love-and of interior life-is precisely its hid-denness. Chekhov often said that he hated lies more than anything. 'The Lady with the Dog' plays with the paradox that a lie-a husband deceiving a wife or a wife deceiving a husband-can be the fulcrum of truth of feeling, a vehicle of authenticity. (Tolstoy would argue that this is the kind of self- deception adulterers classically indulge in, and that a lie is a lie.) But the story's most interesting and complicated paradox lies in the inversion of the inner-outer formula by which imaginative literature is perforce propelled. Even as Gurov hugs his secret to himself, we know all about it. If privacy is life's most precious possession, it is fiction's least considered one. A fictional character is a being who has no privacy, who stands before the reader with his 'real, most interesting life' nakedly exposed. We never see people in life.is clearly as we see the people in novels, stories, and plays; there is a veil between ourselves and even our closest intimates, blurring us to each other. By intimacy we mean some-thing much more modest than the glaring exposure to which the souls of fictional characters are regularly held up. We know things about Gurov and Anna-especially about Gurov, since the story is told from his point of view-that they don't know about each other, and feel no discomfort in our voyeurism. We consider it our due as readers. It does not occur to us that the privacy rights we are so nervously anxious to safeguard for ourselves should be extended to fictional characters. But, interestingly, it does seem to occur to Chekhov. If he cannot draw the mantle of reticence over his characters that he draws over himself-and still call himself a fiction writer-he can stop short of fully exercising his fiction writer's privilege of omniscience. He can hold back, he can leave his characters a little blurred, their motives a little mysterious. It is this reticence that Shcheglov and Suvorin were responding to in their criticism of 'Lights.' Chekhov's replies, with their appealing expressions of epistemological humility and journalistic detachment, skirt the issue, put his interlocutors off the scent of his characters' secrets.
In a story called 'Difficult People,' written in 1886, we can see the shoot from which Gurov's meditation on double life is to grow. A dreadful row has taken place at a provincial family dinner table between an authoritarian father and a rebellious son. The son storms out of the house and, full of bitterness and hatred, sets out for Moscow on foot. Then: 'Look out!' He heard behind him a loud voice.
An old lady of his acquaintance, a landowner of the neighborhood, drove past him in a light, elegant landau. He bowed to her, and smiled all over his face. And at once he caught himself in that smile, which was so out of keeping with his gloomy mood. Where did it come from if his whole heart was full of vexation and misery? And he thought nature itself had given man this capacity for lying, that even in difficult moments of spiritual strain he might be able to hide the secrets of his nest as the fox and the wild duck do. Every family has its joys and its horrors, but however great they may be, it's hard for an outsider's eye to see them; they are a secret.
Chekhov hid the secrets of his literary nest as well as those of his personal one; he was closemouthed about his compositional methods and destroyed most of his drafts. But he didn't merely withhold information about his literary practice; the practice itself was a kind of exercise in withholding. In his letter of March 1886 to Grigorovich, Chekhov noted a curious habit he had of doing everything he could not to 'waste' on any story 'the images and scenes dear to me which-God knows why-I have treasured and kept carefully hidden,' and, again, writing to Su-vorin in October 1888, he cited 'the images which seem best to me, which I love and jealously guard, lest I spend and spoil them, adding, 'All that I now write displeases and bores me, but what sits in my head interests, excites, and moves me.'
In the much-anthologized story 'The Kiss' (1887) Chekhov gave brilliant form to his sense of the danger of dislodging what sits in one's head from its place of safety. A brigade on the march spends the night in a provincial town, and its nineteen officers are invited for evening tea at the house of the local squire, a retired lieutenant- general named von Rabbek. The central consciousness of the story is Ryabovitch, 'a little officer in spectacles, with sloping shoulders, and whiskers like a lynx's,' who thinks of himself as 'the shyest, most modest, and most undistinguished officer in the whole brigade.' At von Rabbek's house Ryabovitch is struck by the social adroitness of the host and hostess and their grown son and daughter, who have invited the officers strictly out of duty, and at a time when it is inconvenient to do so-they are having a house party-but who put on a dazzling performance of hospitality. 'Von Rabbek and his family skillfully drew the officers into the discussion, and meanwhile kept a sharp lookout over their glasses and mouths, to see whether all of them were drinking, whether all had enough sugar, why someone was not eating cakes or not drinking brandy. And the longer Ryabovitch watched and listened, the more he was attracted by this insincere but splendidly disciplined family.' During a period of dancing, in which Ryabovitch does not participate ('He had never once danced in his whole life, and he had never once in his life put his arm round the waist of a respectable woman'), he follows the von Rabbek son and some officers to a billiard room in another part of the house, and then, feeling himself in the way (he does not play billiards, either), decides to return to the drawing room. But in retracing his steps Ryabovitch makes a wrong turn and finds himself in a small dark room. Suddenly, a young woman rushes toward him, murmurs 'At last!' and kisses him. Realizing her mistake- she had come to the room for a lovers' tryst, clearly-she shrieks and runs off. The encounter has a momentous effect on Ryabovitch. It is almost like a conversion experience. 'Something strange was happening to him… His neck, round which soft, fragrant arms had so lately been clasped, seemed to him to be anointed with oil; on his left cheek near his moustache where the unknown had kissed him there was a faint chilly tingling sensation as from peppermint drops… He was full of a strange new feeling which grew stronger and stronger… He quite forgot that he was round-shouldered and uninteresting, that he had lynx-like whiskers and an 'undistinguished appearance.' ' (That was how his appearance had been described by some ladies whose conversation he had accidentally overheard.) The next morning, the brigade leaves the town, and throughout the day's march Ryabovitch remains under the spell of the kiss, which has acted on his imagination like a powerful drug, releasing delicious fantasies of romantic love. At the end of the day, in the tent after supper, he feels the need to tell his comrades about his adventure. He began describing very minutely the incident of the kiss, and a moment later relapsed into silence… In the course of that moment he had told everything, and it surprised him dreadfully to find how short a time it took him to tell it. He had imagined that he could have been telling the story of the kiss till next morning.
One of the officers, a sleazy womanizer named Lobytko, is moved to respond with a crude story about a sexual encounter in a train. Ryabovitch vows 'never to confide again.' Twelve years later, Chekhov will write another version of this scene in 'The Lady with the Dog.' After Gurov returns home from Yalta, he is 'tormented by an intense desire to confide his memories to someone,' and one evening, as he is leaving a Moscow club, he impulsively says to an official with whom he has been playing cards:
'If only you knew what a fascinating woman I made the acquaintance of in Yalta!'
The official got into his sledge and was driving away, but turned suddenly and shouted: 'Dmitri Dmitrich!' 'What?
'You were right this evening: the sturgeon was a bit too strong!'
In both cases, something lovely and precious has been defiled by the vulgar gaze of the outer world. Both men immediately regret their impulse to confide. But the telling scene in 'The Kiss' has an additional moral-a literary one. Ryabovitch makes the painful discovery that every novice writer makes about the gap that lies between thinking and writing. ('It surprised him dreadfully to find how short a time it took him to tell it.') The gossamer images that sit in one's head have to be transformed into some more durable material-that of artful narration-if they are not to dissolve into nothing when they hit the chilly outer air. Chekhov lodges the cautionary incident of Ryabovitch's artless blurting out within his own artful narration. What poor Ryabovitch fails to communicate to his comrades in his amateur's innocence Chekhov succeeds in communicating to us with his professional's guile. He is like the practiced von Rabbeks, who perform their function of giving pleasure because they must and because they know how. 'You can do nothing by wisdom and holiness if God has not given you the gift,' a monk in 'On Easter Eve' (1886) says in a discussion of the poetics of certain hymns of praise in the Russian Orthodox liturgy called akathistoi. 'Everything must be harmonious, brief and complete… Every line must be beautified in every way; there must be flowers and lightning and wind and sun and all the objects of the visible world.' Chekhov's own literary enterprise could hardly be better described. His stories and plays-even the darkest among them-are hymns of praise. Flowers and lightning and wind and sun and all the objects of the visible world appear in them as they appear in the work of no other writer. In almost every Chekhov work there is a moment when we suddenly feel as Ryabovitch felt when the young woman entered the room and kissed him. Three
I
n Chekhov's garden at the villa in Autka (now called the Chekhov House Museum in Yalta), Nina had pointed out a birch tree that, she said, Chekhov himself had planted. (According to a brochure, more than half the trees and shrubs and vines in the garden, representing 149 species, were planted by Chekhov.) The garden had reached a majestic maturity Chekhov did not live to see-indeed, would not have lived to see had he had a normal life span. It
