Reading Chekhov

Chekhov never again wrote so directly about the catastrophe that occurred in the biblical first garden. His gardens thenceforth are prelapsarian, sites of redemption and renewal, freedom and air. References to the Serpent's gift of sexual guilt are relegated to out-of-the-way corners of the narrative, and lodged in brief, unemphatic references to the eating of fruit. Zinaida, the sexy heroine of "An Anonymous Story," who diverts the hero from a revolutionary mission, is introduced lying on a sofa eating a pear, for example; the temptress antiheroine of "Ariadne" eats apples and oranges in the middle of the night (as well as roast beef, ham, and men); and, in the most famous example, Gurov eats watermelon-a display not only of his callousness but an allusion to the transgressive sex that has just taken place. The lovers in "An Anonymous Story" and "Ariadne" end up as alienated as the peasant couple in "Little Apples." It is worth recalling about Anna and Gurov that after they have sex it is touch and go whether they, too, will go off in opposite directions. When Anna assumes her Mary Magdalene attitude, and reproaches herself for being "a vulgar, contemptible woman," Gurov feels "bored, already, listening to her" and "irritated by the naive tone, by this remorse, so unexpected and inopportune." But, as roues know how to do, he controls his irritation, and sweet-talks Anna out of her uninteresting remorse. Most significant, he gets her out of the room. It is the trip to Oreanda-to the sea, mountains, open sky-that marks the beginning of the peaceful love that is to arise between them, and of his transformation. Dostoevsky's heavy shadow doesn't fall on this story, of course-the most delicate and fragrant of Chekhov's tales-or on the largest part of his work. And, where it does fall, it is so oblique that we need the help of a literary radiologist like Jackson to make it out. When we left the Dostoevsky Museum, Nelly directed Sergei to drive us to the nearby Anna Akhmatova Museum, located in a wing-the former servants' wing-of an eighteenth-century palace called the Fountain House, where the poet lived on and off for thirty years. The museum is filled with representations (photographs, paintings, drawings, sculptures) of a strikingly beautiful and elegant woman- tall, slender, with dark bangs, always unsmiling-who achieved fame as an avant-garde poet in her early twenties and lived to become one of the heroines of the tragedy of Russian Communism. Though a child of privilege, Akhmatova, born in 1889 (as Anna Andreyevna Gorenko-in 1911 she took the pen name Akhmatova, after a Tatar princess who was her great-grandmother), chose not to join the aristocrats, artists, and writers who left Russia after the revolution, and threw in her lot with those who remained to see the tragedy through. Her fortitude in the face of suffering and loss-her first husband was shot by the Bolsheviks, her only son was imprisoned three times, for a total of thirteen years, her friend and fellow poet Osip Mandelstam died in a labor camp, as did her third husband-and the major poetry she quietly produced during three decades as a banned (and thus destitute) writer have given her legendary status. Isaiah Berlin, recalling an extraordinary night-long conversation he had with Akhmatova in the autumn of 1945, when she was fifty-six, wrote: "She did not in public, nor indeed to me in private, utter a single word against the Soviet regime: but her entire life was what Herzen once described virtually all Russian literature as being-one uninterrupted indictment of Russian reality." Akhmatova's poem "Requiem," perhaps the best known of her works in the West, was written during one of her son's incarcerations, at the height of the Stalin terror, and takes us into this reality with chilling directness: You should have been shown, you mocker, Minion of all your friends, Gay little sinner of Tsarskoye Selo, What would happen in your life- How three-hundreth in line, with a parcel, You would stand by the Kresty prison, Your fiery tears Burning through the New Year's ice. Over there the prison poplar bends, And there's no sound-and over there how many Innocent lives are ending now. Akhmatova herself escaped arrest, though not the fear of it by which life in Russia was defined during the Stalin years. In a memoir of Akhmatova, Nadyezda Mandelstam, the widow of the poet, writes: "Of everything that happened to us, what was most significant and powerful was the fear and what it produced-a loathsome feeling of disgrace and impotence. There is no need to try to remember this; 'this' is with us always." Mandelstamova goes on to record Akhmatova's stoicism and courage and consistent good conduct during a period when just being decent was to take your life in your hands. Berlin writes of Akhmatova as "immensely dignified, with unhurried gestures, a noble head, beautiful, somewhat severe features, and an expression of immense sadness… she moved and looked like a tragic queen." One is somehow not surprised to learn that this Niobe "worshiped Dosto-evsky," and did not care for Chekhov: She asked me what I read: before I could answer she denounced Chekhov for his mud-coloured world, his dreary plays, the absence in his world of heroism and martyrdom, of depth and darkness and sublimity-this was the passionate diatribe, which I later reported to Pasternak, in which she said that in Chekhov "no swords flashed."