A note on
Anton Chekhov
By
Daryush Feizollahnezhad
Chekhov is one rare literary figure in world literature who attains a high stand in creating two different genres, in a way that he is taken to be the father of both modern drama and modern short story, and his influence over great writers is widely believed. One critic, Teuber, traces this trend back that:
… Chekhov had an immediate and direct impact on such Western writers as James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, and Sherwood Anderson; indirectly, most major authors of short stories in the twentieth century, including Katherine Anne Porter, Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway, Bernard Malamud, and Raymond Carver, are in his debt.
However, Joyce once remarked he started reading Chekhov’s short stories after he had written his.
Chekhov’s uniqueness becomes more tangible when we get to know that he had the same inclination, if not more, to pursue his job as a doctor to help improve people’s physical health equally as well.
As for Chekhov’s writing, any endeavor to elaborate on his fiction would seem redundant, because everything is there in his works. The moment one starts reading Chekhov, he is taken into the realm of simple truths of human mystery, and might feel any comment as distraction. Therefore, there is not much need for an analytical investigation to make him plausible unless one fails to feel into his dramatic revelations. What is intended for this introduction is a survey of some general characteristics in Chekhov’s fictional world which will be suitably guided by observing some conspicuous points in his life and some of his notions concerning art, literature, humankind, life and love expressed in his letters or the comments made by his contemporary critics.
Objectivity is one major characteristic in Chekhov’s writing. The narrator goes on scrutinizing the core of a character’s personality without the least provoking expression of feeling or judgment. However, this objectivity does not lead to the narrator’s detachment from each character’s universe; on the contrary, it is so masterfully done that the reader perceives a mute delicate expressed sympathy. Such an approach owes its power to Chekhov’s own personality whose early job as a doctor helped it work throughout his actual life, so that he treated people with the same artistic objectivity, but never nonchalantly. This idea is reinforced by a glance at his letter to Madame M. V. Kiselyov that:
To a chemist nothing on earth is unclean. A writer must be as objective as a chemist, he must lay aside his personal subjective standpoint and must understand that muck heaps play a very respectable part in a landscape, and that the evil passions are as inherent in life as the good ones.
Thus, in his various writings we feel such objectivity and never encounter the slightest hint at the author’s judgment on the personality and situation of his characters, to the extent that hardly without reviewing his letters or the biographical comments of his friends can we be sure of Chekhov’s views and opinion on his typical characters and the pictured situation.
Simplicity is another remarkable feature in Chekhov. Besides having a simple language, he writes with a minimum level of word usage in his descriptions. Such simplicity may, of course, be partly due to the nature of translating his works, though it cannot be overlooked at all that the general criticisms tell of this simplicity in his original language as well. Likewise, simplicity has deeper roots in his own character: Maxim Gorky, his friend and also a great Russian writer, talks of this trait that, “of a beautiful simplicity himself, he loved all that was simple, real, sincere, and he had a way of his own of making others simple.”
In fact, such simplicity matches Chekhov’s objectivity to give rise to the formation of an essential richness for the content of his writings. What has always been pleasing and attractive for his readers is the very truth pervading all over his works, whether in his early humorous sketches, or in his serious tragic fictions. He targets this truth exposure at whatever possible part of man’s life – what makes some critics take him as a realist writer. But actually, he transcends the realistic layer in his fictional world to reach the universal human truth, at least, than any metaphysical or philosophical one.
Chekhov succeeds in depicting character types who all share in one respect: vulgarity. Having a more polished taste in humanity and morality, Chekhov abhors cheap or low figures that doubtlessly were abundant at his time, and will always be. But it does not limit him to a realist writer; if it does, it should be an impressionistic one. On the whole, his writing is so merited that it stands high over any certain critical limitation, and delights all his readers at all times. This is all because each story opens a new horizon as regards human truth, and therefore, his fiction revolves, more than any other element, on character, which itself is concentrated as mood than as action, and giving form to the critical term “Chekhovian mood” in literature.
As for Chekhov’s acute power of reaching truth, there are naturally some deep-seated causes originating from his lifestyle. He had a lineage of peasantry life up to his father. Furthermore, early in his youth, his father in a bankruptcy, fled, together with his family, to
I am writing my
This experimental visit supported his notions about man and life, and being already a physician enhanced his precision in observing different features and diseases that run parallel, if not under, his literary investigations. He comments on this vocational part of his life in a letter to A. S. Suvorin again that:
... You advise me not to hunt after two hares, and not to think of medical work. I do not know why one should not hunt two hares even in the literal sense.... I feel more confident and more satisfied with myself when I reflect that I have two professions and not one. Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress. When I get tired of one I spend the night with the other. Though it’s disorderly, it’s not so dull, and besides neither of them loses anything from my infidelity. If I did not have my medical work I doubt if I could have given my leisure and my spare thoughts to literature. There is no discipline in me.
Being thus considerate to every aspect of human life and having this sensitivity made Chekhov quite apt for his familiarity with and, somewhat, following Tolstoy, since they had many a characteristic in common, namely in matters of morality and human internal enslavement. Tolstoy had undergone so huge a spiritual change that hardly a writer, even Shakespeare, could meet his expectations of an aesthetic dramatization of human moral greatness and honor. However, when observing the rather young Chekhov’s grandeur in unraveling human folly dramatically, he could not help appreciating him, to the extent that he elaborated on the greatness of “The Darling.” Because in this story, Chekhov has a close idea to Tolstoy’s: that women could only find happiness by reflecting their husbands’ delight; and thus it shows a woman without a self who reflects the selves of her men. Such an idea towards women always ran deep in Chekhov; however, it should be noted that it is an attack not on them at all, but at their typical mental and spiritual education; because generally he had a kind and friendly relation with women, as that to his sister, Masha, and his woman colleagues and friends like Madame M. V. Kiselyov and Madame Stanislavsky, and his actress and future wife, Olga Knipper. Again in his letters we can see his disgust at some especial women types, with his equal aspiring tone for their emancipation. In a letter to his sister, for instance, he talks about the bad dressing of German ladies:
... The worst thing here which catches the eye at once is the dress of the ladies. Fearfully bad taste, nowhere do women dress so abominably, with such utter lack of taste. I have not seen one beautiful woman, nor one who was not trimmed with some kind of absurd braid. Now I understand why taste is so slowly developed in Germans in
Furthermore, of his conceptions about women psychology, he tells to A. S. Suvorin:
... You say that from compassion women fall in love, from compassion they get married.... And what about men? I don’t like realistic writers to slander women, but I don’t like it either when people put women on a pedestal and attempt to prove that even if they are worse than men, anyway they are angels and men scoundrels. Neither men nor women are worth a brass farthing, but men are more just and more intelligent.
Among his stories, “The Darling” is the most telling of Chekhov’s conviction about women: that the nature of love is far more important for women than the object of love. They are ambitious to have something or someone on which they can topple their instinctual affections. This belief is best materialized in Olenka who when alone is dead hopeless, but soon revives when she is in love with someone. The object of her love is not at all important, even if it costs her individuality’s loss, if there is any. This trend is thoroughly backed up with the Chameleonic change of her mentality into her beloveds’. She is purely obsessed with each lover’s mental obsession, be it theater, timber business, medicine or whatever. This oscillation degrades into her love for a rude schoolboy who representatively hates her superfluous caring attentions.
Such a conviction may sound controversial: How is it that Chekhov knows much about human truth but comes to be ignorant of an evident natural truth about women which was uttered curtly but beautifully by Nietzsche at about the same time that “the happiness of man is ‘I will.’ The happiness of woman is ‘He will.’”? The answer might be that he is criticizing relations that are contaminated by some ultra dependence – an aftermath of spiritual emptiness caused by whatever personal or social reasons. Or that he is projecting his personal expectation of women’s independence which is essential for any artistic creation, whether in daily behavior or in literary career. This expectation shows up in a letter responding to A. S. Suvorin advising him to get married, which his wife, Olga, was to read much later after their marriage: “I promise to be a splendid husband, but find me a wife who like the moon would not shine in my heaven every day.” This inclination came thus true when Chekhov had to live in Yalta upon his doctor’s advice for his health’s sake while Olga resided in Moscow to follow her theater career, and their “life became a series of partings and meetings.” Several times she decided to give it up, but seeing Chekhov’s unexpressed discontent, she kept to her occupation, while never did her first impression about Chekhov fade out: “I felt that life with a man like Chekhov would be free of fear and trouble, for he had a great gift for discarding all the dross, all the petty things, all that obscures and chokes the very essence and beauty of life.”
Going back to Chekhov’s criticism of typical woman characters, it should be admitted that, in any case, “The Darling” embodies the old mystical belief, best expressed by Kierkegaard that “people despair about being lonely and therefore get married. But is this love? I should say it is self-love,” even if it is true about all individuals, and is not directed to one gender. The further critical evaluation of this phenomenon demands wider scopes of at least psychoanalysis and mysticism and it does not suit this introductory writing.
Tolstoy, though highly appreciating “The Darling,” believed that Chekhov unconsciously produced such a masterful piece; that is, he wanted to, intellectualistically, depict and perhaps deride an epidemic situation, but reached unwittingly this emotionally sympathetic presentation. But it seems the contrary is more substantial: Chekhov is a perfect intellectual who is all aware of his doing, and has a conscious rare command over his feelings, and thus sustains his ever-present objectivity. This characteristic is later disclosed in a letter to Madame Stanislavsky where he writes that:
As a writer it is essential for me to observe women, to study them, and so, I regret to say, I cannot be a faithful husband. As I observe women chiefly for the sake of my plays, in my opinion the
This mighty observational issue of women should not be interpreted in a way that leads to drawing a negative conclusion concerning Chekhov’s view of women, since, first, he repeatedly emphasized his hatred of some certain types who for whatever reason seem far deviated from the established definition of human dignity, man or woman. Secondly, he expressed the proper way of confronting such a case with delicacy in a letter to his uncle that “one must not humiliate people – that is the chief thing. Better say to man ‘My angel’ than hurl ‘Fool’ at his head – though men are more like fools than they are like angels.” Thirdly, the typical woman character in question has its peers among the man ones as well – Old Musatov in “A Father” being just one example of a selfless man. And finally, he always let out his high opinion about the bliss of love and beauty in women off and on, whether in addressing his sister and wife or mentioning it in his letters, like as: “I shall never be a Tolstoyan. In women I love beauty above all things; and in the history of mankind, culture, expressed in carpets, carriages with springs, and keenness of wit. Ach! To make haste and become an old man and sit at a big table!”
In truth, his interrogation of women’s character belongs to a broader range of his critical investigations which continuously provokes him to dramatize ‘human folly,’ ‘vulgarity,’ ‘weaknesses,’ and covertly, the wrong social educational system of man’s mentality. But he never underscores man’s potential power and dignity, nor does he ever lose hope in man’s emancipation, though some are likely to base part of his writings – like “Misery” or many of his plays – as for a period of his hopelessness in relation to human vulgarity and failure of communication, in contrast to his hopeful period when he foresees a glorious future. Nevertheless, in both cases, Chekhov is persistently picturing vulgarity as he does so for “triviality,” “boredom,” “limitation of human existence,” “futility of human ambitions” which all form his major themes. Maxim Gorky comments on this feature of Chekhov that:
He had the art of exposing vulgarity everywhere, an art which can only be mastered by one whose own demands on life are very high, and which springs from the ardent desire to see simplicity, beauty and harmony in man. He was a severe and merciless judge of vulgarity.
And that:
Vulgarity was his enemy. All his life he fought against it, held it up to scorn, displayed it with a keen, impartial pen, discovering the fungus of vulgarity even where, at first glance, everything seemed to be ordered for the best, the most convenient, and even brilliant.
However, even though he had no illusions about frailty, and exposed triviality and vulgarity, there is a glow of warmth and sympathy under his objective, and often merciless representations.
Here rests his distinguishing feature from many classified schools of art or literature: he knows what truth is; he knows where human weakness lies; he suffers from human shallowness; and he is eager to correct it through a slight revealing of a nasty situation against a standard of thought which is based between the tracks of morality and art, but all while he knows very well the natural essential framework of literature, and does not want or expect it to abolish every human shortcoming. He writes deliberatively to Madame M. V. Kiselyov that:
Human nature is imperfect, and it would therefore be strange to see none but righteous ones on earth. But to think that the duty of literature is to unearth the pearl from the refuse heap means to reject literature itself. “Artistic” literature is only “art” in so far as it paints life as it really is. Its vocation is to be absolutely true and honest. To narrow down its function to the particular task of finding “pearls” is as deadly for it as it would be to make Levitan [Russian painter and also a friend to him] draw a tree without including the dirty bark and the yellow leaves. I agree that “pearls” are a good thing, but then a writer is not a confectioner, not a provider of cosmetics, not an entertainer; he is a man bound, under contract, by his sense of duty and his conscience; having put his hand to the plough he mustn’t turn back, and, however distasteful, he must conquer his squeamishness and soil his imagination with the dirt of life. He is just like any ordinary reporter. What would you say if a newspaper correspondent out of a feeling of fastidiousness or from a wish to please his readers would describe only honest mayors, high-minded ladies, and virtuous railway contractors?
This conscious treatment makes him adore Shakespeare who had, masterfully enough, walked through the same path much earlier, and also it makes him a steady touchstone for the following great writers, to the extent that George Bernard Shaw admits his feeling “like a beginner,” when reading him, and that he worked on his Heartbreak House after “the Chekhov manner.”
It should be noted that Chekhov succeeded in creating the later tragic scenes equally well as he had done for the former comical sketches, since these two essential elements – humor and tragedy – are compliments to one another in his light of human existence. He like Gogol and Maupassant uses humor and satire as a defense mechanism against the sadness and harshness of life, and as Simmons remarks, he “had learned that humor and tragedy, like love and hate, are frequently only the separate sides of the same coin, that life’s misfortunes may be intensified by humor or softened by its wise and gentle smile.”
Another important point for Chekhov was erecting a scope for artistic expression in literature. He believed that we should not expect a writer to know about everything, or if he happened to know, should express it in his writing, be it a psychological fact or a metaphysical truth. He makes it clear that:
It seems to me it is not for writers of fiction to solve such questions as that of God, of pessimism, etc. The writer’s business is simply to describe who has been speaking about God or about pessimism, how, and in what circumstances. The artist must be not the judge of his characters and of their conversations, but merely an impartial witness.
And defying the accusations of a friend, he adds:
He [the accuser] thinks a writer who is a good psychologist ought to be able to make it out – that is what he is a psychologist for. But I don’t agree with him. It is time that writers, especially those who are artists, recognized that there is no making out anything in this world, as once Socrates recognized it, and Voltaire, too. The mob thinks it knows and understands everything; and the more stupid it is the wider it imagines its outlook to be. And if a writer whom the mob believes in has the courage to say that he does not understand anything of what he sees, that alone will be something gained in the realm of thought and a great step in advance.
While Chekhov uses his experiences, practical or intuitional, his views on life and art are no doubt blended with his reading and liking of previous established writers, so that he reaches a firm footing in expressing human truth. Meantime, he attains a stable point between art and morality that he never shuns expressing his idea that:
I do not know which are right: Homer, Shakespeare, Lopez da Vega, and, speaking generally, the ancients who were not afraid to rummage in the “muck heap,” but were morally far more stable than we are, or the modern writers, priggish on paper but coldly cynical in their souls and in life. I do not know which has bad taste–the Greeks who were not ashamed to describe love as it really is in beautiful nature, or the readers of Gaboriau, Marlitz, Pierre Bobo [P. D. Boborykin].
In effect, his definition of morality is noteworthy: it is too impious and disinterested to be confined within the framework of some certain establishment like that of religion, or social taboos. In one typical story, “The Chorus Girl,” Chekhov sets the central character, who is rather a woman of easy virtue, to shine against the arrogant empty Nikolai Kolpakov and his cheap wife. The story creates an atmosphere resembling that of Maupassant’s Boule de Suif.
Now with all these possessions, he devises to apply them in one great field which to him is picturing and revealing different aspects of man’s life, and so remedy many of man’s drawbacks harassing him. Doing so, Chekhov proves an able writer who knows much about human nature, and thus the world he creates foreruns the twentieth-century western writers’ that show a world full of depraved characters, and so many other problems consequential to the prevailing lack of communication disaster. Indeed, Chekhov characters suffer from what was labeled by following thinkers as “alienation” in addition to “isolation.” Chekhov’s job was easy; he simply presented a vivid picture of the predicaments of ordinary people, but with a cute detective-like investigation of the causes running deep in their psyche, while never putting any distance or barrier between them and himself. Olga, his wife believes that “Chekhov asserted the rights of the ordinary, simple man with his sufferings and joys, his dissatisfaction and his dreams of a better, ‘indescribably beautiful’ life,” adding that:
In real life too Chekhov regarded the so-called “little man” with extraordinary sympathy and affection, finding in him a beauty of soul often hidden from the superficial observer. And people responded with the same tender affection. They flocked to him, even complete strangers, just to see him and to hear him speak, to beg him teach them how to live. These visits often wearied and tormented him, for he did not care to preach, and did not know how.
Such dualistic treatment could render him some hindrances: on the one hand, he was heartedly inclined to attain a warm simple communication with people; on the other hand, he could not help, as part of his task, detecting the unheeded important afflictions in human nature. However, he coped with the job successfully, as far as his fictional works let us infer: he sets a warm objective link with his characters, then stars to make them inside out without any ultimate judgment or resolution, just like what happens in real life. “The Kiss” is one good illustration of this feature: we never dare to judge the persona’s view on the character of Riabovich. Chekhov is so delicately handling the story that the reader cannot detect any positive or negative hint as for Riabovich’s personality unless he/she resorts to his/her liking in interpreting him and the nature of his love. And if Chekhov is picturing an ironic situation, he does not blame it on his character here, but on “life’s ironic patterns with their pervasive disharmony between people’s hope and the reality of things,” as Simmons says.
Chekhov explains and recommends such an approach towards treating the realities of life to a friend in this way:
Let me remind you that the writers, who we say are for all time or are simply good, and who intoxicate us, have one common and very important characteristic; they are going towards something and are summoning you towards it, too, and you feel not with your mind, but with your whole being, that they have some object, just like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, who did not come and disturb the imagination for nothing. Some have more immediate objects – the abolition of serfdom, the liberation of their country, politics, beauty, or simply vodka, like Denis Davydov; others have remote objects– God, life beyond the grave, the happiness of humanity, and so on. The best of them are realists and paint life as it is, but, through every line’s being soaked in the consciousness of an object, you feel, besides life as it is, the life which ought to be, and that captivates you. And we? We! We paint life as it is, but beyond that – nothing at all.
While he was doing so, he suffered from life enough to turn him into a severe pessimist: though not believing in reaching self-fulfilment through material things, since early life he had to work for money in order to help his family life and even to abolish the debts his brother had brought on, and also to afford the production of some of his plays; he suffered tuberculosis from early youth – at 20 – which at last caused his death apart from other troubles while living. Furthermore, his sufferings were multiplied by the existence of lots of misfits around when living here and there, so as it made him say over and over that:
I am bored, not in the sense of – weltschmerz [world-weariness] –, not in the sense of being weary of existence, but simply bored from want of people, from want of music which I love, and from want of women, of whom there are none in
To conclude this writing, it is more than helpful to notice his statements in a letter to the editor A. N. Pleshcheev, dating
I am afraid of those who look for a tendency between the lines, and who are determined to regard me either as a liberal or as a conservative. I am not a liberal, not a conservative, not a believer in gradual progress, not a monk, not an indifferentist. I should like to be a free artist and nothing more, and I regret that God has not given me the power to be one. I hate lying and violence in all their forms, and am equally repelled by the secretaries of consistories and by Notovitch and Gradovsky. Pharisaism, stupidity and despotism reign not in merchants’ houses and prisons alone. I see them in science, in literature, in the younger generation.... That is why I have no preference either for gendarmes, or for butchers, or for scientists, or for writers, or for the younger generation. I regard trade-marks and labels as a superstition. My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and the most absolute freedom – freedom from violence and lying, whatever forms they may take. This is the programme I would follow if I were a great artist.
And he seems to have been able to work his program out, and instead of any giving-ups, he decided to ignore every shortcoming in life, personal or social, and devote his art to the physical and mental health of people, with no bias or pious obsession.
Daryush Feizollahnezhad
July 2003
References:
Gorky, Maxim. “Anton Chekhov.” Anton Chekhov: 1860-1960. Ed. Julius Katzer.
Hagan, John. “Chekhov’s Fiction and the Ideal of ‘Objectivity’.” PMLA 81.5 (Oct. 1966): 409-17.
Knipper, Olga. “The Last Years.” Anton Chekhov: 1860-1960. Ed. Julius Katzer.
Poggioli, Renato. “Storytelling in a Double Key.” The
Simmons, Ernest J. Foreword. Anton Chekhov: Selected Stories. Trans. and Ed. Ann Dunnigan.
Teuber, Andreas. “Anton Chekhov: 1860-1904.” http://people.brabdeis.edu/~teuber/chekhovbio.html.
