Reading Chekhov

"The Lady with the Dog" is said to be Chekhov's riposte to Anna Karenina, his defense of illicit love against Tolstoy's harsh (if ambivalent) condemnation of it. But Chekhov's Anna (if this is what it is) bears no real resemblance to Tolstoy's; comparing the two only draws attention to the differences between Chekhov's realism and Tolstoy's. Gurov is no Vronsky, and Anna von Diderits is no Anna Karenina. Neither of the Chekhov characters has the particularity, the vivid lifelikeness of the Tolstoy lovers. They are indistinct, more like figures in an allegory than like characters in a novel. Nor is Chekhov concerned, as Tolstoy is, with adultery as a social phenomenon. In Anna Karenina, the lovers occupy only a section of a crowded canvas; in "The Lady with the Dog," the lovers fill the canvas. Other people appear in the story-the crowd at the Yalta harbor, a Moscow official with whom Gurov plays cards, the daughter he walks to school, a couple of servants-but they are shadowy figures, without names. (Even the dog is unnamed-when Gurov arrives at Anna's house, and sees a servant walking it, Chekhov makes a point of noting that "in his excitement he could not remember the dog's name.") The story has a close, hermetic atmosphere. No one knows of the affair, or suspects its existence. It is as if it were taking place in a sealed box made of dark glass that the lovers can see out of, but no one can see into. The story enacts what the passage about Gurov's double life states. It can be read as an allegory of interiority. The beauty of Gurov and Anna's secret love-and of interior life-is precisely its hid-denness. Chekhov often said that he hated lies more than anything. "The Lady with the Dog" plays with the paradox that a lie-a husband deceiving a wife or a wife deceiving a husband-can be the fulcrum of truth of feeling, a vehicle of authenticity. (Tolstoy would argue that this is the kind of self-deception adulterers classically indulge in, and that a lie is a lie.) But the story's most interesting and complicated paradox lies in the inversion of the inner-outer formula by which imaginative literature is perforce propelled. Even as Gurov hugs his secret to himself, we know all about it. If privacy is life's most precious possession, it is fiction's least considered one. A fictional character is a being who has no privacy, who stands before the reader with his "real, most interesting life" nakedly exposed. We never see people in life.is clearly as we see the people in novels, stories, and plays; there is a veil between ourselves and even our closest intimates, blurring us to each other. By intimacy we mean some-thing much more modest than the glaring exposure to which the souls of fictional characters are regularly held up. We know things about Gurov and Anna-especially about Gurov, since the story is told from his point of view-that they don't know about each other, and feel no discomfort in our voyeurism. We consider it our due as readers. It does not occur to us that the privacy rights we are so nervously anxious to safeguard for ourselves should be extended to fictional characters. But, interestingly, it does seem to occur to Chekhov. If he cannot draw the mantle of reticence over his characters that he draws over himself-and still call himself a fiction writer-he can stop short of fully exercising his fiction writer's privilege of omniscience. He can hold back, he can leave his characters a little blurred, their motives a little mysterious. It is this reticence that Shcheglov and Suvorin were responding to in their criticism of "Lights." Chekhov's replies, with their appealing expressions of epistemological humility and journalistic detachment, skirt the issue, put his interlocutors off the scent of his characters' secrets.

In a story called "Difficult People," written in 1886, we can see the shoot from which Gurov's meditation on double life is to grow. A dreadful row has taken place at a provincial family dinner table between an authoritarian father and a rebellious son. The son storms out of the house and, full of bitterness and hatred, sets out for Moscow on foot. Then: "Look out!" He heard behind him a loud voice.

An old lady of his acquaintance, a landowner of the neighborhood, drove past him in a light, elegant landau. He bowed to her, and smiled all over his face. And at once he caught himself in that smile, which was so out of keeping with his gloomy mood. Where did it come from if his whole heart was full of vexation and misery? And he thought nature itself had given man this capacity for lying, that even in difficult moments of spiritual strain he might be able to hide the secrets of his nest as the fox and the wild duck do. Every family has its joys and its horrors, but however great they may be, it's hard for an outsider's eye to see them; they are a secret.