Great Chekhovian theatre was only to arise out of more and more mischievous attempts to upset the conventions of the Russian stage – and out of the painful symbiosis that Chekhovian drama would establish with Stanislavsky’s and Nemirovich-Danchenko’s revolutionary Moscow Art Theatre. In this early period, Ivanov, The Wood Demon and the vaudevilles brought Chekhov only an income: literary esteem could come only as his prose took on more novel-like forms.
Tolstoy weighs somewhat heavily on a number of stories of the mid eighties. Not that Tolstoy’s use of language affected Chekhov – his own copy of War and Peace is scored with red underlinings marking disapproval of Tolstoy’s repeated metaphors and sermonizing syntax: one character in Chekhov is to remark that Tolstoy writes with a plasterer’s trowel, not a painter’s brush. Sometimes, however, Chekhov makes an interesting experiment out of Tolstoyanism: he preaches neither ‘simplification’ nor ‘non-resistance to evil’, but explores the morass into which honest people stray when they try to put these precepts into practice. Tolstoyanism shows its mark in the technique of seeking the concrete reality behind an abstraction or a pretended virtue, to look for hypocrisy and lies in the words of the characters and to show the reader what is really happening by monitoring the protagonists’ unconscious body language and internal stream of consciousness. Tolstoyan influence can also be seen in Chekhov’s temporary adoption of a secure judgemental authorial stance.
The best of these Tolstoyan works is probably ‘The Name-day Party’ – it is one of the half-dozen Chekhov works which Katherine Mansfield used as models to evolve her own prose (her The Garden Party is likewise a party spoiled by a catastrophe which the celebrants do everything to suppress). ‘The Name-day Party’ punishes hero and heroine, hosts who have hidden their own misapprehensions and neglected their moral duty in order to impress their guests, with a dramatically disastrous ending; it is full of allusions to Anna Karenina in the hero’s hay making, the worried pregnant heroine’s seeking solace from a peasant, in the parallel of a gathering thunderstorm and miscarriage.
Undergoing Tolstoy’s influence was as much a process of inoculation as were Chekhov’s early years spent singing in church: the essential aesthetic element remained, the ideology evaporated. In a year or two the initial influence is assimilated and even to a certain extent rejected. ‘A Dreary Story’ has Tolstoyan allusions, Tolstoyan parallels, but is not Tolstoyan. Common sense, an aesthetic sensing of the limits between art and philosophy, a doctor’s confidence in science and the unknowability of absolute right and wrong have overcome the temptation to pontificate. Perhaps the key element in Chekhov’s medical training was a conviction that only those qualified in a profession were competent to practise it. Chekhov abjures moralizing because he is not a bishop and philosophizing because he is not a philosopher. Unlike Tolstoy, he is convinced that it is not for the writer to ‘show the paths to paradise’.
In the course of 1888 and 1889 Chekhov’s mood was clouded by serious tragedy: the moral collapse of his brother Nikolay was followed by a physical one, and in summer 1889 Nikolay had to be nursed (mainly by Chekhov’s eldest brother Alexander) as he lay dying of tuberculosis, typhoid and drug addiction. Chekhov had seen two grandparents, several uncles and an aunt die of ‘the white plague’; he, too, had haemorrhages, fevers and coughs and could estimate with fair exactitude his own shortened lifespan. The death of Nikolay brings a despair and depression into his work. Helplessness in the face of death was to expel from Chekhov the last assumptions of certainty or immortality. If ‘The Steppe’, which celebrates a lost primeval natural world, is a masterpiece, then ‘A Dreary Story’, which mourns the loss of all meaning in life, transcends anything that was written by Chekhov’s contemporaries in Russia or Western Europe. It is not just a response to the great classics, it is a riposte to them.
One key element in the first-person narrative is that the hero, who has no surname, is a generally recognized hero: a professor of medicine. If there was one idol generally accepted by all ranks and ideological groups in Russia, it was the new generation of Russian medical scientists. Nikolay Stepanovich, who narrates his own last months, in many ways resembles the renowned surgeon, Professor Botkin, who was known to be dying of a liver cancer he himself refused to diagnose. The Tolstoy work which ‘A Dreary Story’ seeks to supersede is The Death of Ivan Ilich. Tolstoy’s hero is a prominent civil servant, and no reader is particularly surprised that he is to find, as he dies in agony, that his life is meaningless. Chekhov’s hero represents the summit of what is attainable to a human being. If Nikolay Stepanovich, the world authority on medicine, is in thrall to existential despair, what hope is there for anyone? Tolstoy consoles his dying man with a peasant lad to nurse him compassionately and a vision of light at the end of a black sack into which he is being sucked. There are no compassionate peasants or lights at the end of the tunnel in ‘A Dreary Story’.
In technique, too, introspection and melancholy have moved Chekhov to a new plane: the interaction of thunderstorm and characters’ moods and behaviour in ‘A Dreary Story’ has none of the obvious Romantic pathetic fallacy – it is an ironic, moving interaction of natural forces and human mood, with nothing of the moral metaphorical import of ‘The Name-day Party’. For the first time, too, Chekhov has hit on a method of first-person narrative that reveals to the reader more than it appears to reveal to the narrator. The all-knowing Nikolay Stepanovich, noting every foible of the family and friends he is alienated from, is not aware that he is in love with his ward, the unhappy actress Katya, from and to whom he refuses all consolation. Here, too, for the first time in Chekhov, we have the hallmark of the mature work – the blurring of the boundary between protagonist and author. There is a distance between the hero–narrator, through whom we see all the rest of the action, and the silent, ubiquitous authorial presence, which has the empathy of an actor for his role. Nikolay Stepanovich expresses hundreds of opinions, usually contemptuous, on his postgraduate students, the city of Kharkov, Brahms, the theatre, fame, the family, Russian literature. Many are to recur in Chekhov’s later work, to acquire an authorial stamp, but for the first time in Chekhov’s work we can no longer mark the frontier between the author and the protagonist: yet another major conventional orienteering aid for the reader has been abolished, and we are deprived of our ability to pass judgement.
The depression of 1889 that found expression in this morbidly ironic if heroic work was only deepened by the increasing boldness of Russia’s critical rabble, who disapproved of Chekhov’s distancing himself from Tolstoyan certainties while adopting a Tolstoyan type of plot. Some critics talked of plagiarism, others of ‘unprincipledness’. The more understandable failure of The Wood Demon added humiliation: Chekhov was told by the distinguished actor Lensky to abandon the theatre since he did not even know the alphabet of drama composition.