Stories

time is flying …*

Just a month earlier, Chekhov had written to a friend saying that his real commitment was to medicine, while literature was a mistress he would one day abandon. Now he likened the effect of Grigorovich’s letter on him to “a governor’s order to leave town within twenty-four hours.” And he obeyed the order. He began to write less and work more. The first story signed with his real name, “Panikhida,” appeared in Suvorin’s magazine New Time that same year—the start of a close and sometimes difficult collaboration between writer and editor that would continue for the rest of Chekhov’s life. Though a delight in the absurd and a sharp eye for human folly remained central to his work, he was no longer merely a humorist. The repentant sketch-writer had made his entry into serious literature.

Chekhov’s contemporaries were struck by his originality. He invented a new kind of story, which opened up areas of life that had not yet been explored by Russian literature. Tolstoy saw it at once. “Chekhov is an incomparable artist,” he is quoted as saying, “an artist of life … Chekhov has created new forms of writing, completely new, in my opinion, to the whole world, the like of which I have not encountered anywhere … Chekhov has his own special form, like the impressionists.” Tolstoy was not alone in using the term “impressionism” to describe Chekhov’s art. We may see what he meant if we look at “The Huntsman,” the story that first caught Grigorovich’s eye. Written entirely in the present tense, it opens with some fragmentary observations about the weather, a brief but vivid and (typically for Chekhov) slightly anthropomorphized description of the fields and forest, a few spots of color—the red shirt and white cap of the huntsman. A woman appears out of nowhere. She and the huntsman talk, she tenderly and reproachfully, he boastfully and casually. “Ashamed of her joy,” she “covers her mouth with her hand.” He scratches his arm, stretches, follows some wild ducks with his eyes. It is clear from what he says that they cannot live together. He gets up and leaves; she watches him go: “Her gaze moves over the tall, skinny figure of her husband and caresses and fondles it …” He turns, hands her a worn rouble, and goes on. She whispers, “Good-bye, Yegor Vlasych!” and “stands on tiptoe so as at least to see the white cap one more time.” That is all. The story does not build to any moment of truth; it does not reach any significant conclusion. It simply stops.

In a letter of May 10, 1886, to his older brother Alexander, who had taken up writing before him with only modest success, Chekhov, from his new position as a recognized author, set forth six principles that make for a good story: “1. Absence of lengthy verbiage of a political-social-economic nature; 2. total objectivity; 3. truthful descriptions of persons and objects; 4. extreme brevity; 5. audacity and originality: flee the stereotype; 6. compassion.” It is a remarkably complete description of Chekhov’s artistic practice. Authorial commentary, if not entirely absent, is kept to an absolute minimum. The most ordinary events, a few trivial details, a few words spoken, no plot, a focus on single gestures, minor features, the creation of a mood that is both precise and somehow elusive— such is Chekhov’s impressionism. “This seemingly slight adjustment of tradition,” wrote the critic Boris Eikhenbaum, “had, in fact, the significance of a revolution and exerted a powerful influence not only on Russian literature, but also on the literature of the world.”*

Chekhov’s way of composition wordlessly extends the limited scope of the story by means of juxtaposition, alternation, simultaneity, that is, by means of a new kind of poetic logic. His art is constructive not in a narrative but in a musical sense, to borrow D. S. Mirsky’s terms.** Not that he wrote “musical” prose; on the contrary, his language is perhaps the plainest in Russian literature; but he built his stories by musical means—curves, repetitions, modulations, intersecting tones, unexpected resolutions. Their essence, as Mirsky says, is not development but envelopment in a state of soul. They are “lyric constructions.” That may partly explain the importance Chekhov gives to sounds, to precisely transcribed noises—night watchmen rapping on their wooden bars, the distinctive calls of corncrakes, cuckoos, bitterns, and “angry, straining frogs,” the banging of shutters in a storm, the howling or singing of wood stoves, the humming of samovars, the ringing of bells—symbolic sounds, of which the most famous is the very last note in his work, the breaking string at the end of The Cherry Orchard.

Another aspect of Chekhov’s originality is the inclusiveness of his world. He describes life in the capitals and the provinces, city life, village life, life in the new industrialized zones around the cities, life in European Russia, Siberia, the Crimea, the Far East, the life of noblemen, officials, clergy high and low, landowners, doctors, intellectuals, artists, actors, merchants, tradesmen, peasants, prisoners, exiles, pampered ladies, farm women, children, young men, old men, the sane, and the mad. “One of the basic principles of Chekhov’s artistic work,” Boris Eikhenbaum notes, “is the endeavor to embrace all of Russian life in its various manifestations, and not to describe selected spheres, as was customary before him. The Chekhovian grasp of Russian life is staggering; in this respect, as in many others, he cannot be compared with anyone …” His characters are not monumental personalities dramatically portrayed, like the heroes of Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, they are sharply observed types—the darling, the explainer, the fidget, the student, the malefactor, the man in a case, the heiress, the bishop, the fiancee. They are made of “the common stuff of humanity,” as Mirsky has said, “and in this sense, Chekhov is the most ‘democratic’ of writers.” There is something in them reminiscent of Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims—the knight, the miller, the prioress, the parson, the manciple, the pardoner, the wife of Bath— but Chekhov’s world is more scattered, and his people are transients of a more accidental sort: summer guests, doctors on call, hunters in the field, riders on ferries, passersby, city people displaced to the country, country people out of place in the city. Their pilgrimage has no definite goal.

Chekhov’s early work was a popular success, and remains popular to this day among ordinary Russian readers, who do not share the common Western image of Chekhov as the pessimistic “poet of crepuscular moods,” the “last singer of disintegrating trifles.” His first collection, Tales of Melpomene, was published in 1884, the year he finished his medical studies; the second, Motley Stories, was published in 1886, and did so well that he gave up the idea of practicing medicine full-time and, with Grigorovich’s blessing, devoted himself to writing. A year later came the collection In the Twilight, which was awarded the prestigious Pushkin Prize in 1888. Among the sketches and anecdotes of these early collections are some masterpieces of artistic concentration and force: not only “The Huntsman” but “The Malefactor,” “Anyuta,” “Easter Night,” “Vanka,” “Sleepy.” Chekhov began writing plays at the same time, and with equal success. His first play, Ivanov, opened in Moscow on November 19, 1887. In January 1889 it was staged in Petersburg, where it was greeted with enthusiasm and much discussed in the newspapers and literary journals. The production later toured the provinces.

But, precisely because of its originality, Chekhov’s work met with opposition from the established critics of the time. For decades literary criticism had been dominated by political ideologists, who judged literary works according to their social “message,” their usefulness to the common cause. The writer was seen first of all as a pointer of the way, a leader in the struggle for social justice; his works were expected to be “true to life” and to carry a clear moral value. Faced with stories like “Anyuta” or “Easter Night,” what were these critics to say? What were they to think of a writer whose first precept was the “absence of lengthy verbiage of a political-social-economic nature”? Chekhov’s “impressionism” was seen as a form of art for art’s sake, a denial of the writer’s social role, and a threat to the doctrine of realism, and he was attacked for deviating from the canons of useful art.

In fact, just as Chekhov created a new kind of story, he also created a new image of the writer: the writer as detached observer, sober, restrained, modest, a craftsman shaping the material of prose under the demands of authenticity and precision, avoiding ideological excesses, the temptations of moral judgment, and the vainglory of great ideas. That is how Chekhov himself has most often been seen, and certainly it was in part what he wanted to be. He often joked about his ideological shortcomings. “I still lack a political, religious and philosophical world view,” he wrote to Grigorovich on October 9, 1888. “I change it every month—and so I’ll have to limit myself to descriptions of how my heroes love, marry, give birth, die, and how they speak.” He considered that the writer’s job, and thought it was enough. On October 27, 1888, he wrote to Alexei Suvorin: