Reading Chekhov

Reading "Ward No. 6" as a political parable is not adequate to its power. One puts it down feeling that in writing it Chekhov had in mind nothing so local as the condition of the Russian empire. As always, it is with the human condition that he is preoccupied. "Life will show her laws sooner or later, trouble will come for [the happy, contented man]- disease, poverty, losses, and no one will see or hear, just as now he neither sees nor hears others." Nikita embodies the brutality of life itself coming at us all with its big fists. Chekhov condemns Ragin for his refusal to bestir himself on behalf of his suffering fellow men, but he also understands him. As a nonbeliever, he, too, has felt the absurdity of it all in the light of our ineluctable permanent extinction beneath the cold stars of a ten-billion-year-old universe.

In "Lights," he puts into the mouth of his reformed rake, Ananyev, a speech about the philosophy of absurdism that at once satirizes it and gives it its due. "I was no more than twenty-six at the time [when he seduced and betrayed the trusting Kisochka], but I knew perfectly well that life was aimless and had no meaning, that everything was a deception and an illusion, that in its essential nature and results a life of penal servitude in Sakhalin was not in any way different from a life spent in Nice, that the difference between the brain of a Kant and the brain of a fly was of no real significance… I lived as though I were doing a favor to some unseen power which compelled me to live… The philosophy of which we are speaking has something alluring, narcotic in its nature, like tobacco or morphia. It becomes a habit, a craving. You take advantage of every minute of solitude to gloat over thoughts of the aimlessness of life and the darkness of the grave." To a young listener, who himself finds life absurd, and challenges a distinction that Ananyev makes between the pessimism of the old and the pessimism of the young, Ananyev replies: The pessimism of old thinkers does not take the form of idle talk, as it does with you and me, but of Weltschmerz, of suffering; it rests in them on a Christian foundation because it is derived from love for humanity and from thoughts about humanity, and is entirely free from the egotism which is noticeable in dilettantes. You despise life because its meaning and its object are hidden from you alone, and you are afraid only of your own death, while the real thinker is unhappy because the truth is hidden from all, and he is afraid for all men.

In his stories and plays, Chekhov is afraid for all men. He was only in his twenties and thirties when he wrote most of them, but like other geniuses-especially those who die prematurely-he wrote as if he were old. Toward the end of "Ward No. 6," he veers off-as he does in other dark and terrible works, such as "Peasants" and "In the Ravine"-to rejoice for all men in the beauty of the world. There is always this amazing movement in Chekhov from the difficult and fearful to the simple and beautiful. As Ragin lies dying, Chekhov tells us, he sees "a greenness before his eyes"; then "a herd of deer, extraordinarily beautiful and graceful, of which he had been reading the day before, ran by him."

"Life is given to us only once." The line (or a variant) appears in story after story and is delivered so quietly and offhandedly that we almost miss its terror. Chekhov was never one to insist on anything. He didn't preach, or even teach. He is our poet of the provisional and fragmentary. When a story or play ends, nothing seems to be settled. "Ward No. 6," for instance, does not end with the image of the beautiful deer. Before Ragin dies another thought passes through his mind: "A peasant woman stretched out her hand to him with a registered letter… Mihail Averyanitch said something, then it all vanished, and Andrey Yefimitch sank into oblivion forever." The registered letter-there is a bit of theatricality in its not being an ordinary letter-glints with meaning. What does it say? Who sent it? The ending of "Ward No. 6" inevitably evokes (and was surely influenced by) the ending of "The Death of Ivan Ilyich," but Chekhov declines to report the mystical experience that Tolstoy confidently reports his hero to have had. Chekhov enters the dying Ragin's mind, but emerges with the most laconic and incomplete of reports. Tolstoy's audacious authorial omniscience gives him his position as the greatest of the nineteenth-century Russian realists. Chekhov's experiments with authorial reticence-equally audacious in their way- point toward twentieth-century modernism. Thirteen

I

n my room at the Hotel Yalta, I tried to turn on the TV, to get the news (during a telephone call to New York, I had heard that Yeltsin was about to be impeached), but could not. I called the front desk, and was told, "There is a woman on your floor. She will help you." "What woman?"

"There is a woman on every floor, near the elevator. She will help you."