Reading Chekhov

Chekhov hated theatricality and was evidently as uncomfortable with nature's histrionics as with man's. In "The Duel" (1891), he employs a dramatic Caucasian landscape of craggy mountains and steep gorges to objectify the Romantic posturings of his hero, Ivan Andreitch Laevsky, the most fully developed of his redeemable cads. Before Laevsky can undergo his transformation from a hysterically miserable man who hasn't fully grown up into an ordinarily unhappy adult, he must be brought low. He must come down from the high places of Byronic self-involvement to the sea level of Chekhovian compassion. ("The Duel" could be described as a Hamlet that turns into a Lear.) Laevsky has run off to the Caucasus with a young married woman named Nadezhda Fyodorovna, of whom he has predictably tired and whom he callously plans to abandon. Laevsky's adversary, Nicholas von Koren, is a rigidly upright young scientist who believes that people like Laevsky ought to be eliminated, and who puts his chilly philosophy into effect by almost killing Laevsky in a duel. However, it is not von Koren who teaches Laevsky the transformative lesson, but Nadezhda. She is one of Chekhov's most striking and subtle portraits of women. Like Anna Sergeyevna-like all the women who fall in love with Chekhov's flawed heroes-she is a rather oathetic fieure. Chekhov does not condemn married women who take up with men like Gurov and Laevsky, but he has no illusions about what they have let themselves in for. ("It was clear to both of them that they had still a long, long road before them, and that the most complicated and difficult part of it was only just beginning," he writes of Anna and Gurov at the end of his story but not of theirs.) Unlike the delicate, almost virginal Anna, the assertive, plumply pretty Nadezhda has sex on her mind all the time: The long, insufferably hot, wearisome days, beautiful languorous evenings and stifling nights, and the whole manner of living, when from morning to night one is at a loss to fill up the useless hours, and the persistent thought that she was the prettiest young woman in the town, and that her youth was passing and being wasted, and Laevsky himself, though honest and idealistic, always the same, always lounging about in his slippers, biting his nails, and wearing her out with his caprices, led by degrees to her becoming possessed by desire, and as though she were mad, she thought of nothing else night and day. Breathing, looking, walking, she felt nothing but desire. The sound of the sea told her she must love; the darkness of evening said the same; the mountains the same… At a picnic among the craggy mountains and steep gorges, Nadezhda "wanted to skip and jump, to laugh, to shout, to tease, to flirt. In her cheap cotton dress with blue pansies on it, in her red shoes and… straw hat, she seemed to herself, little, simple, light, ethereal as a butterfly." She cavorts among the rocks with two of the men at the picnic. Later, she realizes "she had gone too far, had been too free and easy in her behavior, and, overcome with misery, feeling herself heavy, stout, coarse, and drunk, she got into the first empty carriage."