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In Act III, the professor launches his self-serving plan by quoting the mayor’s opening line from Gogol’s famous play: “Gentlemen, I have invited you here to announce that we are about to be visited by a government inspector.” The joke falls flat. Later in that same explosive scene, Sonya’s uncle Vanya, enraged, shouts at the old professor: “My life’s ruined. I’m gifted, intelligent, courageous. If I’d had a normal life I might have been a Schopenhauer or a Dostoevsky. But I’m talking nonsense, I’m going mad . . .” Indeed, Tolstoy would not like this sort of comedy. And Dostoevsky – for whom madness was metaphysical and symbolic – would not have understood it either. Chekhov’s four great dramas and over six hundred short stories represent an ambitious, calculated descent from the didactic comedy of earlier centuries and from the heights of the Great Russian Novel as well. We will view this descent through two lenses: illness, and the
Like Dostoevsky, Chekhov was ill for much of his creative life with an incurable disease. Unlike Dostoevsky, who chose to see in his own chronic epilepsy some visionary potential or symbol (while remaining objective enough to give his disease both to a scoundrel, Smerdyakov, and to a righteous man, Prince Myshkin), Chekhov did not make a special point of trying out his consumption on his fictive characters. When he does, as in “The Black Monk” (1894), the result is distanced and chilly: the morally flawed and hallucinating hero dies in a rush of blood from the throat, presided over by an apparition of the sinister monk. But no judgment is passed on the unhappy hero.
Tolstoy despised doctors, and in this area he never missed a chance to pass judgment. He never allows his heroes to be cured by medical professionals. Freed from French captivity (which had, characteristically, disciplined his body and improved his health), Pierre Bezukhov falls ill for three months, “but despite their treatment – with bloodletting and various medicines – he recovered” (
Chekhov saw what medical people can hardly avoid seeing: that possessing a mortal body means sooner or later something will go wrong with it – it will make a fool of itself, sicken, and die. Cancer and consumption follow their own rules, of course. But the same treatment, or the same accident, can have no effect on one organism, awful consequences on another, curative effects on a third. The body is not obliged to explain itself. Thus the body cannot be conceived as a moral unit. Medical records are neither shocking nor symbolically meaningful. They are records of an organism’s rise and fall. Pain, too, is simply there; it buys nothing and redeems nothing. In what is probably the most famous passage in all of Chekhov, from his short masterpiece “Lady with a Pet Dog” (1899), we are shown how this moral blankness can actually be recruited for human well-being and hope. Gurov and Anna Sergeyevna are sitting on the beach at dawn and listening to the “monotonous muffled noise of the sea”:
It had made that noise down below when neither Yalta nor Oreanda existed; it was making that noise now, and would continue to make that noise in that same hushed and indifferent way when we are no longer here. And in that permanence, in that complete indifference to the life and death of each one of us, is perhaps concealed a guarantee of our eternal salvation, a guarantee of the constant movement of life on earth and of endless perfection.36
In Chekhov, then, pain, illness, and dying are tragic in a clinical and local sense only, not in a moral sense. Death is not punitive, and survival is more a matter of good fortune or timing than of ethical absolutes. Two stories are exemplary in this regard, among the darkest in the canon. In each, one detects a doctor’s trained eye, and a doctor’s tactful, tolerant commiseration that does not pretend to know what it cannot know.
The short story “Enemies” (1887) opens five minutes after Kirilov, a district doctor, has lost his only child, a boy of six, to diphtheria. His wife is stretched out in despair over the dead body; the doctor’s hands are burnt with carbolic acid, the standard disinfectant for this contagious disease. At that moment a neighboring landowner knocks, in a panic, to summon the doctor: his wife has just fallen dangerously ill; can the doctor come? Kirilov says no, he is in mourning. The distraught man persists; finally the doctor, in a stupor, climbs into his carriage, and upon arrival at the man’s manor house it is discovered that the wife had feigned illness to run off with her lover, their house guest. Both doctor and client are stunned. This farce allows each to give furious vent to his individual grief. “Never in their lives,” Chekhov writes, “had they uttered so much that was unjust, cruel, and absurd. The unhappy are egotistic, spiteful, unjust, cruel, and less capable of understanding each
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other than fools. Unhappiness does not bring people together but draws them apart . . .”37 In this story there is no philosophy, no attempt at transcendence, no defense of the nobility of suffering. Dostoevsky and Tolstoy would have tried to provide both. Most Chekhovian characters lack the energy for such transformations.
The second story does present an epiphany, but it is a clinical one – and also stained with carbolic acid. This is “The Name-day Party” (1888), narrated from the perspective of a woman seven months pregnant. Throughout the tedious day, corsetedin to conceal her condition, the wife watches her attractive husband act the charming host to younggirls while she, exhausted, obliged to be gracious to unwanted guests, resents both him and his reluctance to confide his troubles to her. Name-days – the Russian equivalent of birthdays, celebrated not on your birth date but on the official day of the saint after which you were named – were important family events and full-day celebratory affairs. It is an ordinary stressed day in the obligatory social life of a marriage. But it ends with premature labor, an operation, death of the infant, an unknown number of blank days and nights, the despair of the husband, and for the wife, a “mistiness in the brain from chloroform” and “dull indifference to life.” The husband weeps by the window and wrings his hands: “Olya! Why didn’t we take thought for our child?”
But there had been no reason to take special thought. At the end of this bleak story, no specific person or event is to blame. It was a ghastly accident. Chekhov is astute at presenting the frivolities and insincerities of both social and family life, and the name-day party was indeed a strain. But neither corsets nor social conventions were necessarily lethal to an unborn child. If the doctors treating Olya discovered why her body had suddenly broken down and miscarried, Chekhov doesn’t tell us. He cannot and will not do what Tolstoy does in “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” written two years earlier, which is to condemn everything the suffering hero had lived by – that entire round of legal and social duties that made up the life of the condemned judge, Ivan Ilyich – in order to justify the ghastly accident (cancer) that led to his death. No narrator has the right to reconstitute moral causality with such assurance and pass final judgment. About this matter Chekhov felt very strongly: he even wrote “A Tedious Story” (1889), his counter-version of a “bad death,” in response to Tolstoy’s didactic Ivan Ilyich.
On this matter of radical contingency and tragic accident, Chekhov would have considered Dostoevsky even less of a precedent. The symbolic move made at the end of
children, perhaps, can be found in mid-career Tolstoy: the fate of Petya Rostov in
