Chekhov produced The Steppe only eight months after his return from the south. Its lyricism was born of a sense of irrevocable loss. His youth was finished, as he wrote to his brother, and he looked back enviously at his nine-year-old hero. But a more profound change had also taken place in him. It is clearly marked by the distance that separates The Steppe from his next major work, ‘‘A Boring Story,’’ written in 1889, which looks ahead to the spiritual problematics of the twentieth century. Here there is no trace of Gogolian Romanticism, nor of the ‘‘hypnosis’’ (Chekhov’s word) of Tolstoy’s moral influence. The story is quintessential Chekhov, and laid the foundation for all that came after it. ‘‘Perhaps in the future it will be revealed to us in the fullest detail who Chekhov’s tailor was,’’ wrote the philosopher Lev Shestov, ‘‘but we will never know what happened to Chekhov in the time that elapsed between the completion of The Steppe and the appearance of ‘A Boring Story.’ ’’
In 1884, a year after his anointing by Leskov, Chekhov had suffered a first hemorrhage of the lungs, revealing the illness that would bear out Leskov’s prophecy. He never acknowledged that he was consumptive, though as a doctor he could hardly have mistaken the symptoms. They recurred intermittently but more and more alarmingly in the remaining twenty years of his life. His younger brother Nikolai, a gifted artist, was also consumptive. His death in June 1889 deeply shocked Chekhov. Two months later, he began writing ‘‘A Boring Story,’’ the first-person account of a famous professor of medicine faced with the knowledge of his imminent death and an absolute solitude, detached from everything and everyone around him. Shestov considers it ‘‘the most autobiographical of all his works.’’ But Shestov is right to insist that the change in Chekhov reflected something more profound than the shock of his brother’s death and the awareness that the same fate awaited him. We can only learn what it was from the works that followed, among them the four short novels he wrote between 1891 and 1896. In them his impressionism goes from the meteorological to the metaphysical.
By December 1889, Chekhov had decided to make another Russian journey, this time not to the south but across the entire breadth of the continent to Sakhalin Island, off the far eastern coast of Siberia. Given the state of his health, the trip was extremely foolhardy, but he refused to be put off. He was disappointed by the failure of his play The Wood Demon, the first version of Uncle Vanya, which had opened to boos and catcalls on November 27 and closed immediately; he was generally disgusted with literary life and the role of the fashionable writer; he longed to escape his entanglements with women, editors, theater people, and also to answer his critics, who reproached him with social indifference. He wanted, finally, to do something real. Sakhalin Island was the location of the most notorious penal colony in Russia. He planned to make a detailed survey of conditions on the island and write a report that might help to bring about reforms in the penal system.
After a few months of preparation, reading all he could find about Sakhalin and Siberia, obtaining the necessary permissions, as well as tickets for a return by sea to Odessa, he left on April 21, 1890, traveling by train, riverboat, and covered wagon. Eighty-one days later, on July 11, he set foot on the island, where he spent the next three months gathering information about the prisoners, the guards, their families, the native peoples, the climate, the flora and fauna. He interviewed hundreds of men, women, and children, inspected the mines, the farms, the schools and hospitals (he was especially indignant at the treatment of children and the conditions in the hospitals, and later sent shipments of books and medical supplies to the island). On December 2, 1890, having crossed the China Sea, circumnavigated India, and passed through the Suez Canal and the Bosphorus, he landed back in Odessa, bringing with him a pet mongoose and thousands of indexed notecards.
In January he began what would be his longest published work, Sakhalin Island, an intentionally dry sociological dissertation, which was completed and appeared serially in Russian Thought only in 1893–94. After his look into the inner abyss in ‘‘A Boring Story,’’ he had turned and gone to the worst place on earth, as if to stifle his own metaphysical anguish by plunging into the physical sufferings of others. ‘‘Sakhalin,’’ writes Donald Rayfield, ‘‘gave Chekhov the first of his experiences of real, irremediable evil . . . in Sakhalin he sensed that social evils and individual unhappiness were inextricably involved; his ethics lost their sharp edge of blame and discrimination.’’
That experience is reflected, though only indirectly, in The Duel, which Chekhov worked on alternately with Sakhalin Island during the summer of 1891. It is his longest work of fiction. The duel it dramatizes, before it becomes literal, is a conflict of ideas between the two main phases of the Russian intelligentsia in the nineteenth century, the liberal idealism of the 1840s and the rational egoism of the 1860s, in the persons of Laevsky, a self-styled ‘‘superfluous man’’ (a type christened by Ivan Turgenev in 1850), and von Koren, a zoologist and Social Darwinian with an appropriately German name. The one talks like a book (or a small library); the other is so dedicated to science that he decides to participate actively in the process of natural selection. Laevsky and von Koren demolish each other in words behind each other’s backs, before they face each other with loaded pistols. But it is rather late in the day for dueling, the clash of ideas has grown weary, the situation has degenerated, and the whole thing is displaced from the capitals to a seedy resort town on the Caucasian coast, where the Russians appear as precarious interlopers among the native peoples.
The Duel verges on satire, even farce, but pulls back; it verges on tragedy but turns comical; it ends by deceiving all our expectations. The closing refrain – ‘‘No one knows the real truth’’ – is first spoken by von Koren, then repeated by Laevsky. Chekhov enters all his characters’ minds in turn. No single point of view prevails.
In The Duel, Chekhov’s art becomes ‘‘polyphonic,’’ though not in the Dostoevskian sense. It does not maintain the independence of conflicting ‘‘idea-images’’ or ‘‘idea-voices’’ in ‘‘a dialogic communion between consciousnesses,’’ to use Mikhail Bakhtin’s terms in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. As Bakhtin writes:
The idea [in Dostoevsky] lives not in one person’s isolated individual consciousness – if it remains there only, it degenerates and dies. The idea begins to live, that is, to take shape, to develop, to find and renew its verbal expression, to give birth to new ideas, only when it enters into genuine dialogic relationships with other ideas, with the ideas of others. Human thought becomes genuine thought, that is, an idea, only under conditions of living contact with another and alien thought, a thought embodied in someone else’s voice, that is, in someone else’s consciousness expressed in discourse. At that point of contact between voice-consciousnesses the idea is born and lives. In Chekhov it is exactly the opposite: the idea enters into no relationship with the ideas of others; each consciousness is isolated and impenetrable; there is a polyphony of voices but no dialogue; there is compassion but no communion. Chekhov became the master of this protean, quizzical form of narrative, with its radical undercutting of all intellectual positions. The Duel begins and ends at sea.
The Story of an Unknown Man is one of the less well-known of Chekhov’s works. The title has been mistranslated into English as An Anonymous Story . In fact, the first-person narrator, far from being anonymous, has not just one name but two. But though he began with commitment to a revolutionary cause, and ends saying: ‘‘One would like to play a prominent, independent, noble role; one would like to make history,’’ he knows he is fated to do nothing, to pass from this world without leaving a trace, to remain ‘‘unknown.’’ Chekhov began work on the story in 1888, at the same time as The Steppe, but gave it up as too political. In the version he finished four years later, the politics have thinned out to almost nothing. The narrator, based on an actual person, is a former naval officer turned radical, who gets himself hired as a servant in the house of a rich young man named Orlov in order to spy on his father, a well-known elder statesman. At one point he even has a chance to assassinate the old man, but nothing comes of it. The result of all his spying is not action but total inaction. The ideas and ideals that are mentioned never get defined and play no part in the story. There is talk of freedom, of Turgenev’s heroes, but it all borders on absurdity, as do Orlov’s feasts of irony with his cronies. What interested Chekhov was the ambiguous position of the ‘‘servant,’’ who lives as if invisibly with Orlov and his mistress, is there but not there, overhears their most intimate conversations and quarrels, becomes involved in
