Reading Chekhov

If it was Chekhov's fate to be a reluctant literary performer, it was also his fate to remain with his impossible "original owners." His adoption by Suvorin was as inconsequential as Kashtanka's adventure with the circusmaster. Chekhov's autocratic father, the kindly, uneducated mother, who had been helpless to defend him against the father, the feckless older brothers, the not brilliant younger ones, and the unmarried Maria were the people to whom he felt connected. All the rest were "customers," to use Kashtanka's term for outsiders. The friendly reserve he maintained toward outsiders was the outward token of the iron tie to the family. Literally as well as figuratively, Chekhov never left home. Whatever he meant by his new "feeling of freedom," he didn't mean the usual young person's leavetaking of his family. He kept his parents with him in Moscow and Me-likhovo, and, after his father's death, in 1889, he brought his mother to his house in Yalta. Maria, too, was always with him. According to her memoirs (written in old age), she turned down the proposal of an attractive man named Alexander Smagin, "because I could not do anything that would cause unpleasantness to my brother, upset the customary course of his life, and deprive him of the conditions for creative work which I always tried to provide." Chekhov had merely remained silent when she announced her intention of marrying, Maria reports, but this was enough for her to break with Smagin. (Having sacrificed herself for her brother, she was understandably put out when he himself married; however, she remained a fixture in the household, and she and Olga were friends into old age.) Chekhov was as closemouthed about his relationship to his sister as he was about his relationship to any other woman. The letters he wrote to her when he traveled are easy and natural (as are his letters to his brothers). But what the relationship was like-what its tone was, what its themes were-remains among the secrets of the nest. When I turned on the television set in my room at the Hotel Yalta, I had the choice of four channels, two of them in German. All were blurred. I chose one of the Russian stations, which was showing an American movie. Instead of being dubbed, the film was shown with the sound very low, almost inaudible, and with a loud overvoice translating the characters' speech into Russian. By listening very hard, I could make out some of what the characters were saying. The film seemed to be about a mortally ill child whose father takes him to a desert where God has instructed the father to build a stone altar. The child's mother, back home, sends a friend to beg for his return. The father refuses. "What shall I tell Caroline?" the friend asks. I did not need to strain my ears for the reply: "Tell her that I love her." At the end, the sky opens, lightning flashes over the altar, and the miracle occurs: the boy is cured. In Chekhov, there are no miraculous cures. When characters are sick, they die. It is hard to think of a Chekhov play or story in which no death occurs (or over which, having already occurred, it doesn't hover, as the drowning of Ranevskaya's son hovers over The Cherry Orchard). Death is the hinge on which the work swings.