Reading Chekhov

The previous year, Chekhov had written Uncle Vanya. (Or probably had; he was extremely secretive about its composition, perhaps because of its relationship to The Wood Demon, a bizarrely poor play he wrote in 1889 and wished to disown but from which Uncle Vanya unquestionably derives.) The schoolmistress's brief fantasy about marriage to the handsome, depressed, alcoholic Hanov is a kind of shorthand version of Sonya's deep, hopeless love for the handsome, depressed, alcoholic Astrov. At the end of the play, after the professor and Elena and Astrov have gone and Sonya and Vanya are left to live out their lives as silent, patient cart horses, Sonya, too, has an ecstatic vision. She has abandoned hope of earthly happiness, but imagines an afterlife "that is bright, lovely, beautiful. We shall rejoice and look back at these troubles of ours with tenderness, with a smile-and we shall rest. I have faith, Uncle; I have fervent, passionate faith." We do not know whether Marya Vassilyevna has faith, but the church, with its crosses flashing in the setting sunlight, is the fulcrum of her ecstasy. (Chekhov used this image in several other stories, including "Three Years" and "Lights.") A Finkean or perhaps a Jack-sonian reading of "The Schoolmistress" would also take note of Marya's baptism in the river and of the fish in the Moscow apartment. As always, Chekhov's allusions to religion are inconclusive. They mark important moments, but they are written in pencil. As always, and unlike Tolstoy, Chekhov leaves the question of what it all means unanswered. He raises it, but then-as if remembering that he is a man of science and a rationalist-seems to shrug and walk out of the room. Ten

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he second day of my stay in cold, idle St. Petersburg had been scheduled to begin with a visit to one of Catherine the Great's palaces, but when I told Nelly that palaces didn't especially interest me, she-unlike Sonia when I balked at the Armory-simply asked what I wanted to do instead. As with Nina, I felt an immediate rapport with Nelly. She was younger than Nina-she had a fresh, round face, and short, wavy brown hair, and looked to be in her fifties. She was not poor, and was more sophisticated, and more reserved. When I asked her about herself, she told me just so much and no more: that she was a widow (her husband had died of cancer two years earlier); that she had recently remodeled her apartment; that she had a tomcat; that she had been a university teacher of languages, and then had gone into the travel business, originally working for Intourist and now for a private agency called Esperance; that she bought her clothes abroad. She performed her job as guide and translator with beautiful precision, as if it were a piano sonata; throughout my stay in the city, she seemed to know exactly when to explain and when to be silent; when to be present and when to vanish.

She and the driver, Sergei, met me at the St. Petersburg airport, a place that time seems to have forgotten. The terminal, of an early totalitarian-modern style, is worn and faded, leached of all menace. It was empty and silent. Here and there along the stone-floored corridor leading to passport control, a spindly potted palm inclined toward a dusty window. No other flight had come in-perhaps ours was the flight of the day or week-and it took no time to get through the formalities. Sergei picked up my suitcase, and he and Nelly led me to the car, which was parked in a small lot directly in front of the terminal. Was I in Mother Russia or at the Brewster, New York, train station?