Reading Chekhov

In both cases, something lovely and precious has been defiled by the vulgar gaze of the outer world. Both men immediately regret their impulse to confide. But the telling scene in "The Kiss" has an additional moral-a literary one. Ryabovitch makes the painful discovery that every novice writer makes about the gap that lies between thinking and writing. ("It surprised him dreadfully to find how short a time it took him to tell it.") The gossamer images that sit in one's head have to be transformed into some more durable material-that of artful narration-if they are not to dissolve into nothing when they hit the chilly outer air. Chekhov lodges the cautionary incident of Ryabovitch's artless blurting out within his own artful narration. What poor Ryabovitch fails to communicate to his comrades in his amateur's innocence Chekhov succeeds in communicating to us with his professional's guile. He is like the practiced von Rabbeks, who perform their function of giving pleasure because they must and because they know how. "You can do nothing by wisdom and holiness if God has not given you the gift," a monk in "On Easter Eve" (1886) says in a discussion of the poetics of certain hymns of praise in the Russian Orthodox liturgy called akathistoi. "Everything must be harmonious, brief and complete… Every line must be beautified in every way; there must be flowers and lightning and wind and sun and all the objects of the visible world." Chekhov's own literary enterprise could hardly be better described. His stories and plays-even the darkest among them-are hymns of praise. Flowers and lightning and wind and sun and all the objects of the visible world appear in them as they appear in the work of no other writer. In almost every Chekhov work there is a moment when we suddenly feel as Ryabovitch felt when the young woman entered the room and kissed him. Three

I

n Chekhov's garden at the villa in Autka (now called the Chekhov House Museum in Yalta), Nina had pointed out a birch tree that, she said, Chekhov himself had planted. (According to a brochure, more than half the trees and shrubs and vines in the garden, representing 149 species, were planted by Chekhov.) The garden had reached a majestic maturity Chekhov did not live to see-indeed, would not have lived to see had he had a normal life span. It is a hundred years since the garden was laid out, on a bare, dry piece of land near a Tatar cemetery. In May, it had a delicious fragrant lushness. Shrubs and flowers spilled out over paths leading through a kind of maze of variegated green shadiness.