that day.' In a letter of 1894 to his publisher and close friend Alexei Suvorin, Chekhov permitted himself the bitter reflection, 'I acquired my belief in progress when still a child; I couldn't help believing in it, because the difference between the period when they flogged me and the period when they stopped flogging me was enormous.' Chekhov had what he described to another correspondent in 1899 as 'autobiographophobia.' The correspondent was Grigory Rossolimo, who had been a classmate in medical school, and had written to Chekhov to ask him for an autobiography for an album he was assembling for a class reunion-which Chekhov supplied, but not before expressing his reluctance to write about himself. Seven years earlier, when V. A. Tikhonov, the editor of a journal called Sever, asked him for biographical information to accompany a photograph, Chekhov made this reply: Do you need my biography? Here it is. In 1860 I was born in Taganrog. In 1879 I finished my studies in the Taganrog school. In 1884 I finished my studies in the medical school of Moscow University. In 1888 I received the Pushkin Prize. In 1890 I made a trip to Sakhalin across Siberia-and back by sea. In 1891 I toured Europe, where I drank splendid wine and ate oysters. In 1892 I strolled with V. A. Tikhonov at [the writer Shcheglov's] name-day party. I began to write in 1879 in Strekosa. My collections of stories are Motley Stories, Twilight, Stories, Gloomy People, and the novella The Duel. I have also sinned in the realm of drama, although moderately. I have been translated into all languages with the exception of the foreign ones. However, I was translated into German quite a while ago. The Czechs and Serbs also approve of me. And the French also relate to me. I grasped the secrets of love at the age of thirteen. I remain on excellent terms with friends, both physicians and writers. I am a bachelor. I would like a pension. I busy myself with medicine to such an extent that this summer I am going to perform some autopsies, something I have not done for two or three years. Among writers I prefer Tolstoy, among physicians, Zakharin. However, this is all rubbish. Write what you want. If there are no facts, substitute something lyrical.
Maxim Gorky wrote of Chekhov that 'in the presence of Anton Pavlovich, everyone felt an unconscious desire to be simpler, more truthful, more himself.' Chekhov's mock biography produces a similar chastening effect. After reading it, one can only regard any attempt at self-description that is longer and less playful as pretentious and rather ridiculous. Two iff I %is morning I felt giddy,' Nina tells me at the look-X out in Oreanda. 'I was afraid I would not be able to come today. Fortunately I am better.' I question her about her symptoms and urge her to see a doctor. She explains that she hasn't the money for a doctor-doctors can no longer get by on their salaries from the state and now charge for their services. I ask if there are clinics, and she says yes, but they are overcrowded-one has to wait interminably. She finally agrees to go to a clinic the next day to have her blood pressure checked. Nina and I took to each other immediately. She is extremely likable. Because she is large and I am small she has begun giving me impulsive bear hugs and calling me her little one-for lack of a better equivalent for the Russian diminutive. Over the two days we have been together, I have received an increasing sense of the pathos of her life. She is very poor. Her apartment is too small, she says, to keep a cat in. The dress she is wearing was given to her by a Czech woman whose guide she was a few years ago. She is grateful when clients give her leftover shampoo and hand cream; nothing is too small. Earlier in the day, during a visit to the Livadia palace, where the Yalta agreement was signed, she told me that as a young child she lived through the nine-hundred-day siege of Leningrad. Her grandparents died during the siege, and her parents' lives, she said, were shortened because of the sacrifices they made for their children. Now, as she talks about the leftover shampoo, I think about the large tip I will give her at the end of the day, anticipating her surprise and pleasure. Then a suspicion enters my mind: has she been putting on an act and playing on my sympathy precisely so that I will give her money? A week earlier, in St. Petersburg, someone else had used the term 'putting on an act.' I had been walking along the Nevsky Prospect with my guide, Nelly, when I was stopped in my tracks by the horrifying sight of an old woman lying face down on the pavement convulsively shaking, a cane on the ground just out of reach of the trembling hand from which it had fallen. As I started to go to her aid, Nelly put her hand on my arm and said, 'She lies here like this every day. She is a beggar.' She added, 'I don't know if she's putting on an act or not.' I looked at her in disbelief. 'Even if she's acting, she must be in great need,' Nelly allowed. I then noticed a paper box with a few coins in it sitting on the ground near the cane. As the occasional passerby added a coin to the box, the woman took no notice; she simply continued to shake.
If Nina is acting, I think, she, too, must be impelled by desperation, but I decide that she is on the level. There is an atmosphere of truth about her. She is like one of Chekhov's guileless innocents; she is Anna Sergeyevna in late middle age. We rise from the seat and walk over to a semicircular stone pavilion at the edge of the cliff. Names and initials have been penciled on or scratched into the stone. In Chekhov's story 'Lights' (1888), the hero, an engineer named Ananyev, speaks of a decisive youthful encounter in a stone summerhouse above the sea, and offers this theory of graffiti: When a man in a melancholy mood is left tete-a-tete with the sea, or any landscape which seems to him grandiose, there is always, for some reason, mixed with melancholy, a conviction that he will live and die in obscurity and he reflectively snatches up a pencil and hastens to write his name on the first thing that comes handy. And that, I suppose is why all convenient solitary nooks like my summer-house are always scrawled over in pencil or carved with pen-knives.
Ananyev is another of Chekhov's redeemed womanizers, though he undergoes his transformation of soul after hideously betraying the story's gentle, trusting heroine, Kisotchka. The story was written eleven years before 'The Lady with the Dog,' and it was not well received. 'I was not entirely satisfied with your latest story,' the novelist and playwright Ivan Shcheglov wrote to Chekhov on May 29, 1888, and went on: Of course, I swallowed it in one gulp, there is no question about that, because everything you write is so appetizing and real that it can be easily and pleasantly swallowed. But that finale-'You can't figure out anything in this world…'-is abrupt; it is certainly the writer's job to figure out what goes on in the heart of his hero, otherwise his psychology will remain unclear. Chekhov replied, on June 9: I take the liberty of disagreeing with you. A psychologist should not pretend to understand what he does not understand. Moreover, a psychologist should not convey the impression that he understands what no one understands. We shall not play the charlatan, and we will declare frankly that nothing is clear in this world. Only fools and charlatans know and understand everything. To Suvorin, who had also criticized the story's apparent in-conclusiveness (his letter has not survived), Chekhov wrote: The artist is not meant to be a judge of his characters and what they say; his only job is to be an impartial witness. I heard two Russians in a muddled conversation about pessimism, a conversation that solved nothing; all I am bound to do is reproduce that conversation exactly as I heard it. Drawing conclusions is up to the jury, that is, the readers. My only job is to be talented, that is, to know how to distinguish important testimony from unimportant, to place my characters in the proper light and speak their language.
These modest and sensible disclaimers-which have been much quoted and are of a piece with what we know of Chekhov's attractive unpretentiousness-cannot be taken at face value, of course. Chekhov understood his characters very well (he invented them, after all), and his stories are hardly deadpan journalistic narratives. But his pose of journalistic uninquisitiveness is no mere writer's waffle produced to ward off unwelcome discussion. It refers to something that is actually present in the work, to a kind of bark of the prosaic in which Chekhov consistently encases a story's vital poetic core, as if such protection were necessary for its survival. The stories have a straightforward, natural, rational, modern surface; they have been described as modest, delicate, gray. In fact they are wild and strange, archaic and brilliantly painted. But the wildness and strangeness and archaism and brilliant colors are concealed, as are the complexity and difficulty. 'Everything you write is so appetizing and real that it can be easily and pleasantly swallowed.' We swallow a Chekhov story as if it were an ice, and we cannot account for our feeling of repletion.
To be sure, all works of literary realism practice a kind of benevolent deception, lulling us into the state we enter at night when we mistake the fantastic productions of our imagination for actual events. But Chekhov succeeds so well in rendering his illusion of realism and in hiding the traces of his surrealism that he remains the most misunderstood- as well as the most beloved-of the nineteenth-century Russian geniuses. In Russia, no less than in our country, possibly even more than in our country, Chekhov attracts a kind of sickening piety. You utter the name 'Chekhov' and people arrange their features as if a baby deer had come into the room. 'Ah, Chekhov!' my guide in Moscow-a plump, blond, heavily made-up woman named Sonia-had exclaimed. 'He is not a Russian writer. He is a writer for all humanity!' Chekhov would have relished Sonia. He might have-in fact he had-used her as a character. She was a dead ringer for Natasha, the crass sister-in-law in Three Sisters, who pushes her way into control of the Prozorov household and pushes out the three delicate, refined sisters. Sonia saw her job as guide as an exercise in control, and over the two days I spent with her I grew to detest her- though never in the serious way one comes to detest Natasha. My struggle with Sonia was almost always over small-stakes points of touristic arrangement; and her power to get to me was, of course, further blunted by my journalist's wicked awareness of the incalculable journalistic value of poor character. After delivering herself of her estimate of Chekhov, Sonia went
