attracted the Russian reader was that in Chekhov's heroes he recognized the type of the Russian intellectual, the Russian idealist, a queer and pathetic creature that is little known abroad and cannot exist in the Russia of the Soviets. Chekhov's intellectual was a man who combined the deepest human decency of which man is capable with an almost ridiculous inability to put his ideals and principles into action; a man devoted to moral beauty, the welfare of his people, the welfare of the universe, but unable in his private life to do anything useful; frittering away his provincial existence in a haze of Utopian dreams; knowing exactly what is good, what is worth while 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. This is the character that passes —in the guise of a doctor, a student, a village teacher, many other professional people—all through Chekhov's stories.
What rather irritated his politically minded critics was that nowhere does the author assign this type to any definite political party or give him any definite political program. But that is the whole point. Chekhov's inefficient idealists were neither terrorists, nor Social Democrats, nor budding Bolsheviks, nor any of the numberless members of numberless revolutionary parties in Russia. What mattered was that this typical Chekhovian hero was the unfortunate bearer of a vague but beautiful human truth, a burden which he could neither get rid of nor carry. What we see is a continuous stumble through all Chekhov's stories, but it is the stumble of a man who stumbles because he is staring at the stars. He is unhappy, that man, and he makes others unhappy; he loves not his brethren, not those nearest to him, but the remotest.
The plight of a negro in a distant land, of a Chinese coolie, of a workman in the remote Urals, affects him with a keener
*
VN first wrote 'less concerned' and then continued with a passage worth preserving for its interest, though he deleted it: 'less concerned than for instance Conrad was when (according to Ford Madox Ford) he tried to find a word of two syllables and a half—not merely two and not merely three, but exactly two and a half—which he felt was absolutely necessary to end a certain description. And being Conrad he was perfectly right, for that was the nature of his talent. Chekhov would have ended that sentence with an 'out' or an 'in' and never have noticed his ending — and Chekhov was a much greater writer than good old Conrad.' Ed.
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pang of moral pain than the misfortunes of his neighbor or the troubles of his wife. Chekhov took a special artistic pleasure in fixing all the delicate varieties of that pre-war, pre-revolution type of Russian intellectual. Those men could dream; they could not rule. They broke their own lives and the lives of others, they were silly, weak, futile, hysterical; but Chekhov suggests, blessed be the country that could produce that particular type of man. They missed opportunities, they shunned action, they spent sleepless nights in planning worlds they could not build; but the mere fact of such men, full of such fervor, fire of abnegation, pureness of spirit, moral elevation, this mere fact of such men having lived and probably still living somewhere somehow in the ruthless and sordid Russia of to-day 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.
It is from this point of view that those who were equally interested in the misery of the Russian people and in the glory of Russian literature, it is from this point of view that they appreciated Chekhov. Though never concerned with providing a social or ethical message, Chekhov's genius almost involuntarily disclosed more of the blackest realities of hungry, puzzled, servile, angry peasant Russia than a multitude of other writers, such as Gorki for instance, who flaunted their social ideas in a procession of painted dummies. I shall go further and say that the person who prefers Dostoevski or Gorki to Chekhov will never be able to grasp the essentials of Russian literature and Russian life, and, which is far more important, the essentials of universal literary art. It was quite a game among Russians to divide their acquaintances into those who liked Chekhov and those who did not. Those who did not were not the right sort.
I heartily recommend taking as often as possible Chekhov's books (even in the translations they have suffered) and dreaming through them as they are intended to be dreamed through. In an age of ruddy Goliaths it is very useful to read about delicate Davids. Those bleak landscapes, the withered sallows along dismally muddy roads, the gray crows flapping across gray skies, the sudden whiff of some amazing recollection at a most ordinary corner—all this pathetic dimness, all this lovely weakness, all this Chekhovian dove-gray world is worth treasuring in the glare of those strong, self-sufficient worlds that are promised us by the worshippers of totalitarian states.
'The Lady with the Little Dog' (1899)
Chekhov comes into the story 'The Lady with the Little
Dog' without knocking. There is no dilly-dallying. The very
first paragraph reveals the main character, the young fair-
haired lady followed by her white Spitz dog on the
waterfront of a Crimean resort, Yalta, on the Black Sea. And
immediately after, the male character Gurov appears. His
wife, whom he has left with the children in Moscow, is
vividly depicted: her solid frame, her thick black eyebrows,
and the way she had of calling herself 'a woman who
thinks.' One notes the magic of the trifles the author
collects—the wife's manner of dropping a certain mute
letter in spelling and her calling her husband by the longest
and fullest form of his name, both traits in combination
with the impressive dignity of her beetle-browed face and
rigid poise forming exactly the necessary impression. A
hard woman with the strong feminist and social ideas of
her time, but one whom her husband finds in his heart of
hearts to be narrow, dull-minded, and devoid of grace. The
natural transition is to Gurov's constant unfaithfulness to
her, to his general attitude toward women—'that inferior
race' is what he calls them, but without that inferior race
The opening page of Nabokov's lecture on 'The Lady with the
he could not exist. It is hinted that these Russian romances
Little Dog.'
were not altogether as light-winged as in the Paris of
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Maupassant. Complications and problems are unavoidable with those decent hesitating people of Moscow who are slow heavy starters but plunge into tedious difficulties when once they start going.
Then with the same neat and direct method of attack, with the bridging formula 'and so . . .',* we slide back to the lady with the dog. Everything about her, even the way her hair was done, told him that she was bored. The spirit of adventure—
though he realized perfectly well that his attitude toward a lone woman in a fashionable sea town was based on vulgar stones, generally false —this spirit of adventure prompts him to call the little dog, which thus becomes a link between her and him. They are both in a public restaurant.
'He beckoned invitingly to the Spitz, and when the dog approached him, shook his finger at it. The Spitz growled; Gurov threatened it again.
'The lady glanced at him and at once dropped her eyes. 'He doesn't bite,' she said and blushed.
''May I give him a bone?' he asked; and when she nodded he inquired affably, 'Have you been in Yalta long?'
' 'About five days.' '
