Reading Chekhov

And now, all of a sudden, your letter arrived. You must forgive the comparison, but it had the same effect on me as a government order "to get out of the city in twenty-four hours." That is, I suddenly felt the need for haste, to get out of this rut, where I am stuck, as quickly as possible.

In his letter about "Karelin's Dream," Chekhov gives a remarkable account of the way being cold at night gets into one's dreams: When at night the quilt falls off I begin to dream of huge slippery stones, of cold autumnal water, naked banks-and all this dim, misty, without a patch of blue sky; sad and dejected like one who has lost his way, I look at the stones and feel that for some reason I cannot avoid crossing a deep river; I see then small tugs that drag huge barges, floating beams. All this is infinitely grey, damp, and dismal. When I run from the river I come across the fallen cemetery gates, funerals, my school teachers… And all the time I am cold through and through with that oppressive nightmare-like cold which is impossible in walking life, and which is only felt by those who are asleep When I feel cold I always dream of my teacher of scripture, a learned priest of imposing appearance, who insulted my mother when I was a little boy; I dream of vindictive, implacable, intriguing people, smiling with spiteful glee-such as one can never see in waking life. The laughter at the carriage window is a characteristic symptom of Karelin's nightmare. When in dreams one feels the presence of some evil will, the inevitable ruin brought about by some outside force, one always hears something like such laughter…

These dreams, in their atmosphere of dread and uncanni-ness, put one in mind of the novels of Dostoevsky and the paintings of Edvard Munch, and hint at anxieties of which Chekhov preferred never to speak. Chekhov's biographers regularly note his reserve, even as they attempt to break it down. With the opening of the Soviet archives, hitherto unknown details of Chekhov's love life and sex life have emerged. But the value of this new information-much of it derived from passages or phrases cut out of Chekhov's published letters by the puritanical Soviet censorship, and absurdly said to make him "more human"-is questionable. That Chekhov was not prudish about or uninterested in sex is hardly revealed by his use of a coarse word in a letter; it is implicit in the stories and plays. Chekhov would be unperturbed, and probably even amused, by the stir the restored cuts have created-as if the documentary proof of sexual escapades or of incidents of impotence disclosed anything essential about him, anything that crosses the boundary between his inner and outer life. Chekhov's privacy is safe from the biographer's attempts upon it-as, indeed, are all privacies, even those of the most apparently open and even exhibitionistic natures. The letters and journals we leave behind and the impressions we have made on our contemporaries are the mere husk of the kernel of our essential life. When we die, the kernel is buried with us. This is the horror and pity of death and the reason for the inescapable triviality of biography.

The attentive reader of Chekhov will notice a piece of plagiarism I have just committed. The image of the kernel and the husk comes from another famous passage in "The Lady with the Dog," in the story's last section. Gurov, after parting with Anna at the end of the summer and returning to his loveless marriage in Moscow, finds that he can't get her out of his mind, travels to the provincial town where she lives with the husband she doesn't love, and is now clandestinely meeting with her in a hotel in Moscow, to which she comes every month or so, telling her husband she is seeing a specialist. One snowy morning, on his way to the hotel, Gurov reflects on his situation (all the while conversing with Ins daughter, whom he will drop off at school before proceeding to his tryst): He had two lives: one, open, seen and known by all who cared to know, full of relative truth and of relative falsehood, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances; and another life running its course in secret. And through some strange, perhaps accidental, conjunction of circumstances, everything that was essential, of interest and of value to him, everything that made the kernel of his life, was hidden from other people; and all that was false in him, the sheath in which he hid himself to conceal the truth-such, for instance, as his work in the bank, his discussions at the club… his presence with his wife at anniversary festivities-all that was open. And he judged of others by himself, not believing in what he saw, and always believing that every man had his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy and under the cover of night. All personal life rested on secrecy, and possibly it was partly on that account that civilized man was so nervously anxious that personal privacy should be respected.