of them can remotely be said to be love letters. In February 1895, for instance, he wrote Avilova
… I have read both your stories with great attention. 'Power' is a delightful story, but I can't help thinking it would be improved if you made your hero simply a landowner, instead of the head of a rural council. As for 'Birthday,' it is not, I'm afraid, a story at all, but just a thing, and a clumsy thing at that. You have piled up a whole mountain of details, and this mountain has obscured the sun. You ought to make it either into a long short story, about four folio sheets, or a very short story, beginning with the episode when the old nobleman is carried into the house.
To sum up: you are a talented woman, but you have grown heavy, or to put it vulgarly, you have grown stale and you already belong to the category of stale authors. Your style is precious, like the style of very old writers…
Write a novel. Spend a whole year on it and another six months in abridging it, and then publish it. You don't seem to take enough trouble with your work… Forgive these exhortations of mine. Sometimes one cannot help feeling like being a little pompous and reading a lecture. I have stayed here another day, or rather was forced to stay, but I'm leaving for certain tomorrow. I wish you all the best. Yours sincerely, Chekhov
The Avilova book points up the problem of memoir literature in biography. In this case, the discrepancy between Chekhov's letters and Avilova's clumsy quotations is so huge that one can only dismiss her book as a piece of self-aggrandizing fantasy. A more skillful writer who claimed to have had a secret love affair with Chekhov-or anything else-might not be so easily dismissed. The silence of the famous dead offers an enormous temptation to the self-promoting living. The opportunity to come out of the clammy void of obscurity and gain entrance into posterity's gorgeously lit drawing room through exaggerated claims of intimacy with one of the invited guests is hard to resist. The Korolenko story about the ashtray may itself be an invention, as may many other chestnuts of the Chekhov memoir literature. Memoirs have little epistemological authority. They provide the biographer with the one thing the subject cannot provide and over which the subject usually has little control: the sense of how others see him. The consensus that arises from the memoir literature becomes a part of the subject's atmosphere. But one must be wary of memoirs, factoring in the memoirist's motives, and accepting little in them as fact. Five
A
fter returning to the hotel from the trip to Gurzuv, I was summoned again to Igor's office. Without looking up from some papers on his desk, he said, 'Your suitcase has been found. They will bring it from the airport this evening.' It took me a moment to grasp what he had said and to hope it was true. I said thank you and left the office. Something in Igor's manner made me disinclined to question him-and even to feel obscurely in the wrong. Humor-lessness as profound as Igor's is unnerving. In fact, the suitcase materialized a few hours later. Someone had rifled it, but had taken nothing. I will never know what happened. Grace, as usual, had arrived on flat, silent feet.
I went to eat dinner at a restaurant Nina had recommended on the hotel's seaside boardwalk. To reach the boardwalk, one descends several hundred feet in an elevator built into the cliff on which the hotel stands. The elevator opens into a long tunnel leading to the beach. The tunnel is dark and dripping, and one's pace quickens the way it does in the sordid transfer tunnels in the New York subway. I met no one in the elevator or the tunnel or along the boardwalk; most of the bars and restaurants and saunas and massage studios were closed. (I later learned from Igor that there were only fifty guests in the hotel; more were expected in the hot, dusty season.) The beach was nearly deserted. I passed a father playing in the dark sand with a shivering child. It was a melancholy scene-not the sweet melancholy of twilight on summer beaches after everyone has gone home but the acrid melancholy of failed enterprises. The sea was gray and still, as if it, too, had lost its will to beguile.
I looked for the restaurant Nina had mentioned-it was called the Krymen-with small expectation of finding it open, but it was open, though without customers. After a search, a tattered handwritten menu in English with strange spellings was produced by an amiable waitress, and soon a delicious dinner of trout and potatoes and cucumber-and-tomato salad was set before me. I am always touched by simple, nicely prepared food, by the idea that a stranger I will never meet has taken care over my dinner, cooking it perfectly and arranging it handsomely on the plate. I feel something friendly and generous wafting toward me. Conversely, I feel the malice and aggression in pretentious, carelessly prepared hotel food; and even the elegant, rigorously prepared dishes served in good restaurants often produce in me a sense of the egotism of their makers: they are doing it for art's sake, not for mine. I have a few times in my life eaten food on the highest level of gastronomy, food imbued with the impersonality of art-from which flowed the same spirit of kindliness and selflessness that I felt at the Krymen. In 'The Wife' (1892), Chekhov describes a meal served at the house of a benign old landowner named Bragin:
… first a cold course of white suckling pig with horseradish cream, then a rich and very hot cabbage soup with pork in it, with boiled buckwheat… pie was served; then, I remember, with long intervals between, during which we drank homemade liquors, they gave us a stew of pigeons, some dish of giblets, roast suckling pig, partridges, cauliflower, curd dumplings, curd cheese and milk, jelly, and finally pancakes and jam.
The narrator, Pavel Andreitch Asorin, is another of Chekhov's flawed heroes who is mysteriously transformed into a decent person. He and his wife, Natalya Gavrilovna, are living together-but not living together-on his country estate. They are like an estranged modern couple who stubbornly continue to occupy a large rent-controlled apartment. The relationship itself has a modern flavor-the raw, close-to-the-bone ambivalence of marriage in the theater of Pinter and Albee. The story centers on a famine in the village, and on the struggle between Natalya, who has organized a successful relief fund, and Asorin, a harsh, abrasive man who attempts to take over her work and run it into the ground because he can't bear the idea of her effectiveness. Asorin's transformation occurs when he awakes from a nap after the gargantuan meal. 'I feel as though I had woken up after breaking the fast at Easter,' he tells his host, and as he drives home he feels that 'I really had gone out of my mind or become a different man. It was as though the man I had been till that day were already a stranger to me.' When he arrives home, he goes to his wife and tells her, 'I've shaken off my old self with horror, with horror; I despise him and am ashamed of him.' He begins a new life of philanthropy and serene relations with Natalya. In the story's final words, 'My wife often comes up to me and looks about my rooms uneasily, as though looking for what more she can give to the starving peasants 'to justify her existence,' and I see that, thanks to her, there will soon be nothing of our property left, and we shall be poor; but that does not trouble me, and I smile at her gaily. What will happen in the future I don't know.'
Contemporary critics took the line they had taken with 'Lights' (and later with 'The Duel'), reproving Chekhov for his hero's abrupt, unmotivated change of character. But, after enough time goes by, a great writer's innovations stop looking like mistakes; today we no longer find the transformations of Asorin and Laevsky and Ananyev jarring, and we accept the lacunae in their psychologies as normal attributes of the inhabitants of Chekhov's world. We feel, moreover, that on some level the transformations have been prepared for-and it is to this level that a new school of Chekhov criticism has been devoting itself. These critics, who are reading Chekhov's texts 'with the attention accorded poetry,' as one of them-Julie de Sherbinin, a professor of Slavic literature at Colby College-writes, have come upon an unexpected source of possible meaning in a lode of hitherto uninterpreted material; namely, Chekhov's repeated references to religion. It is a kind of 'Purloined Letter' situation: the references to the Bible and to the Russian Orthodox liturgy have always been there, but we haven't seen them, because we took Chekhov at his word as being a rationalist and a nonbeliever. 'How could I work under the same roof as Dmitri Merezhkovsky?' Chekhov wrote in July 1903 to Sergei Diaghilev, who had invited him to coedit the journal The World of Art with Merezhkovsky. 'He is a resolute believer, a proselytizing believer, whereas I squandered away my faith long ago and never fail to be puzzled by an intellectual who is also a believer.' And of a Moscow professor named Sergei Rachinsky, who ran a religious elementary school, he wrote (in a March 1892 letter to Shcheglov), 'I would never send my children to his school. Why? In my childhood, I received a religious education and the same sort of upbringing-choir singing, reading the epistles and psalms in church, regular attendance at matins, altar boy and bell-ringing duty. And the result? When I think back on my childhood it all seems quite gloomy to me. I have no religion now.' However, if we slow the pace of our reading and start attending to every line, we will not fail to pick up the clue in a remark like Asorin's 'I feel as though I had woken up after breaking the fast at Easter,' or in Ryabovitch's feeling that he has been anointed with oil. Indeed, we will find that whenever a Chekhov character undergoes a remarkable transformation, an allusion to religion appears in its vicinity, in the way mushrooms grow near certain trees in the forest. These allusions are oblique, sometimes almost invisible, and possibly not even conscious.
The Dupin of this new perspective is Robert Louis Jackson, professor of Slavic languages and literatures at Yale, whose writing and teaching on the religious subtext in Chekhov's stories have inspired a generation of younger
