and humility, and how poorly we understand the meaning of patriotism. A drunken, worn-out, good-for-nothing husband loves his wife and children, but what good is this love? The newspapers tell us we love our great country, but how does this love express itself? Instead of knowledge—immeasurable arrogance and conceit; instead of hard work—laziness and filth. There is no justice, and the conception of honor does not go beyond “the honor of the uniform,” a uniform which is too often seen in the prisoners’ dock. What is needed is work: everything else can go to the devil. The main thing is to be just, for if we are just all the rest will come of itself.
In this extraordinary letter written to his friend Suvorin, a man whom Lenin later characterized as “the running dog of the Tzar,” Chekhov came closer than ever again to defining his ultimate beliefs. His attitude toward life was poetic and practical, as a child is poetic and practical, but at the same time he spoke with a strange authority which came from his vast knowledge of suffering. Sometimes he seems to be talking like those old peasants who sit round the campfires in his stories, but his voice remained young and vibrant to the end.
His last years were spent at Yalta in the white house he built facing the sea. He had mellowed a little, and the stories tended to become longer and slower, as though he took even greater enjoyment in mulling them over, sipping them like wine. Now at last he could afford to write without any sense of being dogged by time. For fifteen years he had been dreaming of writing “The Bishop,” and in March 1901 he began writing it, but it was not finished until a year later. It is one of the most autobiographical of his stories, though he liked to say that it came about after he had seen a photograph of a certain Bishop Mikhail Gribanovsky in a bookshop in Yalta. He bought the picture, made a few discreet inquiries about the bishop’s life, and sat down to write the story. But in fact the photograph was no more than the catalytic agent. In the portrait of the dying bishop he painted himself.
“The Bishop,” “The Lady with the Pet Dog,” and “The Bride” were all written in Yalta. There is no falling off of strength: there is the same calm, the same mastery, the same flickering gaiety. But what is especially noticeable is that the language has been stripped bare of ornaments: in those last stories he writes close to the bone.
Once in “Gusev” Chekhov spoke of “the huge bull without eyes,” the ultimate horror, the symbol of all that was confused and terrible and final in life. Unlike Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, he showed no rage, no presumptuousness: he would confront the evil calmly, gaily, refusing to be overwhelmed by it, remembering always that his first task was to celebrate life, celebrating it all the more fervently because so little life remained in him.
Sometimes it amused him to wonder how long his works would last. One day, talking with the writer Ivan Bunin, he said he thought that people might go on reading him for seven years.
“Why seven?” asked Bunin.
“Well, seven and a half,” Chekhov replied. “That’s not so bad. I’ve got six years to live. Mind you, don’t tell the Odessa reporters about that.”
He was dead a few months later, making quips and jokes to the end.
Chekhov made a gross mistake in calculating the extent of his fame. His real fame is only just beginning, and it is likely that he will be read hundreds of years from now, for he was one of those who, in the words of Boris Pasternak, “are like apples plucked green from the trees, ripening of themselves, mellowing gradually and always increasing in meaning and sweetness.”
IV
It is perhaps Chekhov’s very greatness as a writer which makes him so impossibly difficult to translate. He writes, of course, in the idiom of the nineteenth century with a certain deliberate diffuseness, and with a feeling for the balanced phrase and for rising and falling periods. Dostoyevsky writes in a harsh journalese; he is nearly always the hammer raining down blows on the souls of men and on recalcitrant paragraphs. Chekhov remains the musician, charming his audience, sometimes introducing melodies for no better reason than that it pleases him to listen to the music. He is Mozart to Dostoyevsky’s Beethoven, and like Mozart, he is the master of many moods and many instruments.
So one translates him as best one can, knowing that there are no precise equivalents, and that nothing is to be gained by making him speak in the modern manner. His precision is not our precision, and we do him a disservice if we put him into crisp English, for his language is essentially romantic. He will speak of “the sweet May-time,” and think nothing of it. He rejoices in the pathetic fallacy, and goes to considerable trouble to make his landscapes reflect the moods of his characters. And since this is as much a part of him as his gaiety and his impudence, we must accept him as he is. To modernize him is to destroy him completely.
The difficulties of translating Chekhov are endless. It is not only that he speaks in the manner of his time; he is continually describing a way of life which has vanished from the earth. The Russians no longer speak as Chekhov spoke. Time after time he describes events which are unthinkable in modern Russia. His peasants fall into colloquialisms which must have been completely intelligible to Russians living at the end of the last century, though they are almost beyond understanding today, with the result that modern texts of Chekhov published in Russia are often provided with explanatory footnotes. More than once I have been baffled by a phrase, and consulted a Russian, only to discover that he was equally baffled. To translate Chekhov adequately, one should have a vast knowledge of church ritual, the social customs of the nineteenth century, the dialects of Moscow and half a dozen other towns in Russia. Ideally, he should be translated by a group of churchmen, sociologists, and experts on dialect, but they would quarrel interminably and the translation would never be done.
Though we can no longer recapture precisely what Chekhov meant by “the sweet May-time,” for too many cruel Aprils have intervened, there is no mystery about his way of looking at the world, or the value he placed on human freedom. The texture of the language changes, but the human heart remains oddly unchangeable, though various. Chekhov celebrated the human variety, and while his peasants and princes have vanished, they are closer to us than we know.
That is why of all Russian writers Chekhov, the archconservative, is the most subversive. He is dynamite for children, for he proclaimed the utmost freedom and gave to the human heart the place of sovereign eminence. His stories are hosannas in praise of freedom, of the wanderings of the human heart in search of its own peace. And so, with the insidious power of genius, he prepares us for the revolutions of the future.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
These translations have been made from the twelve-volume edition of Chekhov’s
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