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Tolstoy’s Sevastopol stories, in which the reader is taken on a “tour” of a city under active bombardment as if it were a museum (or a guidebook). Nekrasov’s images from this poem end up not in Tolstoy, however, but in Dostoevsky, at the moral center of Raskolnikov’s graphic dream of the beating, and then brutal murder, of an exhausted mare.
Nekrasov’s narrator in On the Weather strolls through the town, taking in the sounds and sights, each one more cruel than the other. Before sundown he comes upon a crippled mare [ loshad -kaleka] dragging an impossibly heavy load. She staggers; her driver grabs a log: “(the knout, it seems, isn’t enough) - / And he set to beating her, beating her!” The mare sinks back, legs splayed, “sigheddeeply/And gazed...(as people gaze,/Succumbing to unjust attacks).” The driver beats her across the back, the sides, “across her weeping, gentle eyes.” Throughout this ghastly scene the narrator gazes at the tortured horse, grows angry and then depressed. “And shouldn’t I intercede for her?” he asks himself mournfully. “Nowadays it’s all the fashion to sympathize, / We’d have nothing against helping you, / A mute victim of the people, - / But we cannot even help ourselves!”32 In the end the narrator-voyeur does nothing. The wretched mare rallies and sets off jerkily down the street, rewarded for her efforts by more blows. When Rodion Raskolnikov dreams this scene in the novel, it is the passivity of Nekrasov’s spectator-poet (duplicated in his own cautious father, who assures his son “it’s not our business”) that impels the young boy to rush to the dying mare and kiss her bleeding eyes. Little Rodya will not “sympathize and do nothing.” He will “help himself - by murdering the pawnbroker and thereby righting injustice. That solution too proves to be a disaster. Neither Dostoevsky later nor Nekrasov in this poem offers an easy exit from this moral paralysis. But Nekrasov does demonstrate that poetry, even the most fragile lyric, is fully capable of carrying a civic burden and obligating the reader to respond to it. In 1856, he published in The Contemporary an eight-line poem that would also resonate with Crime and Punishment a decade later: “Yesterday, a bit after five /I walked out on Haymarket Square; / A woman was being beaten with the knout, / A young peasant woman. / No sound came forth from her chest, / only the whip whistled, playing... / And I said to the Muse: ‘Behold! / Your sister!’” To insist, as Nekrasov does, that a violated woman is sister to the Muse would have been alien to the poetics of Pushkin and Lermontov but was well within the realm of the great moral Realists, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. It provides an appropriate transition to Chekhov. As a seer, Chekhov was both of the spirit and of the flesh. As a writer he was far less obsessed with mortality, very possibly because he was forced - both professionally as a medical man and on the testimony of his own organism - to confront it far earlier.
156 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature
Anton Chekhov: lesser expectations, smaller forms
Chekhov’s relations with Dostoevsky were not profound. He referred to him rarely in his letters, ironically in his works, and had to force himself to finish Crime and Punishment (by age forty, he promised himself, he would get to the end; he did, and he was not impressed). Tolstoy, however, was an abiding presence in Chekhov’s life. The two writers were on very friendly terms. Beginning in the late 1890s, both were obliged to winter in the Crimea for health reasons, although Chekhov, thirty years younger, was by far the sicker man. Chekhov’s “Tolstoyan period”began in themid-1880s, when he wastwenty-five, andlasted for ten years. As Chekhov wrote to his friend Aleksei Suvorin, he had been swept up by Tolstoy’s immense energy and intellect, his authority, by his “very reasonableness, and no doubt a species of hypnotism peculiar to him.”33 The “reasonableness” or common sense of Tolstoy’s prose – its reliance on sober observation, logical clarity, and its subtle depiction of nuanced emotional states – offered special benefits to a young writer like Chekhov, who specialized in short forms. Before the 1880s, the short story had been largely a Sentimental or Romantic genre: nostalgic, conventionalized, felt to be a relic or fragment from an earlier era. Literary seriousness meant the big serialized novel, a cutting edge acknowledged by all writers. Even short-story masterpieces, such as Turgenev’s Sportsman’s Sketches (1852), were gathered together and sequenced by their author into a cycle. Realism was descriptive, full of ideas, fearless in its psychological probing, and long.
To be sure, the novel did have some competition. In the 1850s, the ethnographic “sketch” [ocherk] and newspaper feuilleton [from Fr. “leaf” or “sheet of paper,” usually street news or gossip by a roving observer or fla?neur] emerged as favored short forms for recording everyday life, both urban and rural. Each featured a chatty, mobile first-person narrator whose job it was to report on the local terrain. Both the “sketch” and the “leaf” grew out of periodical print genres, the gossip column and the theatre- or special-interest section of newspapers, which were widespread in the popular press that was Chekhov’s literary apprenticeship. Dostoevsky extended this form far beyond a stroll around the city. His Notes from Underground (1864), which grew out of the intent to write a hostile review of Chernyshevsky’s What is to be Done?, became philosophical satire once Dostoevsky turned over the story to an irritable, first-person voice filtered through a well-read urban columnist, trapped for some reason in a dark garret where the only newsworthy item he could report on was himself.
Chekhov was obliged to support himself by his pen and early became a master of the chatty topical sketch. In his hundreds of commissioned stories
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he parodied almost every style and genre that Russian literature had known. In his “Death of a Clerk,” a comic rewriting of Gogol’s “Overcoat,” a titular councilor inadvertently sneezes on a general during an opera performance at the Bolshoi Theatre and, unable to persuade the general to take his apology seriously, dies (literally) of shame.34 Such cameo parodies were supplanted in the mid-1880s by his first mature work, the spatial tone-poem “Steppe,” published in a serious literary journal when Chekhov was twenty-eight. After 1888, he rapidly acquired the perspective and intonation peculiar to him, one far more lyrical than parodic or chatty. Chekhov is lyrical not in the way of most lyric poets, however, but in a distinctly “clinical” way; as a medical doctor. How Chekhov looked at the follies of the body, and to what extent he felt an author had the right to intervene, diagnose, systematize, and pass judgment on those follies, will be our focus in this final section.
Tolstoy cast a long shadow on Chekhov’s generation. But not all of the mature Tolstoy struck Chekhov as reasonable – especially his theories on sexuality and illness, of obvious interest to a doctor. Together with Russia and much of Europe, Chekhov read “The Kreutzer Sonata” in 1889 and followed the ensuing scandal. In various supplemental tracts to that story, Tolstoy argued that women instinctively dislike the carnal relation, that intercourse while pregnant or nursing causes hysteria, and that celibacy within marriage would guarantee the physical and spiritual health of both parties. In response, Chekhov complained to his friend Aleksei Pleshcheyev in February 1894 that Tolstoy “out of sheer stubbornness has never taken the time to read two or three pamphlets written by specialists.” Chekhov was correct: Tolstoy had no use for specialists. Gorky reports Tolstoy saying of Chekhov that his profession spoiled him. “If he hadn’t been a doctor he would have written still better” (“Memoirs,” p. 71). In Tolstoy’s view, a clinical approach to the human condition could only blur its duties. In 1897, Tolstoy remarked that Chekhov was highly gifted but “writes like a decadent and impressionist, in the broad sense of the term.” In the winter of 1900, Tolstoy took in a performance of a Chekhov play at the Moscow Art Theatre and wrote in his diary (January 27): “Went to see Uncle Vanya and was shocked.” What shocked him he doesn’t say, but we might speculate.
The play provides no moral resolution. There is also no cumulative action, motion, or lessons learned. The old professor and his young wife Elena arrive at the beginning and depart at the end. The presence of this provocative couple throughout four acts inspires one unsuccessful declaration of love, one unsuccessful suicide, one unsuccessful seduction; in fact, “everyone in this play is a loser.”35 The closest thing to a “deed” is the professor’s fantastic proposal to sell his daughter Sonya’s estate on terms advantageous to him in his retirement. Comically impotent moments are highlighted by references to literary classics.
