Alexander's second common-law wife] and the cook. Forgive me please, but treating women like that, no matter who they are, is unworthy of a decent, loving human being. What heavenly or earthly power has given you the right to make them your slaves? Constant profanity of the most vile variety, a raised voice, reproaches, sudden whims at breakfast and dinner, eternal complaints about a life of forced and loathsome labor-isn't all that an expression of blatant despotism? No matter how insignificant or guilty a woman may be, no matter how close she is to you, you have no right to sit around without pants in her presence, be drunk in her presence, utter words even factory workers don't use when they see women nearby… A man who is well bred and really loving will not permit himself to be seen without his pants by the maid or yell, 'Katka, let me have the pisspot!' at the top of his lungs…
Children are sacred and pure. Even thieves and crocodiles place them among the ranks of the angels… You cannot with impunity use filthy language in their presence, insult your servants, or snarl at Natalia Alexandrovna: 'Will you get the hell away from me! I'm not holding you here!' You must not make them the plaything of your moods, tenderly kissing them one minute and frenziedly stamping at them the next. It's better not to love at all than to love with a despotic love… You shouldn't take the names of your children in vain, yet you have the habit of calling every kopeck you give or want to give to someone 'money taken from the children.'… You really have to lack respect for your children or their sanctity to be able to say-when you are well fed, well dressed and tipsy every day-that all your salary goes for the children. Stop it.
Let me ask you to recall that it was despotism and lying that ruined your mother's youth. Despotism and lying so mutilated our childhood that it's sickening and frightening to think about it. Remember the horror and disgust we felt in those times when Father threw a tantrum at dinner over too much salt in the soup and called Mother a fool. There is no way Father can forgive himself all that now… Natalia Alexandrovna, the cook, and the children are weak and defenseless. They have no rights over you, while you have the right to throw them out the door at any moment and have a good laugh at their weakness if you so desire. Don't let them feel that right of yours.
Anton Chekhov was a younger brother, but he writes here with the calm superiority of a firstborn. He himself has acquired the culture that Nikolai lacks; he does not sit around the house in his underwear and yell for the pisspot. The letters remind us of someone: of von Koren, in 'The Duel.' They are like notes for the speeches von Koren will make about Laevsky's hopelessness. But the priggish von Koren is not the hero of 'The Duel' (as his predecessor, the priggish Dr. Lvov, is not the hero of Ivanov). Not being an actual firstborn, Chekhov evidently never felt comfortable in the firstborn's posture of superiority, and expressed his dislike of the censorious side of himself by stacking the deck against his fictional representations of it: von Koren and Lvov are 'right,' but there is something the matter with them; they are cold fish. Chekhov, in his relationship with his older brothers, brings to mind the biblical Joseph. Chekhov's 'sourceless maturity'-like Joseph's-may well have developed during his enforced separation from the family. And like Joseph, who wept when he saw his brothers again, in spite of their unspeakable treatment of him, Chekhov's love for his big brothers transcended his anger with them; he evidently never entirely shed his little brother's idealization of them. Out of this family dynamic developed the weak, lovable figure who recurs throughout Chekhov's writing and is one of its signatures. Vladimir Nabokov saw encapsulated in this figure the values lost when Russia became a totalitarian state. In Nabokov's view (put forward in his Wellesley and Cornell lectures in the 1940s and '50s, and collected in Lectures on Russian Literature), the Chekhov hero-'a queer and pathetic creature that is little known abroad and cannot exist in the Russia of the Soviets'- ' combine [s] the deepest human decency of which man is capable with an almost ridiculous inability to put his ideals and principles into action… Knowing exactly what is good, what is worthwhile living for, but at the same time sinking lower and lower in the mud of a humdrum existence, unhappy in love, hopelessly inefficient in everything-a good man who cannot make good.' The emigre Nabokov goes on to write, 'Blessed be the country that could produce that particular type of man… [The] mere fact of such men having lived and probably still living somewhere somehow in the ruthless and sordid Russia of today is a promise of better things to come for the world at large- for perhaps the most admirable among the admirable laws of Nature is the survival of the weakest.' Seven
N
ina and I are sitting in an outdoor cafe a few miles down the coast from Oreanda, looking out on another spectacular vista-one on which Gurov and Anna, too, might have gazed-whose focal point is a castle called the Swallow's Nest, built in 1912 (with great difficulty, one would think) atop a rocky cliff dramatically poised over the sea. American popular music, now obligatory in all public places in Russia, fills the air, and puts the Sublime in its place. A waiter brings us Cokes and ham-and-cheese sandwiches. Nina seems to have recovered from her morning's malaise. She eats quickly, and when I offer her the second half of my sandwich-the sandwiches are huge-she accepts it readily. I don't like to think what her normal diet is. She is somewhat overweight, but carries her heaviness well on her large frame. She must have been beautiful in her youth. Her features have a classical regularity, and her cheeks have an appealing flush. Chekhov would have taken note of her. He was acutely sensitive to the appearance of women. In his letters there are constant references-usually negative-to the looks of the women he encountered. Like the women in Badenweiler, the women in Yalta provoked his derision. 'I haven't seen one decent-looking woman,' he wrote to Olga from Yalta in February 1900. 'There are no pretty women,' he wrote in September of that year. In December 1902: 'I went into town for the first time yesterday… all you meet are people who look like rats, not one pretty woman, not one decently dressed.' (Fifteen years earlier, writing to his sister about a visit to the Holy Mountains monastery, he paused to say about his fellow pilgrims, 'I did not know before that there were so many old women in the world; had I known, I would have shot myself long ago.') Of course, there is irony in Chekhov's presentation of himself as a cold appraiser of female flesh; by the time he lived in Yalta he was clearly out of the running as a rake. But the presence or absence of physical beauty-in male as well as in female characters-rarely goes unremarked in his work. In 'The Kiss,' Ryabovitch's unprepossessing appearance shapes his identity and determines his fate. In Uncle Vanya, the radiantly good Sonya is similarly burdened; Astrov cannot return her love because he is put off by her plainness. ('You like her, don't you?' Yelena asks him. 'Yes, I have respect for her,' he replies. 'Does she attract you as a woman?' Astrov pauses and then says, 'No.') In an essay entitled 'Prosaic Chekhov: Metadrama, the Intelligentsia, and Uncle Vanya,' Gary Saul Morson, writing of Chekhov's dislike of histrionics and his regard for prosaic virtue-for 'good habits, good manners, and small acts of consideration'-and reading the play as an apotheosis of the prosaic, understands Chekhov to be faulting Astrov for rejecting the estimable, plain Sonya and pursuing the useless, beautiful Yelena. 'Chekhov, like Tolstoy, usually regards love based on passion or romance with deep suspicion,' Morson writes, and cites the comment of the kindly Dr. Samoilenko in 'The Duel': 'The chief thing in married life is patience… not love but patience.' But Morson's compelling essay only demonstrates the difficulty of making any generalization about Chekhov stick. Yes, Chekhov adopts the Tolstoyan position in 'The Duel,' but in Uncle Vanya he swerves sharply from it. In his own life, far from regarding romantic love with suspicion, Chekhov considered it the sine qua non of marriage. He could not have put the matter more plainly than he did in a letter of 1898 to his younger brother Michael (who had been urging him to marry): To marry is interesting only for love. To marry a girl simply because she is nice is like buying something one does not want at the bazaar solely because it is of good quality. The most important thing in family life is love, sexual attraction, one flesh; all the rest is dreary and cannot be reckoned upon however cleverly we make our calculations. So the point is not in the girl's being nice but in her being loved.
Indeed, in Uncle Vanya, far from faulting Astrov for rejecting Sonya and pursuing Yelena, Chekhov suggests that Astrov can do nothing else. It isn't a matter of choosing between a good course of action and a bad one. In these matters, one has no choice. 'Alas, I shall never be a Tolstoyan! In women, what I like above all is beauty,' Chekhov wrote to Suvorin in 1891. The words 'beauty' and 'beautiful' echo throughout the play. Far from celebrating prosaic virtue, Vanya mourns its pitiful insufficiency. The action of the play is like the throwing of a stone into a still pond. The 'beautiful people'-Yelena and Serebryakov-disturb the life of the stagnant household of Voinitsky and Sonya, stir up the depressed and exhausted Astrov, and then abruptly depart. The waters close over the stone and are still again. Uncle Vanya is a kind of absurdist Midsummer Night's Dream. Strange events take place, but nothing comes of them. Visions of happiness appear and dissolve. Everything is as it was before. In the heartbreaking speech with which the play ends, Sonya speaks to Vanya of her faith in a 'bright, lovely, beautiful' afterlife. Real life remains luster-less, uninteresting, unbeautiful.
In a story written in 1888 called 'The Beauties,' Chekhov spells out what is coded in Vanya and, with characteristic originality, chooses as the vehicle for his meditation on beauty not a professor of aesthetics but a high-school boy. The boy and his grandfather are driving on the steppe on a hot, dusty summer day, and they stop in an Armenian village to visit a rich and funny-looking Armenian the grandfather knows. The boy settles himself in a corner of the Armenian's stifling, fly-filled house, resigned to a long, boring wait while the grandfather and his host drink tea. The tea is served by the Armenian's sixteen-year-old daughter, Mashya, and at the sight of her the boy
