants us of Yulia Sergeevna, as Laptev watches her walking by herself: ‘‘She was thinking about something, and on her face there was a sad, charming expression, and tears glistened in her eyes. She was no longer the slender, fragile, pale-faced girl she once had been, but a mature, beautiful, strong woman.’’ This image of all that eludes possession hangs suspended without commentary at the end of the story.
During 1896, which was to be his last full year at Melikhovo, Chekhov wrote only two works of fiction: ‘‘The House with the Mezzanine: An Artist’s Story’’ and My Life: A Provincial’s Story. The provisional titles he gave them – ‘‘My Fiancée’’ and ‘‘My Marriage’’ – suggest the closeness of their themes in his mind. Both are ironic. My Life is the most saturated of these five short novels in the realia of Chekhov’s life, from his childhood in Taganrog and from his four years on the estate. Taganrog gave him the provincial town, the business of snaring songbirds, the housepainter Radish, the butcher Prokofy, and the nickname ‘‘Small Profit,’’ which had been pinned on his brother Alexander. Melikhovo gave him the derelict estate of Dubechnya, the incursion of the railways, the thousand details of the building trades, the trials of farming and village life, a close knowledge of peasants, the construction and consecration of the schoolhouse. And life gave him the three women, three variations on failed love, who are central to the narrator’s story. It is a summa of Chekhov’s world.
He described My Life as a portrayal of the provincial intelligentsia. The social ideas it embodies had been in the air for two decades in Russia: the Populists’ idea of going to the land, and the Tolstoyan ideas of radical simplification, the virtues of honest labor, and the rejection of class distinctions. Misail Poloznev, the narrator, is a young man who rebels against the deadly dullness of provincial life by putting some of those ideas into practice. His story tests them against the complexities of human reality: the uprooting force of modernization embodied in the successful railway constructor Dolzhikov; the collapsing aristocracy represented by Mrs. Cheprakov and her degenerate son; the actualities of the peasants’ life and their relations with the ‘‘masters,’’ which are far from Populist and Tolstoyan idealization.
Chekhov had been ‘‘deeply moved’’ and ‘‘possessed’’ by Tolstoy’s ideas in the 1880s, as he wrote to Suvorin in 1894. But after his trip to Sakhalin, he gradually abandoned them. He told Suvorin:
Maybe it’s because I’ve given up smoking, but Tolstoy’s moral philosophy has ceased to move me; down deep I’m hostile to it, which is of course unfair. I have peasant blood flowing in my veins, and I’m not the one to be impressed with peasant virtues . . . War is an evil and the court system is an evil, but it doesn’t follow that I should wear bast shoes and sleep on a stove alongside the hired hand and his wife . . .
My Life has been seen as both an advocacy and a send-up of Tolstoyan ‘‘simplification.’’ It is neither. ‘‘Chekhov does not debunk Tolstoy,’’ writes Donald Rayfield, ‘‘but strips his ideas of sanctimony.’’ Misail, who is the instrument of that process, is an unlikely hero – slow, passive, not very articulate, tolerant except in his revolt against philistine deadness and his search for an alternative way of life. He persists, but in solitude, not in some ‘‘rural Eden’’ of saved humanity. He accepts the consequences of his choice, which Count Tolstoy never had to consider.
The story is symmetrically structured, ending with a final confrontation between Misail and his father that matches the opening scene. It is preceded by another of those uncanny moments in Chekhov. The housepainter Radish has just told Misail’s friend, the young Dr. Blagovo (his name means ‘‘goodness’’), that he will not find the Kingdom of Heaven. ‘‘No help for it,’’ the doctor jokes, ‘‘somebody has to be in hell as well.’’ At those words, something suddenly happens to the consciousness of Misail, who has been listening; he has a waking dream, the recapitulation of an earlier episode, but this time verging on the recognition that hell is exactly where they are.
In 1899, Chekhov wrote to his friend Dr. Orlov, a colleague from the district of Melikhovo: ‘‘I have no faith in our intelligentsia . . . I have faith in individuals, I see salvation in individuals scattered here and there, all over Russia, be they intellectuals or peasants, for they’re the ones who really matter, though they are few.’’ Misail’s victory is personal and solitary. The ambiguity of his nickname, ‘‘Small Profit’’ – is it ironic or not? – is characteristic of Chekhov’s mature vision. In his refusal to force the contradictions of his stories to a resolution, Chekhov seems to come to an impasse. Interestingly, of these five short novels, the last three end with a man left with an orphaned girl on his hands, a being who, beyond all intellectual disputes and human betrayals, simply needs to be cared for. And we may remember the moment in The Duel when the deacon, in a comical reverie, imagines himself as a bishop, intoning the bishop’s liturgical prayer: ‘‘Look down from heaven, O God, and behold and visit this vineyard which Thy right hand hath planted.’’ The quality of Chekhov’s attention is akin to prayer. Though he was often accused of being indifferent, and sometimes claimed it himself, that is the last thing he was.