Reading Chekhov

The conventional literary association of gardens with love and youth and renewal is a touchstone of Chekhov's art. In his stories and plays, gardens are pervasive, almost insistent, presences. Courtships are regularly conducted in them-in the way (as Robert Alter points out in The Art of Biblical Narrative) that betrothals in the Hebrew Scriptures regularly result from encounters at wells. (Gurov and Anna first meet in a restaurant set in a garden.) Intimations of happiness gleam from them. Nothing bad can happen in a garden-except possibly the melancholy induced by the ending of a long summer afternoon. Bad things can happen to a garden, of course. The most famous example is the chopping down of the trees at the end of The Cherry Orchard. In a less well known work, the story "The Black Monk" (1894), another great garden is lost, this one through the miscalculation of its owner, an old horticulturist named Yegor Pesotsky. In an attempt to secure his garden's survival after his death, Pesotsky marries off his daughter to precisely the man most likely to hasten its ruin-a deranged student of philosophy named Kovrin, who believes that he is one of "the chosen of God," destined to lead mankind into "the kingdom of eternal truth." (His lunacy takes the form of a chronic hallucination in which a monk dressed in black emerges from a whirlwind and eggs him on in his grandiosity.) In contrast, Pesotsky is a model of sanity, a kind of horticultural William Morris. "Look at me," he says, "I do everything myself. I work from morning to night: I do all the grafting myself, the pruning myself, the planting myself… The whole secret lies in loving it-that is, in the sharp eye of the master; yes, and in the master's hands, and in the feeling that makes one, when one goes anywhere for an hour's visit, sit ill at ease, with one's heart far way, afraid that something may have happened to the garden." The worst thing that can happen to a garden, he tells Kovrin, "is not a hare, not a cockchafer, and not the frost but any outside person"-the stranger who will come along after his death. Like long summer afternoons, gardens are ephemeral. The old man's attempt to give his garden immortality proves to be as vain as Kovrin's megalomaniacal quest for eternal truth. And yet here at Autka was Chekhov's garden intact, and more beautiful with every passing year! Outside persons had not destroyed it but were tenderly caring for it-as if in fulfillment of Chekhov's prophecy (one that he liked to put into the mouths of certain of his weak, appealing characters) that human nature would improve in the future.