feels all at once as though a wind were blowing over my soul and blowing away all the impressions of the day, with their dust and dreariness. I saw the bewitching features of the most beautiful face I have ever met in real life or in my dreams. Before me stood a beauty, and I recognized that at the first glance as I should have recognized lightning.
The boy notices that he is not the only one dazzled by the girl's beauty; even his old grandfather is affected. He compares the experience of looking at the girl to that of looking at a ravishing sunset. He also notices a feeling of painful though pleasant sadness. It was a sadness vague and as a dream. For some reason I felt sorry for myself, for my grandfather and for the Armenian, even for the girl herself, and I had a feeling that we all four had lost something important and essential to life which we should never find again… Whether it was envy of her beauty, or that I was regretting that the girl was not mine, and never would be, or that I was a stranger to her; or whether I vaguely felt that her rare beauty was accidental, unnecessary, and, like everything on earth, of short duration; or whether, perhaps, my sadness was that peculiar feeling which is excited in man by the contemplation of real beauty, God only knows.
Chekhov's powerful description of aesthetic experience (the story goes on to a second, less potent illustration of it) allows us to understand what the stakes were for Astrov and Voinitsky in their pursuit of the beautiful Yelena (as well as for Sonya in her pursuit of the handsome Astrov)-and for Chekhov himself in his apparently trivial attention to women's looks. 'That peculiar feeling'-whether aroused by a poem or a painting or a piece of music or a view of the sea or a beautiful girl-was Chekhov's Holy Grail. Although he maintained a pose of ordinariness and was sincere in his valuation of 'good habits, good manners, and small acts of consideration,' it was the extraordinary and the uselessly beautiful that deeply stirred him.
Chekhov's long story 'Three Years' (1895) is perhaps the most profound of his fables of beauty. It is a modern retelling of the legend of Beauty and the Beast. (It has been mistakenly taken to be a story about commercial culture in Moscow.) Laptev, a rich, decent, intelligent, but ugly man, falls in love with a beautiful young woman named Julia, who is repelled by him. Chekhov is merciless in his description of Laptev: [He] knew that he was ugly, and now he felt as though he were conscious of his ugliness all over his body. He was short, thin, with ruddy cheeks, and his hair had grown so thin that his head felt cold. In his expression there was none of that refined simplicity which makes even rough, ugly faces attractive; in the society of women, he was awkward, overtalkative, affected. And now he almost despised himself for it. Julia turns down Laptev's proposal of marriage, and then decides to master her revulsion and accept him. She feels (as Irina in Three Sisters is to feel when she accepts the ill-favored Tuzenbach) that she cannot afford to be choosy. She is moving toward her mid-twenties, she lives at home with a self-absorbed, unloving father, and has no other prospects. Besides, she is kind and feels bad about refusing a decent, honest man. The novella traces the first three years of this sad marriage, narrating it mostly from Laptev's point of view but also, so that we may feel her revulsion, from Julia's. Six months into the marriage, in an exquisitely painful scene in Julia's bedroom, the couple confront their situation.
'I understand your repulsion, your hatred, but you might spare me before other people; you might conceal your feelings.'
She got up and sat on the bed with her legs dangling. Her eyes looked big and black in the lamplight. 'I beg your pardon,' she said. He could not utter a single word from excitement and the trembling of his whole body; he stood facing her and was dumb. She trembled, too, and sat with the air of a criminal waiting for explanations…
'You've been my wife for six months, but you haven't a spark of love for me in your heart. There's no hope, not one ray of light! Why did you marry me?' Laptev went on with despair. 'Why? What demon thrust you into my arms? What did you hope for, what did you want?'
She looked at him with terror, as though she were afraid he would kill her.
'Did I attract you? Did you like me?' he went on, gasping for breath. 'No. Then what? What? Tell me what?' he cried. 'Oh the cursed money! The cursed money!'
'I swear to God, no!' she cried, and she crossed herself. She seemed to shrink under the insult, and for the first time he heard her crying. 'I swear to God, no!' she repeated. 'I didn't think about your money; I didn't want it. I simply thought I should do wrong if I refused you. I was afraid of spoiling your life and mine. And now I am suffering for my mistake. I'm suffering unbearably!' She sobbed bitterly, and he saw that she was hurt; and, not knowing what to say, dropped down on the carpet before her.
'That's enough; that's enough,' he muttered. 'I insulted you because I love you madly.' He suddenly kissed her foot and passionately hugged it. 'If only a spark of love,' he muttered. 'Come, lie to me; tell me a lie! Don't say it's a mistake!'…
But she went on crying, and he felt that she was only enduring his caresses as an inevitable consequence of her mistake. And the foot he had kissed she drew under her like a bird. He felt sorry for her. Julia undergoes the terrible suffering of losing the child who has compensated her for her loveless marriage. For many months she can do nothing but grieve. And then, with the inexplicable but inevitable change of heart that occurs in myths and fairy tales, she falls in love with Laptev. However, the Chekhov story does not end like a fairy story. Laptev does not turn into a prince. He remains that peculiar creature-half man, half emblem-by which we mean a Chekhov character. When the magical moment comes, when Julia tells Laptev that she loves him (the scene is in a garden, of course), the prosaic Chekhov appears and coolly breaks the spell: 'She had told him she loved him, and he could only feel as though he had been married to her for ten years, and that he was hungry for his lunch.' Eight
D
riving back to Yalta from Oreanda, I suggest to Nina, sitting beside me in the rear seat-as I had suggested to Sonia in Moscow-that she buckle her seat belt. Sonia's response had been to inform me icily that only people in front were required to use seat belts. (Vladimir drove without one, buckling up only when he was about to pass a police checkpoint.) I asked Sonia if she thought the rear seat belts were there for decoration. She looked at my strapped-in middle contemptuously. 'It is not necessary for you to do that,' she said. The ever-agreeable Nina, however, puts on her seat belt, like a good child consenting to try a new food. She translates my von Korenesque lecture on the foolhardi-ness of driving without a seat belt to the unbelted Yevgeny, who laughs heartily and tells the following anecdote, which he says came from a doctor at a sanitarium where he once worked: 'When there is an automobile accident, the person who wasn't wearing a seat belt is found with a leg here, an arm there, the head there. The person who was wearing a seat belt is found in his seat completely intact-and dead.'
Illustrations like this of resistance to advances in knowledge appear throughout Chekhov's stories and letters. In a letter to his family written during his journey to Sakhalin (May 1890), he comments on the primitive state of medicine in a village near Tomsk. 'Bleeding and cupping are done on a grandiose, brutal scale. I examined a Jew with cancer in the liver. The Jew was exhausted, hardly breathing, but that did not prevent the feldsher from cupping him twelve times.' This terrible scene is reprised in the death of Nikolai Tchikildyeev, in 'Peasants' (1897). (Chekhov has him cupped twelve times, like the Jew-and then, as if to quantify the difference between life and art, twelve times again.) In the reluctant autobiographical note that Chekhov composed for his medical-school reunion, he spoke of the impact of his medical education on his writing: It significantly broadened the scope of my observations and enriched me with knowledge whose value for me as a writer only a doctor can appreciate. It also served as guiding influence; my intimacy with medicine probably helped me to avoid many mistakes. My familiarity with the natural sciences and the scientific method has always kept me on my guard; I have tried wherever possible to take scientific data into account, and where it has not been possible I have preferred not writing at all… I am not one of those writers who negate the value of science, and I would not wish to be one of those who believe they can figure out everything for themselves.
Note the many negatives: Chekhov's acknowledgment of the 'broadened scope' and 'enrichment' the study of medicine has given him is perfunctory, compared to his gratitude for what it has helped him to avoid. As in his letter to Shche-glov about the limits of psychological understanding ('Nothing is clear in this world. Only fools and charlatans know and understand everything'), Chekhov is at pains to dissociate himself from any position of authority. When writing of the horrendous treatment of the Jew with liver cancer, he does not offer an alternative cure. Chekhov spoke of medicine as his wife and writing as his mistress (he later recycled the quip to say that fiction was his wife and the theater his mistress), but he never practiced medicine full-time, nor attained any particular distinction as a physician. Medicine in Chekhov's day did not have the power to cure that it has only recently begun to wield. Doctors understood diseases they were helpless to cure. An honest doctor would have found his work largely depressing. Simmons speculates that Chekhov's study of medicine originated in an incident of serious illness when he was fifteen-an attack of peritonitis-which led to friendship with the doctor who attended him. Simmons also notes that Chekhov 'always attributed to this attack the hemorrhoidal condition which never
