Reading Chekhov

Ananyev is another of Chekhov's redeemed womanizers, though he undergoes his transformation of soul after hideously betraying the story's gentle, trusting heroine, Kisotchka. The story was written eleven years before "The Lady with the Dog," and it was not well received. "I was not entirely satisfied with your latest story," the novelist and playwright Ivan Shcheglov wrote to Chekhov on May 29, 1888, and went on: Of course, I swallowed it in one gulp, there is no question about that, because everything you write is so appetizing and real that it can be easily and pleasantly swallowed. But that finale-"You can't figure out anything in this world…"-is abrupt; it is certainly the writer's job to figure out what goes on in the heart of his hero, otherwise his psychology will remain unclear. Chekhov replied, on June 9: I take the liberty of disagreeing with you. A psychologist should not pretend to understand what he does not understand. Moreover, a psychologist should not convey the impression that he understands what no one understands. We shall not play the charlatan, and we will declare frankly that nothing is clear in this world. Only fools and charlatans know and understand everything. To Suvorin, who had also criticized the story's apparent in-conclusiveness (his letter has not survived), Chekhov wrote: The artist is not meant to be a judge of his characters and what they say; his only job is to be an impartial witness. I heard two Russians in a muddled conversation about pessimism, a conversation that solved nothing; all I am bound to do is reproduce that conversation exactly as I heard it. Drawing conclusions is up to the jury, that is, the readers. My only job is to be talented, that is, to know how to distinguish important testimony from unimportant, to place my characters in the proper light and speak their language.

These modest and sensible disclaimers-which have been much quoted and are of a piece with what we know of Chekhov's attractive unpretentiousness-cannot be taken at face value, of course. Chekhov understood his characters very well (he invented them, after all), and his stories are hardly deadpan journalistic narratives. But his pose of journalistic uninquisitiveness is no mere writer's waffle produced to ward off unwelcome discussion. It refers to something that is actually present in the work, to a kind of bark of the prosaic in which Chekhov consistently encases a story's vital poetic core, as if such protection were necessary for its survival. The stories have a straightforward, natural, rational, modern surface; they have been described as modest, delicate, gray. In fact they are wild and strange, archaic and brilliantly painted. But the wildness and strangeness and archaism and brilliant colors are concealed, as are the complexity and difficulty. "Everything you write is so appetizing and real that it can be easily and pleasantly swallowed." We swallow a Chekhov story as if it were an ice, and we cannot account for our feeling of repletion.

To be sure, all works of literary realism practice a kind of benevolent deception, lulling us into the state we enter at night when we mistake the fantastic productions of our imagination for actual events. But Chekhov succeeds so well in rendering his illusion of realism and in hiding the traces of his surrealism that he remains the most misunderstood- as well as the most beloved-of the nineteenth-century Russian geniuses. In Russia, no less than in our country, possibly even more than in our country, Chekhov attracts a kind of sickening piety. You utter the name "Chekhov" and people arrange their features as if a baby deer had come into the room. "Ah, Chekhov!" my guide in Moscow-a plump, blond, heavily made-up woman named Sonia-had exclaimed. "He is not a Russian writer. He is a writer for all humanity!" Chekhov would have relished Sonia. He might have-in fact he had-used her as a character. She was a dead ringer for Natasha, the crass sister-in-law in Three Sisters, who pushes her way into control of the Prozorov household and pushes out the three delicate, refined sisters. Sonia saw her job as guide as an exercise in control, and over the two days I spent with her I grew to detest her- though never in the serious way one comes to detest Natasha. My struggle with Sonia was almost always over small-stakes points of touristic arrangement; and her power to get to me was, of course, further blunted by my journalist's wicked awareness of the incalculable journalistic value of poor character. After delivering herself of her estimate of Chekhov, Sonia went on to speak of unpleasant experiences she had had with certain previous American clients who had put her down. "They considered themselves superior to me," she said, but when I asked her how they had shown this she couldn't say. "I just felt it." Then she added (as I somehow knew she would) that it was never the rich Americans who made her feel inferior, always the other kind.