Reading Chekhov

The story is narrated by a young man named Pyotr Mihailich, whose sister, Zina, has been seduced by the pathetic Vlassich. Vlassich is separated but not divorced from the Dostoevskian tart, and Zina has defiantly moved in with him on his run-down farm. Pyotr rides out to the farm intending to horsewhip his sister's seducer-and stays to eat strawberries with the errant pair. He finds he cannot hate Vlassich. Indeed, he "was fond of Vlassich; he was conscious of a sort of power in him." At the end of the story, as Pyotr Mihailich rides home, he berates himself. "I am an old woman! I went to solve the question and I have only made it more complicated-there it is!" Making it more complicated is, of course, Chekhov's own stock in trade; but when, near the end of "Neighbors," the story takes a jokingly strange turn, we may wonder whether he realized just how complicated he was making it. (We do know that Chekhov himself was critical of the story; he wrote to Su-vorin that he thought it shouldn't have been published.) The strange turn comes when Zina, making nervous, black-humorous conversation with her brother, says of her new home, "It's a charming house… There's some pleasant memory in every room. In my room, only fancy, Grig-ory's grandfather shot himself… And in this dining-room, somebody was flogged to death." Vlassich then tells the gruesome story of a sadistic Frenchman called Olivier, who had leased the house and had "sat here at this table drinking claret" while stable boys beat to death a young divinity student Olivier disliked. Pyotr Mihailich, angry at himself for his inaction, thinks, "Olivier behaved inhumanly, but one way or another he did settle the question, while I have settled nothing and have only made it worse… He said and did what he thought right, while I say and do what I don't think right; and I don't know really what I do think…" Chekhov knew very well what he thought of violence-he hated it-and Pyotr Mihailich's perverse approval of Olivier's violence seems more in "the style of Dostoevsky" than in that of Chekhov. A Raskolnikov or a Stavrogin might have rationalized such brutality, but surely not soft, nebbish Pyotr Mihailich. The lapse may help us untangle the knot of Chekhov's relationship to Dostoevsky. That Chekhov was concerned with the question of evil that reverberates through Dostoevsky's novels is clear from works like "Ward No. 6," "In the Ravine," and "Peasant Wives." He may have found Dostoevsky pretentious, but he might not have been impelled to write these stories had not The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment come into his ken. As Chekhov divided his life between the time he was beaten and the time he was no longer beaten, so his stories break down into those that take place in the universe where "everything is permitted" and those set in the world of ordinary human beings who cannot stop making each other miserable but do not step over the line into barbarism. He had begun to look into the abyss early in his writing career; among the contributions to the humor magazines there are grim little tales that point directly to the mature works of despair. One of these is the seven-page story "Because of Little Apples" (1880), in which another sadist watches another beating. This time, a landowner catches a young engaged peasant couple eating apples in his orchard, and devises the amusing punishment of forcing first the girl to beat the boy and then the boy to beat the girl. When it's the boy's turn, his sadistic impulses are set off, and in his "ecstasy" he cannot stop beating the girl. Chekhov will reuse this Dostoevskian psychological insight in "Peasant Wives." Here the evil hypocrite Matvey watches the husband of the woman he has seduced go out of control and beat and kick the woman he loves until she collapses. The beating in "Because of Little Apples" stops (when the landowner's daughter appears on the scene) before the girl is seriously injured but not before the relationship between the pair is irreparably damaged. The boy and the girl walk out of the orchard in opposite directions and never see each other again. The scent of Dostoevsky that subtly emanates from the story was picked up by Robert Louis Jackson. In an essay called "Dostoevsky in Chekhov's Garden of Eden" Jackson plausibly connects the story's "motifs of physical cruelty and spiritual disfiguration, the absolute humiliation of the individual, and sadistic delight in cruelty" to Dostoevsky's work in general, and, in particular, to a chilling story about the destruction of innocence called "A Christmas Party and a Wedding." He believes that the nineteen-year-old author of "Little Apples" was already thoroughly conversant with Dostoevsky's work (which would mean that he was rereading it when he made his comment to Suvorin) and that the parallels between "A Christmas Party" and "Little Apples" are too obvious to ignore.