Reading Chekhov

"The Lady with the Dog" is an apparent exception-no one in the story dies or has died. And yet death is in the air. Gurov's spiritual journey-his transformation from a connoisseur of women to a man tenderly devoted to a single ordinary woman-is a journey of withdrawal from life. His life as a womanizer wasn't nice, but it was vital; his secret "real life" in the Moscow hotel has a ghostly quality. He and Anna are like people for whom "the eternal sleep awaiting us" has already begun. Anna's Yalta hotel room smelled of a scent from a Japanese shop, and there was a watermelon on the table; the room at the Slaviansky Bazaar is odorless, and there is nothing to eat. Anna Sergeyevna is pale, and dressed in gray ("his favorite gray dress"); Gurov, catching a glimpse of himself in the mirror, sees that his hair is gray. The color of ashes has already begun to infiltrate the story. When Gurov-like Orpheus descending to the underworld-traveled to S-, he found a long gray fence in front of Anna Sergeyevna's house and in his hotel room "the floor was covered with gray army cloth, and on the table was an inkstand, gray with dust." (Something stirs in one's memory here. One recalls that at the end of "A Dreary Story" the dying professor stays in a hotel in Harkov, where he sleeps under "an unfamiliar gray quilt" and peevishly remarks, "It's so gray here-such a gray town.") In the Moscow hotel room, Gurov notes that "he had grown so much older, so much plainer during the last few years," and goes on to observe of Anna Sergeyevna, "The shoulders on which his hands rested were warm and quivering. He felt compassion for this life still so warm and lovely, but probably already not far from beginning to fade and wither like his own." He sounds almost as if he were speaking of a corpse. In Yalta, only a year or two earlier, he had been struck by Anna's youth, by "how lately she had been a girl at school doing lessons like his own daughter." (She was twenty-two.) He had (twice) noted her schoolgirlish "diffidence" and "angularity." But now this woman who could be his daughter is on the verge of "fading" and "withering." His actual daughter accompanies him on his walk to his tryst in the Moscow hotel. What is Chekhov getting at with his theme of the two daughters? Is he anticipating Freud's mythopoetic reading of King Lear in "The Theme of the Three Caskets"? Does Anna Sergeyevna-like Cordelia-represent the Goddess of Death? Has Gurov, like the professor in Harkov (and Chekhov in Yalta), come to the end of the line? We do not ask such questions of the other Russian realists, but Chekhov's strange, coded works almost force us to sound them for hidden meanings. Chekhov's irony and good sense put a brake on our speculations. We don't want to get too fancy. But we don't want to miss the clues that Chekhov has scattered about his garden and covered with last year's leaves. These leaves are fixtures of Chekhov's world (I have encountered them in the gardens of no other writer), and exemplify Chekhov's way of endowing some small quiet natural phenomenon with metaphorical meaning. One hears them crunch underfoot as one walks in the allee where this year's leaves have already sprouted.

Thu, Aug 16th, 2012, via SendToReader