artist, like the animal performer, is doing something unnatural, almost unseemly. Making art goes against nature. People, like animals, weren't made to perform such feats. If life is given only once, it shouldn't be spent writing. Chekhov would often talk of idleness as the only form of happiness. He said he loved nothing better than fishing. At the same time, like Trigorin in The Seagull, he was afflicted with the writer's compulsion to perpetually, ruthlessly sift life for material, to be writing something in his head all the time.
If it was Chekhov's fate to be a reluctant literary performer, it was also his fate to remain with his impossible 'original owners.' His adoption by Suvorin was as inconsequential as Kashtanka's adventure with the circusmaster. Chekhov's autocratic father, the kindly, uneducated mother, who had been helpless to defend him against the father, the feckless older brothers, the not brilliant younger ones, and the unmarried Maria were the people to whom he felt connected. All the rest were 'customers,' to use Kashtanka's term for outsiders. The friendly reserve he maintained toward outsiders was the outward token of the iron tie to the family. Literally as well as figuratively, Chekhov never left home. Whatever he meant by his new 'feeling of freedom,' he didn't mean the usual young person's leavetaking of his family. He kept his parents with him in Moscow and Me-likhovo, and, after his father's death, in 1889, he brought his mother to his house in Yalta. Maria, too, was always with him. According to her memoirs (written in old age), she turned down the proposal of an attractive man named Alexander Smagin, 'because I could not do anything that would cause unpleasantness to my brother, upset the customary course of his life, and deprive him of the conditions for creative work which I always tried to provide.' Chekhov had merely remained silent when she announced her intention of marrying, Maria reports, but this was enough for her to break with Smagin. (Having sacrificed herself for her brother, she was understandably put out when he himself married; however, she remained a fixture in the household, and she and Olga were friends into old age.) Chekhov was as closemouthed about his relationship to his sister as he was about his relationship to any other woman. The letters he wrote to her when he traveled are easy and natural (as are his letters to his brothers). But what the relationship was like-what its tone was, what its themes were-remains among the secrets of the nest. When I turned on the television set in my room at the Hotel Yalta, I had the choice of four channels, two of them in German. All were blurred. I chose one of the Russian stations, which was showing an American movie. Instead of being dubbed, the film was shown with the sound very low, almost inaudible, and with a loud overvoice translating the characters' speech into Russian. By listening very hard, I could make out some of what the characters were saying. The film seemed to be about a mortally ill child whose father takes him to a desert where God has instructed the father to build a stone altar. The child's mother, back home, sends a friend to beg for his return. The father refuses. 'What shall I tell Caroline?' the friend asks. I did not need to strain my ears for the reply: 'Tell her that I love her.' At the end, the sky opens, lightning flashes over the altar, and the miracle occurs: the boy is cured. In Chekhov, there are no miraculous cures. When characters are sick, they die. It is hard to think of a Chekhov play or story in which no death occurs (or over which, having already occurred, it doesn't hover, as the drowning of Ranevskaya's son hovers over The Cherry Orchard). Death is the hinge on which the work swings.
'The Lady with the Dog' is an apparent exception-no one in the story dies or has died. And yet death is in the air. Gurov's spiritual journey-his transformation from a connoisseur of women to a man tenderly devoted to a single ordinary woman-is a journey of withdrawal from life. His life as a womanizer wasn't nice, but it was vital; his secret 'real life' in the Moscow hotel has a ghostly quality. He and Anna are like people for whom 'the eternal sleep awaiting us' has already begun. Anna's Yalta hotel room smelled of a scent from a Japanese shop, and there was a watermelon on the table; the room at the Slaviansky Bazaar is odorless, and there is nothing to eat. Anna Sergeyevna is pale, and dressed in gray ('his favorite gray dress'); Gurov, catching a glimpse of himself in the mirror, sees that his hair is gray. The color of ashes has already begun to infiltrate the story. When Gurov-like Orpheus descending to the underworld-traveled to S-, he found a long gray fence in front of Anna Sergeyevna's house and in his hotel room 'the floor was covered with gray army cloth, and on the table was an inkstand, gray with dust.' (Something stirs in one's memory here. One recalls that at the end of 'A Dreary Story' the dying professor stays in a hotel in Harkov, where he sleeps under 'an unfamiliar gray quilt' and peevishly remarks, 'It's so gray here-such a gray town.') In the Moscow hotel room, Gurov notes that 'he had grown so much older, so much plainer during the last few years,' and goes on to observe of Anna Sergeyevna, 'The shoulders on which his hands rested were warm and quivering. He felt compassion for this life still so warm and lovely, but probably already not far from beginning to fade and wither like his own.' He sounds almost as if he were speaking of a corpse. In Yalta, only a year or two earlier, he had been struck by Anna's youth, by 'how lately she had been a girl at school doing lessons like his own daughter.' (She was twenty-two.) He had (twice) noted her schoolgirlish 'diffidence' and 'angularity.' But now this woman who could be his daughter is on the verge of 'fading' and 'withering.' His actual daughter accompanies him on his walk to his tryst in the Moscow hotel. What is Chekhov getting at with his theme of the two daughters? Is he anticipating Freud's mythopoetic reading of King Lear in 'The Theme of the Three Caskets'? Does Anna Sergeyevna-like Cordelia-represent the Goddess of Death? Has Gurov, like the professor in Harkov (and Chekhov in Yalta), come to the end of the line? We do not ask such questions of the other Russian realists, but Chekhov's strange, coded works almost force us to sound them for hidden meanings. Chekhov's irony and good sense put a brake on our speculations. We don't want to get too fancy. But we don't want to miss the clues that Chekhov has scattered about his garden and covered with last year's leaves. These leaves are fixtures of Chekhov's world (I have encountered them in the gardens of no other writer), and exemplify Chekhov's way of endowing some small quiet natural phenomenon with metaphorical meaning. One hears them crunch underfoot as one walks in the allee where this year's leaves have already sprouted.
Thu, Aug 16th, 2012, via SendToReader
