Chekhov in Context
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CHEKHOV IN CONTEXT
Premier playwright of modern theater and trailblazer of the short
story, Anton Chekhov was also a practicing doctor, journalist, writer
of comic sketches, philanthropist, and activist. This volume provides
an accessible guide to Chekhov’s multifarious interests and influ-
ences, with over thirty succinct chapters covering his rich intellectual
milieu and his tumultuous sociopolitical environment, as well as the
legacy of his work in over two centuries of interdisciplinary cultures
and media around the world. With a foreword by Cornel West, a
chronology, and a further reading list, this collection is the essential
guide to Chekhov’s writing and the manifold worlds he inhabited.
is Associate Professor of Russian and Comparative
Literature at Boston University. He is the author of Dostoevsky and
the Riddle of the Self ().
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CHEKHOV IN CONTEXT
YURI CORRIGAN
Boston University
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Contents
List of Figures page ix
Notes on Contributors x
Foreword: The Poet of Catastrophe xxi
Cornel West
Note on Texts, Dates, and Transliteration xxvii
Chronology xxviii
Introduction
Yuri Corrigan
Son, Brother, Husband (in Correspondence)
Alevtina Kuzicheva
Chekhov’s Friends
Vladimir Kataev
An “Indeterminate Situation”: Chekhov’s Illness and Death
Michael Finke
Class
Anne Lounsbery
Money
Vadim Shneyder
Politics
Derek Offord
v
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vi Contents
Peasants
Christine D. Worobec
The Woman Question
Jenny Kaminer
Sex
Melissa L. Miller
Social Activism
Andrei D. Stepanov
Environmentalism
Jane Costlow
Sakhalin Island
Edyta M. Bojanowska
Philosophy
Michal Oklot
Religion
Denis Zhernokleyev
Science
Elena Fratto
Medicine and the Mind-Body Problem
Matthew Mangold
The Arts
Serge Gregory
Fin de Siècle
Mark D. Steinberg
The Harm That Good Ideas Do
Gary Saul Morson
Chekhov’s Intelligentsias
Svetlana Evdokimova
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Contents vii
Print Culture
Louise McReynolds
Embarrassment
Caryl Emerson
Tolstoy
Rosamund Bartlett
French Literature
Sergei A. Kibalnik
Modernism and Symbolism
Lindsay Ceballos
Theatrical Traditions
Anna Muza
Modern Theater: Resonances and Intersections
Julia Listengarten
Chekhov’s Moscow Art Theater (–)
Sharon Marie Carnicke
Soviet Contexts
Radislav Lapushin
Chekhov in England
Olga Tabachnikova
The American Stage
James N. Loehlin
Chekhov in East Asia
Heekyoung Cho
Film
Justin Wilmes
In Translation: Chekhov’s Path into English
Carol Apollonio
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viii Contents
Afterword: Chekhov’s Endings
Robin Feuer Miller
Notes
Further Reading
Index
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Figures
Maps from Russian Zemstvo Medicine with locations of zemstvo
facilities and corresponding rates of general mortality, infant
mortality, birth, and population growth page
Anatomical drawings from Pirogov’s Anatome topographica
Scene from The Lady with the Dog (, Kheifits/Lenfilm)
Scene from The Black Monk (, Dykhovichny/Mosfilm)
Scene from Winter Sleep (, Ceylan/Pinema)
ix
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Contributors
is Professor of the Practice of Russian at Duke
University and the author of books and articles about Russian literature,
including Dostoevsky’s Secrets () and Simply Chekhov (). She is
the editor of The New Russian Dostoevsky () and coeditor of
Chekhov’s Letters (, with Radislav Lapushin) and Chekhov for the
Twenty-First Century (, with Angela Brintlinger). Her most recent
book is a translation of Alisa Ganieva’s novel Offended Sensibilities
(). Her travels following the pathways of Russian writers are
chronicled in the blog “Chekhov’s Footprints” (https://sites.duke.edu/
chekhovsfootprints/).
is the author of Chekhov: Scenes from a Life
() and Tolstoy: A Russian Life (), and has written articles on
the musicality of Chekhov’s prose. She has translated two Chekhov
anthologies, of which About Love and Other Stories () was short-
listed for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize, and is the editor and cotran-
slator of Chekhov: A Life in Letters (). In she launched a
campaign to preserve the Chekhov House-Museum in Yalta. Projects
she has initiated as Trustee of the Anton Chekhov Foundation, a UK
charity, include the Chekhov Garden established at a doctor’s surgery
in Devon and the first complete translation of Chekhov’s
earliest prose.
. is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures
at Yale University. She is the author of Nikolai Gogol: Between
Ukrainian and Russian Nationalism (); A World of Empires: The
Russian Voyage of the Frigate Pallada (); and articles on Pushkin,
Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and Tolstoy. Her work centers on the imperial
dimensions of Russian culture, which is also the topic of her current
book project, Empire and the Russian Classics.
x
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Notes on Contributors xi
is Professor of Dramatic Arts and Slavic
Languages and Literatures at the University of Southern California.
She has published widely on performance in Russia, acting history
and methods, and film performance. Her books include Dynamic
Acting Though Active Analysis: Konstantin Stanislavsky, Maria Knebel,
and their Legacy to Actors (), the groundbreaking Stanislavsky in
Focus (), Anton Chekhov: Plays and Jokes (), Checking Out
Chekhov (), The Theatrical Instinct: The Work of Nikolai Evreinov
(), and the coauthored Reframing Screen Performance (). Her
specific work on Chekhov includes her translation of The Seagull, which
won a Kennedy Center award, her direction of Uncle Vanya for the
Norwegian National Academy of the Arts in Oslo, and her contribution
to Chekhov’s Letters: Biography, Context, Poetics ().
is Assistant Professor of Russian and East European
Studies at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. She has
authored several articles on Russian literature and culture, most
recently “The Politics of Dostoevsky’s Religion: Nemirovich-
Danchenko’s Nikolai Stavrogin” (Slavic & East European
Journal, vol. , no. , Spring ) and the forthcoming “Aryan
or Semitic? On the Racial Origins of ‘Tolstoy vs. Dostoevsky’”
(Russian Review, April ). For the – academic year,
she was awarded an ACLS fellowship and a Davis Center fellowship
at Harvard University for her book manuscript, whose current title is
Reading Faithfully: Russian Modernist Criticism and the Making of
Dostoevsky, –.
is Associate Professor in the Department of Asian
Languages and Literature and Adjunct Associate Professor in the
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of
Washington. She is the author of Translation’s Forgotten History: Russian
Literature, Japanese Mediation, and the Formation of Modern Korean
Literature () and the editor of The Routledge Companion to
Korean Literature (). Her articles discuss translation and the crea-
tion of modern fiction, censorship, seriality, graphic narratives, and
digital media platforms. She is a recipient of the National Endowment
for the Humanities fellowship and the American Council of Learned
Societies fellowship.
is Associate Professor of Russian and Comparative
Literature at Boston University. He studies Russian and European
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xii Notes on Contributors
literature of the long nineteenth century, with interests in philosophy,
religion, and psychology. He is the author of Dostoevsky and the Riddle of
the Self (), which examines Dostoevsky as a philosopher of the
unconscious, and is working on a new book, Soul: A Russian Literary
History, a study of the high-stakes cultural struggle to define the human
being in the decades leading up to the Russian Revolution.
is Clark A. Griffiths Professor Emerita of Environmental
Studies at Bates College. Her recent scholarly work explores represen-
tations of the natural world in Russia, with publications on the bear in
late nineteenth-century culture, contemporary cultures of sacred
springs, and water and landscape in the films of Larisa Shepitko.
Heart-Pine Russia: Walking and Writing the th Century Forest ()
won the USC prize for best book in literary studies and appeared in
Russian as Zapovednaia Rossiia in . Her current work explores the
Volga as a landscape of modernization and nostalgia in visual and
literary cultures.
is A. Watson Armour III University Professor Emeritus
of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. Her schol-
arship has focused on the Russian classics (Pushkin, Tolstoy,
Dostoevsky); Mikhail Bakhtin; and Russian music, opera, and theater.
Her recent projects have focused on the Russian modernist Sigizmund
Krzhizhanovsky (–) and the allegorical-historical novelist
Vladimir Sharov (–). She is the coeditor of The Oxford
Handbook of Russian Religious Thought (, with George Pattison
and Randall A. Poole).
is Professor of Slavic Studies at Brown
University. She works primarily in Russian literature and culture
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular interests
in Russian and European Romanticism, relations between history
and fiction, and questions of aesthetics. She has published articles
on Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and others.
She is the author of Alexander Pushkin’s Historical Imagination
() and the editor of Pushkin’s Little Tragedies: The Poetics of
Brevity (, selected as an Outstanding Academic Title for
by Choice). She is the coeditor of Dostoevsky beyond
Dostoevsky: Science, Aesthetics, Religion (). Her most recent
book, Staging Existence: Chekhov’s Tetralogy, is forthcoming from
Wisconsin University Press ().
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Notes on Contributors xiii
is Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages and Literatures
at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author or
editor of eight books on Chekhov and nineteenth-century Russian
literature, including Seeing Chekhov: Life and Art (), the new
biography Freedom from Violence and Lies: Anton Chekhov’s Life and
Writings (), and Approaches to Teaching the Works of Anton Chekhov
(, edited with Michael Holquist).
is Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic
Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. She is the author
of Medical Storyworlds: Health, Illness, and Bodies in Russian and
European Literature at the Turn of the Twentieth Century () and
coeditor of Russian Literature of the Anthropocene (special double issue of
Russian Literature, June–July ). Her research and publications
address the rhetorical, stylistic, and structural intersections of literature
and science, with a specific focus on medicine, astronomy, and non-
Euclidean geometries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centu-
ries. She has also published on Boris Eikhenbaum, Formalist fiction and
the visual arts, the post-Soviet Kitsch aesthetics, and Russian literature
and music. She holds an MA in history of science () and a PhD in
comparative literature () from Harvard University, in addition to a
PhD in Slavic languages and literatures () from the University
of Milan.
is the author of Antosha & Levitasha: The Shared Lives
and Art of Anton Chekhov and Isaac Levitan (). Sweet Lika, his two-
act play based on the correspondence between Anton Chekhov and
Lidia Mizinova, premiered at Seattle’s ACT Theatre in June .
More recently, he contributed the chapter “Burned Letters:
Reconstructing the Chekhov-Levitan Friendship” in Chekhov’s Letters:
Biography, Context, Poetics (). He is currently writing The Sirens of
the Hotel Louvre, a portrait of the actor Lidia Yavorskaya and the writer
Tatiana Shchepkina-Kupernik against the background of the world of
the Russian theater from to . He holds a PhD in Russian
language and literature from the University of Washington.
is Professor of Russian and Chair of the Department of
German and Russian at the University of California–Davis. She has
published widely in the areas of gender in Russian literature and culture
and contemporary Russian drama and film. She is the author of two
monographs: Haunted Dreams: Fantasies of Adolescence in Post-Soviet
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xiv Notes on Contributors
Culture () and Women with a Thirst for Destruction: The Bad
Mother in Russian Culture (), which received the Heldt Prize for
Best Book in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian Gender Studies.
is Professor and Head of the Department of the
History of Russian Literature at Lomonosov Moscow State University.
His research interests include nineteenth-century Russian writers, com-
parative literature, and intermediality. His books include Proza
Chekhova: problemy interpretatsii (), Sputniki Chekhova (),
Reka vremen: istoriia Rossii v khudozhestvennoi literature (),
Literaturnye sviazi Chekhova (), Igra v oskolki: sud’by russkoi klassiki
v epokhu postmodernizma (), Chekhov plius: predshestvenniki, covre-
menniki, preemniki (), “If Only We Could Know”: An Interpretation
of Chekhov (trans. Harvey Pitcher, ), the Chekhov encyclopedia,
A.P. Chekhov. Entsiklopediia (, edited), and K ponimaniu Chekhova.
Stat’i (). He is the president of the Chekhov Commission of the
Russian Academy of Sciences.
. is a leading researcher at the Institute of Russian
Literature (The Pushkin House) of the Russian Academy of Sciences, a
professor at St. Petersburg State University, and Doctor of Philological
Sciences. He is the author of approximately articles and books
on Russian literature of the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, including
Antichnaia poeziia v Rossii: Ocherki. XVIII – pervaya polovina XIX v.
(), Problemy intertekstual’noi poetiki Dostoevskogo (), Chekhov i
russkaia klassika: problem interteksta (), and Khudozhestvennaia
filosofiia Pushkina (rd ed., ). He is the coeditor of collections of
articles from IRLI Russian Academy of Sciences: A. M. Panchenko i
russkaia kul’tura (, with A. A. Panchenko), Dostoevskii: Materialy i
issledovaniia (vol. , , with N. F. Budanova), and Obraz Chekhova
i chekhovskoi Rossii v sovremennom mire (, with V. B. Kataev). He is
a member of the Russian and International Dostoevsky Society and of
the Russian Writers’ Union.
is a candidate of sciences in philology. She is the
author of many articles in academic collections, anthologies, and mono-
graphs on Chekhov’s work and of several biographical books about
Chekhov. Among her many books are Vash A. Chekhov (),
Chekhovy. Biografiia sem’i (), and Chekhov. Zhizn’ “otdel’nogo che-
loveka” (“Zhizn’ zamechatel’nykh liudei” series, ). Her source
books A.P. Chekhov v russkoi teatral’noi kritiki. Kommentirovannaia
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Notes on Contributors xv
antologiia. – (), Teatral’naia kritika rossiiskoi provintsii.
Kommentirovannaia antologiia. – (), and Letopis’ zhizni i
tvorchestva A.P. Chekhova. – (vol. , in two volumes, ) are
the result of many years of archival work. She has published over
articles and reviews on the fate of Chekhov’s theatrical legacy in
the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
is Associate Professor of Russian at the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of two books on
Chekhov – most recently, “Dew on the Grass”: The Poetics of
Inbetweenness in Chekhov (). Excerpts from this book are included
in the Norton Critical Edition of Chekhov’s short stories (). He is
also the coeditor of Chekhov’s Letters: Biography, Context, Poetics (,
with Carol Apollonio) and the author of several volumes of poetry.
is Professor of Theatre, Artistic Director, and
Director of Graduate Studies at University of Central Florida. She is
the author of Russian Tragifarce: Its Cultural and Political Roots (),
coauthor of Modern American Drama: Playwriting, – (with
Cindy Rosenthal, ), and coeditor of Theater of the Avant-Garde,
– (), Playing with Theory in Theatre Practice (), and
The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre since (). She
has contributed to many theater publications, recently edited the eight-
volume series “Decades of Modern American Playwriting: –”
(with Brenda Murphy), and was the editor (–) of the journal
Stanislavski Studies: Practice, Legacy and Contemporary Theater.
. is Shakespeare at Winedale Regents Professor of
English at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the coeditor, with
David Kornhaber, of Tom Stoppard in Context (). He has written
Chekhov: The Cherry Orchard () and The Cambridge Introduction to
Chekhov (). He has also published on Shakespeare’s Romeo and
Juliet, Henry IV, and Henry V, as well as Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor
Faustus. He directs the Shakespeare at Winedale program. He and his
students have done more than fifty productions of Shakespeare, together
with all four of Chekhov’s major plays.
is Professor of Russian Literature and Chair of the
Department of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University. She
is the author of Life Is Elsewhere: Symbolic Geography in the Russian
Provinces () and Thin Culture, High Art: Gogol, Hawthorne and
Authorship in Nineteenth-Century Russia and America (; Russian
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xvi Notes on Contributors
translation ). She has published widely on nineteenth-century
Russian prose in comparative context.
is a postdoctoral research and teaching fellow in the
Department of Modern and Classical Languages at George Mason
University. His articles on Chekhov, Tolstoy, Grigorovich, and
Dostoevsky have appeared in the Slavic Review, the Russian Review,
and several volumes of collected essays. He is currently working on a
monograph titled Chekhov’s Environmental Psychology: Medicine and
Literature, which considers the relationship between medicine and
Chekhov’s creative writing.
is Cary C. Boshamer Professor of History at the
University of North Carolina, where she specializes in the cultural
and intellectual movements of nineteenth-century Russia. She has
published on the mass circulation press, commercial culture, and
sensational murder, consistently posing the broad question of how
Russians adapted to the changes associated with modernity by mak-
ing it their own. The Guggenheim Foundation, the National
Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright, the Institute for
Advanced Study, and the National Humanities Center have sup-
ported her research.
. is Assistant Professor of Russian at Colby College.
Her articles on Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Ulitskaya have appeared in the
Russian Review and the Slavic and East European Journal. She is the
coeditor of The Russian Medical Humanities: Past, Present, and Future
(, with Konstantin Starikov). She is currently at work on a mono-
graph on the figure of the midwife in nineteenth- and twentieth-century
Russian literature and culture. Her other research interests include
maternity studies, science fiction in Russia and Eastern Europe, and
second language acquisition.
is Edytha Macy Gross Professor of Humanities and
Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at Brandeis University.
She received a Guggenheim fellowship for – to begin work on
a new project, “Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and the Small of This World.” Her
books include Dostoevsky’s Unfinished Journey (), a second edition
of “The Brothers Karamazov”: Worlds of the Novel (), and Dostoevsky
and “The Idiot”: Author, Narrator, and Reader (), as well as numer-
ous edited and coedited volumes. She is currently also at work on an
archival project, tentatively titled Kazuko’s Letters from Japan, focusing
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Notes on Contributors xvii
on the letters written by a remarkable woman in postwar Japan over a
period of decades.
is Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of the Arts and
Humanities at Northwestern University and the author of twelve books
on Russian literature, the philosophy of time, the role of quotations, the
genres of aphorisms, and, with Morton Schapiro, two books on what
economists can learn from the humanities. His most recent study,
Wonder Confronts Certainty: How Russian Writers Address the Timeless
Questions and Why Their Answers Matter is forthcoming from Harvard
University Press ().
is Senior Lecturer Emerita in the Department of Slavic
Languages and Literatures at the University of California in Berkeley.
Her research is focused on Russian and Soviet theater as well as
Chekhov’s drama and performance and various performative practices.
She has written on Chekhov, Meyerhold, Stanislavsky, and the Moscow
Art Theater; public celebrations; and theater and film. She has coedited
(with Oksana Bulgakowa) and translated publications of Kazimir
Malevich’s and Sergei Eisenstein’s writings.
is Emeritus Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the
University of Bristol. He has published books on the Russian revolu-
tionary movement, early Russian liberalism, Russian travel writing, and
the broader history of Russian thought, as well as two books on
contemporary Russian grammar and usage. In , he published The
French Language in Russia: A Social, Political, Cultural, and Literary
History, coauthored with Vladislav Rjéoutski and Gesine Argent, which
appeared in Russian translation in . His latest book is Ayn Rand
and the Russian intelligentsia: The Origins of an Icon of the American
Right ().
is Associate Professor of Russian Literature at Brown
University. He has published widely on Russian and Polish nineteenth-
and twentieth-century literature. His research interests also include
literary theory and the history of ideas. He is the author of Phantasms
of Matter in Gogol (and Gombrowicz) () and is currently working on
a monograph on Vasily Rozanov in the context of vitalism in European
thought and literature.
is Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic, East
European, and Eurasian Languages and Cultures at UCLA. He
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xviii Notes on Contributors
specializes in Russian literature of the realist period and is the author of
Russia’s Capitalist Realism: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov () as
well as articles on Dostoevsky, Marxist literary theory, and Soviet
postmodernist literature. He is Secretary-Treasurer of the North
American Dostoevsky Society.
. is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research and writing have focused
on urban history, revolution, religion, emotions, utopias, and Russian
history broadly. His books include Proletarian Imagination: Self,
Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, – (; Russian transla-
tion ), Petersburg Fin-de-Siècle (), the seventh through ninth
() editions of A History of Russia (with Nicholas Riasanovsky), The
Russian Revolution, – (), and Russian Utopia: A Century of
Revolutionary Possibilities, in the book series “Russian Shorts” ().
He is currently working on a new book, Crooked and Straight in the
City: Moral Stories from the Streets of New York, Bombay, and Odessa in
the s.
. is Professor of the History of Russian Literature at
St. Petersburg State University, Doctor of Philological Sciences, a
translator, and a prose writer. He is the author of several books,
including the monograph Problemy kommunikatsii u Chekhova ()
and over scholarly articles, a collection of short stories, and two
novels. He is also the translator of twenty-five books of fiction and
scholarship. He was a finalist for the Novaya slovesnost’ Prize and a
laureate of the N. V. Gogol Prize.
is Reader in Russian and Director of The Vladimir
Vysotsky Centre for Russian Studies at the University of Central
Lancashire. She is the author of Russian Irrationalism from Pushkin to
Brodsky: Seven Essays in Literature and Thought () and the editor of
Facets of Russian Irrationalism between Art and Life: Mystery inside
Enigma (). Her other publications include Anton Chekhov through
the Eyes of Russian Thinkers: Vasilii Rozanov, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii and
Lev Shestov () as well as numerous articles on Chekhov in the global
context and in relation to other classical and contemporary Russian
writers. She also writes on Russian cultural and literary history more
generally, including several coedited volumes, with a special interest in
Russian cultural continuity. She is also a poetry translator and the
author of two books of poetry (in Russian).
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Notes on Contributors xix
is a prominent and provocative democratic intellectual. He
is Dietrich Bonhoeffer Professor of Philosophy and Christian Practice at
Union Theological Seminary. He has also taught at Yale, Harvard,
Princeton, and the University of Paris. He graduated Magna Cum
Laude from Harvard in three years and obtained his MA and PhD in
philosophy from Princeton. He has written twenty books and edited
thirteen. He is best known for his classics Race Matters () and
Democracy Matters (), and his memoir Brother West: Living and
Loving Out Loud (). His most recent book, Black Prophetic Fire
(), offers an unflinching look at nineteenth- and twentieth-century
African American leaders and their visionary legacies. He is a frequent
guest on the Bill Maher Show, CNN, C-Span, and Democracy Now.
He made his film debut in The Matrix trilogy and has appeared in over
twenty-five documentaries and films, including Examined Life, Call &
Response, Sidewalk, and Stand. He has produced three spoken word
albums, including Never Forget, collaborating with Prince, Jill Scott,
Andre , Talib Kweli, KRS-One, and the late Gerald Levert. His
spoken word interludes are featured on productions by Terence
Blanchard, The Cornel West Theory, Raheem DeVaughn, and
Bootsy Collins.
is Associate Professor of Russian Studies at East
Carolina University. His primary research examines post-Soviet cin-
ema and culture but extends to Russian literature, translation, and
Polish culture. His publications have appeared in Russian Literature,
Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, the Pushkin Review, the Polish
Review, Cinemasaurus, and many other venues. His current book
project is titled Alternative Spaces: Independent Cinema in the
Putin Era.
. is Distinguished Research Professor Emerita
of History at Northern Illinois University. She has published widely
on nineteenth-century Russian and Ukrainian peasants, women and
gender issues, and religious history. She is the author of Peasant
Russia: Family and Community in the Post-Emancipation Period
() and Possessed: Women, Witches, and Demons in Imperial
Russia (). She is also the coeditor of Russia’s Women:
Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation (, with Barbara
Evans Clements and Barbara Alpern Engel) and, most recently, of
Witchcraft in Russia and Ukraine, –: A Sourcebook (,
with Valerie A. Kivelson).
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xx Notes on Contributors
is Senior Lecturer in Russian Literature at
Vanderbilt University. He recently defended a dissertation on apophati-
cism of Dostoevsky’s poetics at Princeton University and is currently
reworking the thesis into a monograph. In addition to Dostoevsky, his
research interests include Tolstoy, Chekhov, realist aesthetics, Mikhail
Bakhtin, and Russian religious thought.
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Foreword
The Poet of Catastrophe
Cornel West
When I first discovered Chekhov, I must have been about eighteen or
nineteen.* I was studying philosophy – Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Karl
Jaspers, Heidegger, Sartre, Camus – but when I read Chekhov,
I thought to myself, here is a thinker even more profound than the
Blues. The Blues is a narrative of catastrophe. It’s a tradition that says
I want to be unflinchingly honest and candid about catastrophe, and not
just in the sense of extreme moments in life. What I saw in Chekhov was
precisely a kind of democratizing of the catastrophic – the steady ache of
misery in everyday life, the inescapability, ineluctability of coming to terms
with the effects of the catastrophic. And this is very important because the
catastrophic is not to be reduced to the problematic. Philosophers are
interested in solving problems, whereas with the Blues and with Chekhov
there’s no resolution at all. Fundamentally it’s going to be about the
quality of your stamina, your perseverance. The question is, what kind
of strength, what kinds of resilience are you going to be able to muster in
order to make it until the worms get your body?
Another thing philosophers tend not to carry with them is a profound
sense of the comic – because the comic is precisely about the incongruities
and incoherencies that philosophers are trying to render rational and
consistent, necessary and universal. Wittgenstein has a sense of the comic;
David Hume does at times; but there are no philosophical analogues to
Chekhov. I was reading years ago about a gathering of Yiddish writers in
Eastern Europe. A number of them were making the case that Chekhov
must have been a Yiddish writer on the down-low, because there’s no way
you could understand the tragicomic character of the world without being
Yiddish. And that’s a magnificent compliment.
Now why would Chekhov be deeper than the Blues? Well, one reason is
that the Blues itself is not just American but profoundly Romantic. And
I’ve always thought that there’s simply no Romantic backdrop in
Chekhov. The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O’Neill is a fundamentally
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xxii Foreword: The Poet of Catastrophe by Cornel West
American play – also probably the bleakest play written in the history of
this nation. It’s about dreams that die in overwhelming disappointment.
But Chekhov is able, in my view, to sidestep that disappointment. He’s
not disappointed. He’s not surprised by catastrophe. He never had any
Romantic expectations – whereas to be an American is to be tied to
dreams. It is very difficult to grow up in the American Empire, even in
the ghettos, the reservations, the barrios, and not to have the dream
get you.
So, for someone like myself, shaped by US culture, when I discovered
Chekhov, I saw this profound, tragicomic sensibility that was like the
Blues. He’s attuned to catastrophe. He’s driven by profound compassion,
empathy. There’s no utopian projection there, no easy solutions, no
solutions at all – no projection of a future of fundamental transformation
that can be realized. But he still refuses to yield to cynicism or to paralyzing
despair. “If only we knew!” Those powerful words at the end of, for me,
the greatest play of the century – The Three Sisters.
Now, with Chekhov there’s an important difference between talking
about hope and being a hope. Being a hope is a way of living in the world
that allows you to sustain enough energy and vitality not to kill yourself,
not to jump off a cliff when you’re betrayed, or to come to terms – like in
The Three Sisters – with a marriage that’s empty while the next character in
your life is going off or leaving town. Being a hope is a matter of
movement, not a virtue in an abstract way but an activity, a kinesis.
A very small-h hope. It’s like the end of “Lady with the Lapdog”: things
are getting more complicated; it’s just the beginning. And it’s difficult for
many Americans to fully grasp that reality. Because the ideology of the
dream saturates every nook and cranny of our American existence. Even in
the counterresponse: “There is no dream! The dream is an illusion!” Well,
you’re still obsessed with the dream. The dream is still the point
of reference.
F. O. Matthiessen used to begin his lectures by saying: would America
be unique among modern nations to move from perceived innocence to
corruption without a mediating stage of maturity? There’s something
about the gravitas of perceived innocence in the history of this empire
that makes it very difficult to avoid the flip side of sentimentalism. Oscar
Wilde used to say this all the time – the flip side of sentimentalism is
cynicism. They go hand in hand. Sentimentalism is the cultivation of
spurious emotion with no intention of moral execution. And that’s a sign
of a certain kind of adolescence. Now, if you invest in that, then, when you
grow up, you usually move to a kind of cynicism because your expectations
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Foreword: The Poet of Catastrophe by Cornel West xxiii
have been thoroughly shattered. And that’s the Romantic move – disillu-
sionment, disappointment.
But for Chekhov disillusionment and disappointment are built into the
very nature of what it means to be in time and space, as the kind of
organisms that we are. Why are you surprised? Sorrow is constitutive.
That’s the Blues too. Sorrow is not some compartmentalized experience
you have in your life before you get back on the Disneyland train. Sorrow
is fundamentally elemental to what it is to be human in our lives. And the
degree to which we don’t accept that is already the degree to which we’re
evading and avoiding.
So Chekhov warns us about buying into these dreams. But just because
you don’t buy into a dream, it doesn’t mean you die. It’s not dream or die.
It’s the middle ground that matters. How do you sustain yourself? How do
you experience a love, a laughter? And this middle ground is what we can
call the mature Chekhovian zone. And he’s not the only one there:
Beckett’s there, Kafka’s there, Shakespeare’s there, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy,
Melville, Faulkner, Toni Morrison – there’s a nice crowd.
But Chekhov does believe – as he says to Suvorin in that letter of
January – in amelioration, when he talks about squeezing that slave’s
blood out of himself, drop by drop, so that the blood left in his veins
would be the blood of a real person. But even here, the depth of his
intellectual humility is overwhelming. He’s saying, that’s what I would
write about if I were a real artist – the squeezing out of the slave’s blood.
He’s saying it would be wonderful to be a free man and to have the blood
of a slave squeezed out of me. “I’m trying to do it every day, Suvorin,” he’s
saying, “but I’m not always successful.” I try again, fail again, fail better,
which is the advice of his progeny, Beckett. Try again. Fail again. Fail
better. You can see the echoes of the Chekhovian insight in Beckett.
There is something liberating about truth telling. That’s old-school
talk – truth telling – but I do believe Chekhov is a truth teller. In
America, things are so balkanized, so polarized, so market driven, so
obsessed with overnight panacea, push-button solutions, so utilitarian, so
consequentialist, that the very notion of beginning to look at the world
through a Chekhovian lens is just alien. It doesn’t make any sense at all.
It’s like the academy. If you’re not careerist, if you’re not obsessed with the
next move in your profession – as opposed to your vocation – people look
at you like you come from another world. Why? Because the market is
treacherous. We all know that. But from a Chekhovian point of view, it’s
the epitome of a certain kind of cultural decadence. So when Chekhov
talks about “culture,” and “talent,” and “intelligence,” what he’s saying has
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xxiv Foreword: The Poet of Catastrophe by Cornel West
nothing to do with the cult of smartness that’s hegemonic in neoliberal
America, especially in the neoliberal academy – smart, smart, smart, smart.
Chekhov’s the opposite. What you find in Chekhov is phronesis, wisdom.
When he went off to Sakhalin Island, people thought he’d lost his mind
completely. It makes no sense at all, his whole way of being in the world.
He’s coughing up blood, launching on some altruistic expedition that will
be of no palpable benefit to him whatsoever.
I’ve taught in prisons for thirty-seven years, and I always teach
Chekhov. The two favorite texts of my brothers in prison: Beckett’s
Waiting for Godot and Chekhov’s “The Student.” We read “The
Student” out loud. And it’s not just the religious aspect that these brothers
love, even though the apostle Peter does play an important role in that
story (the very person who denies Christ, and who becomes the body, the
basis of the church). What they find in the story is that unbelievable sense
of connection, of tradition, of being a moment in this tradition that’s
something bigger than you, to play a role that doesn’t suffocate you, but
situates you as an agent and subject in the world with a sense of awe – with
that sense of knowing that all these years there have been the same
problems, the same suffering, the same tears flowing. We can understand
why that one was Chekhov’s favorite. But is that a text of optimism?
Hell no.
Chekhov was a former choir boy; he suffered his father’s beatings, was
alienated from religion, but it’s significant that his favorite story is one
rooted in the biblical text. He’s like James Baldwin: he left the church, but
he’s still a love warrior. He just can no longer accept the dogma or the
hierarchy or the nonsense that often goes hand in hand with so much of
institutional religion. But I don’t think Chekhov could ever be understood
without the backdrop of his religious formation. That’s just an existential
claim about who he is as a person. He wishes he could believe. But as an
agnostic,, he’s probably the most religiously musical of modern writers.
Which is to say, if you are profoundly religious, Chekhov is still for you.
Because he’s going to get inside of those religious folk. He’s not going to
flatten them out in the name of some kind of secular positivistic sensibility.
But then if you try to enlist Chekhov into your religious army, it’s not
going to happen. He’s not open for enlistment. That’s what he told
Suvorin: “I’d like to be a free artist and nothing else.”
Chekhov is what I would call an existential democrat – somebody who,
above all else, emphasizes the dignity of ordinary people in all of their
wretchedness and in all of their sense of possibility. Which means he’s
highly suspicious, as ought to be every small-d democrat, of the arbitrary
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Foreword: The Poet of Catastrophe by Cornel West xxv
deployment of power. He demands accountability with regard to the most
vulnerable. But we know it’s not just a matter of speaking truth to power.
You also have to speak truth to the relatively powerless. So it’s a human
thing across the board for Chekhov. That’s why for him ideology is too
Manichaean. It’s too adolescent. It’s too easy to think that somehow your
own side is not also corrupted by some of the things that you’re struggling
against. But that doesn’t in any way mean that his fundamental solidarity
is not with the most vulnerable. That’s what he writes in his will to his
sister: help the poor, take care of the family.
His solidarity goes deeper. It’s no accident that he’s the greatest Russian
writer who sided with Dreyfus in the Dreyfus Affair. All the great Russian
writers were shot through with the anti-Jewish prejudice and hatred that
had been part and parcel of the history of the Russian Empire. Chekhov
lost his best friend Suvorin over this issue. Suvorin said, you’re making the
biggest mistake of your career, you’re going to lose your Russian readers;
Chekhov said, I don’t give a damn. That’s solidarity based on integrity.
There’s a certain moral witness there, along with the tragicomic complex-
ity that we see in his work. So he’s going to be highly suspicious of
consolidated forms of power wherever they are.
Adorno makes a wonderful statement. A condition of truth, he says, is
the need to allow suffering to speak. And what they say is not to be
accepted uncritically. They don’t have a monopoly on truth. But their
voices become crucial. I read somewhere that there are , characters in
Chekhov’s corpus. And the scope, the breadth of empathy that he has, for
all of them, even for those characters who are a bit gangsta, like Natasha in
Three Sisters, is overwhelming. Chekhov was a poet of compassion – in his
attitude toward his characters and in his own life biographically. Take his
relation, for example, to a Marxist like Gorky; he changed Maxim’s life.
Maxim said, “I have never in my life met a free man like him. Now is he a
Marxist? No. I wish he was. And also his best friend is a right wing so-and-
so.” That’s Chekhov. Love is not reducible to politics; friendship is not
reducible to ideology. He had that kind of conviction.
That’s why, for me, when I think of Chekhov, I think of what
Alcibiades said about Socrates: Atopos. Unclassifiable. Beyond any frame
of reference, any school of thinking, any ideology. He’s so elusive, and in
this way he poses a problem for the academy. How do you attempt to
contain and domesticate him long enough to teach him, and once you do,
how do you manage it in such a way that people who have alternative
views about it will have their voices heard and not just pushed to the
margins? And I think one of the sadder features of humanistic studies is
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xxvi Foreword: The Poet of Catastrophe by Cornel West
that we haven’t had enough philosophers really dwell on Chekhov.
Dostoevsky is always sitting there waiting. People figure, “Oh my God,
I read Notes from Underground, I’ve got something to say!” And it’s like,
“Oh, really? Have you read ‘The Bishop’? Have you read ‘The Betrothed’?
‘In the Ravine’?”
Now it could be that Chekhov’s genius is just so overwhelming as to
intimidate people, especially philosophers who are interested in the
problematic but who avoid the catastrophic. Schopenhauer gave his
lecture at the same hour as Hegel. Five showed up for Schopenhauer,
while Hegel had . Schopenhauer is a philosopher of catastrophe.
Nietzsche, too. But there are very few philosophers of catastrophe,
let alone those who also have a comic sensibility. Again, I go back to
my experience of teaching Chekhov in prisons. A lot of brothers there
were eighteen, nineteen years old, but their lives had already been shot
through with the catastrophic. The Chekhovian was immediately acces-
sible. And now for those who may not have had too many intimate
experiences with the catastrophic, how will an immature person ever
become a person who chooses the road to maturity? That’s why we need
Chekhov. We’ve got ecological catastrophe, nuclear catastrophe, eco-
nomic catastrophe, political catastrophe, psychic catastrophe, civic catas-
trophe, all those multiple catastrophes. This is the age of Chekhov, if
there ever was one. We’re still trying to catch up with him.
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Note on Texts, Dates, and Transliteration
As there is no standard edition of Chekhov’s works in English, contribu-
tors were invited either to use their preferred translations of Chekhov’s
works and letters (as indicated in the Notes) or to translate directly from
the Russian. All references to the Russian text are to the thirty-volume
Academy of Sciences collection of Chekhov’s works (Moscow,
–): eighteen volumes of Works and twelve volumes of Letters.
The references to the eighteen-volume collection of Works are marked by
the letter W before the volume and page number. References to the twelve-
volume collection of Letters are marked by the letter L. For easy reference,
dates are included in all citations of Chekhov’s letters.
All dates are given in the Old Style, in accordance with the Julian
calendar that was used in Russia until , when Russians adopted the
Gregorian calendar as used in the West. The Julian calendar was twelve
days behind the Gregorian calendar in the nineteenth century and thirteen
days behind in the twentieth century.
The volume employs two simultaneous systems of transliteration, one
for discursive text and notes, the other for reproducing Russian terms and
for biographical records (Systems I and II as outlined by J. Thomas Shaw
in Transliteration of Modern Russian for English-Language Publications).
When reproducing Russian terms and citing Russian sources, we have
followed the Library of Congress system without diacritics. In the discur-
sive text we have anglicized Russian terms and proper names, using the “y”
ending for “ii” (e.g., Stanislavsky), “oy” instead of “oi” (e.g., Tolstoy),
“aya” for “aia” (e.g., Ranevskaya), “x” instead of “ks” (e.g., Alexandra), but
using “ai” and “ei” at the end of first names (e.g., Nikolai, Alexei).
xxvii
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Chronology
Chekhov’s grandfather Yegor Chekh buys himself and his
family out of serfdom. As Chekhov’s father, Pavel, puts it
in his own short family chronicle, “Father ransomed the
whole family for , rubles in b[anknotes], at
rubles per soul.”
Anton Chekhov is born on January , in Taganrog, a
seaport city on the southwest corner of Russia.
Serfdom is abolished in Russia, the most significant in a
series of modernizing measures undertaken by Alexander
II known as the Great Reforms (–). These
include the construction of railways across Russia, the
abolition of corporal punishment, the relaxation of
government censorship, the forming of a new judicial
system involving judges and juries, and the creation of
institutions of local democratic self-government known as
zemstvos.
Chekhov’s father, Pavel Chekhov, declares bankruptcy
and flees Taganrog with his family to Moscow, leaving
Anton behind to finish his schooling at the Taganrog
gymnasium and to manage the liquidation of the
family’s assets.
Chekhov wins a scholarship to enroll in medical school at
Moscow State University. He rejoins his family, living
together in cramped quarters, with nine people in three
rooms, including three lodgers whom the family had
taken in for extra income.
– Chekhov’s years as a medical student coincide with
freelance work as a reporter and the publication of
hundreds of stories and sketches (under a variety of
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Chronology xxix
pseudonyms, including Antosha Chekhonte) that help
pay the family’s bills.
Tsar Alexander II is assassinated by members of
Narodnaya Volya, a revolutionary terrorist organization.
The politically repressive age of Alexander III begins.
Chekhov becomes a certified physician, and develops the
first symptoms of the tuberculosis that would later kill
him. He publishes his only novel, The Shooting Party,
along with over seventy stories and sketches.
Chekhov, now the primary breadwinner of his family,
travels to St. Petersburg. He meets his future publisher
and friend Alexei Suvorin. Writing constantly during this
time, he publishes over stories in the period between
and .
Brief engagement to Dunya Efros. Chekhov receives a
letter from writer Dmitry Grigorovich that both
encourages him (“You have true talent – a talent that
advances you far beyond the circle of writers of the new
generation” [L:]) and urges him to take his writing
more seriously. His literary success allows him to move
with his family into a semidetached house, now with his
own study, on a tree-lined street in a nice part of Moscow.
He begins to publish under his own name in Suvorin’s
New Times.
Chekhov travels to Taganrog. He publishes two
collections of stories and writes the play Ivanov for the
Korsh Theater in Moscow.
Chekhov writes a number of longer pieces, including
“The Steppe,” “Lights,” and “The Name-Day
Celebration.” He is awarded the Pushkin Prize.
Chekhov’s elder brother Nikolai, a talented painter and
alcoholic, dies of tuberculosis. Chekhov, now a famous
writer, publishes “A Boring Story.” The play The Wood
Demon (an early version of what would later become
Uncle Vanya) is staged unsuccessfully in Moscow.
Chekhov travels across Siberia to the island of Sakhalin
(over , miles in one direction), where he spends three
months completing a census of the prison population and
inspecting villages, mines, barracks, and prisons. He
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xxx Chronology
returns by sea via Hong Kong, Singapore, Ceylon,
and Odessa.
Chekhov publishes “The Duel” and “The Grasshopper,”
among other stories. He travels throughout Europe with
Suvorin (Vienna, Venice, Bologna, Florence, Naples,
Rome, Nice, and Paris).
– The Russian famine of – causes approximately
,–, deaths. Chekhov helps organize famine
relief in the Nizny Novgorod and Voronezh provinces.
Chekhov purchases a small country estate at Melikhovo,
south of Moscow, and moves there with his parents. He
writes “Ward Six,” works on the house and garden,
receives patients, and engages in multiple altruistic
projects, including work for the zemstvo council to help
contain the cholera epidemic in the area.
Serial publication of The Island of Sakhalin, a
documentary exposé of the Siberian prison system, travel
account of Siberia, and series of sketches of peoples and
places observed on his travels.
Tsar Alexander III dies and Nikolai II accedes. Chekhov
visits Yalta and travels through Western Europe. His
output includes “The Student” and “The Black Monk.”
Chekhov visits Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana. As his illness
gets worse, he continues seeing patients, working on a
variety of charitable projects in the Melikhovo area
(which over the next few years will include overseeing and
funding the building of new schools in the villages of
Talezh, Novoselki, and Melikhovo; inspecting peasant
schools in the district; helping open a post office in the
town of Lopasnya; collecting money for the highway; and
overseeing the construction of a bell tower for the church
and a fire station in Melikhovo). He publishes “Three
Years,” “The Murder,” “Anna on the Neck,” and
“Ariadne.”
Unsuccessful first performance of The Seagull at the
Alexandrinsky Theater in St. Petersburg. Chekhov
publishes “The House with a Mezzanine” and “My Life.”
After a severe lung hemorrhage, Chekhov is officially
diagnosed with tuberculosis. He publishes Uncle Vanya
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Chronology xxxi
and “Peasants,” and takes an interest in the Dreyfus case
in France that will contribute to his rift with Suvorin.
The Moscow Art Theater opens. Chekhov meets Olga
Knipper. The first performance of The Seagull at Moscow
Art Theater is a success. Chekhov’s father dies. Chekhov
buys a plot of land in the village of Upper Autka in Yalta
and oversees the building of a house for himself and his
family. He publishes “The Little Trilogy” (“Man in a
Case,” “Gooseberries,” and “About Love”), among
other stories.
First performance of Uncle Vanya. Chekhov publishes
“Lady with the Little Dog” and “The Darling,” among
other stories. He sells his estate at Melikhovo and arranges
his affairs and his family’s financial future by selling the
rights to his collected works to Adolph Marx.
Chekhov settles in Yalta, is elected to the Russian
Academy of Sciences, and publishes “In the Ravine.”
During the final Yalta period of his life over the next few
years, Chekhov helps to build a school in the Tatar village
of Mukhalatka, saves the Greek church near his home,
treats the Autka poor, places appeals in the local
newspaper to help the starving children of the Samara
province, and becomes involved in the Yalta Charitable
Society, which helps indigent tuberculosis patients in
the area.
Production of Three Sisters at Moscow Art Theater.
Chekhov marries Olga Knipper.
Chekhov publishes “The Bishop.” He withdraws from
the Russian Academy of Sciences in protest after Gorky’s
election to honorary academician is revoked.
Chekhov publishes The Cherry Orchard and “The Bride.”
Chekhov attends the premiere of The Cherry Orchard on
his birthday in January. In June he seeks treatment for his
worsening condition in Germany. He dies in Badenweiler
on July (July according to Gregorian calendar) and is
buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.
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Introduction
Yuri Corrigan
Anton Chekhov inhabited a great many worlds in his short lifetime
(–), without ever really belonging to any. From a family of
former serfs, he grew up in the merchant class, became a modest land-
owner, a doctor, a national celebrity, and a member of the highest tier of
the Russian intelligentsia, while continuing, throughout his literary suc-
cesses, to treat patients from every estate. From within a fiercely polarized
political milieu, he actively resisted recruitment by tendency or ideology,
maintaining close friendships with socialists, monarchists, nationalists, and
revolutionaries alike. Though he lived almost the whole of his life in the
nineteenth century, he is as much an exponent of the twentieth, and was
viewed by his modernist contemporaries as both the epitome of what they
were rebelling against and the founder of their movement. As a prose
writer – probably the most influential practitioner of the short story who
ever lived – he was the last major scion of the age of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky,
and the Russian novel. As a playwright, second perhaps only to
Shakespeare in influence and reach, he was the inventor of a new kind
of psychological theater that widely reshaped the practices of acting,
directing, and playwriting in the century after his death.
Chekhov’s peripatetic temperament makes him a somewhat unwilling
subject for academic scholarship. He is notoriously hard to write about –
unusually private, keeping himself as far away from his own subject matter
as possible, and nurturing a deceptive clarity of style and exposition
designed to infuriate and dissatisfy the heavy-handed interpreter. At the
core of his project lies a rejection of broad explanatory schemas, an
unwillingness to be co-opted by any critical approach. I note, therefore,
under these circumstances, that Cambridge’s “In Context” series is in fact
very well suited to Chekhov’s disposition. Indeed, the purpose of this
volume is not so much to explain or even interpret Chekhov’s works as to
complicate them, or rather, to shed light on them by emphasizing their
complexity – to provide an expansive cultural, political, historical, and
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intellectual canvas against which Chekhov’s life, work, and legacy can
appear in clearer, more composite relief.
Chekhov’s contexts are presented to the reader in five parts: Life,
Society, Culture, Literature, and Afterlives. In surveying his immediate
biographical contexts, the opening section – Life – begins with the often
onerous and always intense family life that was the one constant of his
existence, as elucidated by Chekhov’s Russian biographer Alevtina
Kuzicheva (“Son, Brother, Husband: In Correspondence”). Vladimir
Kataev is then our guide, in “Chekhov’s Friends,” to the bonds and rifts
that shaped the course of Chekhov’s writing. Finally, Michael Finke pro-
vides an account of the fatal illness that overshadowed almost the whole of
Chekhov’s career (“An ‘Indeterminate Situation’: Chekhov’s Illness and
Death”).
The second and most extensive part of the volume – Society – surveys
the sociopolitical ground under the feet of Chekhov and his characters at
the end of the Russian Empire. We begin with Anne Lounsbery’s illumi-
nation (in “Class”) of the dauntingly complex system of estates and ranks
that stratified Russian life and of the emergence of the “splintered middle”
that was Chekhov’s principal focus. As an upwardly mobile player in this
economy, Chekhov spent much of his life pondering his bills, and Vadim
Shneyder provides a financial biography (in “Money”) of Chekhov as a
freelance literary laborer against the backdrop of Russia’s economic expan-
sion and transition to a money-driven economy. Just as urgently requiring
attention were the clashing ideological movements building toward cata-
clysm in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century, of which Derek
Offord (in “Politics”) gives us a bird’s-eye view – first of the revolutionary
currents (idealisms, socialisms, populisms, terrorisms) that flourished in
the years leading up to the assassination of Alexander II in , and then
of the reactionary elements of conservative nationalism that gained ground
under Alexander III.
From here we focus upon specific issues that defined the age. Christine
Worobec (in “Peasants”) takes us through the volatile world of the peas-
antry in the decades following the Emancipation of . Through
Chekhov’s eyes, Worobec considers the cycles of violence and abuse
embedded within these communities and the challenges they faced in an
era of modernization. Tracing problems of emancipation across the various
estates, Jenny Kaminer (in “The Woman Question”) probes the social
position of women in the second half of the nineteenth century as a
microcosm for Russia’s larger-scale reevaluation of social institutions, with
an eye to the new opportunities for work and education available to
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women, and to the restrictive regimes, legal and otherwise, that informed
the lives of Chekhov’s struggling and often unhappily married heroines. As
Melissa Miller subsequently points out (in “Sex”), the Great Reforms of the
s and s yielded a new civil arena composed of modern profes-
sionals with diverging views on sexuality. Miller examines Chekhov’s
participation in this debate, both as a doctor who in medical school was
drawn to questions of sexual difference and as a writer whose frank
depictions of sex and sexual affairs were paradigmatic for his time.
The final three chapters of the Society section examine Chekhov as an
activist. Andrei Stepanov sets the stage (in “Social Activism”) by taking us
through the quite staggering accumulation of “small deeds” that constitute
Chekhov’s altruistic biography, in three stages – Moscow, Melikhovo, and
Yalta. Jane Costlow (in “Environmentalism”) explores Chekhov’s prescient
conservationism against the environmentalist discourse of his time, char-
acterizing Chekhov’s ecological intervention as connected to the problem
of attention, whether in his fascination with the human inclination to look
away from such realities as mass pollution, soil erosion, and deforestation;
or in his attempts to inhabit the minds of animals, to imagine the world as
not inherently bent toward human ends. Edyta Bojanowska (in “Sakhalin
Island”) closes the section by reflecting on the significance of Chekhov’s
arduous mid-career journey to Russia’s penal colony in the North Pacific,
both in terms of the genre-bending book of documentary scholarship that
the voyage yielded and in the significant reconsideration of empire, colo-
nization, corporal punishment, and incarceration that Chekhov’s work on
the island informed.
In mapping out Chekhov’s intellectual milieu from the arts to the
sciences, Part Three – Culture – begins with the two thorniest, most
debated questions surrounding Chekhov as a thinker: his relationships to
philosophy and religion. Mikhal Oklot (in “Philosophy”) addresses the
hazards of imposing philosophical readings on Chekhov, while also prob-
ing his profound engagement with specific traditions – Stoicism,
Cynicism, materialism – and the distinct resonance of his moral perspec-
tive with such figures as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and especially
Schopenhauer. In taking on the problem of Chekhov as a religious artist,
Denis Zhernokleyev (in “Religion”) looks beyond Chekhov’s own ambiv-
alent statements on this topic toward the culture of Eastern Christianity
itself, exploring Chekhov’s creative engagement with the stories, symbols,
and values of the Judeo-Christian tradition that were an ineradicable part
of his upbringing and inheritance. Elena Fratto (in “Science”) takes us
through Chekhov’s lesser-known scientific horizons, showing how his
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passion for horticulture; his knowledge of botany; and his interests in
astronomy, optics, thermodynamics, and evolutionary theory transferred
to his fiction. Matthew Mangold follows up this discussion (in “Medicine
and the Mind-Body Problem”) with a detailed overview of Chekhov’s
medical education; here, Mangold traces Chekhov’s writerly formation in
light of the environmental approach to medicine emerging at the time in
the areas of hygiene, anatomy, and psychiatry, and linking the outer
material world in new ways to the life of the psyche. Equally consequential,
as Serge Gregory shows (in “The Arts”), was Chekhov’s artistic education,
since Chekhov, while in medical school, was also working the Moscow art
beat as a cultural critic, reviewing operas and exhibits, and enjoying the
inside scoop on these worlds thanks in part to his older brother Nikolai, an
accomplished painter. Gregory demonstrates how Chekhov’s literary
impressionism was formed by parallel movements in the arts, especially
through his friendship with Isaac Levitan , whose painterly approach to
mood imprinted itself on Chekhov’s own fictional landscapes.
The final three chapters of the Culture section take a step back to
consider the broader cultural canvas of late imperial Russia. Though
Chekhov died just before the full-blown fin-de-siècle mood burst forth
in Russia around the time of the first revolution in , Mark Steinberg
(in “Fin de Siècle”) locates Chekhov within a “first-wave fin de siècle”
following the regicide of Alexander II. Steinberg depicts Chekhov’s own
searching agnostic temperament as symptomatic of this cultural moment,
with its anxieties concerning the ailments of modernity and its renewed
interest in the concept of personality (or lichnost’) as an antidote. Gary Saul
Morson (in “The Harm That Good Ideas Do”) next provides an overview
of the ideological ferment of the Russian intelligentsia, the quasi-religious
devotion that Russian progressives brought to new dogmas of nihilism,
populism, atheism, and scientism, while emphasizing Chekhov’s status as
the most resistant of major Russian writers to the ideological fanaticisms of
his contemporaries. This claim leads us directly to Svetlana Evdokimova’s
chapter, “Chekhov’s Intelligentsias,” which explores the enigma of the
Russian intelligentsia itself as a disparately defined cultural body.
Evdokimova reviews the ambiguity of the term in Russian society while
staking out Chekhov’s own tormented relationship with this group as its
harsh critic and devoted champion.
Louise McReynolds introduces the volume’s fourth section –
Literature – by helping us imagine (in “Print Culture”) what it was like
for Chekhov as young writer amid the increasingly diverse readerships,
publishers, and editorial boards of his time; how his writing developed in
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response to the state censorship apparatus and to the media outlets, both
popular and “prestige,” of a newly emergent commercial press. The next
four chapters go on to situate Chekhov within the literary institutions and
traditions, both Russian and European, of his age. Caryl Emerson (in
“Embarrassment”) distinguishes Chekhov from the nineteenth-century
Russian prose tradition of Gogol and Dostoevsky through his specific
evocation of embarrassment, an emotion so ubiquitous in Chekhov’s
writing as to become fused with his poetics and worldview. While
Dostoevsky and Tolstoy built their plots on more assertive acts and emo-
tions, Chekhov – Emerson shows – runs his path to redemption and
discovery through the moral capacity to cringe at one’s own words and
behavior. Rosamund Bartlett (in “Tolstoy”) takes up the case of Chekhov’s
most important literary influence, placing the younger writer’s lifelong
admiration of Leo Tolstoy as an artist, arbiter of good taste, and moral
authority, alongside his gradual divergence from Tolstoy over the value of
culture, the importance of art and beauty, questions of marriage and
adultery, and of the state and future of the peasantry. We then step across
to the parallel tradition of European prose through Sergei Kibalnik’s
examination (in “French Literature”) of how Chekhov conducted polemics
with major French writers of the nineteenth century and of how he
overcame his status as the “Russian Maupassant,” ultimately rejecting the
latter’s pessimism in favor of a more homegrown redemptive moral strategy
grounded in the possibility of inward transformation. Lindsay Ceballos (in
“Modernism and Symbolism”) concludes this fourth section by introducing
us to the circles of avant-garde Russian poets who grew up alongside
Chekhov’s writing and who saw in Chekhov – among many other quali-
ties – a “realist” antagonist, fellow “symbolist,” “poet of despair,” paragon of
moral fortitude, and ultimately a larger-than-life embodiment of the
Russian cultural edifice at the turn of the century.
The final three chapters of the Literature section are devoted to the
theatrical worlds that Chekhov inherited and transformed. Anna Muza (in
“Theatrical Traditions”) first examines the influence of the “old forms” on
Chekhov: the works of Shakespeare and Molière, of such nineteenth-
century Russian playwrights as Griboyedov and Ostrovsky , and – possibly
most important of all – the lower-end fare that Chekhov enjoyed as a
young reviewer, the vaudeville and farcical devices that he eventually raised
to the level of high art. Julia Listengarten (in “Modern Theater:
Resonances and Intersections”) extends this discussion to assess
Chekhov’s theatrical revolution in the context of other major innovators
of his time, including Ibsen, Strindberg, and Maeterlinck, presenting
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Chekhov not as an exponent of any movement but as a unique theatrical
practitioner whose work resonated within a broader cultural moment.
Finally (in “Chekhov’s Moscow Art Theater”), Sharon Marie Carnicke
stages the serendipitous convergence of two worlds, showing us how
Chekhov’s fledgling work as a playwright met with the equally fledgling
theatrical dreams of Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko to yield two
mutually reinforcing cultural edifices that would eventually transform
theatrical practices the world over.
Radislav Lapushin begins our consideration in Part Five of Chekhov’s
posthumous Afterlives, by tracking (in “Soviet Contexts”) Chekhov’s
tortuous legacy through the Soviet period. While the Soviets attempted
to co-opt Chekhov for their own uses, Chekhov, we discover, also became,
for many in the anti-Soviet intelligentsia, a democratic ideal, a moral
authority, and an anti-authoritarian icon; a watchword, in short, for the
ideologically impregnable. Olga Tabachnikova next (in “Chekhov in
England”) takes Chekhov up as a mirror for the transformation of
British culture over the twentieth century, from the Bloomsbury Circle’s
natural affinity for Chekhov’s prose, to the uphill, against-the-grain climb
of the plays onto the British stage, tracing the gradual emergence of
Chekhov in the cultural consciousness as a kind of honorary
Englishman, whose understated manner, modesty, reserve, and reticence
made him the least unforeign of the Russian literary titans. James Loehlin
(in “The American Stage”) then emphasizes the game-changing effect of
Chekhov, Stanislavsky, and the Moscow Art Theater on American acting
and playwriting, while offering a sense of the rich history of production
and experimental adaptation that Chekhov encountered both off-
Broadway and across the USA. Heekyoung Cho (in “Chekhov in East
Asia”) focuses on the first few decades of the twentieth century, when East
Asian intellectuals were discovering Russian literature as a resource and
guide to their own confrontation with European modernity. In this
context, Cho uncovers the strikingly optimistic, life-affirming, and hope-
ful-though-cautious vision of Chekhov that filtered into Japan and Korea
through the influential exegesis of the anarchocommunist Pyotr
Kropotkin.
It is worth emphasizing that these afterlives are very far from exhaustive,
and though projected chapters on Chekhov in Africa, India, and South
America, among others, did not work out for this particular volume, one
might hope to see this project expanded into broader and more capacious
studies of Chekhov’s international afterlives by other scholars and editors.
Nor is our single-chapter consideration of Chekhov on the screen at all
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comprehensive, though it is with heroic concision that Justin Wilmes
offers us (in “Film”) an introductory orientation on the Soviet and post-
Soviet reception of Chekhov’s stories and plays, while also directing our
attention to remarkable Chekhov-inspired moments in world cinema,
including the films of Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan.
Carol Apollonio’s “In Translation” helps us confront perhaps the most
pressing problem for Chekhov’s English-language readers – the sheer
vastness of available translations – by taking us through the rich history
of Chekhov in English and outlining the elements of his style that pose the
greatest challenges to the English language. Robin Feuer Miller closes the
volume, appropriately, with a meditation (in her Afterword “Chekhov’s
Endings”) on Chekhov’s career-long search for new ways to end stories and
plays, distinguishing his intervention into literary endings from the work
of other major Russian writers and showing how he took great pains to
craft the overtone of an “eidetic” ending, the kind that retains the sharp-
ness of its image long after one looks away from the text.
This volume is directed to students and scholars of theater, of the short
story, and of Russian literature and culture, as well as to directors, actors,
writers, theatergoers, and general readers who wish to deepen their engage-
ment with Chekhov’s work. Though most readers will probably approach
the volume non-continuously, consulting individual chapters to inform
specific points of reference, I have tried to arrange the chapters of each
section in order to tell a more or less continuous story. To help orient the
general reader, I have included a chronology of the most pertinent events of
Chekhov’s life and times at the start of the volume and a bibliography of
supplementary sources for each chapter at the end. The book’s chief
strength, in my view, lies in the insight, eloquence, and knowledge of its
illustrious contributors – historians, literature and theater scholars, directors,
writers, biographers. In the interest of embracing the perspective of those
Russian scholars who continue to lead the field of Chekhov studies, I have
translated contributions from four prominent representatives – Vladimir
Kataev, Alevtina Kuzicheva, Andrei Stepanov, and Sergei Kibalnik.
For decades now, Cornel West has been a tireless and influential
champion of Chekhov in the United States and beyond. It is a joy and
honor to be able to offer his incisive thoughts on Chekhov as a “cata-
strophic” writer – the very best of foul-weather friends – as a foreword to
this volume.
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Life
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Son, Brother, Husband (in Correspondence)
Alevtina Kuzicheva
The Chekhov family archive has reached our time with gaps. Hundreds of
letters have been lost, whether from neglect, mishap, historical disaster, or
“domestic censorship.” Some letters have survived, however, even from the
writer’s grandfather – the same grandfather who, twenty years before the
abolition of serfdom, saved up enough by hard work to buy himself and his
family out of bondage. The style and handwriting of the former serf betray
a love of the word and the influence of the spiritual literature and scribes of
the time. More importantly, the letters give an idea of the family’s
domostroi, the rules governing relations between fathers and children.
“Accept all kinds of work,” he wrote to one of his grandsons, “obey and
respect your elders, avoid pride, and all evil contrary to God. [. . .] Do not
associate with intractable people, but by choosing carefully – you yourself
will be chosen.”
The writer’s father, an unsuccessful merchant, loved church services and
spiritual chanting more than his own business. In , bankrupt, he fled
to Moscow from his creditors in Taganrog. Soon afterward he summoned
his wife and his younger children, Mikhail and Maria. His older sons,
Alexander and Nikolai, were already studying in Moscow, the former at
university, the latter at an art institute. The “middle” children, Anton and
Ivan, remained in Taganrog to complete their studies; a year later Ivan
dropped out and rejoined his parents.
Chekhov was left alone in his hometown. Though his letters to his
parents have not survived, they are reflected in his parents’ numerous
letters to him. These are a unique documentary source: “For God’s sake,
send money”; “Sasha [Alexander] and Kolya [Nikolai] [. . .] do not help us
at all”; “God grant you more lessons as soon as possible so that you can
make money both for yourself and for us; we are in great need.” The
gymnasium student’s options for making money were either tutoring or
selling off the remaining property. He was asked to send family belongings
to Moscow: featherbeds, icons, crockery – and to console, with respectful
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letters, his parents, whose heartrending pleas for money and strict orders
were accompanied by lectures on a son’s duty: “Our hopes are only
in you.”
Visiting Moscow for the first time in , perceiving the family’s
glaring poverty and the irreparable discord between his father and elder
brothers, Chekhov wrote to his cousin Mikhail: “I wish happiness to your
whole family, which is dearer to you than anything in the world, just as our
family is to me”; “Be so kind as to continue to comfort my mother, who is
physically and morally broken-down. [. . .] There is nothing more precious
to us in this ever-mocking world than our mother”; “Father and mother
are for me the only people in the whole world for whom I will never
begrudge anything” (April , ; L:–).
Such was the vow made by a young man of seventeen – who, like his
brothers, had endured his father’s cruel floggings, had stood for long hours
like “little convicts” at church services and in the choir, to satisfy his
father’s ambitions. The boy who made this promise had forgiven but not
forgotten the suffering of his childhood. Years later, after seeing
Alexander’s indecent treatment of his own family, Chekhov forcefully
reminded him:
I ask you to remember that despotism and lies ruined your mother’s youth.
Despotism and lies distorted our childhood to such a degree that it is
sickening and scary to remember. Think of the horror and disgust we felt
when father was rioting about over-salted soup at dinner or calling mother a
fool. Father can’t forgive himself all of this now. (January , ; L:)
As far as we know, Chekhov never said a word to remind his father of
the past.
Nor did he complain of his unkind childhood in his letters. Only once
did he confide to an acquaintance, “I was caressed so little as a child that
now, as an adult, I take caresses as something unusual” (March , ;
L:). Chekhov pitied his mother and said of her: “Mother is a very
kind, meek and reasonable woman; my brothers and I are greatly indebted
to her” (January , ; L:). Her hurried letters from Moscow did
not ask after her son but complained about the lack of money: “If only you
could be here soon. When you finish in Taganrog, it’ll be much better for
me with you here.” Though Chekhov had relatives in Taganrog, he had to
rely on himself. He endured the trials and temptations of a half-starved
and sometimes severe life, free from parental supervision and help. In his
loneliness, he came to maturity, and his letters show a calm strength and
self-reliance.
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Son, Brother, Husband
Chekhov’s youthful vow to his cousin was neither a gesture of self-
sacrifice nor a response to his father’s sermons on filial duty; it was born
from compassion for his parents’ plight. Chekhov realized that his brothers
would be neither able nor willing to care for their aging parents, nor to
accept them as they were. Throughout his remaining years, Chekhov
arranged his affairs to ensure their comfort. “He had a good old age,” he
wrote after his father’s death. The old age of his mother, who lived with
her son, was also peaceful. His letters to her are invariably respectful,
tolerant, and caring. Knowing his time was limited, he made sure to
provide for his mother and sister in advance. Three years before his death,
he wrote his will in a letter addressed to his sister. The last words are:
“Help the poor. Take care of your mother. Live peacefully” (August ,
; L:).
He kept his vow.
Before Chekhov’s arrival in Moscow, his father wrote: “We hope that
you [. . .] will show your abilities to your brothers, how one should live as a
family . . . From your letters it is evident that you are clever and prudent.”
In doing so, he acknowledged his bankruptcy as “head of the family” in
every respect. Chekhov’s share was not only that of the breadwinner. Both
in jest and in earnest he once wrote, “Fate has made me a nanny, and
I volens-nolens must not forget about pedagogical measures” (June , ;
L:). His elder brothers dreamed of successful careers – Alexander as a
professor of mathematics, Nikolai as an artist. Neither doubted in his own
persistence, diligence, or patience, but both succumbed to the frenzy of
Moscow life (restaurants, brothels, casual affairs), wasting their time,
money, health, and indubitable talent.
The most difficult years were the s. First a medical student, then a
practicing physician and author in satirical journals, Chekhov dragged his
family out from hopeless penury. Alexander lived separately, already
burdened by his own family. He served in the south, and then through
Chekhov’s efforts became a contributor to a St. Petersburg newspaper, but
binge-drinking undermined the well-being of his household. Nikolai, for
his part, got into trouble of all kinds. Chekhov extracted him from
scandals, arranged for his drawings to be printed in journals, lent him
money, clothed him, and gave him medical treatment, but admitted that
he sometimes felt “pained and ashamed” of him.
Ivan, who received a modest teacher’s salary, was not able to help. Their
father worked for a Moscow merchant, but his financial contribution was
small. Chekhov joked bitterly about his “familial entanglement”: “If
I don’t earn a certain number of rubles a month, there’s an order here that
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will collapse and fall on my shoulders like a heavy stone”; “I have my
mother living with me, my sister, Mishka [Mikhail] the student [. . .]
Nikolai, who does nothing [. . .] drinks and sits around unclothed [. . .]
my head is spinning” (April –, ; L:, ). To care for and
rescue this “noisy, financially disordered, and artificially glued together”
family, which, according to Chekhov, was “oppressed by the abnormality
of having to live together,” cost him enormous effort, hard literary toil,
and health.
What prevented Chekhov from leaving his family? From living sepa-
rately and helping his mother and sister financially, as was customary in
their milieu? Was it only pity and the awareness that, no matter where he
lived, it would be up to him to solve his family’s material problems?
Or was he held back by what he considered the absolute condition
for life and creativity: peace of conscience? Whatever the reason, he did
not abandon the “heavy stone,” though already suffering, in , a
serious hemorrhage.
Chekhov still hoped then that his elder brothers would be able to
overpower “the bourgeois flesh that had been raised on canings [. . .]
and handouts,” to overcome their father’s “education” through self-
education. In March he sent Nikolai an extraordinary letter.
Emphasizing his brother’s good qualities (kindness, simplicity, trustful-
ness), he named what he described as Nikolai’s only fault – extreme ill-
breeding and extreme permissiveness with regard to himself, whereas
genuinely educated people “respect the human personality [. . .] are
compassionate [. . .] respect the property of others [. . .] fear lies like fire.
[. . .] If they possess talent, they respect it [. . .] sacrifice peace, women,
wine, vanity for its sake.” For self-education Chekhov presents a radical
recipe: “Constant work, day and night, continuous reading, studiousness,
willpower . . . Every hour is precious [. . .] It’s necessary to get moving
[. . .] It’s time!” (L:–). To Alexander he wrote: “Remember every
minute that you’ll be more in need of your pen, your talent in the future
than now; do not profane them . . . Write and be vigilant in every line”
(April , ; L:). Chekhov’s letters to his elder brother constitute a
rare, rigorous, and inspiring literary school. But his brothers did not “get
moving.” Nicholas died of consumption in . Alexander never heeded
his brother’s advice.
It was Ivan who resolved on “studiousness.” Not having graduated
from the gymnasium, nervous, having experienced a painful rift in his
youth with his father, he educated himself by reading, by training his will.
To his Taganrog uncle, Chekhov described his twenty-three-year-old
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Son, Brother, Husband
brother as “industrious and honest,” “one of the most decent and respect-
able members of our family” (January , ; L:). Through
earnest and steady work, Ivan earned a reputation in Moscow as a teacher,
supported as he was by the knowledge of his brother’s willingness to help.
There is something son-like in his letters to Chekhov: “I would gladly save
money to help you.” On receiving a parcel, “I rejoiced like a little boy.
[. . .] I am very, very much obliged to you. I’ll execute all the errands you
mention in your letter immediately.” All their lives they were bound
together by trust.
This was not the case in Chekhov’s relationship with Mikhail. Once,
Chekhov received a letter from his fourteen-year-old brother, signed: “Your
insignificant and inconspicuous little brother.” Chekhov objected: “You
know where you can recognize your insignificance? Before God perhaps,
before intelligence, beauty, nature, but not before people. Among people
you must be conscious of your dignity. [. . .] Do not confuse ‘humble
yourself’ with ‘be conscious of your dignity’” (c. April , ; L:).
Mikhail, his parents’ favorite, was capable, industrious, and vain; he did not
consider himself his brother’s “junior,” though he lived under Chekhov’s
care for all his high school and college years. After graduating from law
school, Mikhail counted on Chekhov’s acquaintances for his service career,
reminding him intermittently, “don’t forget to take up my case.” Chekhov
yielded to these requests but, on one occasion, admitted their burdensome-
ness: “He is a very kind and sensible person, but sometimes it’s hard for me
to be with him. [. . .] In general, patronage is an unpleasant thing, and
I would rather take castor oil or a cold shower than pull strings” (May ,
; L:). There was no estrangement between the brothers, but little
emotional connection or genuine correspondence. After his brother’s death,
Mikhail made himself Chekhov’s biographer. His book Around Chekhov
() lives up to its title, losing Chekhov in lists, details, and cursory
references to contemporaries.
Chekhov’s sister also left reminiscences. Her book From the Distant Past
() repeats Mikhail’s book in many respects, and the letters she selects
for her book Letters to My Brother () give an incomplete impression of
what connected them. Her true role in Chekhov’s life is revealed through
the family correspondence as a whole. It is clear from her letters what it was
like for a teenage girl during those first years in Moscow, and with what
difficulty she was able to enter a diocesan women’s institute where the girls
were taught to be modest, well-mannered, and submissive. Maria shared
the household chores (laundry, cooking, cleaning) with her mother. After
the institute, she enrolled in university courses. When Alexander once
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remarked ironically that his twenty-year-old sister had not grown to
understand his personality, Chekhov replied: “Think back, have you ever
even once talked to her like a human being [. . .] have you ever written her
even one serious word? [. . .] Why does our sister tell me things she
wouldn’t tell any of you? Probably because I didn’t deny the person in
her [. . .] with whom one must speak . . . She is after all a human being, and
even, my God, what a human being” (February , ; L:–). In
, Maria began to serve in a private gymnasium, not for her daily
bread, but for a sense of independence. She used her modest earnings for
minor expenses. Like her parents, she herself was always fully supported
by Chekhov.
Maria was always her brother’s helper in household affairs, especially in
the years when they lived at Chekhov’s estate in Melikhovo: “She is in
charge. [. . .] I rely on her for everything.” Their correspondence was
businesslike, specific. Hardworking and exacting, she managed servants
and employees better than anyone, and Chekhov trusted financial matters
to her sensible and reliable nature. He reckoned on her moving to Yalta,
where he settled with his mother, but she preferred to spend her winters in
Moscow, where there were exhibitions and theaters; she traveled to Yalta
for Christmas, Easter, and summer vacations. Clever and ambitious, she
understood well what it meant to be “Chekhov’s sister” in the eyes of
writers, artists, and famous people. She wrote jokingly to Mikhail, “I live
in a state of honor. They honor me for my brother. I have a lot of friends.”
Maria did not marry, but the speculation that she gave up her personal
happiness for the sake of her brother’s peace of mind and to devote her life
to him is only a beautiful legend.
In spite of her outward fragility, the main thing about Chekhov’s sister
was her independence, her sense of dignity, her self-sufficiency. Chekhov
always gave his sister absolute freedom in deciding how to live. “Live as
you wish,” he wrote, “and this will be the best thing you can think of”
(January , ; L:). After her brother’s death, Maria’s foremost work
was collecting and storing the family archive, preparing the first edition of
Chekhov’s letters, and turning the Yalta house into the Chekhov
Museum – her brainchild, which she spearheaded until the end of her
long life.
Chekhov’s romance with the actress Olga Knipper was no secret from
his family, but the wedding in came as a surprise. Chekhov was
already very ill after a near-fatal hemorrhage in . He knew how little
time was left. The story of Chekhov’s all-consuming, all-forgiving love,
both devastating and salutary, and arising immediately from the moment
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Son, Brother, Husband
he saw Knipper on stage, is in his letters to her. The correspondence
between them (–) consists of more than a thousand letters. They
lived together for less than half of their married life. For the rest she was in
Moscow, in the thick of theater life, while he was in his unbeloved, dreary,
wintry Yalta. And meanwhile only letters, letters, letters . . . an epistolary
family life, a “mythical” husband and wife, as Knipper noted. It was as
though Chekhov’s old humorous prediction had come true: “I promise to
be a splendid husband, but give me a wife who, like the moon, will not
appear in my sky every day” (March , ; L:).
To Knipper’s impatient expectations, and to her questions about a
church marriage, Chekhov replied even before they were married: “If we
are not together now, we can blame neither you nor me, but the demon
who put the bacillus in me and the love of art in you” (September ,
; L:). His terminal illness was insuperable, and Knipper’s passion
for the stage proved stronger than her promises to leave the theater and to
nurse him when he became very ill. Everything ended with a succession of
entreaties not to curse, to forgive, to understand . . .
As in previous winters, Chekhov, on January , , consoled his
wife: “If you had lived with me in Yalta all winter, your life would have
been spoiled, and I would have felt remorse [. . .]. I knew after all that I was
marrying an actress [. . .]. I don’t consider myself a millionth part offended
or neglected. Be calm, my dear, don’t worry, but wait and hope” (January
, ; L:). In her letters, Knipper imagined how they would
meet, how they would live happily “somewhere, sometime . . ..” With
excitement she asked after his work on The Cherry Orchard. She was
hoping for a new role, for success. Not later, but now . . .
Chekhov waited for her letters, any kind of letters, even “angry” ones. In
response, he wrote how he loved his wife “deeply and tenderly,” “desper-
ately,” “more and more.” With this feeling, with these letters, and with the
play he wrote for her, he prolonged both his creativity and his life.
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Chekhov’s Friends
Vladimir Kataev
“I assert that Chekhov had no friends,” wrote Ignaty Potapenko in his
memoirs, though Potapenko himself had for many years been on friendly,
even intimate terms with Chekhov. The two writers met often, and
corresponded; the same woman (Lika Mizinova) played a role in both of
their lives, and Potapenko can be viewed as a prototype for Trigorin in The
Seagull. Nevertheless, Potapenko held to his claim.
It has been estimated that the number of characters in Chekhov’s works
exceeds ,. Behind these are perhaps hundreds of “real” people whom
Chekhov met and observed up close or from the side. Doctors, writers,
students, landowners, engineers, peasants, monks, merchants, officials,
military personnel, actors, convicts – for his relatively short life, the range
of Chekhov’s interactions was extremely broad. The peculiarities of his
personality – his thirst for communication and ability to win people over –
allowed for the creative use and transformation of the most diverse human
material. Chekhov himself was not at all remote from the people in his life:
“I am on the very best terms with my comrades, both doctors and writers”
(February , ; L:). Among Chekhov’s letters, there are passages
that are striking in their sincerity and self-disclosure. But – and on this
virtually all memoirists agree – there was no one who could boast of
knowing and understanding all that went on in Chekhov’s soul. From
about the mid-s onward (the beginning of the most interesting and
important period of his work) there was no one with whom he was ready
to share his most intimate thoughts as he had in earlier years with his elder
brother Alexander or his publisher Alexei Suvorin. Mention is often made
of Chekhov’s emotional armor, of his loneliness among those closest to
him. In his notebook he wrote: “Just as I will lie in the grave alone, so in
essence do I live a lonely life” (W:).
Like anyone, Chekhov had his own set of requirements for defining
friendship, his own reasons for rapprochements and estrangements. This
changed over time, as did his circle of acquaintances. His constant and true
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Chekhov’s Friends
friends were his two older brothers, the journalist and writer Alexander and
the artist Nikolai, and though Anton soon outgrew both of them spiritu-
ally and morally, he nevertheless saw their lives as part of his own. The
degree of intimacy, openness, and frankness (both personal and profes-
sional) is striking in his letters to Alexander, the friendly and humorous
banter inexhaustible. The person he trusted most in family matters was, to
the end, his sister Maria. He preserved friendly relations with a few
comrades from the Taganrog gymnasium, with classmates from Moscow
University, with colleagues from the satirical journals, then from the
“thick” journals, and with the friends of his artist brother: “I am
acquainted with all of Moscow’s young painters and Raphaelizers” (for
his friendship with Isaak Levitan, see Chapter ).
Some of the connections in his early years did not have time to form
into lasting attachments. While still a student, Chekhov helped the com-
poser Pablo de Sarasate with medical advice during his tour in Moscow
(a photograph survives with the inscription, in Spanish: “To my dear
friend Dr. Antonio Chekhonte as a token of appreciation for his medicine.
Pablo Sarasate. Rome. Piazza Borghese . . . With love”). With his “favorite
scribbler” Nikolai Leskov, the student Chekhov walked and traveled
around Moscow and received a blessing: “I anoint you with oil, as
Samuel anointed David . . . Write.” Among his fellow writers, whom
Chekhov called “the artel of the s,” he searched out like-minded people
and friends:
The greater our solidarity, our mutual support, the sooner we learn to
respect and value each other, the more truth there will be in our mutual
relations. Not all of us will be happy in the future. One doesn’t need to be
prophet to predict that there will be more grief and pain than peace and
money. That’s why we need to hold onto each other. (March , ;
L:)
In another letter of the same period, however, he confessed, “there are no
people around me who require my sincerity and who are entitled to it”
(January , ; L:). Apart from solidarity or similarity of interests,
tastes, and evaluations, Chekhov named truth and sincerity as indispens-
able conditions of friendship.
The hero of “A Boring Story,” Nikolai Stepanovich, says of himself
(in the third person): “There is no one for him to be friends with now, but
if we talk about the past, the long list of his glorious friends ends with such
names as Pirogov, Kavelin, and the poet Nekrasov, who bestowed on him
the warmest and most sincere friendship” (W:). Chekhov was not
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immediately aware of his commensurability with the greatest figures of his
time, as can be seen in his modest, sometimes self-deprecating confessions:
“I am ready to stand guard of honor day and night at the porch of the
house where Pyotr Ilyich [Tchaikovsky] lives – to such an extent do
I respect him” (March , ; L:). A personal meeting confirmed
mutual sympathies; the composer expressed a wish for Chekhov to write a
libretto for him – an idea that was, unfortunately, not destined to be
realized. Leo Tolstoy, whom Chekhov undoubtedly ranked first in modern
Russian literature, expressed his sympathy for Chekhov the man many
times in person and correspondence; he valued Chekhov the writer as the
creator of “new, entirely new forms of writing for the whole world,” but
regretted the lack of a homiletic religious orientation in the works of his
younger contemporary. Chekhov, who for years had been under the charm
of Tolstoy’s personality (“not a man but a titan”) and artistic manner,
eventually distanced himself from Tolstoy’s spiritual “tutelage.” The two
writers became acquainted in the mid-s, but their conversations in
Moscow, in Yasnaya Polyana, in the Crimea meant something more than
mere acquaintance. In , Chekhov wrote:
I’m afraid of Tolstoy’s death. If he were to die, there would be a large empty
place in my life. [. . .] I don’t love anyone as much as I love him, I’m a non-
believer, but of all the faiths I consider his faith the closest and most suitable
to me. [. . .] His work serves as a justification for the hopes and aspirations
that are being placed on literature. (January , ; L:–)
Among his literary peers and contemporaries, the more lasting connec-
tions were with those for whom Chekhov felt sympathy and trust – the
writers Vladimir Korolenko and Ivan Leontiev-Shcheglov , and the play-
wright and director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko.
Chekhov expressed his admiration for Korolenko’s personality and
writerly talent from the start of their acquaintance in , soon after
Korolenko’s return from Siberian exile: “He is a talented and most won-
derful man [. . .] In my opinion, you can expect very much from him”
(October –, ; L:); “He is my favorite of modern writers”
(February , ; L:). And in a letter to Korolenko himself: “You
and I will not do without points of common ground in the future. [. . .]
I think we are no strangers to each other. I don’t know whether I’m right
or not, but I like to think this” (October , ; L:). Their mutual
sympathies persisted in later years, though both writers took different, at
times divergent paths in both their literary and social positions. The point
of their “common ground” proved to be the “academic incident” of ,
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Chekhov’s Friends
when the Academy of Sciences, in response to Tsar Nicholas II’s displea-
sure, revoked Maxim Gorky’s election as honorary academician.
Korolenko and Chekhov, after exchanging letters, announced their with-
drawal from the Academy in protest. Korolenko left reminiscences about
Chekhov, warmly describing their infrequent meetings.
Chekhov met Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko while working together
in satirical journals. Their close relations and correspondence lasted until
the end of Chekhov’s life. A letter from Chekhov on November , ,
speaks to the degree of their friendship and mutual trust:
Dear friend, I would like to answer the main point of your letter – why do
we so rarely have serious conversations. [. . .] What is there to talk about?
We have no politics, no social life, no circles, not even a public life; our city
existence is poor, monotonous, stale, uninteresting. [. . .] About literature?
But we’ve already talked about that . . . Every year it’s the same thing, and
everything we say boils down to who wrote better and who wrote worse;
conversations on more general themes never take off, because when all you
have around you is tundra and Eskimos, then general ideas, unsuited to the
present, vanish and slip away as quickly as thoughts of eternal bliss. About
personal life? [. . .] We’re afraid that we’ll be overheard [. . .] I’m personally
afraid that my friend Sergeenko, whose mind appeals to you, will, raise his
finger in all the train-cars and houses, and loudly discuss why I got together
with N, while Z still loves me. [. . .] In short, for our silence [. . .] blame
neither yourself nor me, but blame, as the critics say, “the era,” the climate,
the space, whatever you like, and leave circumstances to their own fatal,
inexorable current, hoping for a better future. (L:–)
Having fallen in love with Chekhov’s The Seagull, Nemirovich insisted on
including it in the repertoire of the young theater he had founded with
Stanislavsky, whom he infected with enthusiasm for Chekhov, and with
whom he staged all of Chekhov’s following plays. Chekhov gave
Nemirovich a medal with the inscription, “You gave my Seagull life.”
Outliving Chekhov by almost forty years, Nemirovich later directed the
legendary production of Three Sisters.
The writer Ivan Leontiev (pseudonym Shcheglov) began to appear in
print almost simultaneously with Chekhov, and in the late s, judging
from their letters, friendly relations were established. A sincere regard can
be sensed behind Chekhov’s jovial addresses: “Sweet Alba!” “Dearest
Captain!” “Sweet tragic Jean-ushka!” Chekhov read Shcheglov’s novel
and short stories and wrote of their merits, noting moments of outdated
style (later, in The Seagull, when Konstantin laments the formulaic turns in
his own works, Chekhov included some phrases from Shcheglov’s texts).
Seeing more merit in his friend’s prose, he was skeptical about Shcheglov’s
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dramaturgical attempts. Having witnessed several of Shcheglov’s failures in
the theater, Chekhov, by his own admission, endowed Katya, the heroine
of “A Boring Story,” who possesses a fatal passion for the theater, with
“some traits of the loveliest Jean” (August , ; L:). Shcheglov,
in an article-memoir on Chekhov, recalled a “wonderful blaze of friendship
and youth.” But his diary reflects elements of jealousy and plain envy for
his brilliant friend, which he hid from Chekhov at the time – and which
recall Salieri’s attitude toward Mozart. In his entry of December –,
: “What a talent, what sensitivity, what a sympathetic personality,
this damned Antoine!” And next to that: “Chekhov is a talent, but not a
teacher – for that you need will + morality, a general idea that animates.”
Shcheglov perceived Chekhov as a darling of fortune and himself as an
undervalued talent: “ July . Chekhov was given success easily, but
I had to fight every step of the way.”
On returning from Sakhalin, Chekhov encountered displays of ill will,
including from those he had considered friends:
I am surrounded by a thick atmosphere of malicious sentiment. Extremely
vague and incomprehensible to me. They feed me with dinners and sing me
vulgar dithyrambs, and meanwhile they’re ready to devour me. For what?
The devil knows. If I were to shoot myself, I’d give great pleasure to nine-
tenths of my friends and admirers. And in what petty ways they express
their petty feelings! [. . .] Shcheglov tells me all the gossip that goes around
about me, etc. It’s all terribly stupid and boring. These aren’t people, but
some kind of mold. (January , ; L:–)
Still, Chekhov kept up his correspondence with the friend of his youth to
the end, and encouraged and supported him: “Dear Jean, do not offend
your gift, which is, after all, from God, be free” (January , ;
L:). Shcheglov’s diary entry of July , , suggests late repentance:
“But since the Lord has condemned me to ‘outlive’ Chekhov, a duty arises –
to tell all the good about him, what has accumulated in my soul – to tell it
without delay . . . Chekhov’s death has certainly given me new sight; it has
morally regenerated and strengthened my will for the service of duty.”
Chekhov was fated to experience disappointment in his so-called friends
on the day of The Seagull’s failure at the Alexandrinsky Theater:
It was not the play that failed, but my own personality. Even during the first
act, I was struck by one circumstance, namely that those I’d been frank and
friendly with, before Oct. , the people I’d dined with carelessly, whose
cases I’d pleaded (such as Yasinsky) – all had a strange expression, terribly
strange . . . In a word, something happened there that gave Leikin reason to
express in his letter of condolence that I have so few friends, and for him to
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Chekhov’s Friends
ask in The Week: “what did Chekhov do to them?” [. . .] I’m at peace now,
my mood is fine, but still I can’t forget what happened, just as I wouldn’t be
able to forget it if, for example, someone had hit me.” (L:)
This letter of December , , is addressed to Alexei Suvorin, whose
friendship, at the time, was beyond question.
There were many points of difference between Chekhov and the pub-
lisher of Russia’s largest newspaper, the New Times. Suvorin was a quarter
of a century older than Chekhov, but their connection formed with
remarkable speed and developed into a long-lasting correspondence and
friendship. Suvorin, an experienced writer and publisher, had an immedi-
ate appreciation for Chekhov’s literary talent. He published many of his
works in his newspaper and for many years held the monopoly on
Chekhov’s prose collections. The time of their most intense closeness
was the second half of the s. Chekhov found more than a tactful
patron and an interesting conversationalist in Suvorin; he also found a
sincerity that was well suited to friendship:
Suvorin is the incarnation of sensitivity. This is a great man. In art, he
proceeds in the same way as a setter in a snipe hunt – that is, he works with
devilish keenness and always burns with passion. He is a bad theorist; he
hasn’t studied science; there’s much he doesn’t know; he is self-taught in
everything, hence his purely canine unspoiledness and wholeness, hence the
independence of his views. [. . .] It is pleasant to talk to him. And when you
understand his conversational technique, his sincerity, which the majority
of conversationalists lack, then talking to him becomes almost a delight.
(July , ; L:)
In discussions with Suvorin and letters to him in the late s and
early s, Chekhov was extremely open, willing to enter into the details
of his life and to share his creative designs. It was in his letters to Suvorin
that Chekhov most directly formulated his views on the tasks of literature:
“It seems to me that writers should not try to solve such questions as God,
pessimism, etc. It is the task of the writer to depict only who spoke or
thought of God or pessimism, and how, and under what circumstances.
The artist should not be the judge of his characters and of what they say,
but only an impartial witness” (May , ; L:); “You are confus-
ing two concepts: the solving of the question and the correct formulation of
the question. Only the second is obligatory for an artist” (October ,
; L:); “You scold me for objectivity, calling it indifference to good
and evil, the absence of ideals and ideas, and such. [. . .] When I write,
I fully rely on the reader [. . .] to provide those subjective elements that are
missing from the story” (April , ; L:).
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Suvorin’s replies have not survived, but we see that Chekhov was openly
firm in explaining his positions, apparently valuing a reciprocal sincerity in
his friend. The need for such communication was undisguised: “I long
passionately to speak with you. My soul is boiling. I want no one but you,
because you are the only person I can talk to” (December , ;
L:). Suvorin’s newspaper the New Times was a purveyor of state
ideology and right-wing conservative politics. From the very beginning,
Chekhov did not conceal his aversion to the aggressive articles of the
newspaper’s leading writers, but at the time he separated the publisher
from his “cactuses.” Chekhov “did not love The New Times,” recalled the
journalist Vlas Doroshevich, “but loved ‘old man Suvorin’ deeply and
strongly.” Keeping up his frankness in his letters, Chekhov pointed out the
wrongness to Suvorin himself of his coverage of important public events –
the student protests and especially the newspaper’s antisemitic campaign
with regard to Emile Zola’s involvement in the Dreyfus case in France. “In
the Zola case,” Chekhov wrote to his brother Alexander, on February ,
, “The New Times behaved simply vilely. The old man and
I exchanged letters over this (though in a very moderate tone) – and then
both fell silent. I don’t want to write him and don’t want to receive his
letters. [. . .] I’ve been bored with all of this for a long time now” (L:).
The exchange of letters would continue, but without any trace of the
former friendly intimacy. After Chekhov’s death, on July , , Suvorin
confessed, in the New Times: “I’m much indebted to Chekhov, to his
beautiful soul.”
With the writers of the next generation – Maxim Gorky, Ivan Bunin,
Alexander Kuprin – Chekhov maintained well-disposed, at times friendly
relations, sharing creative advice. Each of them left reminiscences of their
meetings with their older comrade.
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An “Indeterminate Situation”
Chekhov’s Illness and Death
Michael Finke
Doctor Anton Chekhov lived two decades knowing that his life would
likely be cut short by tuberculosis (TB). His final hours, related by his
wife Olga Knipper, became legend, and a museum memorializes his
passing in the Black Forest spa town of Badenweiler. Raymond
Carver’s “Errand” retells it – shifting focus and draining the tale of
affect – and his fictional details have been taken up by subsequent
Chekhov biography as fact.
Pulmonary TB may have receded in the cultural consciousness
together with the disease, but this essay was written during the global
COVID- pandemic. COVID- above all attacks the lungs, and this
has made Chekhov’s suffering newly vivid. Accounts of a gasping
Chekhov pausing for breaks when climbing a few flights of stairs to his
wife’s Moscow apartment or growing winded from merely pruning a
rosebush in the garden of the White Dacha at Yalta acquire added
emotional resonance.
There also may be new facts about Chekhov’s death. In a team of
biochemists was given access to letters Chekhov had worked on and the
shirt he was wearing the day he died. Lifting molecular evidence from
blood and sputum stains for laboratory analysis, they found – as expected –
proteins characteristic of M. tuberculosis. But they also found a protein
known as ITIH, produced in response to blood clots, which “suggests
that the immediate cause of Chekhov’s death was not heart failure or
suffocation caused by the infection itself but a stroke, which cut off blood
supply to an artery in the writer’s brain.”
To a layman, the hypothesis of a massive stroke seems contradicted by
Knipper’s telling of Chekhov’s last minutes:
The doctor arrived and ordered champagne. Anton Pavlovich sat up and
loudly informed the doctor in German (he spoke very little German), “Ich
sterbe.” (“I’m dying”).
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He then took a glass, turned his face towards me, smiled his amazing
smile and said, “It’s a long time since I drank champagne,” calmly drained
his glass, lay down quietly on his left side, and shortly afterwards fell silent
forever.
Perhaps Knipper fibbed, substituting self-awareness, agency, and an undis-
torted smile, suitable for posterity, in place of debilitation. But the only
other firsthand memoir, by Leo Rabeneck, does not contradict her in the
fundamentals. Further, Chekhov had recurring phlebitis; could the clot-
ting protein have issued from that malady? And by the time of his death he
had a significant history of heart problems: having long complained of
digestive disorder, hemorrhoids, headaches, and flashing in his eyes, after
his strenuous journey to Sakhalin he began suffering an irregular heartbeat,
with palpitations at times waking him at night and leading to worries of
imminent death. As his TB progressed and general muscular wasting
became evident, it still seems likely that heart failure delivered the
final blow.
But just what, precisely, brought Chekhov’s life to an end is itself a dead
end. Whatever turned the switch off at the very last moment, it was TB
that killed Chekhov, while any meaningful story to be told about his illness
and death will address how he lived with knowledge of his illness.
That, however, is also somewhat perplexing.
Certain externals are clear. Letters and the memoirs of family and
associates locate Chekhov’s bouts of blood-spitting; a case history from
his posthemorrhage stay at the Ostroumov clinic in was published
(with his identity disguised) during his lifetime. Chekhov wintered in
locales prescribed as healthful in the last years of his life, and he obediently
stayed indoors at dusk and avoided alcohol. Memoirs describe the care he
took with his sputum to avoid infecting others. In his last years he
organized his literary estate (the disadvantageous contract with Adolf
Marx); an informal will ensured a home and income for his mother and
sister after he was gone.
When it comes to how Chekhov felt about all this, however, speculation
begins. He rarely made telling disclosures to his family or friends and
instead persistently understated or lied about his condition. Letters prior to
his massive hemorrhage in insisted that his symptoms did not add up
to TB. From after his first serious episode of blood-spitting in until
the hemorrhage almost killed him, he refused sounding by another
physician; even after diagnosis in he avoided it. His very last
communications to his family from Badenweiler misleadingly claimed he
was on the mend.
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Chekhov’s Illness and Death
Biographers ask how Chekhov could have ignored his illness for so long.
Why undertake the difficult journey to Sakhalin instead of measures to
resist disease? Chekhov’s downplaying of his affliction involved pragmatic
stoicism, and perhaps also a deliberate double consciousness: it was con-
ventional for a physician to lie in regard to a disease whose course might be
better if a positive attitude were maintained.
Also, Chekhov was confronting his TB at a particularly complicated
moment. Germ theory was displacing previous understandings of the
disease by , and in Robert Koch isolated the responsible
bacillus. Nevertheless, longstanding views of the disease and an individ-
ual’s capacity to resist it as hereditary and constitutional remained preva-
lent. In this preantibiotic age, identifying the bacillus took Chekhov no
closer to a cure, though rest and better feeding might have helped: good
hygiene and nutrition, escape from overcrowded housing, and isolation
and education of infectious individuals reduced the incidence of TB over
the twentieth century more than antibiotics.
Chekhov surely kept current on TB, but his library of medical books
shows no pronounced focus. Interestingly, while he always avoided nam-
ing the disease afflicting him, he would refer to the “bacillus” as present in
his body. He wrote Shekhtel’ that he could not marry, because “I’ve got
the bacillus in me” (December , ; L:). In February –
shortly before his massive hemorrhage – the actress Liudmila Ozerova,
with whom he had an affair, wrote that she “cannot believe that some sort
of bacilli have dared to take over your organism.” Later Chekhov assuaged
his wife’s self-castigation for pursuing her career in Moscow while he
convalesced in Yalta: “If we’re not together now, then it’s neither you
nor I who is guilty for that, but the demon who planted the bacillus in me
and a love of art in you” (September , ; L:).
Why avoid naming his malady?
Ideas about the hereditary and constitutional bases of TB had a power-
ful hold on Chekhov. Deeply engaged with theories of evolution and
degeneration, and critical of the latter, his thinking about himself was
shaped by both. Degeneration had a disquieting resonance for the grand-
son and son of former serfs, the son of a bankrupt, and the brother of two
alcoholics – one consumptive – who was himself facing TB. When in
March Chekhov gushed blood while dining at the Hermitage Hotel
in Moscow, he soberly pointed out to Suvorin that both his late brother
and his cousin had suffered such bleeds from the same (right) lung.
Chekhov wanted to believe he could transcend his inheritance. He
argued with the prominent zoologist Vladimir Vagner that “no matter
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how irreversible degeneration may seem to be, it could always be overcome
through personal will and education.” The famous letter to Suvorin, in
which Chekhov encouraged him to write the story of how a “young man
[he means himself] squeezes the slave out of himself drop by drop”
(January , ; L:), should probably be taken quite literally.
Rather than a disavowal of reality, stubbornly resisting diagnosis may
partially reflect a program of self-disciplining, of willfully overcoming
degenerative inherited traits.
In any case, worries do show through between the lines of Chekhov’s
letters prior to .
After Chekhov’s first documented lung hemorrhage, he wrote his pub-
lisher Nikolai Leikin about three days of bleeding from his throat, “and
just when the medicaments my colleagues are stuffing me with will help
I cannot say” (December , ; L:). Chekhov claimed to have
been surprised, though he had reported ominous signs in earlier letters. He
located the cause in “some little ruptured vessel . . .,” but the ellipsis is
telling: he knew better. Chekhov prevaricated from the start.
Over the next five years Chekhov suffered at least eleven episodes of
blood-spitting. With others he always avoided direct mention of TB, as
well as medical treatment. During his spring trip to Taganrog and
the south of Russia, for instance, he complained to Leikin of hemorrhoids,
digestive distress, bronchitis and phlebitis. Such frequent false intimacies
to Leikin warded off demands of material for Oskolki or invitations to visit
St. Petersburg or travel together.
And yet, Chekhov did sometimes disclose his dire condition indirectly,
through coded remarks. A letter to Alexei Pleshcheev refers to “spitting
blood. It’s probably nothing, but nonetheless unpleasant” (October ,
; L:). An apparent non sequitur then conveys the significance of
this “nothing”: the next line tells of a wall collapsing on Kuznetsky street
and crushing many people, thus evoking the motif of sudden death. In a
canonical feature of Chekhov’s poetics, a seemingly accidental contiguity
evokes an equivalence.
A more detailed account followed to Alexei Suvorin:
I first noticed [blood-spitting] in myself years ago in the Circuit Court: it
continued for about – days and produced no little commotion in my soul
and in my apartment. [. . .] Every winter, fall and spring and every humid
summer day I cough. But all this frightens me only when I see blood: in
blood flowing from the mouth there’s something ominous, as in a red glow
in the sky. When there’s no blood, I don’t worry and don’t threaten
Russian literature with “yet another loss.” The thing is that consumption
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Chekhov’s Illness and Death
or other serious lung maladies are identified only by an aggregate of signs,
and I do not have precisely this aggregate. In itself bleeding from the lungs
is not serious; blood sometimes flows from the lungs all day, in torrents
[. . .] and it finishes with the patient not being finished off – and that’s most
often the case. So, be aware, just in case: if someone known not to be
consumptive suddenly bleeds from the mouth, there’s no need to be
terrified. [. . .]
If the bleeding that had happened to me in the Circuit Court had been a
symptom of beginning consumption, then by now I’d have long been in the
other world – that’s my logic. (October , ; L:)
The passage’s concluding words oppose “my logic” to medical knowledge,
underlining Chekhov’s illogic: he wanted Suvorin to know the truth
without having to speak it.
Two weeks later Chekhov responded to Dr. Elena Lintvareva’s ques-
tioning why he “took no measures” regarding his health: “You recommend
that I take measures, but you don’t name any of these measures. Take
Dover’s powder? Take anise drops? Go to Nice? Not work? Doctor, let’s
agree that we will never again speak of measures” (October , ;
L:). With a fellow physician Chekhov vetoes substantive discussion:
medicaments would do nothing, while retirement and travel to healthier
climes are impossible, given his resources and family responsibilities.
Chekhov was less disavowing facts than consciously suppressing both
facts and attending emotion. So it was in his handling of his brother
Nikolai’s last weeks. In spring of Chekhov took him to the family’s
current summer retreat at the Lintvarev estate near Sumy. Although
Chekhov assured the patient that he would recover from the typhoid also
afflicting him, Chekhov knew the end was near. Letters also express consid-
erable irritation at Nikolai’s demands and noisy coughing. In mid-June,
misjudging the time remaining, Chekhov departed for a respite with friends
in Poltava province. The day after he left, Nikolai died, and Chekhov
returned immediately. At some level Chekhov perhaps wished to be away
for Nikolai’s death. At the funeral he demonstrably tamped down emotion:
in a letter written afterward, Alexander reported that among the family only
Anton had not cried (and according to his mother and sister, never cried in
his life). Chekhov wrote Pleshcheev, “our family had not yet known death”
(June , ; L:), but this repressed the sudden loss of his
beloved toddler sister, Evgeniya. When his own death was approaching,
Chekhov went abroad, avoiding familial emoting.
Soon after Nikolai’s burial Chekhov began conceiving his research
voyage to Sakhalin Island. That hard journey was an assertion of bodily
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health; a project with social and scientific value that promised new mean-
ingfulness to life, it conveyed him to a world of suffering that displaced his
own troubles. At a mythopoetic level it figured as a journey to hell, a quest
involving death and rebirth. On the sea voyage home he challenged death
in the Indian Ocean by diving from the bow of the steamer, swimming in
the open sea, and catching a line dragged by the ship’s stern as it went by
to reboard. Nevertheless, Chekhov fell ill as soon as he returned home,
complaining of headache, lethargy, and an irregular heartbeat.
A remarkable letter to Suvorin from exposes Chekhov’s compli-
cated approach to intimations of mortality:
Last night I had fierce palpitations [. . .] I didn’t let the palpitations scare
me, because all these sensations, such as tremors, knocks, falterings, etc., are
horribly deceptive. And you shouldn’t believe them either. The enemy that
is killing one’s body ordinarily sneaks up unnoticed, in a mask, while for
example you’re ill with consumption and it seems to you that it’s not
consumption but trifles. People don’t fear cancer either because it seems
to be a trifle. Thus, what’s terrible is what you’re not afraid of; that which
arouses apprehension is not terrible. It seems I’m writing unclearly. Healing
nature, killing us, at the same time artfully deceives, as a nanny does a baby
when she’s carrying him from the living room to sleep. I know that I’ll die
from an illness that I won’t be fearing. It follows from this: if I’m afraid, it
means I won’t die.
The letter then dismisses Suvorin’s complaints, in implicit contrast with
his own, as “a psychological semi-illness,” and ends by wishing the wealthy
Suvorin “more money and a white ceiling in your study,” circling back to
the letter’s opening, about wanting to build a quiet space where he could
work at Melikhovo (August , ; L:–). Though couched in
negating, paradoxical formulations, Chekhov all but tells healthy Suvorin
that he expects to die of TB.
At Melikhovo in Chekhov nearly passed out while walking and
talking with his neighbor, “and for a moment I thought I was dying [. . .]
suddenly something tore loose in my chest, I felt warm and claustropho-
bic, there was buzzing in my ears” (April , ; L:). A few months
later: “Some years ago I was practicing spiritualism and the shade of
Turgenev, summoned by me, answered: ‘Your life is approaching sunset.’
And in fact right now I find myself wanting every little this and that [. . .]
some force, like a premonition, is rushing me to hurry” (July , ;
L:). “Some years ago” recalls and Chekhov’s first bout of
blood-spitting. Without saying so directly, Chekhov traces a lust for life to
the moment when he first knew himself to be consumptive. Indeed, his
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Chekhov’s Illness and Death
most productive years immediately followed the blood-spitting epi-
sode, and a qualitative shift in his writing (assisted by better publication
venues) took place in that period as well.
Others noticed changes for the worse prior to the hemorrhage in .
Although Mikhail Chekhov’s memoir insists that Chekhov did not appear
sick, he had witnessed a bloody coughing fit. Told “it’s nothing,” but to
keep it from their sister or mother, Mikhail willingly dismissed his worries.
The family had incentive to disbelieve their own eyes: Chekhov had been
taking care of them in one way or another for twenty years.
All changed following the Hermitage bleed in March . After a few
days Obolonsky took Chekhov to the university clinic of their former
professor, Dr. Ostroumov, near the Novodevichy Monastery. Chekhov
was in the hospital for fifteen days. Over six feet tall, he now weighed less
than pounds. Now he spoke directly, telling Suvorin that the blood
was coming from his right lung, as with his brother Nikolai and another
relative who died of consumption.
The position of patient still rankled, and published reports of his ill
health particularly upset Chekhov. He avoided talking or writing about
death, often deflecting the matter with the formulaic reference to his
“indeterminate situation.” But he also began reorganizing his life in ways
that definitely acknowledged his condition.
There were stints in Nice and Yalta and the purchase of a series of
properties in the Crimea. There was his marriage at the end of May ,
when his health had so declined that he and Knipper sped directly from
the wedding to a rustic koumiss spa in Ufa province; it did him no good.
Two months later Chekhov wrote a will in the form of a letter to his sister,
which Knipper turned over after he died. The day before he and Knipper
left Moscow for Badenweiler, Nikolai Teleshov visited and was shocked by
Chekhov’s condition; Chekhov told him that he was leaving “to die,”
using a harsh euphemism. They stopped in Berlin for a useless consulta-
tion with a gastric specialist; there the foreign correspondent of the Russian
Gazette afterward reported to his employer that “Chekhov’s days were
numbered.” Nevertheless, Chekhov put on a brave face about this jour-
ney and its therapeutic prospects to the end.
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Society
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Class
Anne Lounsbery
In Chekhov’s lifetime class was only one of a number of terms – all of
them contested – that were used to describe how the population of
Imperial Russia was organized and determine how it was ruled. Between
and there existed competing and sometimes conflicting ways of
sorting and ranking the empire’s inhabitants. Most important was the
system of sosloviia (singular soslovie), usually translated as “social estates,”
which were categories the government had long used to define individuals’
rights and obligations. Unlike class, which sorts people according to their
economic condition and in theory permits social mobility, soslovie was
inherited, as well as legal and ascriptive. It was possible to be a rich
member of the peasantry, for instance, and to be a very poor member of
the dvorianstvo (nobility); it was also possible, though not easy, to change
one’s status.
Adding to the complexity was the crucially important hierarchy laid out
in the “Table of Ranks” (Tabel’ o rangakh), the state bureaucracy created by
Peter I and abolished only in . The Table defined the order of ranks in
military, civil, and court service, with the primary purpose of linking noble
soslovie status more closely with service to the autocratic state. The prestige of
one’s service rank (chin) did not necessarily correspond to one’s noble title or
lineage, though achieving a certain rank was a way for non-nobles to join the
nobility. Men were often addressed by their state service titles in daily life,
and rank could be indicated by dress. The system’s visibility and the tensions
it created afforded rich possibilities to realist writers – including Chekhov,
several of whose earlier stories focus on the power dynamics generated by
officialdom. Rank plays a significant role in Chekhov’s later works as well. In
Three Sisters (), for instance, when Natasha’s husband Andrei chooses
to ignore her affair with а local bureaucrat, Andrei’s decision makes sense
only in light of the official’s higher status.
It was soslovie, however, that determined how one was taxed, tried in
court, punished for crimes, and required or not required to serve in the
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military, as well as where one was allowed to live and how one was likely
to dress. In other words, estates were deeply embedded in the structures
of daily life, reinforced not just by law but by “property relations,
custom, and prestige,” by “way of life, values, religious practice, and
education.” Chekhov’s own soslovie origins were in the lower levels of
the merchantry. His mother was the daughter of a merchant; his
grandfather and father had been born enserfed peasants, but in
his grandfather managed to purchase his and his family’s freedom.
Chekhov’s upbringing (traditional and exceedingly pious) was fairly
typical for children of his background.
In theory the main sosloviia were nobles, clergy, townspeople or
merchants, and peasants; in theory these categories were mostly heredi-
tary. But in reality the system was less systematic – both more fragmented
and more flexible, and with a more complicated history – than it was often
represented to be. It was also persistent. In the period between the Great
Reforms and , though educated Russians of various political stripes
expected class-based divisions to replace those based on estate, soslovie
continued to shape not just government policy but also how people lived
and thought of themselves. The census still asked respondents to
identify themselves by soslovie, and in Moscow and St. Petersburg direc-
tories published around , many – but not all – “urban citizens of
substance” still identified themselves by soslovie even as they also included
information about their professions and service ranks.
Nonetheless, by the s industrialization and urbanization were
changing Russia in ways that the soslovie system could not easily accom-
modate. Most crucially, neither professionals nor industrial workers
occupied a clear status (indeed the meaning of the word “worker” –
rabochii – was unstable, only gradually coming to signify a class of people
who worked for wages). Proletarianized peasants in the cities were still
officially peasants; professionals like doctors, lawyers, teachers, and agron-
omists – whose lives had begun to coalesce around their professions – often
had no clear soslovie identity, or they eschewed whatever status they had
formerly occupied. The slippery term raznochintsy (literally “people of
various ranks”), which had appeared as early as the eighteenth century,
was increasingly used to designate upwardly mobile people from the lower
social orders (though it was at times used, including by Chekhov, in
a more explicitly ideological sense to identify “a select group of radical
non-noble intellectuals distinguished by their democratic spirit, social
conscience, and unassuming way of life”). Entrepreneurs of all soslovie
backgrounds were making money in private industry, and while these new
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Class
capitalists never cohered into “a self-conscious bourgeois class” in the
European sense, their identities were disconnected from their soslovie
origins. The many peasants who were still agricultural workers – a
population that had long been effectively self-administered simply because
the state lacked sufficient resources to control them directly – formed the
most self-contained and traditional segment of society. These rural peas-
ants remained largely unresponsive to class-based political appeals, at least
until the very eve of the revolution.
By the last decades of the nineteenth century, various kinds of socialist
ideas – ideas centered on the category of class – were extremely widespread
among Russia’s educated elites. Many thinkers on both the right and the
left agreed that Russia should strive to avoid the class conflict and urban
immiseration brought into being elsewhere by capitalism and industriali-
zation. And while orthodox Marxists in Europe held that the “iron
necessity” of historical laws required all countries to pass through the same
stages, Russian Marxists often rejected such inevitabilities (seeking alter-
natives in the peasantry’s communal traditions, for example, or in what
would come to be called “the advantages of backwardness”).
Chekhov’s adult life coincided precisely with the soslovie system’s weak-
ening ability to account for key segments of the population and thus to
make sense of Russia’s actual social structure. In a time of painful eco-
nomic transition and mass dislocation, with real-life social divisions no
longer reflected in legal definitions, traditional labels inevitably became
amorphous and confused. Thus new forms of self-description – not least
among them “intelligentsia” – were taking hold. This was especially true in
the “vast splintered middle of Russian society,” where many were
unmoored from the old categories but lacked a modern sense of class
consciousness per se. Urban factory workers, however, were developing
the sort of self-conscious class-based identity that would, by the end of the
century, make them receptive to revolutionary messages. By the last decade
of Chekhov’s life, Russian society was effectively structured by both soslovie
and class: while the two systems are perhaps theoretically incompatible,
they coexisted and overlapped all the way up to . Chekhov’s oeuvre
is remarkable for how it reflects these complexities and reflects upon them.
Compared, for example, to Tolstoy’s major works – which tend to focus
on the nobility and the peasantry, paying far less attention to the “splin-
tered middle” – Chekhov’s stories and plays encompass characters from a
wide range of social strata.
How did Chekhov conceive of class, classes and class conflict? An
letter has sometimes been cited as evidence that he rejected such
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categories: “I do not believe in our intelligentsia . . . I believe in individual
people, I see salvation in individual personalities scattered here and there
across Russia, whether they are intelligenty [members of the intelligentsia]
or peasants” (February , ; L:). A story like “The Fiancée”
() would seem to support the contention that Chekhov was far from
embracing class-based thinking, at least of the kind being promulgated by
revolutionaries. Here Chekhov invokes the vocabulary of revolution only
to undermine it by putting it in the mouth of a callow student, proclaim-
ing the imminent and glorious transformation of the world. And yet one
might argue that certain texts – among them “A Woman’s Kingdom,” “In
the Ravine,” and “A Case History” – could be read as quasi-Marxist
analyses of economic exploitation.
Above all Chekhov’s art reveals the confusion that afflicts ordinary
people in an era of radical change. The story “A Woman’s Kingdom”
() is told from the point of view of an orphaned young woman who
has inherited a fortune (and the factory that made the fortune) from a
self-made uncle. Anna Akimovna’s money has alienated her from every-
one, especially from those who share her social origins. She knows she is a
worker’s daughter, that others despise her for that, and she looks back
wistfully – and perhaps, Chekhov hints, unrealistically – to her early
childhood in a community of working people, wishing she were “a
worker, not a mistress!” (W:). Anna Akimovna receives anonymous
letters written in the up-to-date vocabulary of class hatred (calling her a
“millionaire exploiter” who “drinks workers’ blood,” W:). But the
impoverished people who beg her for money also use words like “bene-
factress” and “savior” (W:), thus evoking an entirely different moral
and economic imagination. Here, as in many other Chekhov texts, to fall
outside of or between clear social groups is to be vulnerable, especially
for women.
From the novella My Life (The Story of a Provincial) () one can
construct a virtual taxonomy – though unavoidably a very confusing one –
of the blurred and incongruous social categories produced (and destroyed)
by economic and social upheaval. The main character, Misail Poloznev, is
a member of the hereditary gentry. His father, a mediocre architect, has
managed to leverage soslovie privilege into a professional occupation, but
young Poloznev’s political principles lead him to “become a worker” so as
to live by his own labor. “What you call a position in society is the privilege
of capital and education,” he declares. “Poor and uneducated people earn
their daily bread by physical labor, and I see no reason why I should be an
exception” (W:).
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Class
Poloznev is a member of the percent who decides to join the
percent. The experiment is a disaster: Poloznev’s father disowns him; the
other workers distrust him; his labor is backbreaking and meaningless.
Most distressingly, he comes to see his fellow workers as nearly bestial in
their filth and vice. And yet the remnants of the old nobility are even more
loathsome: an old general’s widow, a former serf-owner, lives surrounded
by the detritus of her possessions, insisting that others pay lip service to her
noble status even as her mad son amuses himself by catching and eating
flies. She has sold her estate to an upstart capitalist, a self-made railroad
engineer of peasant background.
This arriviste despises all members of the lower orders, including the
proletarianized peasants he employs (and exploits) to build the railroad. As
is usual in Chekhov’s work, the railroad is associated with brutal modern-
ization, and the engineer (like Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard) represents
the possibility of a capitalist future in which Russians are effectively cut off
from old social identities. In “The New Villa” (), a member of the
nascent professional class – another “engineer,” this one in charge of
constructing a bridge – brings his family to rural Russia, where they try
to make sense of the locals. Despite their (inept and self-serving) offers of
aid to the peasants, the engineer and his wife are seen as a new version of
“gentry” (W:), whom the wary peasants address as “master,” “your
honor,” and “mistress” (e.g., W:, , ). The people’s distrust of
educated elites runs so deep that they meet offers of help with cries of,
“You have no right to insult [us] common people [narod]! We’re not serfs
anymore!” (W:). A Beckett-like scene toward the end of the story – a
crowd watches as two peasants, father and son, quietly “hit each other
again and again on the head in what [looks] less like a fight than some sort
of game” (W:) – suggests the near-impossibility of cross-
class understanding.
The harrowing story “In the Ravine” () depicts a village ravaged and
a formerly patriarchal family restructured by a capitalism that is both corrupt
(as represented by counterfeit coins that circulate throughout the narrative)
and energetically entrepreneurial. As is very often the case in Chekhov’s
stories about capitalist industrialization, less attention is paid to actual
production than to the circulation of money and useless goods (we see
something similar, for instance, in Three Years and “A Case History”). And
as usual, the victims are from the peasantry – here, former agricultural
workers who are forced to become day laborers in a brickyard. As one of
them says, in a telling conflation of the words for “peasant” and “Christian,”
“I’ve lost my feeling for peasant (khrestianskoi) work” (W:).
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But in Chekhov’s representation the exploiters themselves are often
from the peasantry. In the novella Peasants (Muzhiki, ), for instance,
the title immediately raises the possibility of fractures within peasant
society: the word muzhiki signifies not “the peasantry” (krestianst’vo, a
collective noun), nor “the (common) people” (narod, a word rich with all
the ambiguities of English “the people” and French “le peuple”), but just
“peasants” – numerous and ordinary. The story depicts the degradation of
the countryside, where hungry people inflict pointless violence upon one
another, as well as the disintegration of ideas that once afforded peasant
lives a semblance of meaning. As in My Life, Tolstoyan visions of dignity
attained in and through labor are entirely absent; indeed, here no labor is
represented at all.
The story is told from the perspective of a peasant family who have been
forced by illness to return from Moscow to the village, a narrative point of
view that underscores the isolation and alienation of rural life. Illiterate,
deeply ignorant, without religious faith or any inkling of a wider social
order, the villagers live “worse than beasts” and in constant fear (W:).
Above all, what they must fear are their fellow peasants: because it is most
often peasants like themselves who have become petty officials with the
right to steal from and abuse their neighbors. “Who runs the tavern and
gets people drunk?” the narrator asks, “The peasant. Who embezzles and
drinks away funds from the peasant collective, from the church, from the
schools? The peasant. Who has stolen from his neighbor, set fires, given
false testimony in court for a bottle of vodka? The peasant” (W:). Not
class conflict but social breakdown is the novella’s main concern.
However, in the unfinished and unpublished continuation of Peasants,
Chekhov’s focus changes: here we witness the process of proletarianization
that takes place once the peasant widow and her daughter, now beggars,
return to Moscow, where one becomes a laundress and the other a
prostitute (W:–, ). Much as The Cherry Orchard depicts
the process by which a gentry family’s ancestral land can become plots of
real estate to sell to dacha-buyers, so the epilogue of Peasants portrays how
deracinated peasants in the metropolis risk becoming what might be
described as an underclass.
One of Chekhov’s most celebrated stories, “Gooseberries” (), fea-
tures a character with the absurd name Nikolai Ivanovich Chimsha-
Gimalaisky. He is of noble status, but only marginally and tenuously: his
grandfather was a peasant, his father was a soldier who just barely attained
nobility through military service, and he himself was raised much as peasant
boys were. After inheriting nothing, for decades Chimsha-Gimalaisky lives a
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Class
stingy bureaucrat’s life, consumed with the goal of hoarding enough money
to buy an estate. He succeeds: the estate is ugly and straitened – the
gooseberries “hard and sour” – but nonetheless he delights in lording it over
the narod and repeating incessantly “I, as a member of the nobility”
(W:). His smugness leads to the narrator’s famous reflection on how
the complacency of the rich is a necessary condition for the suffering of the
poor: “All is quiet, peaceful, and the only protest comes from mute statistics:
how many people have gone mad, how many buckets [of vodka] have been
drunk, how many children have died of hunger. [. . .] And such a state of
things is clearly necessary; it’s clear that the happy man can feel good only
because the unhappy bear their burden silently” (W:).
That is why, the narrator continues, outside the door of every happy
person there should be a man with a hammer, striking incessantly to
remind him that others are not so fortunate. Here, as elsewhere,
Chekhov is sensitive to the often imperceptible ways in which the actions
of one group affect the lives of other groups. To this extent, Chekhov
thinks in terms of class and classes. But far from adopting the category of
class wholesale as an explanatory mechanism, Chekhov integrates it into
his work much as he does, say, religious symbolism: questions of class are
embedded in the specifics of individual situations, “translated into the
vernacular of quotidian life,” with the result that ideologies and received
ideas are just as likely to be subverted as they are to be confirmed.
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Money
Vadim Shneyder
The quarter-century of Chekhov’s literary career (–) unfolded
in the midst of a great transformation in Russia’s economic life. In ,
finance minister Sergei Witte wrote a secret memorandum to Emperor
Alexander III in which he observed that in the decades since the
emancipation of the serfs in , a multitude of disparate households
across the Russian Empire had merged into a national economy on a
continental scale:
The market and its price structure represent the collective interest of all
private enterprises which constitute our national economy. Buying and
selling and wage labor penetrate now into much deeper layers of our
national existence than was the case at the time of serf economy, when
the landlord in his village constituted a self-sufficient economic little world,
leading an independent life, almost without relation to the market. The
division of labor; the specialization of skills; the increased exchange of goods
among a population increasingly divided among towns, villages, factories,
and mines [. . .] all these processes rapidly developed in our fatherland
under the influence of the emancipation of the serfs, the construction of
a railroad network, the development of credit, and the extraordinary growth
of foreign trade. Now all organs and branches of our national economy are
drawn into a common economic life.
At the turn of the twentieth century, millions of people were entering the
money economy. Peasants were leaving their villages, often seasonally, to
work in the factories and industrial sites that were growing around the
empire. St. Petersburg and Moscow joined the ranks of the world’s largest
cities. Industrialization proceeded rapidly, particularly in the s, driven
largely by the expansion of the rail network. Work on the Trans-Siberian
Railway, which would eventually connect Moscow to Vladivostok, was
begun in (too late for Chekhov’s arduous journey to Sakhalin the
previous year) and completed in . This new environment appears
throughout Chekhov’s works, but it also profoundly shaped the conditions
of their production.
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Money
Though the Russian Empire remained a comparatively poor and under-
developed state relative to its European neighbors, contemporary observers
found the scale of the changes undeniable. Many of Chekhov’s works,
particularly the stories of his later years, feature capitalists and industrialists
as major characters. Even when they are not at the center of the story,
factories dot the landscapes that Chekhov’s characters traverse. In the
opening paragraph of “In the Ravine” (), we learn that only two
structures in the town of Ukleevo are visible from the road: the church
tower and the factory smokestack. Both in the fictional worlds of Russian
literature and in the lived experience of countless people, the late nine-
teenth century saw the overturning of the old social system and the
emergence of a new, money-driven society. Lopakhin, the self-made
businessman from The Cherry Orchard, arrives by train to purchase the
aristocratic Gaev’s estate, chop down the orchard, and use the land to build
rental properties. Gentry decline was by then a familiar theme in Russian
literature, but Chekhov, who was the grandson of a serf and who had
worked to survive since his teenage years, was himself the product of a new
era in Russia’s economic history. Chekhov’s financial biography touches
on many facets of Russia’s cultural and economic life at the end of the
century: the periodical press, the theater, the profession of medicine,
and landownership.
Writing for the Periodical Press
When Chekhov arrived in Moscow in to join his family and begin
his medical studies, his parents and five siblings were living in a squalid
apartment with few sources of income. He soon turned to writing humor-
ous pieces for newspapers in his spare time to supplement the family
budget. Like Dostoevsky before him, Chekhov depended primarily on
income from his literary undertakings – not inherited wealth or a produc-
tive estate – to maintain his family. This was not easy. The reading public
was growing in the s, and a range of periodicals and publishers
emerged to cater to a diversifying audience, but ordinary writers struggled,
especially when they had dependents to support. In January ,
Chekhov wrote to his older brother Alexander to thank him for one money
transfer and ask for another while complaining about his literary earnings:
“Please tell me, my soul, when will I start living like a human being, that is,
working and not in need? These days I work and am still in need, and I am
marring my reputation by having to do shitty work” (January , ;
L:).
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By this point, Chekhov had written hundreds of short stories, but each
brought in very little income. At the end of January , he asked
Alexander to stop by the office of the Petersburg Newspaper and “send
your pathetic brother” “the miserable honorarium” of rubles and
kopeks for lines of print (January , ; L:). The story
in question, “Sleepy,” now a classic, earned Chekhov about two weeks’
worth of a gymnasium teacher’s salary. This is a far cry from what was
considered a high income. In Anna Karenina (published –),
Stiva Oblonsky finds a remunerative private-industry job offering an
annual salary of between , and , rubles. Together with his
concurrent civil service post, this position promises to save him from his
creditors and secure a comfortable life for his family – the kind of stability
that Chekhov would seek for most of his life. But Chekhov’s fortunes, too,
were changing. Just a few days after the letter to his brother, he calculated
what he stood to earn from a long story that he was hoping to place in the
prestigious thick journal the Northern Herald. The editor had agreed to pay
rubles per printer’s sheet ( pages of printed text). “One has to be
a very great writer to earn a thousand rubles in one () month. Isn’t that
so?” Chekhov wrote (February , ; L:). “The Steppe,” which
appeared in the March issue, was both an artistic and a
financial breakthrough.
Along with the sale of his second book of stories, In the Twilight, the
-ruble award that came with the Pushkin Prize he received for that
collection in , and the income from performances of his early dra-
matic works, this promotion into the prestige press marked a change in
Chekhov’s financial situation. In October , he wrote to his cousin
Georgy Chekhov: “Brother, I’ve become a merchant. I sell articles, plays,
books, and medical advice. I’ll get no less than , rubles for the play
[Ivanov]; the other day I sold about stale, old, previously published
stories for rubles. . . . In a word, business is booming” (October ,
; L:). As his stature grew, so did his rate per printer’s sheet
(a common measure of remuneration among nineteenth-century Russian
writers). By the s, Chekhov was near the top of the writers’ pay scale,
earning rubles per sheet, like Nikolai Leskov, but still below Leo
Tolstoy. At the peak of his fame in the last years of his life, Chekhov
earned , rubles per sheet, comparable to Leonid Andreev and Maxim
Gorky. As Chekhov’s writings became more profitable, their form also
changed. In the early years, Chekhov published countless stories, most of
them short and intended for speedy consumption. Critics lamented that he
was wasting his talents on disposable trifles that were designed to be read
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Money
once and forgotten in the course of a busy day. Later, with the freedom
to work more slowly, Chekhov wrote fewer, longer, more artistically
ambitious pieces, almost all of which are now classics. Nevertheless, the
financial pressures did not relent.
In a February letter to the memoirist and writer Lidiia Avilova,
Chekhov declared “I am a ‘Marxist’ now” (February , ; L:). This
was no revolutionary profession de foi. Chekhov was jesting about his
recently signed agreement with Adolf Marx, one of Russia’s leading
publishers, for the purchase of republication rights to all of Chekhov’s
previously written works, plus everything he would write in the next
twenty years. Although Chekhov had maintained a close working relation-
ship and friendship with Alexei Suvorin, whose weekly newspaper New
Times published many of his works in the s, Suvorin had been
hesitant to fund the publication of Chekhov’s collected works. Marx was
more enthusiastic about the project. Moreover, the sum he offered –
, rubles for all of Chekhov’s previous works (not including those
written for the stage), plus a gradually increasing rate for his future
writings – was very appealing, given that Chekhov was still burdened by
debts and the need to support his family. In the beginning of his career,
Chekhov’s survival as an unknown writer depended upon his canny
understanding of mass tastes and on the growing market for popular
literature. His agreement with Marx near the end illustrates the growth
of the Russian publishing industry and reading public; the second edition
of Chekhov’s collected works, published in ten volumes as a supplement to
Marx’s illustrated magazine The Cornfield, appeared in in an extraor-
dinary run of , copies.
The Theater as Institution and Source of Income
Money was both a major plot element in Chekhov’s plays and a major factor
in their creation. Chekhov had long been interested in drama, but his
decision to write a play for Fedor Korsh’s Moscow theater in was
motivated primarily by money. In a letter to Alexander in October of that
year, Chekhov laid out his financial situation in stark terms. He was in poor
health, struggling to write, and facing bankruptcy. His earnings from news-
paper publications were pitiable. The only hope was the play, which might
bring in –, rubles. In another letter a few days later, he explained the
payoff of the upcoming performance of Ivanov: “the conditions: no less than
percent of the earnings. A night’s earnings for Korsh = ,–,, and
, for a benefit performance. The play will be staged many times”
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(October , ; L:). Although the Moscow premiere was not a great
success, subsequent performances of Ivanov, first at the Imperial
Alexandrinsky Theater in St. Petersburg and then in various cities of the
empire, brought Chekhov fame as a dramatist. A series of one-act comic
plays, notably The Bear (), earned additional income in the following
years. By the turn of the century, Chekhov was a well-known playwright, and
his collaborations with the Moscow Art Theater (MAT) had yielded both
notoriety and money. The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and the earlier
one-act plays were generating a substantial income. In December ,
Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, codirector of the MAT, reported that
Chekhov should expect , rubles in earnings from the winter season.
The theater world that Chekhov entered with the first performance of
Ivanov had recently undergone a transformation. In Russia, as in other
European countries, the state had traditionally held a monopoly on
theaters. In , in the course of a wide-ranging reform of theater
legislation, the monopoly of the imperial Russian theaters was abolished.
This permitted the establishment of commercial theaters in the two
capitals, and new theaters soon appeared in order to accommodate a
diversifying audience. On the one end of the spectrum were theaters
dedicated to high art, like the Korsh Theater and the MAT. On the other
were popular theaters that catered to the workers whose influx was trans-
forming Russia’s major cities. Unlike the imperial theaters, which received
substantial government subsidies, the private theaters depended upon
ticket sales and private investment to survive. Financial support often came
from wealthy patrons, like the textile magnate Savva Morozov, who
became the major supporter of the MAT. With their smaller budgets,
private theaters struggled to offer actors salaries comparable to the imperial
theaters. On the other hand, they could provide more innovative reper-
toires than their lavishly funded but artistically staid competitors. At its
inception, the MAT paid actors modestly, from as little as up to ,
rubles per year. As the lead director and head of the theater, Konstantin
Stanislavsky earned , rubles per year, which he sometimes had to
forgo to shore up the precarious budget. For comparison, Maria
Ermolova, star of the Imperial Malyi Theater in Moscow, earned ,
rubles a year at a time when actresses could outearn actors.
The Medical Profession
Chekhov practiced medicine throughout his life, jesting on several occa-
sions that it was his “lawful wife” while literature was an “unlawful” one
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(February , ; L:). However, it was his literary activity that
funded his lifestyle, permitted him to support his family, and made it
possible to pay for his own treatment as his tuberculosis worsened.
Physicians’ incomes in late imperial Russia were notoriously inadequate.
According to data gathered in , among doctors in salaried positions or
private practice, the vast majority earned less than , rubles annually,
and some as little as . Doctors often had to supplement their incomes
with other sources. For instance, Chekhov was earning between , and
, rubles annually from publications in the late s and early
s. The social status of doctors, particularly those who practiced in
the countryside, was correspondingly low. In the story “Enemies,”
the provincial doctor Kirilov fulminates against the nobleman Abogin,
who has called him away from his own child’s deathbed to attend to a
patient who turns out to have eloped with her lover. “I am a doctor,”
Kirilov protests, “and you think that doctors and all workers who don’t
smell of perfume and prostitution are lackeys and people of mauvais ton”
(W:). Medical practice and public health remained crucial for Chekhov
throughout his life. He set off on his journey to Sakhalin in part to
gather data for a doctoral dissertation, but it was his literary work that
funded his research.
Melikhovo and Landownership
In February , Chekhov acquired the -acre estate of Melikhovo,
about forty miles south of Moscow. As he explained in a letter to the
painter Alexander Kiselev, the estate had been purchased for , rubles,
of which Chekhov had paid , down. Of the borrowed money, ,
came from Suvorin, and Chekhov hoped to pay off the debt with new
editions of his books. The estate was supposed to cost less than the
apartment he was renting in Moscow for himself, his parents, and his
younger sister. He hoped it would generate ,–, rubles a year in
income. As it turned out, the run-down estate was time-consuming and
expensive to manage. In the summer of , Chekhov put Melikhovo up
for sale. He advertised it for , rubles but ended up selling for a
fraction of that amount – to a timber merchant who, in anticipation of The
Cherry Orchard, was interested in the estate for its forest.
Traditionally, landownership had been associated with the nobility,
and Chekhov joked that by buying the estate he was fulfilling his dream of
becoming a duke. The emancipation legislation of inaugurated an
era when landownership among commoners became more widespread.
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Among the nobility, wealth inequality was high, and by , nearly two
thirds of nobles owned no land at all. In nineteenth-century Russian
literature, as in traditional historiography, the decline of the nobility in
the decades following the emancipation was a well-established narrative.
More recent scholarship continues to debate the extent to which the real
nobility underwent a generalized decline. As Elise Wirtschafter puts it,
“the putative ‘decline of the nobility’ referred to a changing relationship
to the land and a broadening of employment opportunities due to
economic modernization and the spread of education. In the post-
emancipation era, economically weak landowners and those who were
not interested in farming their states withdrew from the countryside,
leaving in place a core of entrepreneurial noble proprietors who success-
fully adapted to the significant economic and social innovations of the
late nineteenth century.”
Although generally skeptical of stereotypes, Chekhov contributed pow-
erfully to the narrative of gentry decline. In his plays and stories, new
people, empowered variously by ambition, talent, greed, or luck, often
lacking the weakness and refinement of their gentry predecessors, were
ascendant on country estates, in provincial towns, and in the big cities.
Chekhov was one of these new people. He was one generation removed
from serfdom; his father had, until age sixteen, belonged to the historian
A. D. Chertkov; and Chekhov, who spoke only Russian fluently, who first
traveled abroad at thirty-one, and who had fantasized since his youth about
a gentry lifestyle, described this great transition so vividly because he
embodied it.
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Politics
Derek Offord
The life of Anton Chekhov (–) spanned the period from
Alexander II’s Great Reforms (–) following Russia’s defeat in
the Crimean War (–), starting with the emancipation of the serfs
in , to the eve of the First Russian Revolution in , which was
accompanied by another unexpected military humiliation, this time in the
Russo-Japanese War of –. This period encompassed both a
phase of belated modernization and reform and a phase of reaction and
counter-reform. Seen as a whole, it was a time of increasing urbanization
and industrialization and of belated capitalist development, although, by
the time of Chekhov’s death, Russia was still a relatively rural and back-
ward country by European standards. It was also a time when a revolu-
tionary movement established itself to an extent that would make it
impossible for the Romanov dynasty, which dated from , to retain
absolute political power. Profound social change was taking place too: this
was the twilight hour for the nobility. The change is poignantly captured
in Chekhov’s last play, The Cherry Orchard, premiered six months before
his death, in which the estate of an impoverished noble family is sold at
auction to the entrepreneurial son of a man who had been a serf on it
before the emancipation. The purchaser, Lopakhin, who represents both
the dynamism and the destructiveness of the economic forces unleashed by
the Great Reforms, will chop down the estate’s orchard, which is laden
with meaning for its previous owners, in order to make space to build
dachas for rent.
In this brief survey of the political conditions in which Chekhov lived
his adult life, I shall focus on two interrelated subjects that inform the
cultural and moral climate of Russia from the late s, when he was
maturing and when he moved from Taganrog to study at Moscow
University. First, I shall describe the development of the revolutionary
movement, its lull during the s, after its first peak (which coincided
with Chekhov’s first two years at university), and the rise of new currents
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in it from the early s. Secondly, I shall consider the return to
reactionary politics in the s, during the reign of Alexander III
(–), and the concurrent development of an extreme form of
conservative nationalism. In the process, I shall allude to some of the ways
in which the political context I outline may help us better understand the
mood that pervades Chekhov’s short prose fiction and drama, and some of
the issues raised in them.
The Revolutionary Movement
In the early s, students attracted to socialist ideas had begun to
organize circles in their institutions and to conduct propaganda in workers’
circles in the main cities and some provincial towns of European Russia.
Then, in , some , young men and women undertook a large-
scale “going to the people” (khozhdenie v narod), descending on villages
throughout European Russia and taking jobs as teachers, doctors, mid-
wives, craftsmen, and laborers. Their aim was to familiarize the peasants
with socialist ideas by means of peaceful propaganda (as advocated by the
revolutionary strategist Petr Lavrov) or to incite uprisings among them, as
recommended by the internationally renowned anarchist Mikhail
Bakunin. The failure of this uncoordinated movement to create unrest
and the arrest of the majority of its participants led the revolutionaries’
remaining sympathizers, in , to found a tightly structured, centralized
underground party, Land and Liberty (Zemlia i volia).
The harsh sentences meted out at trials conducted in and to
the participants in the “going to the people” for their largely peaceful
activity tended to turn the idealistic youth toward more violent forms of
opposition. The early acts of terrorism committed under the aegis of Land
and Liberty ranged from attempts to kill police agents who had infiltrated
socialist circles to the killing of agents of the justice system (public
prosecutors, police chiefs, prison governors) who were responsible for the
detection, prosecution, and punishment of revolutionaries. News of this
activity, incidentally, provoked discussion even in sleepy Taganrog, where
the teenage Chekhov was beginning to prepare himself to apply to medical
school in Moscow.
Eventually, the attention of the revolutionaries came to rest on the tsar
himself, as the bearer of ultimate responsibility for Russia’s social and
political conditions. In the autumn of , influential members of Land
and Liberty concluded that it was necessary to wage a terrorist campaign
against the autocrat in the hope of wringing political concessions from the
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Politics
government (especially freedom to conduct their propaganda or the grant-
ing of a constituent assembly) or even toppling the autocratic regime.
Some thinkers and activists based this hope on the assumption that the
autocracy was a colossus with feet of clay that did not represent the
interests or enjoy the support of a powerful social class like the bourgeoisie
in Western Europe. A new party was therefore founded, The People’s Will
(Narodnaya volia), which, over a period of roughly a year and a half,
organized several attempts on the tsar’s life. In November , they
detonated a bomb under a railway line on the outskirts of Moscow and
derailed a train on which they mistakenly thought he was traveling. In
February , a manual worker associated with the party managed to
gain employment in the Winter Palace and caused an explosion there with
dynamite that he had smuggled into his quarters two floors below the tsar’s
dining room. The tsar, however, arrived late for dinner on that day.
Finally, on March , , they fatally injured Alexander with a bomb
in an attack on the embankment of a St. Petersburg canal. Chekhov
himself was not attracted by the eager student activism of these years,
let alone the aura of heroism that seemed to many of his fellow students to
emanate from members of The People’s Will.
The assassination of Alexander II yielded none of the outcomes that the
members of The People’s Will regarded as desirable or possible.
Nonetheless, revolutionary groups did continue to spring up after the
assassination and repeated efforts were made to sustain or revive the
organization, including one in St. Petersburg in . Another attempt
at tsaricide in the capital was planned in –, but the members of
the terrorist cell were arrested before they could attack the tsar, and five of
its leaders, including Alexander Ul’ianov, the elder brother of Lenin, were
hanged. However, The People’s Will was now being driven into more
remote locations on the periphery of the European part of the empire. One
attempt to rebuild the party, for instance, was made in the south of Russia
by mainly Jewish revolutionaries who tried to establish bases in such cities
as Odessa, Khar’kov, and Rostov-on-Don and even in backwaters such as
Taganrog. One of the leaders of this short-lived revival, Natan Bogoraz,
had been a pupil at Chekhov’s school.
Many opponents of the regime, though, concentrated in the s on
less glamorous and patient propagandistic activity within student circles
and among urban workers. At the same time, the range of views they held
about Russia’s path toward socialism and revolutionary strategy began to
broaden. The followers of Lavrov and Bakunin and the members of Land
and Liberty and The People’s Will – all of whom came to be classified as
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“Populists” of one complexion or another – had believed that Russia could
proceed directly from its present state of social and economic organization
to a form of socialism by building on the supposedly collectivist nature of
the Russian peasant. By the s, though, growing awareness that
factory workers were more receptive than peasants to socialist propaganda
encouraged opponents of the regime to consider whether the Marxian
model was applicable to Russia. The increasingly visible development of
capitalism there, according to proponents of this Western strand of social-
ist thought, such as Georgy Plekhanov and – in the s – the young
Lenin, portended the rise of the bourgeoisie and its acquisition of political
freedoms that would weaken the autocracy. In these circumstances, one
wing of the revolutionary movement anticipated a struggle of the sort
described by Marx between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat and estab-
lished a social democratic labor party in , which split in into the
parties known as Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. Many other people with a
social conscience settled for more modest local attempts to ameliorate the
conditions of the poor through “small deeds” (malye dela), such as the
creation of schools, libraries, medical centers, and pharmacies – activities
into which Chekhov threw himself, especially during his years at
Melikhovo.
Traces of the influence of revolutionary ideas abound in the world
Chekhov describes, although Chekhov himself was skeptical about ideol-
ogies and the social panaceas they seem to offer, and doubted the wisdom
and motives of those who embrace them with certainty. In “On the Road”
(), for example, Likhariov recounts his many flirtations with fashion-
able ideas and movements, from atheism, nihilism, going to the people,
working in factories, and love for “the Russian people” to Slavophilism and
the Tolstoyan pacifist doctrine of nonresistance to evil by force. Likhariov
is a literary descendant of Ivan Turgenev’s “superfluous man” Rudin: he
has the capacity to believe passionately in something and to inspire others,
but his lack of practical sense dooms him to squander everything he has,
both property and relationships. The narrator of “An Anonymous Story”
() is a revolutionary sympathizer who, we are led to believe, was once
attracted to terrorism. Using a false identity, he has obtained a post as a
domestic servant in the home of a St. Petersburg official, Orlov, with the
intention of collecting information that will enable fellow revolutionaries
to assassinate Orlov’s father, who is a government minister. The plot
comes to nothing, though, as Chekhov’s sick and jaded protagonist
abandons St. Petersburg and ends up caring for the infant child of a lover
whom Orlov had rejected. Evidently, the “eternal student” Trofimov in
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Politics
The Cherry Orchard has also harbored revolutionary sympathies, but like
Chekhov himself he is critical of the intelligentsia’s habit of unproductive
philosophizing.
There are traces too in Chekhov’s stories of tensions among the regime’s
opponents. In “House with a Mezzanine” (), for instance, the young
artist who narrates the story and the aristocrat with whom he is staying are
taken to task for their lack of social conscience and neglect of local affairs
by Lida Volchaninova, a young noblewoman who devotes her life to the
sort of philanthropic work Chekhov himself undertook, but with a self-
assurance of which Chekhov did not approve. In “My Life” (also ),
the narrator, Misail Poloznev, is driven by a forceful woman, Masha
Dolzhikova, whom he loves and to whom he is briefly married, to attempt
to merge with the peasantry in the manner of some Populists and
Tolstoyans. However, the project serves only to underline the differences
between Misail and Masha and, more broadly, the futility of well-meaning
efforts by the intelligentsia to save the common people. Masha’s theoretical
concern for the peasants, whom she comes to see as ungrateful savages,
quickly cools.
The Conservative Turn
Although revolutionary groups continued to function in the s and
branched out in new directions in the s, they found themselves
operating in a more reactionary and nationalistic environment after the
assassination of Alexander II. The son of the dead tsar who came to the
throne in as Alexander III was a staunch conservative who respected
native custom and resisted Western innovation. He was in any case heavily
influenced and easily manipulated by his former tutor, Konstantin
Pobedonostsev, the Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod throughout his
reign and the author of the manifesto of April , , in which the tsar
affirmed his determination to defend the absolute power of the Russian
sovereign. Pobedonostsev opposed aspirations to introduce constitutional
and democratic government, resisted social mobility, and invariably sup-
ported the interests of the Orthodox Church over those of other religious
denominations and Russian Orthodox sects.
The new tsar indefinitely shelved proposals that had been approved by
his father on the morning of his death. These proposals had made
provision for the establishment of commissions consisting of local repre-
sentatives who would discuss draft legislation before its enactment.
Alexander II’s relatively liberal advisers now resigned or retired and were
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replaced by men of reactionary temper. Sweeping emergency powers were
granted, in a law of August , which could be used whenever and
wherever the highest authorities deemed them necessary.
Legislation inspired by Pobedonostsev and the ministers of Alexander
III was intended both to suppress discussion of dissenting ideas and to
buttress the old social order by restoring social and political privileges
to the nobility. Thus, in , there were new provisions relating to
censorship (provisions which editors of periodicals in which Chekhov
published his short stories, such as Alexei Suvorin, always had to keep
in mind). The long-lived Notes of the Fatherland, which stood toward
the liberal or radical end of the spectrum of periodical publications, was
closed by the authorities in . In , a Nobles’ Land Bank was
set up from which members of the gentry could take out loans on
favorable terms. In , steps were taken to restrict the access of
pupils from the lower social classes to higher education institutions
by raising fees for tuition in gimnazii (high schools, from which pupils
could progress to universities) and by requiring head teachers to supply
institutions with information about their pupils’ social background and
political attitudes.
Alongside the long-standing liberal and radical “Westernist” tendency in
the Russian intelligentsia and the revolutionary tendency that developed
from the s, there had also flourished a strong tradition of conservative
nationalism. This tradition had been represented, from the late s to
the mid-s, by the so-called Slavophiles, who romantically imagined
the Russians as a pacific, apolitical, and innately Christian people, and by
Official Nationalists, who defined the bases of Russian life as autocracy,
Orthodoxy, and (more vaguely) nationality, which they conceived as
Russianness. By the s, Official Nationality had been supplanted by
Pan-Slavism, which primarily served the expansionist interests of the
imperial state, especially in the Balkans. On the domestic level, unsenti-
mental nationalism of this sort encouraged Russification of the empire’s
ethnic minorities, such as its Poles, Ukrainians, Jews, Tatars, Baltic
Germans, Finns, and Armenians. One particularly virulent manifestation
of this species of nationalism was official tolerance of antisemitic pogroms,
of which over broke out in the south of Russia in –.
(Antisemitism informs characters’ comments about the dying Jewish wife
of Ivanov, the eponymous central figure of Chekhov’s first four-act play
[; revised edition ].) A more benign, but conspicuous, cultural
sign of the nationalistic mood of the closing decades of the century was the
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Politics
ostentatiously native architectural style of the Church of the Savior on
Spilled Blood that Alexander III had built in St. Petersburg, Russia’s
European metropolis, on the spot where terrorists of The People’s Will
(revolutionaries infected by Western nihilism, conservatives believed) had
mortally wounded his father in .
The reactionary turn in the closing decades of the nineteenth century is
reflected in Chekhov’s writings in the strong sense of antagonism between
social classes that informs “My Life.” Misail, Chekhov’s narrator, prefers
physical labor to the sorts of managerial or professional work that his father
expects scions of his noble family to undertake. For this leaning, Misail is
reported to the local marshal of the nobility, summoned to an interview
with the provincial governor, and threatened with expulsion from the
town in which he has been brought up if he does not conduct himself in
a manner deemed more becoming for a nobleman. The stifling political
atmosphere of the s and s could also militate against adventur-
ousness and encourage the sort of dull conformity exhibited by Chekhov’s
timorous schoolteacher Belikov, the eponymous “Man in a Case,” who has
a crippling fear of rule-breaking.
Combined with the failure of the “going to the people” and the
subsequent terrorist campaign, the reactionary social and cultural policies
pursued by Alexander III and continued by his son Nicholas II (reigned
–) helped in the last two decades of the nineteenth century to
create among the opponents of the autocratic regime a mood of resignation
reminiscent of the oppressive reign of Nicholas I (–). The feeling
that an age of great expectations had come to an end was accentuated by
the deaths, in , , and respectively, of the poet Nikolai
Nekrasov, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev, whose writings had demonstrated
the vitality of Russian literature. The resulting despondency and sense of
futility are pervasive in Chekhov’s plays. They are embodied, for example,
in Ivanov (the ubiquity of the protagonist’s surname seems to suggest that
he is an everyman in his milieu). At thirty-five years of age, this weary
former idealist has become a burned-out, self-loathing representative of the
generation that had failed in the s to bring youthful dreams to
fruition. The play aptly ends with Ivanov’s suicide. Characters who remain
in some way idealistic or romantic – Vershinin, Masha, and Irina in Three
Sisters, first performed in , for instance – are defeated by meshchanstvo,
the vulgar and philistine mores of the provincial lower middle class,
represented in that play by Natasha, who marries into the sisters’ family
and takes control of their household. Only members of distant future
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generations, it seems to such characters, will have opportunities to live
purposeful and fulfilling lives.
*
Readers of Chekhov, pace Marxist-Leninist criticism, can have little con-
fidence that political solutions will ever remove the sort of ennui that
depresses or enervates so many human beings as Chekhov portrays them.
Sometimes the adoption of a political cause or idea, be it nihilism or belief
in the goodness of the common people, is presented as a step that actually
hampers a person’s search for a useful or fulfilling life. Nonetheless, the
politics of Russia in Chekhov’s day is an irremovable part of the texture of
his stories and plays, both as a subject on which his characters reflect and
argue and as a partial explanation of their often frustrating experience.
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Peasants
Christine D. Worobec
On February , , two years before Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves
in the United States and a year after Anton Chekhov’s birth, Tsar
Alexander II ratified the statutes emancipating Russia’s serfs. On March
, at the beginning of Lent, the premises of emancipation were announced
in Orthodox churches across the empire. Resulting from the humiliating
defeat in the Crimean War that underscored Russia’s military
unpreparedness and economic backwardness, the freeing of twenty-three
million serfs, who accounted for about a third of the peasant population,
was greeted with great fanfare by peasants and educated society. Upon
closer inspection, however, the conservative nature of the reforms struck
elements within these same groups as insufficient.
Expecting complete liberty from the tutelage of their former masters and
the state, the serfs were baffled by the emancipation’s requirement of a
transitional period between serfdom and freedom to sort out which land
allotments peasants would receive from their former masters. Meanwhile,
the peasants were to continue to fulfill their feudal labor obligations and
dues. Only when the landowners and government mediators worked out
the land transfers would the peasants be freed from those responsibilities.
To make matters worse, the peasants would subsequently have to purchase
that arable land by making redemption payments to the state for forty-
nine years.
Other categories of peasants were treated differently. Emancipated
domestic servants did not receive land, in the expectation that the majority
would migrate to or stay in urban areas to find employment. Peasants
owned by the crown had to wait until for the redemption process
regarding their land to begin. State peasants were to continue paying taxes
on the land they farmed on loan from the government until , when
those taxes were to be converted to redemption payments.
Of all of the categories of peasants, only domestic servants enjoyed
temporary freedom of movement, beginning in February . Peasant
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.
communes, which had mutual responsibility for taxes and dues (including
the new redemption payments), decided which of their members might
temporarily travel elsewhere for work. They issued them passports, another
vestige of serfdom, which had to be annually renewed, again with permission.
When nobles’ serfs learned the details of their emancipation, they
wondered if they had heard them correctly and if they had been read out
correctly. They searched out literate neighbors who could read the proc-
lamation in such a way as to grant them true freedom and an equitable
redistribution of land among serf-owners and their peasants. In some areas,
rebellions against the so-called emancipation erupted. The most famous
incident occurred in Kazan province in . The peasants carefully
couched these outbursts as being supportive of the tsar’s desire to eman-
cipate them fully, a desire they claimed had been thwarted by landowners
and government officials. As reality set in and the agricultural crops upon
which the peasants depended for survival had to be sown, former serfs
adopted a wait-and-see approach.
In support of the former serfs, radical intellectuals denounced the
emancipation provisions. They criticized both the provisions that irked
the peasants and the long-term bonds that landowners received from the
government to compensate them for the loss of land. At the same time,
these intellectuals supported one of the emancipation decree’s major aims,
which was the prevention of the peasants’ immiseration and proletariani-
zation by endowing the peasants’ communes with more authority and
limiting peasant mobility. While government reformers hoped to avoid the
labor unrest plaguing other industrializing countries, utopian-minded
intellectuals viewed the peasant commune as the harbinger of true egali-
tarian socialism. In other words, radicals perceived the commune as a
viable socioeconomic structure and cultural institution that would allow
Russia to escape the stage of capitalism.
Revolutionaries were buoyed by the rebellions against the emancipation
provisions, believing them to be indicative of the peasants’ willingness to
battle the oppressive autocratic state. Russian populists, many of them
students radicalized at universities in Moscow and St. Petersburg, tried
unsuccessfully to foment revolts in the summer of by descending
upon the countryside dressed as peasants and explaining to peasants why
rebellion served their best interests. These revolutionaries failed to under-
stand the peasants’ subsistence needs, which depended upon their ability
to pursue their agricultural labors, crafts, and trades. The peasants neither
had time to rebel nor did they wish to. The former serfs had come to
realize that the emancipation’s devolution of some authority to their
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Peasants
communes and village assemblies granted them greater control over their
lives than they had enjoyed under serfdom.
The peasants had also made economic accommodations with their
former masters. In exchange for their labors, they grazed their animals
on the landowners’ fields. They gathered wood, mushrooms, and berries
and hunted animals in landowners’ forests. Some worked as paid day
laborers on estates. Domestic servants who were too old to make a new
life for themselves, such as Firs in Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard, often stayed
on in their masters’ employ. In addition, former serfs now had access to
township courts that adjudicated petty lawsuits among peasants. These
courts had been introduced to state peasants between and .
Peasants elected the judges from their own ranks, and these judges in turn
employed customary laws and practices in their rulings.
Other significant reforms ameliorating all peasants’ lives were intro-
duced after . An decree granting soldiers in active service
extended leave was followed in with one promulgating universal
military service. The length of service was reduced from twenty-five years
(which had amounted to a lifetime) to a maximum of six years.
Significantly, an reform introduced the zemstvo (district councils
led by noble representatives and bureaus) in most European Russian
provinces. Headed by educated specialists, the zemstvo bureaus began to
provide medical and veterinary assistance and elementary education to all
peasants. Alexander II’s emancipation and the other Great Reforms of the
s and s promised a progressive future.
Nonetheless, not everything was rosy. The vestiges of serfdom and
continuation of an arbitrary autocratic system that refused to reform itself
and allow for some political representation of its subjects preoccupied
Russian intellectuals. Chekhov, however, refused to adopt a political
ideology, often to their dismay. He rejected classical liberalism, disap-
proved of revolutionaries, and eventually found Tolstoy’s idealistic
embrace of the Russian peasants’ way of life problematic. Chekhov was
above all a humanitarian who believed that incremental change among
peasant communities was possible through small deeds (including provid-
ing them with medical care and effective charity, and building schools and
roads for them) and the modern technologies of “electricity and steam”
(March , ; L:–). As he wrote to his editor Alexei Suvorin
(who was the son of a serf ) on December , , “if I had to choose
between the [revolutionary] ‘ideals’ of the renowned ‘sixties,’ or the very
worst zemstvo hospital of today, I would, without a moment’s hesitation,
choose the second” (L:–).
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.
At the same time, as the grandson of a former serf who had purchased
his and his family’s freedom in , Chekhov was deeply troubled by the
type of society that Russian serfdom had produced. In his later years, he
remarked in a notebook that Russians had “been abased by centuries of
slavery and fear of freedom.” That sentiment could have been written
decades earlier. In one of his early short stories, “Because of Green Apples”
(), Chekhov depicts the indebted landowner Trifom Semenovich as a
master teacher of violence. Having caught a peasant lad picking a single
apple for his betrothed in his orchard, Trifom angrily recites the Eighth
Commandment while forgetting his Christian obligation of charity. He
threatens to torture the young couple with nettles, egging them on to
thrash each other in turn, all because of an apple. In contrast, Chekhov
delighted in giving out apples to peasant children on his small estate of
Melikhovo in the s.
The subject of violence is one to which Chekhov frequently returned.
He himself had been beaten as a child and had gotten “into fights [and]
tormented animals,” but, as he described the situation memorably in a
letter, as a prospective topic for a story, he “wrings the slave out of himself
drop by drop until one fine morning, upon awakening, he feels that what
is flowing in his veins is no longer the blood of a slave, but that of a real
human being” (January , ; L:). In “The Huntsman” (), the
protagonist Egor is a successful huntsman who is enjoying liberation from
serfdom and from his native village. His liberty, however, comes at the
expense of his wife, Pelageia, whom he has beaten and abandoned. Egor
blames the marriage on the lowly cowherd Pelageia rather than on the
former nobleman who plied him with drink and lured him into this
marriage. Refusing to take responsibility for his actions, the huntsman
taunts Pelageia, saying, “You’re not a serf, after all, you could have put up
some resistance?” (W:). It would appear that Pelageia, who continues
to love this liberated but violent man, epitomizes a feudal relic. In
actuality, she has maintained her dignity and moved beyond serfdom by
working as a paid laborer during the agricultural months and in the winter
participating in the foundling trade. The ruble Egor gives her to assuage
his conscience is less than one of her monthly wages.
Chekhov also saw incivility and inhumanity in the Russian penal system
before his trip to Sakhalin Island in . In , the same year as “The
Huntsman,” he pairs up a magistrate with a simple but not stupid peasant
in “A Malefactor.” Based on an actual conversation that Chekhov had had
with a peasant, the story presents two diametrically opposed worldviews,
one modern and one traditional. The ignorant and barefoot peasant with a
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Peasants
pockmarked face is baffled by his being hauled before a magistrate for
having removed a bolt from a railway tie for his fishing and sustenance
needs when he did no harm, noting that all the peasants do this sort of
thing and take only a random bolt here or there. The magistrate, a
representative of the rational legal system, sentences the old man to hard
labor on grounds of malicious intent. In “Darkness” (), Chekhov
shifts the balance of the even-handedness with which he presents the two
sides to underscore the penal system’s dire consequences. This time, a
peasant blacksmith is sentenced to three years in a convict work battalion
(on top of the year the man had spent in jail awaiting trial) for stealing
tobacco and ransacking a store with two others while drunk. Unable to pay
the requisite bribes, the convict’s young brother, who earns a pittance at a
factory, cannot convince any authority figure to look into the matter and
bestow mercy on a man whose three-generational family is starving and
destitute without his labors. In , while at Melikhovo, Chekhov
himself successfully pled the case of a drunken peasant who accidentally
set his mother’s house on fire before a local investigator. The writer knew
that without her son’s labors, the mother would descend into poverty.
In the above two stories the peasants were tried in the regular courts,
where penalties were stiffer and outcomes generally favored non-peasant
plaintiffs. Paradoxically, government sentences for horse thieves and arson-
ists, who preyed on peasant villages and could wipe out their livelihoods,
were much lower. According to an law, sentences ranged from only
three months to a year for the theft of a horse. An individual who pursued
horse theft as a trade (such as Chekhov’s disdainful Kalashnikov in
“Thieves” []) was liable for between one and a half and two and a
half years in the reformatory. To avoid being victimized again when such
thieves were released from prison, peasants usually paid them off or, in the
worst cases, resorted to vigilante justice against them.
In addition to the violence inherent in the serf and autocratic systems,
which only begat violence among peasants and other classes of society,
Chekhov also highlighted the cruel fate that often attended the children of
favored domestic serfs who had been brought up in the manor house. For
example, in “Requiem” (), he writes about a young serf girl, Mashutka,
whom an upper-class gentry family educate along with their daughters. They
teach her how to read and write and how to comport herself as if she were
one of them. They even take Mashutka to live with them in Moscow.
Neither gentry nor peasant, Mashutka ultimately becomes an actress and
most likely a courtesan. Serf-owners were notorious for having serf orches-
tras, theaters, and operatic groups. While educating these serfs in the finer
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.
arts and dressing them in the latest fashions, they also subjected them to
beatings and sexual abuse. Manumitted and emancipated female serfs who
chose the stage ended up, like Mashutka, in thrall to others. Like her, they
often died young of venereal disease. Similarly, in “Vanka,” written also in
, Chekhov depicts a serf boy who is doted on and educated by his
mistress, only to be demoted to work in the servants’ kitchen after his
mother’s death. Subsequently, he is apprenticed to a shoemaker in
Moscow, who starves and beats him. In the haunting story “Sleepy”
() Chekhov goes a step further. He depicts the consequences of the
physical and verbal abuse a female child receives as a nursemaid and
housemaid for a bootmaker, while traumatized by her serf father’s premature
death and the reduction of her remaining family members to the status of
wandering beggars. The girl ends up committing infanticide.
Not all was bleak in Chekhov’s early stories about peasants. Chekhov
observed the intimate knowledge of nature among peasants, their natural
skills as gardeners, farmers, and fishermen. The homeless and gentle
cobbler Old Terenty in “A Day in the Country” () epitomizes this
type. “He knows everything [. . .] the names of all the wildflowers, animals,
and stones. He knows what herbs cure diseases; he has no difficulty in
telling the age of a horse or a cow. Looking at the sunset, at the moon, or
the birds, he can tell what sort of weather it will be the next day.” Despite
his poverty Terenty befriends and cares for two beggar children, coming at
night to make “the sign of the cross over them” and to put “bread under
their heads.” In his stories Chekhov tended to privilege peasant men over
peasant women in having these skills, even though in reality women were
often more adept at healing with the herbs and plants they grew in their
kitchen gardens or found in the wild fields.
In his fiction, Chekhov portrayed the peasant men who left the village
to ply specialized trades in the cities, particularly St. Petersburg and
Moscow. These migrants, many of whom were literate, secured passports
from their communes to travel and work while their family members
stayed behind in the village. Like immigrants from Europe to the New
World, these male migrants sought out fellow villagers in towns, who
could put them up temporarily and find them jobs in factories, in domestic
service, in various trades, or as cabmen. Villages often specialized in urban
trades such as carpentry, painting, and masonry. Groups of men lived
snugly together in rented urban rooms, shared their wages and food, and
sent remittances home.
When the migrant laborers returned to the countryside in the off-season,
they brought gifts of store-bought cloth, leather boots, parasols, and
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Peasants
eventually ready-to-wear clothing. The young among them were much-
sought-after prospective husbands. Most of the migrants married village
women who subsequently lived with their in-laws and bore their labor share
in the household economy. Women left the village only because of sexual
indiscretions (for which they were always blamed), marital separations, or
some misstep within the village that made them pariahs.
Chekhov centered one of his late stories, “Peasants” (), on the fate of
a waiter at a Moscow hotel. Prosperous until illness costs him his job, he
must return with his wife and young daughter to his home village Zhukovo.
What awaits them is a living hell. The urbanized family finds a community
barely able to feed itself. Uncleanliness, drunkenness, and violence among
family members are ubiquitous. Even ungodliness predominates. A fire
almost engulfs the village, but is extinguished by a fire brigade from the
manor across the river. In addition to the fire’s damages, the community has
been unable to pay its taxes. The police inspector senselessly seizes samovars,
hens, and sheep, which languish at the police station. The peasants have lost
all faith in the promise of emancipation.
This dark story reflects an indignant and sorrowful Chekhov, who had
come to know the countryside intimately and the toll that hunger, disease,
and unsanitary conditions had taken on peasants during the –
famine in the Volga region and its aftereffects in a supposedly modernizing
Russia. With “Peasants” Chekhov sent a warning shot across Russia to
demand that it wake up to the devastation that the vestiges of serfdom, the
autocracy, and capitalism had wrought among the peasants, whom he
describes as having “had no help and none to whom they could look for
help.” He blames in particular the horde of “mercenary, greedy, depraved,
and idle [officials] who only visit the village in order to insult, to despoil,
and to terrorize.” Chekhov does nevertheless present some glimmer of
light. Cooperation between the gentry and peasants in firefighting with the
latest technology produces a favorable outcome, and a strong peasant
woman announces that freedom is better than serfdom. Although
Nikolai dies and his pious, Bible-reading widow Olga and daughter
Sasha leave the village begging for crusts of bread as they make their way
back to the city, Olga reflects on the very humanity of the brutalized
people she must leave behind. The telegraph posts on the horizon and
their mysterious humming represent a better future.
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The Woman Question
Jenny Kaminer
“Woman,” wrote the “Man without a Spleen” in , “does not con-
tribute anything useful to the fatherland. She does not go to war, does not
copy documents, does not build railroads.” A woman sorely lacks in the
brains department, he continues; while her hair may be long, her intellect
is short. Her only redeeming quality, according to the author of the essay
“About Women,” is that she “gives life to such wondrous creatures as men,
for which all of her faults are forgiven” (W:). The “Man Without a
Spleen,” of course, was one of Anton Chekhov’s favorite early pseudo-
nyms. With this Swiftian satire, the author penned a wry, humorous
commentary on one of the most heated issues in Imperial Russian society
of the second half of the nineteenth century: the Woman Question.
What was a Russian woman’s proper role? Should she devote herself
exclusively to the home and to the mothering of future citizens? Or should
women work alongside men in advocating and fighting for a more just and
humane society? How much education was “appropriate” for women, and
on what should that education focus? These were among the questions
preoccupying Russian writers, thinkers, legislators, and jurists since ,
when the educator and surgeon Nikolai Pirogov first publicly pondered the
fate of Russian women in his essay “Questions of Life.” Having observed
firsthand the noble sacrifice and bravery in the face of unrelenting danger
exhibited by Russian nurses during the Crimean War (–),
Pirogov wondered if society was inadvertently losing out on the “marvel-
ous gifts of our women.” With his call for educational reform, Pirogov
catalyzed a sustained focus on women’s education in the Russian press and
struck a powerful chord among women themselves. Two years later, in
, Tsar Alexander II initiated the first-ever secondary schools for
Russian girls. By , when twenty-three-year-old Nadia, the heroine
of Chekhov’s late short story “The Bride,” breaks off her engagement to
escape to St. Petersburg to pursue an education, Russia’s advanced educa-
tional offerings for women had exceeded those available in the rest of
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The Woman Question
Europe. Consequently, women’s wholesale financial dependence on men
had begun to be mitigated by increasing employment opportunities in
fields such as teaching – as exemplified by characters like Olga in
Chekhov’s The Three Sisters ().
This brief summary, however, belies the complexity and controversy
that characterized the debates about women’s opportunities and responsi-
bilities throughout Chekhov’s lifetime. The Woman Question was deeply
intertwined with the broader political and social fissures running through
nineteenth-century Russian society. Voices from both the conservative and
the radical ends of the political spectrum claimed that, as woman goes, so
goes all of Russia. First and foremost, the reevaluation of women’s roles
accompanied profound challenges to the institution of the family, the
stability of which in turn underpinned both pillars of Imperial Russian
society: the Church and the autocracy. As Jane Costlow deftly summarizes,
“if woman constitutes a question [. . .] it originates in societal visions of her
role as a mother” – visions that were subjected to intense scrutiny
throughout the second half of the nineteenth century.
While Pirogov’s essay initiated public debates about women’s
education, it was the emancipation of the serfs in that catalyzed a
wholesale reconsideration of all Russian institutions, including the family.
The traditional model stressed the abnegation of the individual in favor of
whoever ranked higher in the hierarchy of the family and, subsequently,
the subsuming of the individual family under the power of the autocrat.
The Domostroi, the sixteenth-century Russian household advice manual
that firmly delineated domestic relations, elevated the father to the role of
domestic ruler. The Russian judicial system reinforced this patriarchal
structure, and imperial law buttressed the familial power dynamics that
gave the father the same absolute authority over his wife and children that
the state wielded over its citizens. It was not uncommon to refer to the
father as the “tsar” of the family. In other words, the family was a
microcosm of the state. A woman’s willingness to sacrifice her own needs
and desires undergirded this hierarchical system, a readiness that was
inculcated during childhood. Parents were advised by moralists to teach
their daughters to subjugate their own will to that of others from an early
age, insisting that this would ensure their happiness. In his short
story “The Darling,” Chekhov subjected this ideology of limitless female
self-sacrifice to gentle parody.
By the time of the emancipation and the accompanying reevaluation
of all societal structures, the patriarchal organization of domestic rela-
tions was drawing fervent criticism, particularly in the legal realm.
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Liberal jurists argued that the abolition of serfdom in had changed
social conditions and relationships so profoundly that it rendered earlier
family law obsolete. By the s, the “affective ideal” of the family, one
no longer based on a rigid hierarchy but instead on mutual affection and
respect, had become the underlying principle of most legal writing.
Reform-minded jurists aimed to instill the rule of law into domestic
matters by, for example, making marriage and divorce the province of
civil courts rather than of the Orthodox Church. Women’s rights played
the role of the “Trojan mare” in attempts by judicial reformers to
introduce legality into Russian society.
These efforts provoked a severe reaction from conservatives, who
warned that, without family relationships built on authority and obedi-
ence, and supported by the self-sacrificial woman at their foundation, the
entire fabric of society would unwind. Chekhov began his literary career in
the s against the backdrop of a virulent conservative backlash by
opponents of women’s education and rights. The assassination of Tsar
Alexander II in prompted his successor, Alexander III, to attempt to
reverse the far-reaching reforms initiated by his father, including those
expanding opportunities for women. Most prominently, educational
options were curtailed, with the closure of the majority of courses open
to women, including those allowing them to train in medicine, by .
Only the Bestuzhev courses in St. Petersburg – the most likely destination
for the heroine of “The Bride” – were allowed to continue.
At the same time, the Russian Orthodox Church stymied the efforts of
judicial reformers to introduce those changes into marriage and family law
that would mitigate the absolute power of the husband over domestic
affairs. For a woman professing a desire to leave her spouse, regardless of
the reason, the options were extremely limited. The law explicitly man-
dated “spousal cohabitation,” a provision supported by the internal pass-
port regime. Any travel beyond twenty miles from one’s place of residence
required proper documentation, and a married woman was inscribed on
her husband’s passport, having surrendered her own passport at the church
on her wedding day. This regime left even women from the noble classes
completely dependent on their husbands’ cooperation, rendering them
effectively incapable of free movement. Married women were not allowed
their own passports until .
Divorce continued to be the provenance of the Church until the
Russian Revolution in . The process was complicated, lengthy,
expensive, and frequently unsuccessful, despite a radical upswell in the
number of petitions filed during the second half of the nineteenth century.
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The Woman Question
The only acceptable grounds were abandonment or disappearance (includ-
ing Siberian exile), sexual or mental incapacity, and adultery. The latter
could only be proven through the testimony of two eyewitnesses to the act
of sexual intercourse, usually requiring collusion between the two parties.
In the rare case that the Church granted a divorce during Chekhov’s
lifetime, the guilty party was not allowed to remarry – a provision not
altered until , the year of the author’s death. The adulterous affairs
that dot the landscape of Chekhov’s plays and stories – the pair in “The
Lady with a Lapdog” and Vershinin and Masha in The Three Sisters,
among many others – unfold against the backdrop of this restrictive legal
regime. Thus, when the author penned his satirical essay “About Women,”
he was pillorying those reactionary societal forces that relegated women
exclusively to the domestic sphere and found that a woman’s “marvelous
gifts,” to return to Pirogov’s phrase, should remain hidden at home.
Chekhov’s essay satirized the active disruptors of efforts at legal and other
institutional change: the conservatives who insisted that women must
provide a bulwark against the forces of modernization and
Westernization imperiling the stability of traditional Russian society.
The genie, however, refused to jump back in the bottle. Despite
conservative efforts at reversing the process of reform, Russian women
attained an unprecedented, and continuously accelerating, degree of visi-
bility outside of the home throughout the second half of the nineteenth
century. The drive to industrialize Russian society, initiated under
Alexander III, intensified during the reign of his successor, Nicholas II.
Hundreds of thousands of peasants, including many women, moved from
the countryside to urban areas to work in the newly built factories. The
drive for women’s educational opportunities never diminished and began
to yield success again under the new tsar. In , Nicholas II permitted
the opening of the St. Petersburg Medical Institute, and the Moscow
Higher Women’s courses resumed in –. As a result, women
increasingly found employment in positions requiring educational attain-
ment, including teaching, medicine, and clerical work. “The movement of
privileged women into the paid-labor force,” according to historian
Barbara Evans Clements, constituted one of late Imperial Russia’s “most
important developments.” During the s and s, women could be
spotted in the offices of the State Senate and the state bank, working as
cashiers for the Russian railyard, or as secretaries to officials of all varieties.
Female journalists and fiction writers were attaining a new level of prom-
inence in the same period as Chekhov. More female performers than ever
graced the stages of Russia’s theaters, and female artists were among the
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originators of the Russian avant-garde. The number of female-run charities
increased, drawing women from an ever-broadening stratum of Russian
society and thrusting them into the public sphere. Russian women’s
“marvelous gifts” were clearly no longer confined to the home, and the
modest level of financial independence that many women were able to
attain further eroded the inviolability of the patriarchal family.
Some women, rather than advocating for increased opportunities within
existing structures, channeled those “marvelous gifts” toward the wholesale
destruction of Imperial Russia’s fundamental institutions. Beginning in the
early s, women, mainly from noble backgrounds, joined the ranks of
the so-called “nihilists,” insisting that self-transformation preceded social
reform, and that the confines of the traditional family impeded both. The
nihilists rejected their privileges and dedicated themselves to working
among the poor, believing that women should be treated as equals rather
than sexual objects. Many fled their comfortable country estates and lived
together with men in urban communes, scandalizing their fellow citizens.
The nihilists boldly shunned traditional notions of female attire and
behavior; they declared that women should cultivate knowledge and
positive deeds instead of sexual attractiveness. Accordingly, they wore their
hair short, donned men’s clothing, and smoked cigarettes; when Masha
from Chekhov’s The Seagull () drinks vodka and takes snuff, it is a
subtle echo of the nigilistka’s embrace of “masculine” indulgences
and androgyny.
By the end of the s, nihilism was being eclipsed by revolutionary
movements that, impatient with the pace of change, embraced more
radical measures in their fight for social justice. Many women joined the
Populists, aspiring to rouse the Russian peasantry to overthrow the auto-
cratic regime and build a more egalitarian society modeled on the village
commune. In , the Populists initiated a “going to the people” cam-
paign, heading to the villages and attempting to inspire the mainly indif-
ferent peasants to revolt. Women numbered percent of those arrested
during the campaign, and female membership in radical groups in Russia
significantly exceeded the percentage in other European countries. It was
a woman, Vera Zasulich, who catalyzed the next, more violent phase of the
revolutionary struggle when she shot the governor general of St. Petersburg
in . A few years later, another woman, Sofia Perovskaya, coordinated
the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in , becoming the first woman
to be executed for a political crime. The “vocation of revolutionary” –
more, perhaps, than any other pursuit – allowed Russian women to
develop their skills and talents as equals alongside men. For these women
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The Woman Question
and their revolutionary comrades, a broader struggle subsumed the
Woman Question; the liberation of Russia from the inequality and
injustice of the autocratic regime would herald and accompany their
own emancipation.
Initiated on the pages of journals, the Woman Question soon featured
prominently in the fictional works of nineteenth-century Russia’s most
famous authors. Many of Chekhov’s predecessors and contemporaries
engaged deeply with the Woman Question, providing impassioned fic-
tional commentary on the connection between the fate of woman and that
of the Russian people as a whole. What is to Be Done? (), one of the
first and most influential novels for the formation of the Woman
Question, was penned by the radical Nikolai Chernyshevsky while he
was imprisoned in St. Petersburg’s Peter and Paul Fortress. It became a
“Bible for all advanced Russian women with aspirations toward indepen-
dence” and influenced several subsequent generations of revolutionaries.
The novel’s heroine, Vera Pavlovna, flees an oppressive family life –
namely, a greedy and scheming mother who wants to marry her off to a
nobleman against her will – by entering into a so-called “fictitious mar-
riage” with a sympathetic and enlightened man. Enjoying full autonomy in
the marriage, Vera channels her energies toward productive labor, starting
a sewing collective with other women and helping them attain financial
independence. When she falls in love with another man, her husband
exerts no patriarchal power over Vera, instead conveniently bowing out
and allowing her to forge her own destiny. Vera goes on to train as a
physician and work among the poor alongside her new husband, demon-
strating a degree of self-determination and agency heretofore unseen
among Russian literary heroines. What is to Be Done? answers the question
posed by its own title, as well as the Woman Question as a whole, by
offering the following vision: an egalitarian foundation for relations
between the sexes in place of the patriarchal family; women engaged in
collective, socially useful work; and the inevitable reorganization of society
as a whole along more just and progressive lines as precipitated by these
changes in the gender order.
Writers occupying the opposite end of the ideological spectrum viru-
lently objected to Chernyshevsky’s image of the future and women’s place
within it. While Chernyshevsky presented individuals acting in accordance
with the tenets of rational egoism as the precondition to positive social
change, Leo Tolstoy, to cite but one famous example, interrogated the
deleterious effects of undermining the ideal of female self-sacrifice in his
novel Anna Karenina (–). As Anna recklessly and single-mindedly
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pursues her romance with Count Vronsky, Tolstoy charts her devolution as
a mother: from tenderness toward her son, to callous indifference toward
her infant daughter with Vronsky. The author links Anna’s increasing
isolation to her exclusion from the “classless communality of motherhood”
enjoyed by other characters, such as Dolly and, later, Kitty. Tolstoy
presents Anna’s decision to turn away from motherhood in pursuit of her
own desires as contributing to a cynical and solipsistic frame of mind, the
precursor to her tragic suicide. Without motherhood, Anna Karenina
suggests, a woman becomes unmoored.
Throughout Anton Chekhov’s lifetime, then, fervent debates unfolded
about a Russian woman’s rights, opportunities, and obligations; about the
proper definition of her role as a wife, as a mother, and as a citizen. For
various segments of Imperial Russian society, from legal reformers to
revolutionaries to novelists, the fate of woman emblematized the fate of
the institutions underpinning society as a whole – namely, the family and
autocracy. As conservatives attempted to reverse the limited educational
opportunities women had attained and to block judicial reform, female
revolutionaries embraced violence in their quest to end autocracy’s ineq-
uities. All the while, women entered the public sphere in unprecedented
ways and numbers. In his fiction and plays, Chekhov, unsurprisingly,
never saddled his female characters with excess symbolic or metaphorical
baggage. He explored, instead, the poignant clash between the desire for
self-fulfillment – a woman’s own efforts at realizing the full scope of her
“marvelous gifts” that shifting societal norms were making increasingly
possible – and the obligations of home and community. For Chekhov, the
Woman Question, like all of the major questions of life, offered no simple
solutions.
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Sex
Melissa L. Miller
Sex – understood both as sexual conduct and in terms of the broader
social categories of ‘men’ and ‘women’ – was a “political subject” in late
Imperial Russia. Between the mid-s and the revolution,
a period which almost exactly spans Chekhov’s own life and career,
prominent Russian authors posed questions of social justice, civic and
governmental reform, and morality within the framework of men and
women’s interpersonal relationships. Provocative early examples of such
creative work include Alexander Herzen’s Who Is to Blame? (), which
chronicles the demise of a young couple’s love due to adultery, and
Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? (), whose young
protagonist Vera Pavlovna abandons her family and an arranged marriage
to build a female work collective. By the late s, Leo Tolstoy’s novels
Anna Karenina () and The Kreutzer Sonata () sparked heated
polemics on sexual authority in which Russia’s leading intellectuals
took part.
Alexander II’s Great Reforms, which transformed power relations at all
levels of Russian society, inaugurated this era of public discourse. By
freeing the serfs, relaxing censorship, and reforming legal systems,
Alexander II also created a modern civil society made up of people from
professional disciplines, for whom modern sexuality emerged as a major
issue of debate. Participants in this new civil arena – doctors, lawyers,
teachers, writers – began to agitate for their views on the sex question.
While most of these professionals themselves rejected traditional notions of
patriarchy, the reforms had done little to release women from the practical
fetters of the old patriarchal order. At all levels of society, Russian women
were dependent on the consent of male relatives in order to obtain paid
employment and even their own internal passports. Women had only
limited access to higher education, while many professions refused to
admit them. In the domestic sphere, women were restricted as to the
inheritance they could receive, although they could keep whatever
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property they might have owned before marriage. Married life itself was
fraught with limits on a woman’s personal autonomy: contraception, legal
separations, and divorces were all difficult to come by.
Notable intellectuals participated in this ongoing public debate on
sexuality in Russia, from jurist V. D. Nabokov to writers Leonid
Andreev, Vasily Rozanov, and Leo Tolstoy. Though he was not known
for his outspoken social or political views, Chekhov also took part. Instead
of issuing direct public statements or contributing to journalistic polemics,
Chekhov wove his responses into his artistic work. Chekhov is a necessary
figure to consider in this context, for his dual careers of medicine and
literature positioned him at the intersection of two disparate groups of
professionals who sought to create modern views on sexuality. While
physicians approached this work via their public and professional respon-
sibilities, writers shaped public opinion. Chekhov is unique in that he
participated in both processes, the one informing the other.
From the beginning of his intertwined careers, Chekhov displayed an
intense interest in problems of sex, sex authority, and autonomy. While in
medical school at Moscow University from to , he planned to
write a thesis inspired by Charles Darwin’s pioneering work in evolution-
ary biology. On the Origin of the Species and The Descent of Man had made
Darwin a household name and had initiated new discussions of sex in
Russian intellectual circles. Chekhov was also inspired by other writers’
work on the position of women in society, such as Leopold von Sacher-
Masoch and Herbert Spencer. The thesis, prospectively titled “A History
of Sexual Authority,” proposed an examination of the history of sexual
dominance in the natural world’s mating species, from insects to human
beings, with an eye to resolving sex inequality in human society.
Considering the ambitious nature of the project, it is unsurprising that
Chekhov abandoned it shortly after graduation in favor of the more
practical concern of earning a living. Issues of sex authority continued to
captivate, however. Over the course of his writing career, Chekhov instead
transmuted them into an artistic form that blended hard and popular
science, journalism, and literature (though in many ways critics have only
just begun to chart this area of Chekhov research).
For decades, scholars tended to minimize and even ignore sex and
sexuality in Chekhov’s life and, by extension, his work, preferring instead
to treat him as a sexual ascetic. Ascertaining Chekhov’s ideas in this area
accurately is, admittedly, not a straightforward task, largely due to censor-
ship. Preeminent Chekhov scholar A. P. Chudakov has demonstrated how
published editions of Chekhov’s personal correspondence were purged of
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Sex
much of the latter’s frank commentary on women and sexual relationships
to better correspond to both prerevolutionary and Soviet notions of the
“great writer.” It therefore comes as no shock that a sanctified image of
both the man and the author continues to circulate, though it should be
noted that Donald Rayfield’s biography Anton Chekhov: A Life ()
swings to the opposite pole, marshaling an impressive amount of archival
research to argue for a more complex account of the role sex played in
Chekhov’s personal life.
To the dissatisfaction of readers and critics alike, Chekhov’s readily
available correspondence and biographical data paint a contradictory por-
trait of his views on sex. While we would consider some, even many, of his
ideas to be progressive, he was not always able to throw off prejudices
about female intelligence, ability, and ambition that were common for his
time and place. Neither was his personal behavior always beyond reproach.
On the one hand, Chekhov displayed marked empathy for women,
particularly those in the provinces, whose talent and aspirations were
curtailed by a dearth of personal and professional options. Time and again
in his letters he bemoaned the lack of healthy living and working condi-
tions for women in the countryside, circumstances made worse by unsa-
nitary childbirth practices and rampant venereal diseases spread by
unscrupulous itinerant husbands. Chekhov personally attended at count-
less women’s births for free, supported medical initiatives to improve their
standard of care, and advocated for women’s education. Chekhov also
participated in public health initiatives to investigate conditions in
Moscow’s red-light district and urged his mentor Alexei Suvorin to use
his newspaper to bring awareness to the “most terrible evil” of prostitution
(November , ; L:). He also admired many of the female
physicians that he knew, and advanced the careers of female authors in
his orbit by editing their drafts and using his influence to place their work
in suitable venues for publication.
On the other hand, Chekhov also wrote of women’s mental deficiencies
in both intellect and creativity vis-à-vis men, declaring, when he outlined
his prospective thesis in a letter to his brother, that woman was “not a
thinker” and that “one must help nature” to achieve progress in this regard
(April –, ; L:). Moreover, in , in another letter to his
brother Alexander, Chekhov expressed the opinion that, even if a woman
is “a doctor, a landowner, free, self-reliant, educated and has her own views
on things,” she still is “just a broad (baba)” whose greatest desire in life
must be to get married (August , ; L:–). And, as Rayfield’s
pioneering account makes uncomfortably clear, Chekhov himself enjoyed
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patronizing the very brothels he objected to on ethical grounds and was
capable of treating his own sexual partners with conspicuous cruelty.
If we look to Chekhov’s fiction, we find that, here too, he often deals
with the sex question in ambivalent, contradictory, and ultimately
unresolved ways. At the beginning of his career, from the early to the
mid-s, Chekhov parodied what he saw as stupid and ridiculous
views on sexuality but stopped short of providing more serious criticism.
Throughout this period Darwin’s theories remained connected to issues
of sex difference in Chekhov’s creative imagination. As a result, many of
Chekhov’s humorous tales lampooned simplistic and reductive applica-
tions of evolutionary theory to human relationships, alongside their
attendant sexist implications. For example, Chekhov’s print debut, the
epistolary tale “Letter to a Learned Neighbor” (), caricatures the
erroneous viewpoint that the theory of evolution means that humans
should follow the norms of primate society, including the rules of sexual
attraction. Stories such as “The Naturalists’ Conference in Philadelphia
(An Article of Scientific Content)” () and “At A Hypnotic Séance”
() mock similar themes. This line of Chekhovian ridicule achieves
more serious critique in two later works: the novella The Duel (),
when the Darwinist Von Koren must admit that he was wrong to reduce
the relationship between Laevsky and Nadezhda to nothing more than
the sexual frolics of macaques, and the story “On the Estate” (), a
darkly funny tale which excoriates a racist father who attempts to marry
off his daughters according to misapplied Darwinian principles of
sexual selection.
As Chekhov matured as an artist, he continued to be drawn to problems
of sex writ large. In the mid-s, he became fascinated by French
Naturalism, as well as by the work of its founder, Emile Zola.
A controversial writer in his native France and tremendously popular in
Russia, Zola reveled in shocking critics and readers with his graphic
sexuality and risqué detail. Zola first defined French Naturalism in the
preface to the second edition of his scandalous novel Therese Raquin as
creative fiction that adheres to the principles of scientific inquiry and
portrays its characters as “naked, living, anatomical specimens” whose
“hidden workings of the passions” and “urges of instinct” the author must
meticulously trace. As with his early responses to Darwinian thought,
Chekhov’s first stories engaging with French Naturalism were parodies
that capitalized on the Russian reading public’s penchant for overtly racy
themes. A popular target was Zola’s novel Nana, about the rise and fall of a
beautiful Parisian cocotte at the end of France’s Second Empire. So great
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Sex
was the commotion surrounding Nana that Russian critics referred to
Naturalism itself and its perceived offshoots in Russia as “Nana-turalizm,”
and its practitioners as “nana-turalisty.” Chekhov’s own imitations, such as
“My Nana” () and “A Guide for Those Who Wish to Take a Wife”
(), spoof the hunt for a bride, with Nana herself ironically canonized
as the negative ideal.
The influential writer and critic Dmitry Grigorovich chastised Chekhov
for parroting features of French Naturalism, warning him away from
including “details of a base material undertone” in his stories, which the
senior author saw as Zola’s major flaw (April , ; L:). Joining
Grigorovich was Chekhov’s friend Maria Kiselyova, a writer herself. She
took Chekhov’s story “The Mire” () to task for what was, in her view,
its crude and offensively pungent depiction of sexual relations between
men and women, which she labeled a “manure pile” (L:).
Undoubtedly, “The Mire” is a provocative story. It chronicles a young,
attractive Jewish woman named Susanna, who seduces men in lieu of the
money she owes them. But while graphic depictions of sexuality may have
started out as coarse parody on Chekhov’s part, they grew into something
much more significant. Chekhov’s response to Kiselyova’s criticism took
the form of an impassioned defense of the artist’s right to explore whatever
themes he or she wishes. Chekhov replied that “for chemists nothing on
earth is unclean. A writer should be just as objective as a chemist. He
should turn away from subjectivity and know that a manure pile plays a
very honorable role in the landscape, and that evil passions are just as
essential to life as noble ones” (January , ; L:–). Chekhov
held to this position. In addition to “The Mire,” stories such as “Anyuta”
(), “Agafiya” (), “Big Volodia and Little Volodia” (), and
the novella An Anonymous Story (), not to mention the plays The
Seagull () and The Cherry Orchard (), are frank in their portrayal
of sexual desire and of the frustrations, complications, sufferings, and
betrayals that can arise therefrom.
The debate within Russia regarding the nature of love and sex in
marriage and the place of women in society at large drew international
attention in the early s with the publication of Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer
Sonata. At the center of Tolstoy’s incendiary tale is Pozdnyshev, who
murders his wife in a jealous sexual rage. The narrative follows
Pozdnyshev’s retelling of the scandal to a group of captive listeners (and
readers!) while riding a train. In approximately a hundred pages, Tolstoy
expounds on a bounty of controversial ideas, from women’s aversion to sex
and the characterization of married women as socially sanctioned
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prostitutes, to celibacy as the ideal condition, even in marriage. An array of
renowned figures, from Zola to Theodore Roosevelt, condemned these
extreme views, while the United States Post Office banned Tolstoy’s text
from circulation. Chekhov, too, entered the fray.
Chekhov had already polemicized with Tolstoy’s portrayal of female
sexuality over issues of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood. In “The
Name-Day Party” (), in contrast to Tolstoy’s emphatically traditional
and idealistic depictions of childbearing, Chekhov probes its erotic, terri-
fying, and, above all, personal nature. But The Kreutzer Sonata prompted
Chekhov to sharpen his criticism. While he praised the novella’s beauty of
expression, he also opposed Tolstoy’s ill-informed moralizing on sexuality,
heatedly declaring:
There is still one thing there that I can’t forgive the author, namely, the
audacity with which Tolstoy pontificates about what he doesn’t know and,
from pigheadedness, doesn’t want to understand. His judgments on syph-
ilis, foundling homes, women’s aversion to sex and so forth are not only
debatable, but they are illustrative of a person who is ignorant, who hasn’t,
in the course of his long life, bothered to read or books written by
specialists. (February , ; L:)
Critics have identified many Chekhov stories to be in dialogue with The
Kreutzer Sonata, including The Duel (), “Peasant Women” (),
“The Wife” (), and “Ariadne” (). But it is his best-known tale
of mature love – “The Lady with the Little Dog” () – that pro-
vides Chekhov’s most complete rejoinder to Tolstoyan sexual morality.
Common details abound between it and Tolstoy’s works: both feature
Annas with gray eyes that are compared to a lone candle’s flicker, and
Chekhov’s characters have “Karenin-like” spouses whom they despise.
Chekhov’s Gurov mirrors Pozdnyshev’s cynicism concerning the value
of women, for he habitually refers to them as “the lower race,” which is
reminiscent of Pozdnyshev’s frequent characterization of his wife as an
“animal.” Finally, both men crave the company of the “inferior sex”
and, similar to Pozdnyshev’s philosophizing on the ephemeral nature of
sexual desire, Gurov feels passion for his lovers only to quickly
abandon them.
However, Chekhov challenges Tolstoy’s preoccupation with the
destructive nature of sex, which plays a prominent role in Anna Karenina
and The Kreutzer Sonata. In the most iconic scene of “The Lady with the
Little Dog,” right after Anna and Gurov consummate their relationship,
Anna is mortified by her moral transgression, while Gurov calmly eats her
watermelon. Gurov’s pleasurable vivisection and consumption of the ripe
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Sex
red fruit serves as a parodic deflation of Tolstoy’s fusion of murder and the
sex act, which the latter described both figuratively – in Vronsky and
Anna’s first postcoital scene – and literally, when Pozdnyshev uses a knife
to penetrate his wife’s body and to kill her. In Chekhov’s story, Gurov,
instead of comforting Anna, sits in ludicrous silence, punctuated only by
his slicing and chewing. Eventually, as if to crown the ridiculousness of the
scene, Gurov and Anna both begin to laugh. Throughout the rest of the
story, Chekhov advances a reassessment of erotic love that emphasizes
possibility over destruction, as both Gurov and Anna are able to achieve
both genuine love and more authentic versions of themselves. By ending
their story on the word “beginning,” Chekhov leaves Anna and Gurov in
a state of perpetual becoming. Chekhov’s notoriously open ending allows
for his characters to be alive somewhere, eternally “beginning” their
difficult journey.
Chekhov’s interrogation of sex authority ended only with his death in
. His last published story, “The Betrothed,” continues to examine
power differentials between men and women and their consequences.
“The Betrothed” follows Nadya, a provincial young woman who is on
the verge of marrying her own Kareninesque bridegroom but who, awak-
ening suddenly to the absurdity of her predicament, escapes to pursue an
education in the city. The penultimate paragraph tells us Nadya’s life
remains “new, wide-open, expansive, and this life, still uncertain, full of
mysteries, attracted and enticed her” (W:). So reluctant is Chekhov
to give us a definitive answer that he ends the story on the question of
whether Nadya will ever return to her hometown. Chekhov thus closes out
his career by both reopening the question that underpins his thesis – how
can women achieve equality? – and resolutely refusing to answer it.
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Social Activism
Andrei D. Stepanov
Chekhov’s image, to many of his contemporaries, was that of a modest
physician and a public person who managed to combine his activities
for the public good with truthful and emotionally rich stories about
Russian life. In Yuri Eichenwald’s description: “Zemstvo [local self-
government] doctor, zemstvo practitioner of the old sympathetic fold,
provincial toiler, energetic collaborator in honest and difficult labor,
worker-democrat, participant of meetings, inventories, statistics, diligent
sower of zemstvo fields – all this abides, it turns out, in the sophisticated
personality of an elegant, refined artist, a psychologist of languid moods,
a creator of piercing elegies.” The assessment is largely correct. For
Chekhov, public activism was a way of acquiring necessary life experi-
ence, a lifelong means of self-education, a way of helping people, and a
way of maintaining good relations with them. If for the young Chekhov
this help was limited mainly to medical practice and care for relatives
and friends, then in the second half of his life, starting with his trip to
Sakhalin, his concerns began to extend to a wider range of people –
convicts and exiles, peasants, schoolchildren, students, poverty-stricken
consumptives. At the same time, the cases he took on were always
specific and of tangible benefit.
Soon after his voyage to Sakhalin (undoubtedly his best-known act of
voluntary public service; see Chapter ), Chekhov took part, to the best
of his ability, in the struggle against the famine that, following a bad
harvest in , had engulfed southern Central Russia and the Volga
region, a vast territory inhabited by no fewer than thirty million people.
Charitable committees were established throughout the country; local
landowners, priests, merchants, and the peasants themselves volunteered
to help government officials and zemstvo workers. Doctors played a
special role, since the famine was accompanied by a sharp increase in
incidences of typhus, dysentery, and malaria (with the addition of cholera
in the following year).
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Chekhov wanted to see the situation for himself and to participate
directly in famine relief. In January , he set out to collect donations
and to establish free canteens in the Volga region. Over the course of a
week, in snowstorm and severe frost, Chekhov traveled through the
villages while also catching a bad cold. The general conclusion he drew
from his observations was ambivalent: “The government does not behave
badly, helps as much as it can; the zemstvo is either incapable or dissem-
bles, and private charity is next to nil” (January , ; L:). After
his return to Moscow, despite his illness, he left again after only a few
days with Alexei Suvorin for the Voronezh province, a center of the
famine. Instead of visiting the villages, however, they spent entire days in
meetings and idle conversation with officials and benefactresses, and
Chekhov returned to Moscow frustrated by the pointlessness of the trip
and disappointed in Suvorin. His experience of observing the benefac-
tors, their outbursts, quarrels, and ambitions is reflected in his story “The
Wife” (), where Chekhov, perhaps for the first time, introduced
“current events” into his mature prose: the crisis of a marriage unfolds
against the background of attempts on the part of the intelligentsia to
help the starving peasants. In the same year, at the invitation of the
newspaper Russkie vedomosti, Chekhov participated in the charity collec-
tion Help for the Starving (), where he printed a chapter from his
book Sakhalin Island.
Chekhov’s medical, zemstvo, and charitable activities expanded signifi-
cantly after his purchase of the Melikhovo estate in , about fifty miles
from Moscow. Like his decision to go to Sakhalin, his choice of place was
influenced by a desire to live closer to the people: “If I am a doctor, I need
patients and a hospital; if I am a writer, I need to live among the people,
not on Malaya Dmitrovka [a fashionable Moscow street] . . . I need at least
a small piece of social and political life . . . and this life within four walls
without nature, without people, without a fatherland, without health and
appetite – is no life” (October , ; L:).
Like all country doctors, Chekhov, on moving to the country, had to
treat diseases of all kinds, perform surgeries, deliver babies, and (in the
absence of an ambulance) go out constantly on calls, often to his own
extreme discomfort: “I drove to Ugriumovo to see a patient,” he com-
plained to his sister on October , , “and was so shaken that all my
insides were turned upside down. The ride is impossible” (L:). The
number of doctors per capita in late nineteenth-century Russia, especially
in rural areas, was minute, and each of them, Chekhov included, had to see
dozens of patients a day. Serious treatment under such conditions was out
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of the question, hence the reflections of Chekhov’s protagonist Dr. Ragin:
“To give serious help to forty patients before lunch is not physically
possible; so deception is inevitable” (W:–). Chekhov, however,
unlike the hero of “Ward Six,” did not give up, and continued treatments.
Over two years, about , people were admitted to the Melikhovo
precinct. Meanwhile Chekhov did not charge the peasants of neighboring
villages a fee and thus earned himself the fame of “holy fool.” Medical
work was also important for Chekhov as a writer: constant communication
with peasants lent him enormous life experience. As Ivan Bunin
recollected, “as I got to know his life more and more, I gradually began
to realize what a diverse experience of life he had; I compared it with my
own and understood that next to him I was a little boy, a puppy.”
In , the global cholera pandemic reached Russia. The disease was
advancing rapidly from the south (from Persia) into central Russia, and the
authorities set about organizing quarantine measures. Again the zemstvo
and doctor-volunteers played a major role. Chekhov undertook the duties
of cholera doctor (without compensation) for a district of the Serpukhovo
region that included twenty-five villages, four factories, and a monastery.
He traveled frequently within his district, instructing the peasants on
epidemic measures and collecting donations from the landowners:
I’ve turned out to be a first-rate beggar; thanks to my beggarly eloquence
my district now has two first-rate barracks with all the furnishings and
about five barracks that aren’t first-rate, in fact miserable. I’ve even spared
the zemstvo the expense of disinfecting and have acquired lime, vitriol and
all kinds of smelly rubbish for all of my villages from the factory owners.
(August , ; L:)
The results did not take long to make themselves felt. In October ,
the Serpukhovo Sanitary Board reported that, thanks to Chekhov’s “self-
less offer” to participate “free of charge in the fight against the epidemic,
[. . .] the necessity of establishing special observation posts [. . .] was
eliminated.” Fortunately, the epidemic passed the district in , and
it became possible to concentrate on writing, though Chekhov continued
his zemstvo and charity work.
The zemstvo that had been introduced under Alexander II in was
organized democratically: a zemstvo assembly was held once every three
years in the region, where deputies were elected according to quotas from
all estates. In and Chekhov was elected deputy of the
Serpukhovo zemstvo assembly, and he participated in meetings and elec-
tions. Another important sign of the democratization of Russian life after
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Alexander II was the emergence of a non-class-based deputy court with
jury trials, which effectively equalized everyone before the law. Chekhov,
who had depicted the advantages of these new courts in several of his early
stories, was himself appointed as a juror in the s; he traveled to district
court sessions and was even elected foreman of the jury, announcing
verdicts to the members of the court. On his return from a session he
wrote to Suvorin: “Here is my conclusion: ) jurors are not simply street-
fare, but people who are quite ready to embody the so-called public
conscience; ) good people in our midst have enormous authority, regard-
less of whether they are noblemen or peasants, educated or uneducated”
(November , ; L:). His observation of the judges and his
knowledge of law and judicial practice were reflected in his assessment of
the novel Resurrection and in the advice he gave to Tolstoy in after
listening to the author’s reading of excerpts. According to the recollections
of the Tolstoyan Sergei Semyonov, after the reading,
[Chekhov] quietly and calmly began to say that it was all very good. The
picture of the trial had been especially truthfully captured. He had only
recently served as a juror himself and had observed the judges’ attitude to
the case: everyone was busy with side interests and not with the business at
hand. [. . .] The only thing that seemed incorrect to him was Maslova’s
sentence to two years’ hard labor. One could not be sentenced to hard labor
for such a short term. Lev Nikolaevich accepted this and subsequently
corrected his mistake.
In January , the government began to carry out an important and
long-anticipated task, one that was unprecedented in Russia: a general
census of the population (as it turned out later, the first and the last in the
history of the Russian Empire). Chekhov, again voluntarily, took charge of
fifteen surveyors to carry out the census in the villages surrounding
Melikhovo. He explained duties to his charges, sent out census question-
naires, verified the ones that were delivered to him, counted, and trans-
mitted the information to the local census commission. On January
and , , he moved from house to house, enumerating the
inhabitants of the village of Melikhovo. Until the beginning of February,
he worked on the necessary documentation: “The census has exhausted
me,” he admitted in a letter, “never have I had so little time” (January ,
; :). On February , he performed the final tally, telling Suvorin:
“The surveyors worked excellently, pedantically to the point of ridiculous-
ness. But the zemstvo bosses [. . .] behaved disgustingly. They did nothing,
understood little, and claimed illness at the most difficult moments; [. . .]
how annoying to deal with them” (L:).
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The most time-consuming of Chekhov’s public affairs during the
Melikhovo period were the trusteeship of public education and the con-
struction of schools. For two years, beginning in , he was trustee of
the school in the village of Talezh, where the teacher, one Alexei
Mikhailov, as Chekhov explained, “receives rubles a month, has a wife,
four children, and is already gray in spite of his years. He is so oppressed
by want that, no matter what you talk about with him, he reduces
everything to a question of salary” (November , ; L:).
Chekhov helped Mikhailov out from his own resources (money, firewood,
books, etc.), and portrayed him sympathetically under the name
Medvedenko in The Seagull, which he was writing at the time.
The school, which educated sixty-seven children from neighboring
villages, was housed in a dilapidated and cramped building that was more
than forty years old. Chekhov helped the school with money and the
purchase of necessities (including new desks), while also intending from
the outset to construct a new building. The zemstvo usually allocated less
than half the required amount for the construction of schools; philan-
thropists had to either collect the remainder or donate it from their own
funds. The latter was not easy for Chekhov, who had bought the
Melikhovo estate on credit and was living in rather cramped circum-
stances. Nevertheless, the writer invested about , rubles into the
school. His main expense, however, was not money but time.
Contractors could not be relied on for such projects, and the trustee
had to do all the organizational work: draw up the plan and estimate for
the construction of a one-story wooden house, purchase the materials,
and monitor the process, which in this case took about a year and a half.
The story of construction of the Talezh school and of the uneasy
relations with the peasants who did not understand the undertaking
and tried their utmost to cheat the benefactors and gain something for
themselves, is told in detail in the story “My Life,” written at that time.
After finishing the construction, Chekhov continued building schools.
Spending another , rubles, he built a school in the village of
Novoselki (completed in ), and after his serious illness caused him
to leave the region, his sister Maria, in , oversaw the completion of a
school in the village of Melikhovo itself. The school buildings in
Novoselki and Melikhovo have survived and are now part of the
“Museum-Reserve of A.P. Chekhov ‘Melikhovo.’”
In addition to building schools, Chekhov held the post of assistant to
the district marshal of the nobility for the supervision of public schools.
His duties included inspection of peasant schools. On December ,
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, he wrote to Suvorin: “I am preparing material for a book, like
Sakhalin, which will depict all zemstvo schools in our county, from
the economic perspective. This will be for the zemstvo” (L:). The plan
was not realized, due apparently to the escalation of his illness in .
Equally engaged in other “small deeds,” Chekhov helped open a post office
(now the Chekhov Letters Museum) in the town of Lopasnya, near
Melikhovo. He collected money for the highway and built a bell tower
for the church and a fire station in Melikhovo. As a member of the district
sanitary council he often visited factories, one of which is depicted in
“A Case History” ().
Nor did Chekhov forget about his hometown. An impression of the
general unculturedness of provincial life seems to have remained firmly in
his memory from his trip to Taganrog in . Starting in he
continually sent books in large quantities to the Taganrog city library on
a variety of subjects: Russian and foreign classics, modern fiction, ency-
clopedic and reference books, historical studies, publications on agriculture
and on his favorite subject of gardening. In , Chekhov sent a new
blueprint for the library’s reference department to Doctor Pavel Iordanov,
a member of the city council and a former classmate. During his medical
treatment in Nice in , Chekhov purchased and sent an entire library
of French literature (“ authors, or volumes” March , ;
L:) but asked Iordanov not to tell anyone about his involvement in
the library. In his efforts to remind the “sleeping” residents of their city’s
rich history (founded by Peter I in ), Chekhov also helped in the
creation of a museum, and secured an agreement with the sculptor Mark
Antokolsky to give Taganrog a monument to Peter I, providing the first
donation himself and inviting other Taganrog acquaintances to raise funds.
The museum was eventually named after Chekhov, and the monu-
ment by Antokolsky still graces the city on the Sea of Azov.
The final period of the writer’s life, in Yalta, was marked by serious
illness. Even during this time, however, he continued to send books
regularly to the Taganrog library; helped to build a school in the Tatar
village of Mukhalatka; saved the Greek church near his home in Autka;
treated the Autka poor; placed appeals to help the starving children of the
Samara province in the local newspaper; gave money to petitioners; and
paid the tuition for several gymnasium students. His principal activist
work in the early s, however, was in helping tuberculosis patients in
need. Having become involved in the Yalta Charitable Society, which
consisted of doctors from the community, he was elected district trustee
for impecunious patients arriving to the area.
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There were many such patients in Yalta. Climatotherapy was considered
the only remedy for tuberculosis, and consumptives, often on their last
penny, flocked to the Crimea from all over the country. As trustee, it was
Chekhov’s task “to find cheap rooms, a table, milk, free medical care and
cheap medicine, to find lessons, classes” (W:). Chekhov, however,
considered his main goal to be the creation of a generally accessible
sanatorium “where needy lung patients would receive accommodation,
maintenance, and treatment for a minimum fee or free of charge”
(W:). He prepared a fundraising appeal and placed it in the local
newspaper, while also sending it out to editorial boards, friends, and
acquaintances. Chekhov gained support. Gorky, ill with tuberculosis
himself, reprinted the letter with some changes in the Nizhny Novgorod
newspaper. Donations came from many cities and from within Yalta.
Chekhov collected them both in Yalta and during his visits to Moscow;
his sister and brother Mikhail helped him in this, as did members of the
Moscow Art Theater. Consequently, in August , a boarding house in
Nizhnyaya Autka was established for twenty patients. In , Chekhov
and other members of the charitable society had raised enough to buy a
plot of land on Baryatinskaya Street and erect a building for fifty patients;
Chekhov was unanimously elected as a member of the committee for its
construction. The boarding house, designed by the architect Lev
Shapovalov, became one of Yalta’s most beautiful buildings, and the
antituberculosis sanatorium that grew out from that building exists to this
day, bearing Chekhov’s name.
Chekhov’s characters often express the need to labor for the sake of the
future, often at the cost of their own happiness. As Vershinin declares in
The Three Sisters , “We must only work and work, and happiness will be
the lot of our distant descendants” (W:–). Unlike his characters,
and unlike many of his contemporaries and colleagues, Chekhov was able
to combine dreams and reality. He rejected neither worldly pleasures nor
imaginings of “the life that will come after us, in two or three hundred
years.” At the same time he also managed to help a great many people,
both acquaintances and strangers, during his short life.
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Jane Costlow
Since at least the s, Anton Chekhov has had a reputation as an
environmentalist avant la lettre, a writer whose concern for ecological
damage at both a local and a global scale was uncannily close to the
anxieties of our own era. Whether it is the ecological vision embedded in
“The Steppe,” Astrov’s discourse on deforestation and species loss in Uncle
Vanya, or the interlacing of factory pollution, poverty, and corruption in
“In the Ravine,” Chekhov has seemed depressingly perspicacious about the
human propensity not merely to use but to abuse. A production of
Uncle Vanya in Paris, directed by Stéphane Braunschweig, set the play in a
hothouse of human making, and the heat was not just psychological: the
characters periodically took dives into an onstage pool to cool off.
Braunschweig explains the directorial choice in this way:
Astrov is saying that the world, that nature is destroyed by humans. He
talks about these forests being destroyed. Today we think “Chekhov
warned us, over a hundred years ago, but no one listened.” Because today,
forests are burning in the Amazon, in Siberia, in Australia . . . these aren’t
natural catastrophes! It’s humans who have done it, it’s climate change, for
which we’re responsible. It’s extraordinary that Chekhov already saw it.
The climate is indeed changing, and humans’ propensity for irritation and
misunderstanding (those other hallmarks of Chekhovian writing) has
not changed.
“Chekhov already saw it.” What did Chekhov see? The nineteenth-
century historian Vasily Kliuchevsky saw Russia’s physical environment,
with its networks of great rivers set into a landscape of forest and steppe, as
a pivotal shaper of Russian history and culture. By the late nineteenth
century that environment was a patchwork of both dramatic change and
staggering inertia – rural corners where nothing seemed ever to have
happened and industrialized regions where humans were forging a new
and often terrifying reality. The nineteenth-century environmental and
scientific context helps us situate what Simon Karlinsky called Chekhov’s
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conservationism; while we now understand it as less exclusive to Chekhov
than it seemed forty years ago, it is no less trenchant in its insights. In the
early twenty-first century, writing about the environment is ubiquitous,
spanning genres and tones from the dystopian to the elegiac, from jour-
nalistic exposé to intimate encounter, bridging science, sensibility, and
politics, often indulging precisely those impulses to nostalgia, simplifica-
tion, and absolutes that Chekhov challenged. The question in this context
is not merely what Chekhov saw but how he asked us to see it. Chekhov
repeatedly registers the human inclination to look away, to forget some
sight that might draw us out of what we have come to call our comfort
zone. A characteristic example: “In the Ravine” begins with a brief descrip-
tion followed by what in the world of movies we would call a trailer. First,
the description: for those passing by on the highway or train, the only
thing you can see of the village of Ukleevo (the name is redolent of
something sticky) are the church tower and the factory smokestack.
Then comes the “trailer”: “That’s the village where the deacon ate all the
caviar at a funeral.” Even critics writing about the story tend to reference
“In the Ravine” in terms of the caviar story rather than the haunting
architectural juxtaposition of pollution and spirit. Chekhov’s story leads us
into an abyss of abuse: acetic acid and tannery waste, regulations that are
ignored and doctors who are bought off, even before we get to domestic
abuse, counterfeiting, and murder. “In the Ravine” is unflinching, even if
one flinches before following Chekhov into this hell. Mostly this is an
environment we do not want to see. We would rather hear the one about
the deacon and the caviar.
Chekhov was born in , in a part of Russia known for its steppe. In
the course of his lifetime, scientific understanding and public alarm at
human impacts to each of Kliuchevsky’s key environments – forests,
steppe, and river basins – would intensify. The earliest discussions of
deforestation in Russia date to at least the s, when the British
geologist Roderick Murchison visited Russia and remarked on how quickly
the country was destroying its woodlands. German scientists in the early
nineteenth century had come to better understand the dynamics of river
hydrology, how upstream deforestation could transform an entire river
basin, disrupting everything from shipping to agriculture. Russians’ prof-
ligate cutting of wood for heating, for railroad construction, and (before
the coming of petroleum products in the s and s) as fuel for
steamboats began to be remarked on in the s and s in journals
that were read by gentlemen landowners and avid hunters. Foresters who
trained at German universities returned to Russia and began to argue the
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need for forestry that would mandate restrained cutting and reforestation.
The social and economic changes launched with the emancipation of the
serfs in accelerated the pace of land sales and clear-cutting (a situation
that Tolstoy alludes to in Anna Karenina). Russian foresters like Alexander
Rudzky and Fedor Arnol’d documented (with statistics and maps not
unlike Astrov’s) how forests were shrinking in different regions of Russia,
arguing that even private woodland should be subject to regulation: their
abuse “threatens to lead to national disasters,” and thus personal rights
should be constrained “in the name of the common good.” Specialists
who wrote for both popular and specialized journals argued for the
importance of seeing woodlands not merely in terms of utility and poten-
tial revenue, but as important cultural landscapes, tied to traditional
cultures and understandings of identity. Dmitry Kaigorodov, a forest
scientist at the St. Petersburg Forest Academy, was best known for his
beautifully illustrated books about Russia’s forests and migratory birds. In
Chekhov’s short “Fragment,” a retired civil servant buys an estate
and, “in imitation of Prof. Kaigorodov,” begins keeping a nature journal.
For Kaigorodov, the first step in moving toward understanding and
ecological care was to pay attention to the world around you, hence his
advocacy of readers taking notes on seasonal change. Whether Chekhov’s
characters ever achieve this kind of attention – much less love and care – is
always up for debate.
Russians had long understood their forests to be endless, an assumption
that these scientists, along with numerous writers and painters, began to
challenge. Turgenev’s “Khor and Kalinich” – one of his Huntsman’s
Sketches – opens by telling the reader that soon “the last woods and
brushwood of the Orel region will disappear,” a narratorial premonition
that Chekhov’s “The Reed Pipe” expands into the dystopian visions
of a peasant-Cassandra. Ilya Repin’s magisterial painting of a
religious procession shows a clear-cut hillside in the background
(Procession of the Cross in the Kursk District). The painting’s motley crowd
is shadowed by horseback police and heavy dust, hinting at a connection
between deforestation and drought that scientists of Chekhov’s day were
trying to understand. How did climates change, and why? Were humans
responsible? How could the growing erosion and desiccation of soil in
Russia’s southeastern European regions – just a bit farther east from
Chekhov’s native Taganrog – be explained? The great soil scientist Vasily
Dokuchaev, along with the climatologist Iakov Veinberg, debated whether
drought and desertification were anthropogenic or part of cyclical changes.
Meanwhile, the mystical philosopher and poet Vladimir Solov’ev wrote
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essays declaring that the “enemy from the east” most threatening Russia
was not a political rival but encroaching desert. Alarm about these issues
intensified in the wake of the severe drought, famine, and epidemics of
cholera at the beginning of the s – disasters that drew attention and
intervention from a host of writers (Leo Tolstoy and Vladimir Korolenko
in addition to Chekhov). Korolenko’s discussions of both famine and
cholera emphasize that these were disasters that owed at least as much to
administrative failure (corruption and inefficiency) as to natural causes.
In the Ukleevo of Chekhov’s “In the Ravine” the water is polluted, and
both humans and livestock fall ill. Russia’s factories in the late nineteenth
century generated vast wealth for entrepreneurial and merchant families,
women and men whose personal dramas are the focus of stories like
“A Woman’s Kingdom,” “A Case History,” and “Three Years,” narratives
in which we sometimes get a glimpse of fire and iron, or the squalor of
workers’ quarters. By the s and s these networks of industry were
beginning to run on fossil fuel. Changes in imperial policy ushered in an
oil boom around Baku; much of that oil made its way across the Caspian
and up the Volga into Russia’s industrial heartland. Perhaps as much as
percent of the oil was lost to seepage from the mostly wooden barges that
carried it; oil skimmed out onto Russia’s greatest river, asphyxiating fish
and poisoning municipal drinking water. Scientists studying fisheries
documented the issue and made recommendations for its remediation.
They would have read Chekhov’s description of the colors of polluted
water and the smells emanating from the tannery and textile factories in
“Ukleevo” with recognition – as might the inhabitants of the south Asian
villages where many of our own leather goods now come from.
What makes Chekhov’s environmental attention so powerful, of course,
is not science or statistics but stories. Over the decades of his writing career
we find numerous examples of narratives that stun us with their feel for the
natural world, for the lives of animals, the casual cruelty and institution-
alized forms of destruction that undermine health for reasons that seem
maddeningly trivial. The story “Cold Blood” throws us in medias res
into the railway journey of a father and son taking bulls to market. The
story is a vivid, almost tactile evocation of the cold discomfort of traveling
in a freight car. Mostly “Cold Blood” focuses on human actors (father, son,
various railway workers), and on not going anywhere: many of its pages are
about sitting on sidings, or shunting back and forth, so that the reader
comes to feel as though trapped in a vast tangle of trains that do not leave
and lines that go nowhere. Going anywhere in this world depends on
bribing the conductor, the engineer, the subconductor, the guy who
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schedules the coupling and uncoupling. The father thinks he is good at it,
and is proud of himself. He is, after all, moving his product, eight cars full
of bulls. What is stunning about the story is not just the Kafkaesque maze
of train numbers, bribes and (im)mobility; it is the fact that Chekhov
manages, within that context, to include a few short reminders of the other
sentient beings who are suffering through this horror, the bulls themselves.
In just a few brief passages he shifts our awareness to them: the train shifts
backward, the bulls fall over, and their quarters are so tight they struggle to
get back on their feet; they are given nothing to drink or eat for four days
and are so thirsty they lick hoarfrost off the sides of the car. They alone in
this story have eyes that express a soul: “The bull stumbled from pain, ran
a dozen paces forward, and looked about with an expression as if of shame
at being beaten in front of strangers” (W:). In the end, Chekhov tells
us, the father sells the bulls for less than he had hoped. He and his son
head home with an assortment of newly purchased goods they could have
bought anywhere. The coachman taking them to their train “whips his
horse and starts to swear at the weight of their luggage” (W:).
Devastating in its understated outrage at the human treatment of
animals, this story also rehearses a complex of themes and motifs that
show up elsewhere in Chekhov: technologies of iron and fire; corruption;
greed; consumption (one loses count of how many glasses of vodka are
drunk on the railway sidings of “Cold Blood”); and the final suggestion
that the whole enterprise (which is also an infrastructure – railway ties,
networks, capital, officials) has no real point. Midway through the
“A Case History,” a doctor – who has been called to a consultation about a
factory owner’s ailing daughter – surveys the great complex from the
inside; he thinks of the factory as the “devil,” as a chronic, untreatable
illness, as a “misunderstanding,” and finally as evidence of a “law of
nature” that deems the strong must subdue the weak. Cotton factories
and a tannery in Ukleevo pollute the air and water; in “A Case History”
industry begets a process of tangled thought not unlike the back-and-forth,
going-nowhere trains in “Cold Blood.” The doctor does not know what to
say to the young heiress, nor about the factory as a whole and the various
forms of benevolent projects that are meant to mitigate its impacts (enter-
tainment and an on-site clinic). So he jumps into the wishful thinking
about a distant future that Chekhov’s characters are so susceptible to,
which is a way of not thinking about the “misunderstandings” and
pathologies of the present.
“A Case History” might be thought of as a story about what it means to
be healthy. At one point the doctor sits on a woodpile outside the factory
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walls and listens to frogs and nightingales, sleepy roosters, the quiet of a
May night. This particular soundscape evokes a world in which everything,
both human and natural, wild and domesticated, is filled with health and
simply being. But the pile of wood has already been cut (“for construc-
tion” – more factory), and the doctor’s listening is but a brief interlude.
The question of what constitutes health, and how humans should relate to
the natural world, remains characteristically well posed but unanswered.
The story “The Black Monk” launches this question with particular
acuity, although its response is oblique and cautionary. In many ways the
inverse of “The Steppe,” with its youthful, ecological perspective, “The
Black Monk” is a study in mental illness, set in a world where all of nature
is bent to human ends – whether utilitarian or imaginative. A gifted young
scholar visits a father and daughter in the countryside and has a series of
hallucinatory conversations with a cowled monk. The story is punctuated
by descriptions of the family’s orchards and garden, with wild woods, a
river, and fields in the distance. The garden of the story is hardly a place of
innocence: the orchard is run (profitably) with a mixture of tyrannical
anger and pedantry by the father; the garden itself features shrubs pruned
to look like what they are not. No one in the story seems to sleep; everyone
has bad cases of insomnia and nerves. Humans are overwrought, as is the
cultivated land; everything is overworked. The monk who appears to
the scholar insists at one point that health and equilibrium are only for
the mediocre “herd”; to be delusional is a sign of brilliance. The narrative,
however, suggests otherwise. By story’s end the garden has been sold and is
in the process of being destroyed, just as the lives of all the story’s
characters are ruined by a mixture of perpetual agitation and a perspectival
arrogance that keeps any of them from seeing things with dispassion. It
seems not irrelevant that “science” in the story (one potential source of an
objective view) is characterized not by detachment but by petty disputa-
tion and dreams of grandeur.
Trained in medicine, Chekhov maintained a lifelong curiosity about
the natural sciences, at one point entertaining the idea of founding a
journal to be called The Naturalist together with the zoologist Vladimir
Vagner. Inspired by the botanist Kliment Timiriazev’s denunciation of an
absurdly bad “botanical station” set up at the Moscow Zoo, Chekhov and
Vagner wrote their own pamphlet denouncing the zoo’s appalling condi-
tions and mercenary management. Not unlike Korolenko with his exposé
of famine, Chekhov gathered data and information about distant
Sakhalin, thinking to solidify his reputation not merely as a writer but
as a scientist. The power of Chekhov’s environmental imagination,
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Environmentalism
however, derives from his writerly accomplishments: juxtapositions, lyri-
cism, compassionate attention, persistent irony, his development of an
“ecosystem” of characters and landscapes as diverse as Russia. The fact
that Chekhov was not alone in writing about environmental issues in
nineteenth-century Russia does not diminish the enduring power of how
he addressed them, and how his work continues to unsettle us. Tom
Newlin has argued that, by the mid–nineteenth century, writers like
Turgenev and Aksakov had created a distinctively Russian environmental
aesthetic, one that was “contemplative” and attuned to ecological relation-
ships. By century’s end Chekhov grants us deeply contemplative
moments, but also challenges a merely quietist appreciation of nature, or
the escape hatch of a distant, invisible better day. To quote Karlinsky once
more: “The shattering ‘In the Ravine’ [. . .] confronts the theme that in a
more subdued form and in a totally different social milieu is also basic to
the play Three Sisters: [. . .] the inability of the good but weak to defend
themselves from those who are armed with the strength of selfishness.”
A bitter truth, but an essential one.
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Sakhalin Island
Edyta M. Bojanowska
The forbidding north Pacific island of Sakhalin, which housed the Russian
Empire’s most notorious penal colony and was separated from Moscow by
a perilous ,-mile journey, did not strike Chekhov’s family and friends
as a suitable travel destination for a writer in frail health and with better
things to do. But Chekhov’s mind was made up, and he set out from
Moscow on April , . Although the Suez Canal provided faster
oceanic access to Russia’s Pacific shores, and though Chekhov used this
route for his return, he opted for the arduous overland passage through
Siberia when journeying to Sakhalin. In doing so, he followed the path of
the adventurers, explorers, soldiers, government officials, settlers, outlaws,
exiles, and convicts who extended the Russian Empire to the Pacific.
This was not an itinerary for a casual tourist. Initially, the steamboats that
linked European Russia’s rivers brought Chekhov to the symbolic gateway
to Siberia – the city of Perm, near the Ural Mountains. Then, railroads
carried him to Tyumen, in western Siberia, but there they ended. Prior to
the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway, which began in ,
crossing the rest of Siberia involved impassable roads or swampy flood plains
that had to be navigated by horse-drawn carriages or boats, and when those
failed, by foot. Along the way, bitter cold and insect swarms of biblical
proportions gave way to unbearable heat and dust. But the endless taiga was
thrilling, if eerily disorienting. The journey through eastern Siberia was
punctuated by stopovers in the emerging urban centers of Tomsk, Irkutsk,
Chita, and Nerchinsk. After reaching the stunning shores of Lake Baikal,
the jewel of Siberia, Chekhov sailed in the company of gold prospectors and
Chinese merchants on the Amur river, a huge region Russia annexed from
China in to gain navigable egress into the Pacific. On July , after
eleven weeks of travel, he finally reached Sakhalin.
Why would Chekhov, a busy and impecunious doctor and writer with
early symptoms of tuberculosis, undertake this eight-month journey
costing him over , rubles? Several reasons combined to infect
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Sakhalin Island
Chekhov with “Sakhalin mania,” as he called it. He was shaken by the
recent death of his brother Nikolai from the very disease that he himself
had, though he refused to acknowledge it. This condition made a bucket-
list frame of mind not entirely premature for this thirty-year-old man. He
wanted to escape his general malaise and romantic entanglements, and to
broaden his range of experiences. Having long wallowed in the arms of his
mistress Literature, as he colorfully put it, he felt the need to return to his
lawful wife Medicine, meant here as an analogy for scholarly activity
(L:). A bold deed would set him apart from the blathering, sofa-
ridden intelligentsia he despised. Such a deed would in some measure pay
homage to heroic men of action such as “the Russian Livingston,” Nikolai
Przhevalsky, the dauntless explorer of Central Asia whom Chekhov hon-
ored in an obituary. It might also clear Chekhov of the accusation that he
ignored burning social problems. Not least, Chekhov simply loved to
travel. Before Sakhalin, he traveled in Ukraine, the Caucasus, and the
Crimea; after Sakhalin, he visited Austria, Italy, and France. His unrealized
post-Sakhalin travel plans included Algiers, southern Africa, India, Japan,
Australia, the United States, Sweden, and Egypt.
Yet why Sakhalin? Chekhov’s stated goal was to study the problem of
katorga, or penal servitude. But the vast archipelago of this carceral system
offered plenty of research sites, some of which he passed by on his way to
Sakhalin with barely a mention. Sakhalin’s notoriety as a particularly brutal
outpost of katorga certainly played into this decision. The most concrete
explanation was delivered by Chekhov in a letter of March , , to his
editor and friend Alexei Suvorin: “Sakhalin is the only place except for
Australia, in the past, and Cayenne today, where one can study coloniza-
tion by convicts” (L:). (Cayenne, popularly known as Devil’s Island,
was a penal colony off the coast of French Guiana.) This clarifies that
Chekhov’s interest lay not in penal servitude itself, as is often assumed, but
in its use as a method of colonization, the scientific study of which
required the “controlled” environment of an island.
Reacting in this letter with rare passion to Suvorin’s failure to find
Sakhalin of interest, Chekhov retorts that a society that exiles thousands
of people to this appalling place of suffering, wasting millions of rubles in
the process, cannot afford such disinterest. He indicts all of Russian society
for Sakhalin’s barbaric conditions, by then sufficiently publicized, claiming
that the island should become a site of pilgrimage for Russians, like Mecca
is for Turks. Russia’s reckless disregard for humanitarian norms in the
operation of its penal system, he argues, violates the basic rules of Christian
civilization.
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.
The trip to Sakhalin was meant to verify these dark premonitions. As a
ploy for meeting prisoners and observing their living conditions, Chekhov
designed a census for the collection of demographic information. The
prison authorities who allowed it later regretted it. Chekhov polled about
, exiles and convicts during his three months on the island, limiting
his census to Russia’s penal settlements, which in fact represented a small
fraction of this Ireland-sized island.
Sakhalin was an imperial possession of recent vintage, and Russia’s
territorial footprint on the island was still small. By , after a century
of competition with Japan, Russia had controlled the northern half of
Sakhalin for only thirty-five years, and its southern half for just fifteen.
Prior to the late s, China had exercised loose sovereignty over the
island. Karafuto, which is Sakhalin’s Japanese name, seemed to Chekhov
the end of the world, but it was quite central to East Asia’s imperial rivalries.
The island held strategic importance for Russia because it had rich coal
deposits, secured access to the recently annexed Amur river, and provided
an isolated location for katorga, which would relieve the overcrowded
Siberian prisons and cleanse them of their most socially undesirable
elements. The rapid influx of convicts to Sakhalin began in , reaching
about , at the time of Chekhov’s visit. By the time Russia closed the
colony in , after losing the island’s southern half to Japan yet again,
their ranks had doubled. As elsewhere in Siberia, katorga’s carceral goals
went hand in hand with colonial ones, often to the detriment of rehabil-
itation. Prison term completed, a convict would become an exile, typically
for life, though some earned the right to return to the mainland.
When preparing for the trip and writing his book, Chekhov consulted
nearly sources. He found the writing difficult and tedious, his pro-
crastination resulting in several masterpieces of short fiction, such as “The
Duel” and “Ward No. .” He confessed to stealing ideas from printed
sources and passing them off as his own to sound authoritative, then a
common practice in travel writing and popular science. Yet he also decried
this procedure as “sheer swindle.” His exasperation at having to dig in
sources for hours and reread all manner of boring material to produce a
single line of text will resonate with any scholar (L:, , , ).
The resulting book, Sakhalin Island: Travel Notes (Ostrov Sakhalin [Iz
putevykh zapisok]), appeared in , following a serialized journal run.
Most fans of Chekhov’s literature find it a bit dry and boring, but the writer
accorded enormous importance to this book, his longest, claiming that it
would outlive him, a guess he did not freely hazard about his fiction and
drama. Sakhalin Island is situated in multiple traditions. It is a harsh
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Sakhalin Island
documentary exposé of Siberian katorga, like George Kennan’s Siberia and
the Exile System (), banned but widely known in Russia, or like Vlas
Doroshevich’s later book Sakhalin (). It belongs to literary treatments
of Siberian katorga, alongside Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of
the Dead () and Leo Tolstoy’s Resurrection (). It is also a travel
account about Siberia, like Ivan Goncharov’s imperial bestseller The Frigate
Pallada (), a childhood favorite that Chekhov had reread before the
voyage. The genre of Sakhalin Island is typically treated as a series of
sketches (ocherki), or informal descriptions of peoples or places, with
authorial reflections embroidered on the factual canvas of mostly firsthand
observation, in places reinforced by science. Yet the book’s disciplinary
blend of sociology, ethnography, criminology, statistics, medicine, meteo-
rology, and botany has also inspired a variety of hybrid designations. Other
single-genre labels include penological literature, sociological study, or
medical geography, each of which narrows the book’s actual scope.
Though his terse literary styling graces many descriptive passages,
Chekhov consistently presented Sakhalin Island as a fact-based work of
scholarship. His own subtitle – “travel notes” – places the book squarely
within the genre of travel writing, for which the sketch form was a natural
fit, and which typically incorporated rich nonfictional material from a
variety of disciplines. Nineteenth-century travel writing ran the gamut
from personal accounts of travel impressions – witty, ironic, often self-
consciously literary – to impersonal, footnote-studded scholarly tomes,
which were often shaped by the traveler’s professional interests (minutiae
of navigation filled explorers’ accounts; naturalists expatiated on plants).
Chekhov used the personal mode to describe his journey through
Siberia in a series of sketches “From Siberia,” which were serialized in
New Times (Novoe vremia). In Sakhalin Island, however, he opts for the
information-laden format. A “travel account” may well be the best generic
umbrella for the first fourteen chapters of Sakhalin Island, which roughly
follow Chekhov’s itinerary and offer what he calls a “survey of settled
places” (W/:). These include Aleksandrovsk and settlements along
the Duika, Arkai, and Tym Rivers in the north, and in the south,
Korsakovsk and the Aniva Bay. In the remaining nine chapters,
Chekhov takes an analytical cross section of this descriptive material by
focusing on the specific problems of the colony. These include, in order: )
the relation of katorga to colonization; ) the situation of women; )
children and family structure; ) inhabitants’ occupations; ) nutrition,
education, and religion; ) non-convict population; ) crimes and punish-
ments; ) reasons for escape; and ) health.
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.
Are katorga and colonization mutually beneficial? How can Sakhalin
become a more viable settlement colony? These are the key questions that
Chekhov confronts in his book. He makes Sakhalin a test case of Russia’s
modernity and imperial fitness, and, despite some evidence of progress, he
finds it a depressing failure on both counts.
The main roadblock is the administration’s irrational belief in the
island’s agricultural potential, heedless of the soil and climatic conditions.
Some places average eight sunny days per summer; frost in August has
killed the potato crop in one village. As the joke goes, Sakhalin has no
climate, only bad weather. Instead of the senseless cloning of Russian-style
agriculture to a mostly barren island, Chekhov recommends exploiting the
resources it does provide, such as plentiful fish. Japanese fisheries, he notes,
bring millions in profit. The harvesting of sea kelp, for which there was a
big East Asian market nearby, had uplifted communities not dependent on
the Russian imperial diktat.
Sakhalin required non-Russian thinking because it was not Russia.
Chekhov felt like a foreigner there, as he would have in Patagonia or
Texas (his comparisons). Local life had its own cultural and economic
coordinates; talk of Russian art and politics just made people yawn. This
caused no regret for Chekhov, who hoped Siberia might become the embryo
of a new Russia, unencumbered by the sins and burdens of the old one.
So far, however, the tentacles of the Russian state choking Sakhalin
merely magnified those burdens and revived the sins long renounced back
in Russia. To Chekhov, the administrators’ use of prisoners as unpaid
servants eerily resembled serfdom. Women brought to the island were
distributed among men like chattel, the prettiest and youngest going to the
officials. These women were given the choice to either cohabitate with
their assigned male or enter prostitution, and many did both to survive and
feed their children. Chekhov also reports in excruciating detail a flogging
he witnessed: how the prisoner’s skin cracks under the lash, how he retches
from pain. At some point, Chekhov leaves the room, unable to watch.
Perhaps the lowest circle of Sakhalin’s hell for Chekhov was Dué, south of
Alexandrovsk, where the most hardened criminals toiled in harrowing
conditions in the local coal mines. They were housed in overcrowded
barracks, as many as thirty people to a cell: floors covered with viscous filth,
the sour stench of cockroaches and human bodies, indoor icicles in the
winter. Dispensing with his vaunted terseness, Chekhov lists every single
occupant of four sample cells: the men, their wives, their concubines, and
children. It takes a writer of Chekhov’s skill and daring to balance the
reader’s increasing boredom against the compounding feeling of suffocation.
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Sakhalin Island
The “etc.” (i t.d.) that breaks off this page-long list serves as both a release
from the tedium of enumeration and a chilling magnifier of human misery.
In conclusion, Chekhov invites the reader to judge from these “barbaric”
conditions “how disrespected and despised are the women and children who
had voluntarily followed their husbands and fathers to exile [. . .] and how
little thought is given to an agricultural colony” (W/: ).
Yet not all is doom and gloom on Sakhalin. Some prisons are relatively
clean and well provisioned, with sufficient amounts of air per person and
toilet facilities of which even Chekhov’s medical professor would approve.
Some settlements do prosper, though the reasons turn out to be either the
illegal alcohol trade or the lack of interference from the state, which tended
to ruin everything. Towns, roads, and orchards have been built where not
long ago there was only taiga. Chekhov finds less hunger and poverty in
southern Sakhalin, which has a warmer climate. The Japanese fisheries
there provide a livelihood and training to the Russian free settlers they
employ. But overall, whether Russian colonization of Sakhalin will succeed
is an open question for Chekhov.
Chekhov’s conclusion is that carceral and colonial goals are incompat-
ible – “the prison is the antagonist of the colony” (W/:) – so he
proposes ways to mitigate this antagonism. Settled exile is in fact harder
than katorga. While in prison, convicts are at least housed and fed; when
released, they are given an axe and a shovel and told to go fend for
themselves. Chekhov therefore argues that prison terms should be short-
ened so that, upon transition to settled life, men are not yet past their
colonizing prime. During their prison term, they should be allowed to
build homes and acquire the skills and trades needed for their future
survival as colonists. Exiles should have their civic rights restored sooner,
despite the risk of escape to the mainland. Proper expertise is needed for
the selection of settlement sites. Most importantly, the ill-conceived plan
of turning Sakhalin into an agricultural cornucopia must be abandoned.
In Sakhalin Island, as elsewhere in his oeuvre, Chekhov aimed to
reform, not to reject, the empire. He held it accountable to its stated goals
of progress and civilizing mission. Alas, Russia seemed bent on a deciviliz-
ing mission in Sakhalin. “These are no longer sinless virgin shores,”
Chekhov wrote in an early draft, “we have already defiled them by
violence” (W/:). Russia’s failure pained Chekhov especially when
compared with what he saw as British successes. He confessed to Suvorin:
“I became indignant when I heard my fellow Russian travelers inveigh
against the British for exploiting the natives. I thought – sure, they exploit
the Chinese, the sepoys, and the Hindus, but in return they give them
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roads, plumbing, museums, Christianity. You too exploit the natives, but
what do you give them in return?” (Dec. , ; L:).
Indeed, what did Russia give the Sakhalin natives in return? Not much
that was good, according to Chekhov. The Russian administration uses the
peace-loving Nivkh (Gilyak) people of northern Sakhalin as bounty
hunters for fugitive prisoners, vaunting this employment’s Russifying
dividend. Distrustful that the natives understand the fine points of
Russian criminal law, Chekhov surmises that their natural conclusion is
to equate Russianness with violence and a license to kill. He is shocked to
discover that the Russian official appointed to translate the indigenous
languages does not speak any of them. “If Russification is really necessary,”
Chekhov dispiritingly avers, “the needs [of the natives] must take prece-
dence over ours” (W/:).
Chekhov also confronts the cause célèbre of the Siberian regionalist
Nikolai Yadrintsev – “the dying out” of Siberian natives (vymiranie inor-
odtsev). On this point, however, Chekhov is defensive. He casts doubt on
official statistics reporting a percent decline of the Nivkh population
and percent decline of the Ainu, indigenous to southern Sakhalin.
Perhaps the census takers were improperly trained, or the aborigines
simply migrated to neighboring islands? (Chekhov does not inquire as to
reasons.) Or maybe this is a natural process of extinction, in which the
Russians played no role? Could the natives’ horrible diet and hygiene be
factors? (Never mind that both served them fine for centuries.)
Chekhov’s ethnographic profiles of indigenous people rely on predictably
biased printed sources much more than his descriptions of Russian settle-
ments do. Though praised for their humanitarianism and certainly well-
intentioned, these descriptions depart from today’s standards of cultural
sensitivity. They mix sympathy with disgust, as in his portraits of abject
Ainu women. They report as fact all manner of prejudices or simply bizarre
improbabilities (such as the Ainu’s physiological need to eat every hour).
Sakhalin Island galvanized public opprobrium of the penal system,
propelling a series of reforms. Terminal exile and katorga were discontin-
ued, and laws regulating marriage of exiles were changed. The lashing and
corporal punishment of women were banned, and treasury funds for
orphanages were appropriated. As for Chekhov, who claimed that after
the journey everything for him was “sakhalined through and through” (vse
prosakhalineno), the experience gave him a more global sense of Russia’s
social problems and increased the urgency of addressing them.
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Culture
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Philosophy
Michal Oklot
“Chekhov’s philosophy? . . . Isn’t that an absurdity?” Most likely,
Chekhov’s friend Ivan Leontiev-Scheglov was right, and we should end
this entry right away, following the advice of one of his characters: “No
philosophizing, please [. . .] For one evening anyway live like a human
being!” (W:). Yet the question of philosophy and Chekhov keeps
coming back, not only in criticism and scholarship, but also in his works.
Considering the philosophical context of his works, we need to talk,
then, about: ) philosophy as imposed on him in criticism and scholar-
ship; ) philosophy as dramatized (or mocked) in his works; and ) the
philosophical worldviews inherent in his works, as related to his own
philosophical interests.
At the turn of the nineteenth century – when Chekhov’s readers,
growing in number and enthusiasm, began to expect something more
from him than literature – literary criticism also took a philosophical turn.
The social-civil criteria applied to Chekhov’s work had started to fade
away, being replaced by aesthetic-philosophical questions. As A. S. Glinka
(Volzhsky) – a philosophically oriented critic and the author of an impor-
tant study on “the philosophical sense of Chekhov’s artistic works”
– noted once, the authentic Russian philosophy, a juicy and aromatic
artistic philosophy in colors and paint, is hidden precisely in literature.
Sergei Bulgakov’s lecture-turned-essay, “Chekhov as a Thinker” (),
Lev Shestov’s philosophizing essay, “Creation from the Void” (), and
Glinka’s Sketches on Chekhov () were among the first efforts to read
Chekhov philosophically. In one way or another, these works translated,
into the language of philosophy, N. K. Mikhailovsky’s reading of Chekhov
as the voice of the s generation, characterized by a lack of ideals, social
apathy, and а “reconciliation” with reality. The problem with some of
these essays – especially Bulgakov’s and Shestov’s – is that their authors are
not so much talking about Chekhov as projecting their own philosophical
and religious convictions onto his works. Shestov offers a reductionist
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reading of Chekhov; with dogmatic zeal and pathos, he emphasizes
Chekhov’s adogmatism ad nauseum, while treating the statements of
Chekhov’s characters as the author’s own convictions. In this manner,
Shestov advances an argument about Chekhov’s nihilistic skepticism,
which he supports with the observation that philosophy in Chekhov
consists of bits and pieces of contradictory thoughts. Bulgakov, somewhat
melodramatically, sees in Chekhov a pensive, dark Byron, a Nietzschean
“overman” lost in unresolvable contradictions and groping through the fog
toward divine ineffability.
More relevant for our understanding of Chekhov are the philosophical
traces and hints left in passing in the studies of critics whose trade is
literature. Leonid Grossman, for instance, in the introduction to the first
scholarly edition of Chekhov’s notebooks, comparing their poetics to
Pascal’s Pensées and, indirectly, to Vasily Rozanov’s Fallen Leaves, talks
about the inherent incompleteness of Chekhov’s art, which we may inter-
pret as potentiality for the creative act, leaving existential questions behind.
Chekhov’s “creation from the void,” then, does not necessarily imply
Shestov’s gloomy-tragic vision, but is rather a quality of any good art,
regardless of the author’s philosophical robustness or existential groundless-
ness. Rozanov’s ambivalent responses to Chekhov follow a similar logic.
Iury Aikhenvald, in his elegant and tactful essay on Chekhov, interprets his
“superfluous” characters through Søren Kierkegaard’s concept of repetition.
They get exhausted, he writes, under the burden of repetition, being unable
to repeat the aesthetical stage in the ethical one, to find love and “their
inner cherry orchard.”
All these digressions and passing thoughts tell us more about the
relevance of philosophy to Chekhov’s poetics than either the essays men-
tioned above or more recent scholarly studies in whose titles Chekhov is
followed by the name of some philosopher or philosophical trend, or
preceded by a word borrowed from philosophical jargon. Approaching
the philosophy theme in Chekhov, we should be cautious to remember the
difference between art and philosophy. Art, as Chekhov’s near contempo-
rary Georg Simmel once said, is the vision of the cosmos through the eyes
of a temperament, whereas philosophy is the temperament seen through a
world vision. And Chekhov always stays with art. Consequently, when we
implant philosophical vocabulary into Chekhov, we may find ourselves,
unnoticeably, in the middle of his text . . . as one of his characters. From
early on, philosophically oriented literature critics have also dismissed the
question of philosophy in Chekhov entirely. Nieviadomsky, for instance,
making the case for Chekhov as an “atheoretical” writer, said that if he had
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Philosophy
to write an essay on the theme “Chekhov as a Thinker,” he would have
titled it “Chekhov Was Not a Thinker.” Konstantin Mochulsky consid-
ered Chekhov’s “philosophy” as “sallow and limited.”
Similarly, Chekhov’s characters cannot stop talking about “philosophy,”
which is, in his artistic vocabulary, almost always synonymous with the
search for “the meaning of life,” for the notorious “general idea.” One of
Chekhov’s characters has even “over-philosophized” himself (zafilozofstvo-
valsia). The tormenting questions of these characters remain unanswered
in Chekhov’s artistic world. Perhaps we should ask instead, what is the
meaning of “philosophical chatter” itself? Besides its role in the character-
ization of a typical disillusioned “intelligent” of the s–s, philos-
ophizing chatter is a philosophical moment in its own right. The situation
of “let us philosophize” in which many of Chekov’s characters find
themselves, especially in the plays, reflects more broadly a modern discon-
nectedness from life; “life does not agree with philosophy,” Chekhov once
wrote. In the context of modernist philosophy, fundamental “groundless-
ness,” an uncanniness of suspension (die Unheimlichkeit der Schwebe) is
expressed precisely in empty chatter (das bloße Gerede). Often the lan-
guage of Chekhov’s characters – philosophical chatter in particular – is
detached from life, beginning to live its own life, feeding on itself. Maurice
Blanchot, in his essay “La parole vain,” devoted precisely to “chatter” and
literature, noted that talking means that no one speaks, and that we live in
a civilization of talkers without speech, aphasic babblers. And it is no
coincidence that Nikita’s fist stops the philosophical chatter of Andrei
Yefimych in “Ward Six,” a gesture, in the place of exhausted language,
which reveals “something salty,” “probably blood,” in short, naked life:
“Talk some more! – Nikita answered from behind the door. – Talk more!
Nikita quickly opened the door, shoved Andrei Efimych away with both
hands and knee, then swung around and struck him in the face with his
fist” (W:). A character in “Three Years” says at one point: “There’s no
philosophy that can reconcile me to death, which I view simply as
annihilation. One wants to live” (W:) – and this, we may assume,
echoes Chekhov’s own preoccupations. What is at stake for Chekhov is
always this finite life.
Among Chekhov’s works, there also is a group of stories in which the
content of philosophical chatter does matter and often reflects Chekhov’s
own questions. “Ward Six” can be read as a refutation of Stoicism and
Cynicism. It exposes Dr. Ragin’s stoic imperturbability and cynical detach-
ment from the cares of life as symptoms of moral laziness. “The Duel”
challenges the popular scientific positivism and materialism of the time
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through its depictions of the basic human hatred that lies behind the
zoologist’s scientism. “Lights,” perhaps Chekhov’s most important philo-
sophical statement, challenges the crude pessimism of a fashionably
nihilistic worldview, and forces us to think about how art might respond
to absurdity. “The Bet” is a philosophical fairy tale that toys with Arthur
Schopenhauer’s question of whether we have the freedom to will (or not to
will); what is worth noting here is that the first version gives a negative
answer, while Chekhov’s later, revised version does not. Nor do these few
examples exhaust the long list of Chekhov’s works that dramatize his own
philosophical questions.
When thinking about Chekhov’s own philosophical reading list, what
first comes to mind is Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, which was in his
home library in Russian translation. Naturally, then, many readers have
commented on stoic motifs in Chekhov’s works, most notably in “Ward
Six” and “A Boring Story.” Without going into detail, “Ward Six,” if read
in this key, shows the fragility of Marcus Aurelius’ project of building the
“inner citadel” to resist the external. Also, the Stoic image of the world,
filled with possibilities and choices but ultimately finite, can be said to
align with that of Chekhov.
Chekhov’s almost compulsive awareness of finitude, as the limit and
foundation of the human condition, led him, besides Stoicism and
Epicureanism – one wonders whether he was familiar with Lucretius’
De Rerum Natura – to materialism. His letter to Alexei Suvorin
concerning Paul Bourget’s novel The Disciple (), widely discussed
in Europe, is perhaps Chekhov’s most explicit declaration on this score.
The major flaw in this novel, Chekhov wrote, is Bourget’s “pretentious
crusade against the materialist doctrine.” “Everything that lives on
Earth,” Chekhov declares,
is necessarily materialistic [. . .] Outside of matter there is no experience or
knowledge, and consequently no truth [. . .] It seems to me that when a
corpse is being dissected, even the most inveterate spiritualists must
necessarily come up against the question of where the soul is. And if
you know how great the similarity is between mental and physical illness,
and when you know that both one and the other are treated with the same
remedies, you can’t help but refuse to separate soul from body. (May ,
)
This statement, indeed, sounds as if it were quoted from Lucretius.
Chekhov’s materialism, however, is related not only to nineteenth-century
positivism and ancient materialism, but also to Friedrich Nietzsche, who,
like Chekhov, recognized the body as an important factor in thinking,
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described cultural phenomena in physiological or neurological terms, and
held that “historical philosophy can no longer be separated from natural
science.” In his first letter to Suvorin concerning The Disciple, Chekhov
expressed a similar thought, writing that both anatomy and literature have
the same goals and enemies, recalling Goethe, the naturalist and the poet.
Chekhov’s other letter expressed his wish to talk with Nietzsche for a
whole night – not at home, naturally – but on a train or a steamer
(February , ; L:). Most likely, materialism, anatomy, and
literature were the topics these two unorthodox positivists would have
discussed in the midst of the night. Trying to build a comparative story of
this cryptically acknowledged affinity – we may also think about the oft-
quoted letter, in which Chekhov writes: “My holy of holies is the human
body” (October , ).
Many of Chekhov’s characters, however, are blinkered mechanical
materialists. Von Koren (of “The Duel”), Lvov (of Ivanov), and Nikolai
Stepanovich (of “A Boring Story”) are among the moralizing and uncom-
passionate egoists, the disillusioned skeptics whose cognitive perspectives
rely on the materialist worldview. Nikolai Strakhov’s description of mate-
rialism as “the lightest form of metaphysics” is directly applicable to these
characters. In Strakhov’s words, “they stubbornly hang onto their points of
view, being blind to the fact that empiricism leads to true skepticism, to
the negation of cognition, even materialism, and finally to absolute indif-
ference, to the negation of any reality.” Neither the true skeptic nor the
idealist secures spiritual freedom. For Chekhov, to live life in agreement
with such philosophical convictions is possible only behind the bars of
one’s own madness (e.g., “The Black Monk”). The limits of “internal
freedom,” with which Chekhov experiments in his works, can be inter-
preted not only as a playful polemic with the Stoics or materialists, but also
with Dostoevsky.
If we had to name one philosopher whose worldview Chekhov fully
absorbed, it would be Arthur Schopenhauer. This is no surprise, since both
Nietzsche and Schopenhauer shaped the modernism of the late nineteenth
century. In Chekhov’s times, Schopenhauer was translated by Strakhov,
F. V. Chernigovets, Afanasy Fet, and Aikhenvald. Whenever his characters
refer to “Schopenhauer,” as one scholar noted, Chekhov was not so much
interested in Schopenhauer’s philosophy itself, as with the phenomenon of
Schopenhauer’s Maxims among the Russian intelligentsia of the s,
who read them as either a justification for sloth and avoidance of struggle,
or simply out of intellectual snobbery. Schopenhauer is mentioned most
famously by Uncle Vanya, who exclaims in desperation: “If I had lived a
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normal life, I might have become another Schopenhauer or Dostoevsky.”
Von Koren, a modern man in all respects, a materialist and an empiricist,
mocks Laevsky’s chatter on fashionable philosophers. “As for
Schopenhauer and Spencer,” Von Koren says, “he treats them like small
boys and slaps them on the shoulder in a fatherly way: ‘Well, what do you
say, old Spencer?’” One of the characters confesses: “For philosophy, you
must apply to my wife. She has been at University lectures and knows all
your Schopenhauers and Proudhons by heart . . .” (W:).
But we know that Chekhov himself was an avid reader of
Schopenhauer. Among the books from his home library in Taganrog,
there is a copy of Aphorisms and Maxims and Thoughts, published in
in Chernigovets’ translation. In a few of his letters, Chekhov genu-
inely prized Schopenhauer. But it is probably better to talk about an
affinity of sensibilities rather than a causal influence. Ludwig Büchner’s
remark on Schopenhauer could be easily applied to Chekhov. “If the
gentlemen require an Absolute,” he wrote, “I will give them one that
possesses their cloudy creation; it is matter. So, Schopenhauer himself is
a materialist.” Schopenhauer took Kant’s notion of human dignity back
from the realm of pure thought and placed it into the body, which is the
center of his metaphysics. We can say the same about the traces of
metaphysical imagination inherent in Chekhov’s poetics.
Chekhov’s reservation concerning philosophy (including the
Schopenhauer phenomenon) and moralizing is also Schopenhauerian,
the ethical gesture questioning reason’s role in explaining our behavior,
attaching a moral value to our choices, and putting an equal sign between
man and animals. As one of his characters, Ananyev, a jaded Don Juan,
whom Chekhov endows with all three of Schopenhauer’s ethical motiva-
tions – malice, egoism, and compassion – says in his three-point philo-
sophical program, “the predominance of reason over the heart is simply
overwhelming amongst us. Direct feeling, inspiration – everything is
choked by petty analysis [. . .] That virtue is only known to those who
are warm, affectionate, and capable of love” (W:). Ironically, closer to
the end of “Lights” – arguably one of the most explicit expositions of
Chekhov’s attitude toward philosophy – the compassionate and attentive
narrator feels sorry for Ananyev’s roommate, whose sleep, most likely, was
disturbed by Ananyev’s thunderous snoring; no matter how deeply we
moralize, we are mortal organisms that always follow the demands of the
will, he seems to say. Nevertheless, Ananyev’s story sums up Chekhov’s
and Schopenhauer’s view of human life: it is finite and contains suffering,
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but it is the only life we have. And it is awareness of finitude that implies
the ethical gesture in Chekhov’s prose. The moral lesson of how to relate
ourselves to the world and others in Schopenhauer and Chekhov is
compassion (Mitleid in German; mitleiden is, literally, to “suffer with”).
Ananyev says, “pessimism comes to [old people] not casually from outside,
but from the depths of their own brains, and only after they have
exhaustively studied Hegels and Kants of all sorts, have suffered, have
made no end of mistakes, in fact – when they have climbed the whole
ladder from bottom to top” (W:). What can we learn from them,
Chekhov’s readers may ask? Nothing, besides making or accepting a silent
compassionate gesture. One of Schopenhauer’s biographers said that
Schopenhauer’s ethics of compassion is an ethic of “nevertheless.” It begins
with the assumption of the bankrupt dead-endedness of things and tries to
salvage what it can. We can perhaps say the same of Chekhov’s ethics.
“There are all sorts of talents,” says the narrator of a “A Nervous
Breakdown” of the story’s protagonist, “but he had a peculiar talent – a
human one (chelovecheskii). He possessed an extraordinarily fine delicate
sense for pain in general” (W:). All of Chekhov’s narrators have this
one major talent.
In “Lights,” the Schopenhauerian “elucidation” of the philosophical
parable that Ananyev promises is not the story’s punch line. The last word
belongs to a medical doctor and a storyteller, a detached but compassion-
ate listener: “A great deal had been said in the night,” he says, “but I carried
away with me no answer to any question, and in the morning, of the whole
conversation there remained in my memory, as in a filter, only the lights
and the image of Kisochka” (W:). What survives is the image, after
all. But Chekhov’s aestheticism should not be confused with decadent art
for its own sake. The image in Chekhov is grounded in the ethical
dimensions of the story itself (and in this case the anatomical reality of
the story’s heroine). The primacy of suffering in life gave his prose its
signature with respect to what Simmel called the culture of emotion or
emotionally experienced existence. Nevertheless, we need to remember
what Chekhov wrote to Suvorin in their epistolary exchange on the theme
of pessimism: “Certainly, I am neither Schopenhauer nor Pascal, you are
right” (March , ; L:).
Before considering the philosophical context of Chekhov, we should
keep in mind the harsh words of his choirmaster Gradusov, from an early
comical sketch: “I kicked him out for philosophy. Only an educated
person who has completed a course can philosophize, and if you are a fool
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who is not of high intelligence, then sit in the corner and hold your
tongue” (“Out of the Frying Pan into the Fire”; W:). Otherwise, we
may come to the conclusion Chekhov reached after the artistic fiasco of his
own “philosophical” manifesto, “Lights”: “I meant to philosophize, but
rosin with vinegar has come out of it. I’m rereading what I wrote and am
drooling from nausea: disgusting!” (April , ; L:).
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Religion
Denis Zhernokleyev
The significance of religion in relation to Chekhov is a complex and elusive
problem. It consists of two different though interrelated issues –
Chekhov’s personal religious sensibility, and religion as it manifests itself
in his art. Concerning his faith, we can conclude very little. Unlike
Tolstoy, he left us no confessional account; nor did he write a philosoph-
ical treatise on the essence of religion. Whatever fragmentary statements
we find in Chekhov’s correspondence could support diametrically opposite
claims. A more fruitful question is the status of religion in Chekhov’s
literary fiction. Here too we must abandon any hope of dispensing with
ambiguity. It is possible, however, to examine the religious sensibility and
the accumulation of traditional religious sources that inform Chekhov’s
aesthetics and worldview.
Chekhov’s works are saturated with religious, specifically Christian,
allusions. Stories with overt spiritual motifs include such texts as “On
the Christmas Eve” (), “On Easter Eve” (), “In Passion Week”
(), and “The Student” (). Toward the end of his life, Chekhov’s
engagement with Christianity was so consistently thorough, as for example
in “The Bishop” (), that it becomes difficult to explain as merely an
aesthetic indulgence. Hence, some of Chekhov’s early commentators
emphasized the religious aspect of Chekhov’s work. The theologian
Sergei Bulgakov, in a memorial lecture given just a few months after
Chekhov’s passing, argued that Chekhov’s relentless questioning of
religion did not contradict but rather embodied traditional Russian spir-
ituality: “The Russian quest for faith, the longing for a higher meaning, the
restless urgency of the Russian soul and its pained conscience reflect
themselves radiantly in Chekhov’s work.” Though always open-ended,
and thus accommodating to nonreligious or atheistic readers, Chekhov’s
emphasis on doubt, in Bulgakov’s view, anticipates a religious response:
“As stated by Chekhov, the riddle of humanity can be resolved either
religiously or not at all.” Not every early commentator, however, shared
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Bulgakov’s theological reading. In , the writer’s first biographer,
Alexander Izmailov, insisted that Chekhov’s “weaving of faith and unbe-
lief” remained decidedly unresolved, requiring that we appreciate both his
worldview and his art strictly within this tension.
Izmailov’s image of Chekhov as dwelling somewhere between faith and
unbelief echoes what is arguably the writer’s most important statement
concerning his religious views. In a notebook for Chekhov writes:
Between “God exists” and “there is no God” lies a vast field, which the true
sage traverses with difficulty. A Russian knows only one or the other of
these extremes; the middle ground between them does not interest him;
and therefore he usually knows nothing or very little. (W:–)
It is important to recognize that Chekhov here addresses not so much the
concept of religion as the perceived Russian cultural trait of arriving at
resolute religious conviction. In contrast to religious euphoria, which must
soon give way to the staunchness of dogmatism, Chekhov advises a slow
and contemplative journey.
It might be tempting, especially for a Western reader, to identify the “vast
field” of the “true sage” with the secular cultural realm, the metaphysically
self-sufficient space where religion is no longer necessary and is simply one
aesthetic experience among many. However, to assume that such a purely
secular mode is possible within Chekhov, and indeed within Russian culture
more broadly, is to overlook the insistence of many serious readers who have
sensed the presupposition of religious experience, whether intended or not,
in the very poetic structure of Chekhov’s texts.
The Chekhovian sage is not a Cartesian “thinker,” paralyzed in pensive
isolation. He is a variety of the Russian ascetic wanderer, akin to the
protagonist in Tolstoy’s “Father Sergius” () after he abandons the
monastery and begins to travel through the vast plains of Russia, reading
the Bible with the peasants in exchange for a meal. The indefatigably
peregrinating doctor from “The Head Gardener’s Story” () is
Chekhov’s version of the saint’s life. Unlike Tolstoy, Chekhov never
openly renounced the Church; therefore, it is no surprise that his sage
never wanders too far from its walls. And though the sage is weary of
Church dogma, he is drawn to its liturgy, which he feels is respectful of his
doubt. In a letter from December , , Chekhov explains that the
sage’s perpetual doubt resists not faith but idolatry: “One must believe in
God, but if faith is absent, one shouldn’t replace it with idle sensational-
ism; instead one should seek and seek, seek all by oneself, all alone with
one’s conscience” (W:).
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Religion
The aspect of Chekhov’s worldview that could be considered closest to
the atheist extreme of the “vast field” was his sympathy with scientific
positivism. A medical doctor by training, Chekhov appreciated a sober,
naturalistic perspective on reality. It would be a mistake, however, to see
Chekhovian realism as evident of a materialist worldview. Chekhov saw
science and religion as complementary. In fact, he believed that modern
science would one day bring humanity to encounter the divine. “Modern
culture,” Chekhov writes in , “is only the first beginning of work for a
great future, work which will perhaps go on for tens of thousands of years,
in order that man may, if only in the remote future, come to know the
truth of the real God – that is not, I conjecture, by seeking it in
Dostoevsky, but by clear knowledge, as one knows twice two are four”
(December , ; W:). Chekhov’s harmonizing of the
evolutionary worldview with religious truth is a response to the Russian
culture wars of the second half of the nineteenth century, which juxta-
posed Darwinian materialism to Dostoevskian mysticism. Some circles of
the Russian intelligentsia, especially those of Marxist leanings, saw in
Darwin the ideological force to help Russia overcome its captivity to the
monarchy and the Church. Other circles, anticipating an impending social
catastrophe, mounted a defense of the sacramentality of Russian culture.
This group of “God-seekers,” the forgers of a “new religious conscious-
ness,” some of whom called themselves Symbolists or decadents, were
inspired by the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky and the religious mysticism
of Vladimir Solovyov. When invited to join the initiative, Chekhov
politely declined, explaining in a letter that, in his view, the religious
intelligentsia was “only playing at religion, from having nothing to do”
(December , ; L:). Serious engagement with religion,
Chekhov concluded in his letter, would bring together faith with scientific
knowledge through patience and hard work.
Despite his affinity for the evolutionary worldview, Chekhov did not
share contemporary optimism as regards scientific progress. For him such
optimism was based on a reductively benign understanding of human
nature. After his arduous trip to the penal colony on Sakhalin in ,
his rejection of positivism became more pronounced. The extreme deg-
radation Chekhov witnessed there shook his trust in the moral reliability of
natural human goodness.
It could be argued, however, that Chekhov’s disillusionment with the
positivist worldview began long before his trip to Sakhalin. Already during
his studies in medical school Chekhov called attention to the reductive
nature of the objectifying gaze of medical empiricism. In “Anyuta” ()
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Chekhov tells the story of a tired, lonely young woman who lives in
squalor with medical student Stepan Klochkov, assisting, among other
services, as his anatomy model. Klochkov memorizes the order of the ribs
by tracing the contours of Anyuta’s body with a piece of charcoal. When
his artist neighbor Fetisov drops by to borrow Anyuta as a model,
Klochkov forces the unwilling Anyuta to indulge him, reminding her that
she serves the higher purposes of science and art. Upon her return,
Klochkov decides to throw Anyuta out, but later capitulates, allowing
her to stay for another week. Through Klochkov’s begrudging gesture of
pity, which the reader understands will not significantly alter Anyuta’s fate,
Chekhov underscores the utter impotence of virtue to address the problem
of exploitation. Violence here stems not from the immorality of its
characters but from what Cathy Popkin calls “the objectifying epistemol-
ogy” inherent in both the “medical thinking” of Klochkov and the
“Renaissance naturalism” of Fetisov. The problem, in other words, lies
not in the kind of morality that Klochkov practices, but in the way he sees
the world; not in a specific ethical precept but in a mode of perception that
reduces human beings to physiological functions and keeps the perceiver
myopically oblivious to the lived reality of others. This “epistemological”
concern helps us appreciate why Chekhov so carefully guards his poetics
from the catharsis of a sentimental reading.
In the post-Sakhalin works, Chekhov’s divergence from scientific
naturalism as a worldview only intensified. If, in “Anyuta,” he examines
the tragedy of abstraction from life in the context of interpersonal
relationships; then, in “Ward Six” (), Chekhov’s treatment of this
problem acquires distinct Christological undertones. Set in a provincial
mental asylum, the story describes the relationship between doctor and
asylum director Andrei Ragin, and his mentally ill patient Ivan
Gromov. In Doctor Ragin, Chekhov portrays a protagonist who hides
behind philosophical and scientific abstractions, who feels guilty for not
treating his patients but assuages these feelings of guilt through scien-
tific posturing, through the same kind of “objective” myopia that
Klochkov and Fetisov employ in perceiving Anyuta. For Ragin, this
detached scientific gaze is elevated to the status of a worldview, a path
of escape from the realities of life and from the pain of others. The story
depicts the failure of this worldview. The doctor finds himself drawn
into the life of his patient, loses his medical objectivity, and becomes
humanized through this process. The conclusion, when he finds himself
imprisoned in the ward, is both horrific and redemptive for the doctor,
who in his suffering becomes initiated into new, unforeseen dimensions
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of experience; becomes, through his participation in life, in a sense,
fully incarnated. Whether Chekhov in this story holds to the reality of
the resurrection is a question that cannot be answered, but his dedica-
tion to the mystery of the incarnation of Christ, salvation through the
suffering body, is incontestable. In response to Ragin’s praising of
intellectual detachment, Gromov juxtaposes his passionate love for life:
“I have paranoid delusions, constant tormenting fear, but there are
moments when the thirst of life takes hold of me and then I am afraid
to go mad! I want terribly to live! Terribly!” (W:). Although, at first,
Ragin disregards “real life” as a melodramatic preoccupation on
Gromov’s part, over the span of the story his kenotic succumbing to
life intensifies to the point of his own mental breakdown and incarcer-
ation. Death soon follows when his mind, like Gromov’s, is incapable
of withstanding the terror of existence.
To appreciate the fundamental tension between the Christological and
naturalistic worldview in Chekhov, it is important to understand the
radical nature of Russian kenoticism. Kenosis is a theological notion,
referring to Christ’s “divine condescension” or “voluntary self-humilia-
tion” (Philippians :–). While, in the West, especially in Protestantism,
kenosis has been sanguinely interpreted as an ethical life in accordance
with Christ’s teachings, in the East, especially in Russian culture, kenoti-
cism constitutes an unreserved embrace of human suffering and is there-
fore difficult to understand in terms of practice. Indeed, Russian
kenoticism makes more sense as an existential attitude. It is ultimately
an apophatic category, one that insists on the irreducibility of suffering to
social or physical illness, of morality to behavior, and of Christ’s miracu-
lous incarnation to the practical wisdom of his teachings. In “Ward Six,”
kenoticism manifests itself in Gromov’s explicitly Christological yearning
for suffering, when he explains to Ragin that Christ did not shun agony:
“Christ responded to reality by weeping, smiling, grieving, being angry,
and even anguished; he didn’t meet his suffering with a smile, nor did he
scorn death, but he [. . .] prayed for this cup to pass” (W:). Through
Ragin’s existential journey, Chekhov relates the psychological yearning for
embodiment to the mystery of Christ’s incarnation.
While Chekhov would not permit this dynamic to resolve itself in an
unambiguously religious epiphany, we do find, increasingly in the final
years, a Christian eschatological line of thought. Noteworthy in this
respect is “The Bishop” (), which crowns a sequence of liturgical
stories set in the context of Holy Week, the central feast of the
Orthodox Church calendar, the week of somber meditation on
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Christ’s kenotic passion and death that culminates in a paschal celebra-
tion of Christ’s resurrection.
The story describes the last days in the life of an auxiliary bishop, Pyotr,
whose quick submission to illness and death coincides with Holy Week.
We learn very little of the bishop’s past, and his failing effort to remember
his life becomes an integral part of the story’s poetic structure. At first
glance, the narration seems to unfold on two temporal planes – the
objective plane of the narrator and the subjective plane of the protagonist.
However, the traditional structure, in which an omniscient narrator sup-
plies the protagonist’s struggling memory with objective information,
weakens over the span of the story, shifting the narration into an interme-
diate sphere where it begins to rely on the subjective voices of the
characters poised around Pyotr. The absence of an authoritative voice
amplifies the bishop’s struggling efforts to conceive of his existence as a
coherent whole. He tries to remember all the way back to his childhood,
but “the past had all withdrawn somewhere into the distance, the mist, as
if it had been a dream” (W:). Only during the liturgy, in the unity
with people at prayer, does the bishop’s memory regain its integrity: “It is
still the same people in church as it was then, in his childhood and youth,
and that they would be the same every year, and for how long — God only
knew” (W:). The continuity of the bishop’s existence no longer
relies on his own frail memory but through its merging with the congre-
gation and the liturgy itself finds support in a deeper, communal form
of memory.
What is remarkable about the function of the liturgy in “The Bishop” is
how rigorously Chekhov engages its theology. A good example is the
bishop’s sudden loss of spiritual tranquility during the liturgy of Great
Tuesday: “He thought that he had achieved everything possible for a man
in his position, he had faith, and yet not everything was clear; something
was still missing; he did not want to die” (W:). To treat the bishop’s
distress here in the skeptical mode as a struggle between faith and reality
would be to disregard Chekhov’s subtle yet thoroughly theological engage-
ment of liturgy. Pyotr’s anxiety is invited by the liturgy itself and is born in
the bishop’s heart in response to the reading of the parable about the
Bridegroom’s sudden arrival (Matthew :–), whose purpose is to
initiate self-doubt. Chekhov’s engagement with scripture is subtle and
relies on the reader’s intimate familiarity with the Orthodox liturgy.
Only an initiated reader can fully appreciate the important irony of
Chekhov making the bishop read the first of the Twelve Gospels during
the liturgy of Maundy Thursday. As Christopher J. G. Turner points out,
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Religion
the words that Chekhov highlights for the reader, “Now is the Son of Man
glorified” (John :), capture the eschatological essence of the Maundy
Thursday liturgy, which insists on proclaiming Christ’s resurrection pre-
cisely in Christ’s death. It is also at this moment that the bishop’s health
begins to deteriorate. Chekhov’s irony builds on the theological irony of
Holy Week, which meditates on Christ’s suffering and death in the
hopeful anticipation of Christ’s resurrection. As always, Chekhov would
not permit the eschatological hope of the liturgy to find its fulfillment
within the story. However, given the integration of the liturgy into the
story’s poetic structure, the strikingly realistic depictions of the bishop’s
death at the end of the story, which coincide with Christ’s death in the
liturgy, do not contradict the paschal truth and, in fact, deepen it by
reminding that resurrection is preceded by death.
Does the theological poetics of “The Bishop” suggest that, at least at the
end of his life, Chekhov had become a believer? It is impossible to answer
this question without contradicting evidence from other realms of
Chekhov’s life. What we can say with confidence, however, is that
Chekhov’s interest in Christianity was not confined to the purely aesthetic
level, a nostalgic affection for the pealing of bells. The paschal eschatology
of the liturgy allows Chekhov to explore time as saturated with expecta-
tion. The theme of kenotic incarnation in “The Bishop,” a continuation
from “Ward Six,” allows hope to coexist with loneliness and alienation.
The mother receives back her son, a celebrity. She is shy and constrained
in his presence, and only in his illness and death does he become her son
again; in that final scene of his weakness, the bishop is aware of the
redemptive potential of his own kenotic humiliation. Redolent of
Michelangelo’s “Pietá,” Chekhov’s treatment of death in this story is
loaded with scriptural resonance, relies for its narrative weight on the
symbolism of the crucifixion, evokes the passion, and yet evades any
affirmative statement of credo. To give in to religious triumphalism would
violate the central tenets of Chekhov’s art.
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Science
Elena Fratto
In a letter from January , , Anton Chekhov wrote a few words in
defense of his short story “Mire” (Tina): “For chemists there is nothing
unclean on earth. A writer should be as objective as a chemist; he must give
up everyday subjectivity and realize that dunghills play a very respectable
role in a landscape, and that evil passions belong to life as much as good
ones do” (L:). Indeed, Chekhov’s style, characterized by surgical pre-
cision in his language, economic use of words, and attention to detail,
reflected the writer’s medical training, and both his themes and aesthetics
were influenced by the groundbreaking scientific discoveries that took
place in his lifetime – from germ theory to evolutionary biology to the
laws of thermodynamics.
Unsurprisingly, medicine reverberates throughout Chekhov’s produc-
tion (as Chapter discusses in detail). Not only did Chekhov portray
aspects of the medical profession in several short stories – such as
“Intrigues” (), “Anyuta” (), “An Awkward Business” (),
“A Nervous Breakdown” (), “Ward Six” (), and “Ionich”
() – but he also introduced doctor characters in works that did not
necessarily explore medical themes, especially in his plays. Chekhov’s
works stage or acknowledge the monumental transformations that took
place in medicine and medical institutions in the second half of the
nineteenth century – pasteurization; the increasing classification of dis-
eases; the reforms in medical education; the rise of professional organiza-
tions of physicians; and the institution of zemstvos, the local administrative
units in charge of public health that Alexander II’s reforms introduced in
. Chekhov’s medical stories exude the author’s bold optimism and
enthusiasm for science and progress (he even named his two dachshunds
Brom and Khina, Bromine and Quinine), as well as for the achievements of
zemstvo medicine. At the same time, the limits of medical institutions and
the arbitrariness and constrictive nature of diagnostic labels, especially in
psychiatry, are the target of scathing critique in such stories as “Ward Six.”
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If we consider changes in the field of medicine more broadly, it is
important to note that at the end of the nineteenth century public health
came to rely largely on mathematical models and statistics. In Russia,
Fyodor Erisman, with whom Chekhov had studied hygienics, introduced
statistical methods into medicine in the s. Chekhov tried to familiar-
ize himself with an approach that provided scientific grounds for public
health and sociology. Such an intellectual investment and effort is visible in
the readings he completed in preparation for his trip to Sakhalin
Island (see Chapter ), where he conducted an epidemiological survey of
the health and social conditions of the penal colony on the island, along
with an investigation of the flora, fauna, and natural resources, and an
inquiry into the culture and history of the region. A list of the books that
Chekhov read before undertaking that trip includes works on statistics by
A. D. Brylkin and V. I. Nikol’sky, and a manual by Y. E. Ianson. In
addition to surveying Sakhalin, Chekhov also worked as a census taker and
supervisor in .
In Chekhov’s writings health and the environment emerge as closely
connected. The correlations between bodily functions (the inner milieu)
and the surrounding social and natural milieu had been traced by Claude
Bernard since the s, and further examined in Russia by Fyodor
Erisman in the s. In “A Doctor’s Visit” () the young doctor
Korolyov is called in from Moscow to visit the heir of a factory owner,
Liza, who lives in the family house on the factory premises and suffers from
anxiety and heart problems. After visiting the patient, Korolyov takes a
nighttime walk around the house and is troubled by disquieting noises
coming from the factory building, which sound as if they were “produced
by a monster with crimson eyes, the devil himself” (W:). Only then
does the doctor realize how the industrial machinery and production, and
the social and natural environment have extended their influence into the
woman’s room and affected her body. Earlier in the day, while approach-
ing Liza’s house, Korolyov had also noticed the workers’ dire physical and
living conditions. This particular use of sounds, intra- and extradiegetic at
once, allows for a portrayal of human-made and natural environments in
strained coexistence, with the anthropomorphic figure of the devilish
factory and its loud and haunting noises displacing the sounds of frogs
and nightingales, now barely audible from far away. In general, ecology,
and especially forestry, was one of Chekhov’s interests, as is detailed in
Chapter . One could mention, among other instances of this theme, the
character of Astrov in Uncle Vanya, who plants trees and bemoans the
destruction of the Russian forest.
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A keen and accomplished gardener, Chekhov was also interested in nature
that is harnessed to human life and activity, especially advances in agricul-
tural sciences. The innovative theories of German chemist Justus von Liebig
on the exchanges between life and the soil were well known and had been
incorporated into Russian “soil science,” a discipline that bore overtones of
social thought and thus attracted the interest of humanists in the s.
Chekhov was familiar with the work of French horticulturalist Nikolaus
Gaucher, widely read in Russia, on tree grafting and fruit growing. Fyodor
Schmidt’s account of the botanic classification of Siberian plants in the royal
geographic expedition to Siberia (), along with Fyodor von Frieden’s
description of agriculture in Sakhalin in and Richard Schroeder’s how-
to manual devoted to kitchen gardens, plant nurseries, and orchards, were
included in the list of works that Chekhov compiled for study prior to his
trip to Sakhalin, where part of his investigation concerned the agronomic
(and economic) development that the colonization of the island would bring
if the venture were conducted more scientifically and effectively.
When describing everyday life at Melikhovo, Mikhail Chekhov wrote
about his brother Anton: “From very early morning, sometimes at am,
[. . .] he would go out into the garden and spend a long time inspecting
every fruit tree, every shrub; he would prune them or squat for some time
by the trunk, observing something.” Chekhov’s passion for horticulture
finds expression in “The Black Monk” (), which he wrote in order to
depict megalomania (mania velichiia), a condition that French physician
Benjamin Ball had defined in . At the time, Chekhov was very
interested in psychiatry and had frequent conversations at Melikhovo with
the famous psychiatrist Vladimir Iakovenko, who completed the first
census of the mentally ill in the Moscow region. These interests in
psychiatry and botany come together in “The Black Monk,” where a
young psychology professor, Kovrin, visits his former guardian, agronomist
Pesotsky, and his daughter Tanya in their estate, and where their indefat-
igable work to maintain the park, the orchard, and the ornamental garden
reflect Chekhov’s own significant knowledge of botany:
The oddities, elaborate monstrosities and travesties of nature that were to be
seen here! There were trellised fruit trees, a pear tree shaped like a
Lombardy poplar, globe-shaped oaks and limes, an apple tree umbrella,
arches, initials, candelabra, and even an “” made from plums – this was
the year Pesotsky first looked up horticulture. Here also were fine, graceful
saplings with straight, firm stems like palm trees [. . .] From dawn to dusk
gardeners with wheelbarrows, hoes and watering cans swarmed like ants
near the trees and bushes, on the paths and flowerbeds.
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Science
It was not only earthly nature that inspired Chekhov’s themes and
aesthetics. In the late nineteenth century astronomical observation was
evolving, with the new art of photography and its objective equipment that
came to replace fallible human observers and illustrators in registering
astronomical events (especially on the occasion of the transit of Venus in
). The Pulkovo observatory, to this day the main astronomical
observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences, was opened in ,
under the direction of Wilhelm von Struve, and was equipped with state-
of-the-art machinery, including one of the world’s largest refractors.
During that same era, physicists and geologists were discussing the dissi-
pation of heat on Earth and the universe, and though optics as a discipline
became institutionalized in Russia only after the October Revolution, the
sun nevertheless received particular attention in scientific and popular
conversations alike.
Chekhov’s brother Mikhail recalled a conversation with Anton on optics
that lay behind the legend of the “black monk”:
When the sun was approaching the horizon with its huge red disk, we were
sitting by the gate that opened on a field, and one of us raised the following
question: Why, when the sun sets, is it redder and much bigger than during
the day? After a long debate we decided that in those moments the sun is
already below the horizon, but because the air acts on it like a glass prism
held to a candle, then, refracting through the prism of the air, the sun
becomes visible to us from its position below the horizon, while it is already
losing its natural hue and looks much bigger than during the day [. . .].
Then we started talking about mirage, the refraction of the sunbeams
through the prism of the air, and so on, and as a result the question arose:
Can the mirage itself refract through the prism of the air and create a second
mirage? Clearly, it can. And that second mirage can generate a third one,
the third a fourth one, and so on ad infinitum. As a consequence, there may
be now wandering around the Earth mirages in which different regions
reverberate and even people and animals from ten thousand years ago. Are
ghosts not based on that? Of course, all of that was just a juvenile
conversation, bordering on nonsense, but the settling of those questions
was for all of us at Melikhovo always very interesting.
In “The Black Monk,” Kovrin tells Tanya – his future wife and his
mentor’s daughter – the legend of a monk dressed in black, who, walking
across a desert in Syria or Arabia, produced mirages of himself that people
would see in different parts of the world and in different epochs. He
concludes by saying: “Precisely one thousand years after that monk first
walked across the desert, the mirage will return to the earth’s atmosphere
and appear to people. And it seems these thousand years are almost up.
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According to the legend, we can expect the black monk any day now’”
(“The Black Monk”:–). Kovrin’s prophecy – loosely connected as
it is to contemporary conceptions of optics and sunlight – turns out to be
accurate. That same evening, shortly after sundown, he looks out at a vast
field of rye, exactly at the spot where the sun has set and sees a “black
column rising up into the sky, like a whirlwind or tornado [. . .] moving at
a terrifying speed straight towards him,” which turns out to be “a monk in
black vestments” (“The Black Monk”:–).
The sun was also at the center of scientific debates of the time as a
response to the “heat-death” theory. The second law of thermodynam-
ics, developed by Sadi Carnot in , reformulated by Rudolf Clausius
in , and generalized by William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) in ,
states that, while energy is not created nor destroyed (as expressed in the
first law), all the energy that is not converted into work is lost through
friction in the form of heat. This principle was generalized to all
inanimate matter, including the sun, which would eventually cool down
and be extinguished. In Russia physicist Nikolai Shiller, whose work
was admired by James Clerk Maxwell, distinguished himself by his
contributions to thermodynamics. The prospect of the effects of the
sun’s “heat-death” on Earth, though remote, particularly struck the
popular imagination. For many of Chekhov’s characters this long view
and the very distant temporal horizon that these new theories intro-
duced provide an excuse for inaction and immobility in the present. In
“Ward Six” we witness doctor Andrei Efimich’s comforting himself with
the rationalization that everything is condemned “to grow cold together
with the earth’s crust, and then for a million years, to fly with the earth
round the sun with no meaning and no object.” He knows that “at the
very time when his thoughts were floating together with the cooling
Earth round the sun, in the main building beside his abode people were
suffering in sickness and physical impurity: someone perhaps could not
sleep and was making war upon the insects, someone was being infected
by erysipelas, or moaning over too tight a bandage.” The temporality
implied by the scientific theories and discoveries of the era – the cooling
sun, but also evolutionary biology with its claims of teleology, or
paleontology, presenting humankind as the pinnacle of Earth’s life –
certainly introduced a new quality of time in the literary imagination,
one that at the fin de siècle had to be negotiated with the subjective
time of the lyrical “I.”
Scholars have pointed out how the concept of entropy implicitly sup-
ported theories of degeneration in biology. Chekhov read Charles Darwin
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Science
and Herbert Spencer with great interest, and cited both in his dissertation
prospectus. However, as Michael Finke points out, with his trip to the
Sakhalin penal colony, the writer’s bold enthusiasm for materialism and
the scientific method was shaken as he was faced with the sizable ethical
repercussions of categorizing human beings and labeling them “degener-
ate.” As a result, the works written after his public health survey stage a
nuanced discussion of the topic. One example of this evolution in
Chekhov’s attitude toward positivism is the novella The Duel, written
in , when Chekhov was simultaneously working on Sakhalin Island.
In the summer of that year, Chekhov discussed “degeneration” in depth
with V. A. Wagner, the founder of zoopsychology, who inspired the
character of von Koren, the materialist zoologist who sees human beings as
extensions of the competition for survival in the animal world, and who
expresses his contempt for all those species with “flaws that nature does not
find it necessary to transmit to posterity.” Earlier in the text, von Koren
makes the analogy with his enemy Laevsky more explicit:
Primitive mankind was protected from the likes of Laevsky by the struggle
for existence and selection; but nowadays our culture has considerably
weakened the struggle and the selection, and we ourselves must take care
of destroying the feeble and unfit, or else, as the Laevskys multiply,
civilization will perish and mankind will become totally degenerate. It will
be our fault. (The Duel:)
However, later in the story von Koren’s friend the deacon offers reflections
that counterbalance von Koren’s materialistic reasoning (with which
Chekhov may have concurred in the past) and offer a less reductionist
and more nuanced picture:
True, Laevsky was crackbrained, dissolute, strange, but he wouldn’t steal,
wouldn’t spit loudly on the floor, wouldn’t reproach his wife: “You stuff
yourself, but you don’t want to work,” wouldn’t beat a child with a harness
strap or feed his servants putrid salt beef – wasn’t that enough for him to be
treated with tolerance? Besides, he was the first to suffer from his own
shortcomings, like a sick man from his sores. (The Duel:)
The reverberation of the sciences in Chekhov’s writings has contributed
to his rich legacy and enduring relevance. His rendition of doctors as far
from invincible, indeed as vulnerable and seized by doubt, was praised by
William Carlos Williams, who deemed it important for medical students
to read Chekhov. “Ward Six,” “Ionich,” “Anyuta,” and “A Nervous
Breakdown” are among the texts commonly read in today’s medical
humanities programs. “Ward Six,” in staging the confluence of medical
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discourse and institutional power (Chekhov had read Cesare Beccaria’s On
Crimes and Punishments, ), also points to major themes in today’s
philosophy of medicine, such as biopolitics, the social constructedness of
medical truth, and the arbitrariness of the normal/pathological dichotomy.
With the increasing scholarly attention on theories of the environment in
Russia at the turn of the twentieth century – triggered by the focus on the
biosphere and the Anthropocene, two concepts that originated in that
milieu – Chekhov’s environmental sensitivity proves as crucial to our
understanding of that moment in Russian environmental history as the
work of Nikolai Fyodorov, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, and Alexander
Bogdanov. Moreover, Chekhov’s examination of materialism, which
acquired rich nuances after his trip to Sakhalin, appears particularly
poignant in our times, as we face the question of science denial. It also
points to the ethical aspects of science and warns us against the limits of
uncritical, blind faith in science and progress. Indeed, one of Chekhov’s
most remarkable teachings that arise from his medical training and his
unflagging interest in science is probably his ability to ask precise questions
that allow for open-ended answers.
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Medicine and the Mind-Body Problem
Matthew Mangold
Training in the medical sciences had a serious influence on my
literary activities. [. . .] Familiarity with the natural sciences, with
the scientific method, always kept me alert and I tried, wherever
possible, to consider the scientific evidence. Where it was not possi-
ble, I preferred not to write at all. (W:)
Chekhov was nineteen when he left Taganrog to study medicine at
Moscow University. While in high school, he was treated for peritonitis
by an Estonian doctor who inspired him to pursue the healing arts.
Academic talent earned him a scholarship to study in Moscow, though
his family’s poverty still required him to make extra money by writing
short humorous sketches. His earliest published work, “Letter to Our
Neighbor the Scientist” () in The Dragonfly, comically details the
struggle of a scientist hoping to gain acceptance in a small provincial town.
Not long after joining the medical ranks, Chekhov was already mining
natural science for fiction.
Chekhov began his medical studies at an opportune time, as medicine
was gaining social and political ground for its pragmatic models of health.
This was largely because an environmental approach to the human organ-
ism had begun to unify the sphere. The notion that spatial and social
environments shaped human beings had implications for disciplines rang-
ing as widely as hygiene and neurophysiology. Diseases could not only be
tracked and mapped geographically; they could also be mapped on the
body through innovations in anatomy and psychiatry. These spatial and
environmental approaches drew new attention to a fascinating boundary,
between the outer material world and inner psychological life, the mind-
body problem, which stirred Chekhov’s curiosity. The physician Pavel
Arkhangelsky, under whom Chekhov held residence at the Chikinsk
zemstvo hospital in , remarked that, in addition to “traditional
medicine,” his understudy “attached great significance to the effects the
doctor and the surrounding environment had on the psyche of the
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patient.” The equal attention that Chekhov gave to the physical and the
psychological placed him in the vanguard of medical inquiry. In hygiene,
Fyodor Erisman was focused on physical environments and health; anat-
omy offered spatial and empirical perspectives to studying the body; and
Ivan Sechenov had articulated a basic relationship between outer and inner
life in experimental neurophysiology. As a doctor and a writer, Chekhov
was uniquely situated to perceive the overlaps among these approaches,
and to envision the relationship between the mind and body anew.
Hygiene and Anatomy
After the discoveries of John Snow and Louis Pasteur, most medical
disciplines that Chekhov studied embraced the idea that environmental
conditions and concrete materials could be investigated to understand and
prevent illness. Hygiene in particular assumed the task of publicizing
research on how and why diseases spread. As Chekhov progressed through
his coursework, he attended lectures by Fyodor Erisman, a leader in this
research. Erisman was a charismatic lecturer who argued for reconceiving
human health as environmental. The healthy state, he asserted, was a
“harmonious equilibrium of the human organism” that might be influ-
enced “by changes in environmental surroundings.” A holistic sense of the
human body as open and integrated with its spatial surroundings emerges
in his definition of hygiene: “The study of all those phenomena of nature
or the factors of social life that contribute in any way to the disturbance of
the physiological functions of the human organism and accordingly that
influence morbidity and mortality.”
Applying a broad environmental approach, hygiene took into its scope
developments in bacteriology and statistical mapping, which lent the
discipline a spatial form. Erisman regularly spurred his students to gather
environmental and epidemiological data in the surrounding area, so
Chekhov spent his summers trekking through Moscow’s regions to assess
soil and water, rainfall, heating, lighting, ventilation, diet, and clothing in
addition to rates of morbidity and mortality. These categories, comprising
the “conditions of daily life,” could be projected onto maps that revealed
vulnerable regions, and the paths, density, and devastation of migrating
illnesses (see Figure ). Hygiene was Chekhov’s introduction to viewing
human life spatially and materially: the body, its physical and social
aspects, could not be extracted from its surroundings, but had to be seen
as integrated in locations and conditions and conceived broadly in the
social context of disease.
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Medicine and the Mind-Body Problem
Figure Maps from Russian Zemstvo Medicine with locations of zemstvo facilities
and corresponding rates of general mortality, infant mortality, birth, and
population growth.
Active material bodies were at the center of hygiene, but the inert
corpses of the anatomy classroom also taught Chekhov to understand
the human organism spatially (see Figure ). Following anatomical
topographies, physicians viewed the body as a multilayered terrain with
internal and external systems that could be mapped, diagrammed, and
methodically analyzed. Nikolai Pirogov’s Anatome topographica circulated
among medical students, and Chekhov kept a copy of Geitsman’s
Descriptive and Topographical Anatomy of Man, An Atlas in his home
library. Images from these texts reveal how a spatial approach to the body
helped physicians systematize their understanding of respiration, circula-
tion, skin, and organ health.
Chekhov envisioned the body spatially and environmentally in keeping
with his broad training. A case history he wrote in , his fourth year in
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Figure (cont.)
school, shows how he mobilizes spatial and system metaphors to describe
his patient, Anna Yakovleva, a Moscow woman in her sixties:
The patient is of average height. [. . .] Her muscular and skeletal systems are
satisfactorily developed; the sub-skin cellular layer is weakly developed. The
supra and infraclavicular spaces of the chest are retracted. [. . .]
The size of both lungs is normal. On auscultation, one can hear bron-
chial respiration and crepitant wheezing throughout the upper right lung
(especially in the back). [. . .] Organs of blood circulation are normal. The
size of the heart is normal.
Spatial metaphors dominate Chekhov’s descriptive language. He focuses
on Anna’s height; the layers of her skin; the boundaries of her lungs, heart,
and other organs; and he describes the area of her upper chest as a space.
The physical examination is largely anatomical as it investigates each of
Anna’s major systems in the search for symptoms. Crepitant wheezing and
the dull sound of her lungs under the stethoscope allow Chekhov to
diagnose Anna with pneumonia.
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Medicine and the Mind-Body Problem
Figure Anatomical drawings from Pirogov’s Anatome topographica.
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We also see in the case history how Chekhov had internalized Erisman’s
environmental approach to health. Chekhov situates Anna in various levels
of her environment, systematically noting specific conditions:
Before the time of admittance to the hospital the patient lived in the
Sretenk Section on Golovin Lane and, with her daughter, occupied a
two-room apartment with a kitchen in a two-story stone building. [. . .]
The apartment is warm, a little damp. The rooms are well lit and the
ceilings are high. The toilet in the inner hall is cold. From fear of catching a
chill, when it gets cold the patient passes feces in the bedroom.
Chekhov constructs his patient within spatial and social matrices, locating
her apartment, describing the dwelling, its lighting, heating, moisture in
the rooms, and sanitation, all factors that fall into hygiene’s purview. He
points in particular to the cold toilet and the dampness of the apartment,
details that suggest correlations between Anna’s illness and her surround-
ings. This case history systematically addresses the material dimensions of
Anna’s everyday life – the body in the mind-body problem – and we see in
detail how Chekhov draws on hygiene and anatomy to consider its spatial
and environmental aspects.
The Environmental Soul
Hygiene viewed the human body as responsive to its external surround-
ings, but the soul, the internal faculty governing mental life, persistently
evaded empiricism’s classificatory gaze. Sechenov’s groundbreaking
work Reflexes of the Brain, however, opened an approach to decipher-
ing the soul’s mysteries. The treatise rocked imperial Russian social dis-
course by introducing scientifically grounded notions about the soul’s
location in the body, not as a substance around the heart but as embedded
in the nervous system – a point that Tolstoy’s Levin struggles with in the
opening chapters of Anna Karenina (). The treatise also seemed to
reframe behavior as largely controlled by the external stimuli of environ-
ments, rather than as freely determined by the will.
Sechenov had discovered that reflexes, or the body’s movements, were not
only those more obvious displays of excitation in response to a stimulus, but
also of inhibition, or the controlled responses we associate with higher
mental functions like thought, will, or learning. Sechenov found that when
certain areas of a frog’s brain were stimulated, stimulations to the leg elicited
no reflex response, whereas the legs of decapitated frogs consistently
responded to stimuli. From this he deduced centers in the brain that
inhibited movement and, along with excitation, he began to consider
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Medicine and the Mind-Body Problem
inhibition as a nervous reflex. While involuntary reactions to environmental
stimuli easily correlated with fear or flight, inhibition opened a much wider
range of mental phenomena to neurophysiological interpretation.
The human organism’s physical and psychological environments
appeared to garner extraordinary power through Sechenov’s discovery,
supporting Western social theories of environmental determinism. If the
thought or willpower preventing a movement reduced to an externally
stimulated reflex, then the environment might be viewed as the primary
cause of human activity, excluding the will and morality. Tolstoy
dramatizes this error in the popular reception of Sechenov’s idea by
making Stiva Oblonsky a reader of Reflexes of the Brain. Stiva uses
Sechenov’s essay to excuse his adultery with the family’s governess. The
problem boils down to the involuntary smile that gives away his remorse-
lessness. Merely a “reflex action of the brain,” Stiva implies that his
sheepish smile, and by extension his infidelity, is an uncontrollable
response to a social environment saturated with attractive young women.
But as Stiva gets himself into a deeper mess through his lack of restraint,
he, along with many of Russia’s reading elite, misses the forest of
Sechenov’s hypothesis through its trees.
Sechenov’s treatise was far from sanctioning unfaithful husbands. But it
was ascribing new faculties of preservation, analysis, and synthesis to the
sense organs, with the nervous system’s foundational relationship to them
enabling memory, volition, and the work of differentiation and association
that lead to self-consciousness. Further, Sechenov posits asymmetries
between involuntary and voluntary reflexes as he distinguishes between
excitation and inhibition. Excitation is instinctual and immediate, but
inhibition, also in response to an environmental stimulus, involves tem-
poral delays and spatial discontinuities. For Sechenov the environment is
around us, but also penetrates into the body as impressions, environmental
traces that become muscle and sensory memories. These proceed through
thought, imagination, volition, and finally, at no predestined time, end in
the body’s controlled movement. In the delays of voluntary action moti-
vated by pleasure, fear, language, learning, morality, all our psychological
and spiritual affects play roles in shaping behavior.
What emerges in Sechenov’s work is a robust, functional model of the
human organism as a porous, receptive sensorium, an environmental soul
inseparable from and animating the body. Sechenov never addresses adult
moral behavior. Instead, he focuses on the child, the stages through which
the sensorial mind develops as it encounters its spatial environment, new
objects, traumas, sounds, words, the process through which it becomes
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conscious of itself, and its identification with others as it finds its place in
the world.
Chekhov and the Mind-Body Problem
Sechenov’s treatise was required reading among medical students.
Chekhov not only dissected frogs in the biology classroom with
Sechenov’s concepts in mind; he also saw the effects of nerve stimulation
in his psychiatric patients. Coffee, tea, alcohol, baths, and medicines were
known nervines, or substances that stimulated or soothed the nerves. This
medical classification required physicians to inquire about nervines on all
intake questionnaires. The corpses from Chekhov’s anatomy classrooms
also presented him with nerves integrated with the flesh, connected to
organs and muscles. But perhaps more importantly, this work opened the
chance for Chekhov to moonlight as a coroner after he finished medical
school. Recounting where his thoughts strayed during forensic autopsies in
cold hospital rooms and barns, he jests with editor Alexei Suvorin about
the soul’s location and functions:
I think that when you open up a corpse, even the most incurable spiritualist
must ask: where is the soul? And if you knew how great the similarities are
between physical illnesses and mental illnesses, and that each of these types
of illness is treated with the same medicine, you are not going to want to
separate the soul from the body. [. . .] Psychological phenomena are so
strikingly similar to physical phenomena that it’s impossible to tell where
one begins and the other ends.” (May , ; L:)
For Chekhov, soul and body are not separable, implying that material
bodies always have something of the psychological in them, just as the soul
shares a material dimension. This is why the environments of his patients
were so important to Chekhov: he was not practicing nontraditional
medicine under Arkhangelsky in Chikinsk; he was applying an interdis-
ciplinary approach to diagnosis and care.
Chekhov’s spatial approach to the human organism also extends to the
core of his literary project. An innovative early story, “Grisha” (), for
example, initiated a series of narratives about childhood development by
describing the relationship between soul and body in a boy at the age of
two years and eight months. “Grisha” blends environmental medicine and
neurophysiological models to construct the eponymous character’s first
experience of the outside world, and the unanticipated effects of its intense
impressions. The story begins with Grisha’s careful orientation in the
“four-cornered world” of his home “where his bed stood in one corner,
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Medicine and the Mind-Body Problem
his nanny’s trunk in another, in the third a chair, and a little icon lamp
burned in the fourth.” Grisha can already associate and differentiate
impressions, analytical and synthetic abilities that, in Sechenov’s model,
initiate self-consciousness between the ages of two and three. To Grisha,
“Mama looks like the doll and the cat looks like Papa’s fur coat, only the
coat doesn’t have eyes and a tail” (W:). These associations between
favorite objects, animals, and people stabilize Grisha’s world, but he also
differentiates between his mother and his aunt, who gave him the doll. His
mother, ever present in the home, he comprehends, but his aunt’s play of
absence and presence leaves Grisha confused. He cannot imagine a context
that makes sense of her disappearances.
When he encounters this context, the world of the streets outside his
home, Grisha is so overwhelmed with new environmental details that his
mental facilities collapse. Horse movements are incomprehensible; cats
with big noses and long tongues (likely dogs) appear larger than life; pieces
of glass and shiny buttons in petticoats captivate him: “the gleam of the
sun, the noise of the carriages, the horses, the shining buttons – all this is
so amazingly new and not scary that Grisha’s soul (dusha) brims with a
feeling of pleasure and he starts to laugh” (W:). Outside, Grisha reverts
to an uninhibited sensorium, his “soul” taking in impressions with
immense pleasure. He cannot synthesize them, however: his laughter is
an involuntary response to sensorial overload. Grisha loses the ability to
differentiate and remerges with the environment around him. He impul-
sively grabs oranges from a tub and is drawn involuntarily after the “cats”
into the street. Later, in his nanny’s apartment, he grabs for pie and
demands, “Me!” to drink. She teases him with vodka, and Grisha wanders
from the table to encounter a terrifying black mass: “He sees the dark
ceiling, a giant fork with two horns, and the stove peering at him with its
giant black hole.” Grisha’s uninhibited terror projectively animates this
object, and he cries for his mother: “Ma-a-m-a!” (W:).
When the child returns to his room that evening, he does not return
alone. He carries with him the day’s fantastic images. He tries to commu-
nicate these to “his mother and the walls of his room,” but with inadequate
language, his gesticulations fail to express his experiences. He must process
the intense impressions alone:
Soldiers with birch brooms, big cats, horses, pieces of glass, tubs of oranges,
the shiny buttons – all of this heaps together and presses itself on his brain.
[. . .] “The stove!” He cries, “Go away stove!” [. . .] And Grisha, bursting
with the impressions of the new life he has only just experienced, is given a
spoonful of castor oil by his mama. (W:)
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Grisha’s world is saturated with the details of everyday life: readers can
locate him in the space of the bustling city, describe the conditions of his
dwellings, their lighting and heating, and the daily activities around him.
We are overloaded with environmental details through the defamiliarized
perspective of the child, but it is also Chekhov’s training in environmental
medicine that pervades the text. Hygiene allowed him to conceptualize the
environment as an array of forces shaping health, leading, in part, to the
careful presentation of the interiors and exterior spaces through which
Grisha wanders. But Chekhov presents details that evoke more than the
environment’s physicality or its capacity to transfer illness. We also see
how the environment enters Grisha, imprints itself on his neural body, and
leaves its visual, aural, olfactory, and emotional traces there. The black hole
of his nanny’s stove and Grisha’s failure to communicate his terror remain
embedded deeply within his physical and psychological existence. This
original trauma outside the home will, with time, fully differentiate him
from his mother and the four walls of his room, resulting in the delayed
actions of self-conscious identification with his own body. The deeply
symbolic language accompanying this will be highly developed even as it
consistently falls short of his efforts to articulate the vastness of his
environmental soul.
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The Arts
Serge Gregory
“It’s not for nothing that when speaking of Chekhov, you are
reminded of Levitan’s landscapes and Tchaikovsky’s melodies.” –
Konstantin Stanislavsky
Anton Chekhov’s creative years from to spanned a period of
profound transformation in the arts. In the theater, it was Chekhov
himself, in collaboration with Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theater, who
fundamentally changed the nature of drama on the Russian stage. In opera
and ballet, the stodgy productions at the state-run Bolshoi Theater gave
way to the innovative set designs of Savva Mamontov’s private opera and
eventually to the more radical stagings of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.
In painting, the realistic style of the Itinerant movement was displaced
by the symbolism and abstraction of Russian modernism in the Silver Age.
In music, Pyotr Tchaikovsky represented the pinnacle of Russian
romanticism, but by the turn of the century we see Alexander Scriabin
beginning to push musical boundaries toward atonality.
Soon after arriving in Moscow in , Chekhov was introduced to a
group of young writers, painters, and musicians thanks to his older brother
Nikolai, who had come to the city four years earlier to attend the Moscow
School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture. Depending on his writing
to make a living, Chekhov quickly learned how the business side of the arts
in Moscow and St. Petersburg worked. In June , Nikolai Leikin, the
editor of the St. Petersburg weekly Fragments, asked Chekhov to take on
the twice-monthly feuilleton “Fragments of Moscow Life.” Leikin was
hopeful that Chekhov, who had been publishing humorous sketches in
his journal for over a year, would be the right person to carry out his
editorial plan to use the feuilleton to disparage Muscovites for the amuse-
ment of his St. Petersburg audience.
While not resorting to the level of disdain encouraged by Leikin,
Chekhov nevertheless for the next two years took on the persona of a
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witty, young boulevardier commenting on Moscow’s cultural life. When
writing about the fine arts, he most often focused on the world of the
theater, but he touched on painting and music as well. Nikolai’s class-
mates – the painters Isaac Levitan and Konstantin Korovin – became
sources for anecdotes. Chekhov’s irritation at Nikolai’s dissipation colored
his attitude toward many of the school’s students: “They draw, don’t care
about the sciences, sinfully love to drink schnapps, don’t cut their hair,
don’t get any farther in anatomy than the neck bones” (W:).
Chekhov, or more accurately the flippant version of himself that he
created for “Fragments,” at first included Levitan among the school’s artists
who, lacking discipline, would “quickly flower and quickly fade.” But he
gradually found himself drawn to the landscape painter, who had no desire
to reflect the prevailing notions of political engagement in art. Levitan’s
refusal to present any sort of narrative in his paintings put him at odds with
the dominant aesthetic of the Itinerants, a secessionist group that had
broken away in from the classical Imperial Academy of Fine Arts.
In a June feuilleton, Chekhov made fun of the Itinerant painter
Viktor Vasnetsov’s attempt to find a parallel between stone age brutishness
and the present human condition. Through his artist friends, Chekhov was
able to preview a series of large-scale friezes that Vasnetsov was preparing
for the archeological hall of the Moscow Historical Museum. He found the
depictions of the lives of stone age men and women (inventing fire,
hunting a mammoth) to be “lackluster mush” that only served to scare
children. Even in this early, callow phase of his creative life, Chekhov was
already allergic to melodrama. Around this time, Vasnetsov became the
lead scenic designer for Mamontov’s opera and enlisted the help of Levitan
and Korovin in painting background drop curtains. Through these con-
nections, Chekhov was privy to the gossip surrounding Mamontov’s pro-
ductions, and in early February he reviewed the premiere of
Alexander Dargomyzhsky’s opera Rusalka.
Unlike his siblings, Chekhov never mastered playing a musical
instrument. The Chekhov children had a music teacher at home (Anton
briefly took some violin lessons), and he sang (sometimes under duress) in
his father’s church choir. Taganrog was a seaport town whose Italian
merchants funded performances by touring opera companies, which fos-
tered Chekhov’s lifelong preference for Italian singers. He also attended
operettas and musical vaudevilles, as well as recitals by soloists and cham-
ber groups from Moscow and St. Petersburg. With this early exposure to a
variety of genres, Chekhov was not at all reluctant to critique musical
performances in his “Fragments” columns.
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Over the course of three feuilletons, Chekhov reacted harshly to
Mamontov’s productions, writing that the impresario was an obscenely
rich dilettante who had no business making art and who had spent vast
sums of money hiring amateurs who sang badly (“They’re waiting for the
Italians”). What most caught Chekhov’s attention was the mediocrity of
the arts scene in Moscow, its failure to innovate. The Bolshoi Opera was
moribund: “Not a scrap of novelty. The same artists as usual, the same
style of singing” (W:). The Bolshoi Ballet no longer attracted
connoisseurs of dance: “Now there only remain those who, if they stumble
into the ballet, it’s only by chance, and sitting in the ballet, they look lazily
at the talents of the knees, heels, and toes, with yawns and the same dull,
numb expression with which bulls stare at a passing train” (W:).
Operettas became particular objects of ridicule. Chekhov was dismayed to
learn that the revered Pushkin Theater had been turned into the Follies
Berger, offering Offenbach, a Russian bar, and cabaret evenings where
patrons danced the can-can with “young French girls from Hamburg”
(W:).
Chekhov stopped writing “Fragments of Moscow Life” in the fall of
. He spent the previous summer at Babkino, a country estate owned
by the Kiselyovs, a cultured but impoverished noble family. The atmo-
sphere at Babkino made an unforgettable impression on Chekhov at the
very point that he was beginning to think of himself as more than a mere
scribbler of humorous sketches. Mornings at his writing desk were fol-
lowed by afternoons of walking, fishing, and mushroom hunting. Evenings
were given over to comic improvisations and musical recitals. “Imagine – a
warm summer evening,” Chekhov’s sister Maria recalled, “an attractive
estate standing on a high bank of the shore, the river below, an enormous
forest beyond the river . . . the evening silence. From the open windows
and doors of the house drifted the sounds of a Beethoven sonata, a Chopin
nocturne.” The mise en scène orchestrated by the Kiselyovs would later
inspire the settings and characters found in Chekhov’s major plays. We
need only remember the opening scene in the garden in Ivanov (“As the
curtain rises, the sound of a cello and piano duet being practiced can be
heard coming from indoors”), or the first act of The Seagull, where Treplev
presents his symbolist play for family and guests on an outdoor stage in the
park of the Sorin estate. In fact, Chekhov described his play as constructed
in the fashion of a musical piece: “I began it forte and ended it pianissimo”
(November , ; L:).
Among the guests at Babkino was Levitan, whom Chekhov had invited,
hoping that spending the summer there painting would cure his bouts of
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depression; recently the piece he had submitted to graduate from the
School of Painting had been rejected. Chekhov and Levitan had gradually
grown closer over the preceding five years, but their summer together at
Babkino cemented their relationship. Looking at Levitan’s paintings and
sketches at Babkino, Chekhov came to understand something that Levitan
already knew – we perceive nature subjectively, ascribing to it qualities that
reflect our state of mind. Chekhov himself felt the emotional power of the
“unusually warm, caressing landscape” surrounding him. Already aware of
the effect that looking at the countryside had on him, Chekhov could not
help but be struck that Levitan had the ability to use color, composition,
light, and shadow to turn that emotional response into art.
In several stories written that summer, Chekhov went beyond simple
anthropomorphizing in his descriptions of nature and started using more
subtle metaphorical language to establish a mood. In “The Huntsman,”
written at Babkino: “The sunbaked grass had a disconsolate, hopeless
look . . . The forest stood silent, motionless, as though it were looking at
something with its tree-tops or expecting something” (W:). By ani-
mating nature in a way that created a psychological landscape, Chekhov
used words to produce the same effect already recognized in Levitan’s
work – his paintings were not so much literal representations of nature as
reflections of human feelings. Eventually both artists would confront a
sense of a gap between the existence of natural beauty and our articulation
of it. Levitan focused on his own inadequacy in translating his perception
onto a canvas. Chekhov’s response was more outwardly directed; it was not
that he felt unable to convey natural beauty but that the world cared too
little for it.
Chekhov’s admiration for Levitan’s painting was lifelong and unwaver-
ing. In March , on the eve of his first trip to Europe, he went to see
the annual Itinerant exhibition in St. Petersburg. He excitedly reported to
his sister Maria that “Levitan is celebrating the birthday of his magnificent
muse. His painting [Quiet Abode] is causing a furor” (L:). A month
later in Paris he attended another exhibition, this time the French
Academy’s annual Salon, which included a gallery of Russian paintings.
He wrote to his family: “In comparison with the local landscape painters
I saw yesterday, Levitan is king” (L:). Levitan, in turn, was struck by
what he saw as landscape paintings in Chekhov’s stories, particularly “the
pictures of the steppe, the mounds, the sheep in the story ‘Happiness.’”
What drew Levitan to this story was the way that Chekhov used descrip-
tions of the natural setting to create a pensive, languorous mood that
echoes the shared musings of three men on the steppe.
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In Chekhov published “The Grasshopper,” a story that was
quickly recognized to be loosely based on a ménage à trois involving
Levitan, his mistress Sophia Kuvshinnikova, and her physician husband.
Levitan understandably took offense, and the two men did not speak to
each other for almost three years. Yet even as the painter Ryabovsky in
“The Grasshopper” is portrayed as cruelly oblivious to the effect of his
affair on the good doctor Dymov, Chekhov’s description of Ryabovsky’s
artistic gifts clearly echoes his own appreciation of Levitan’s talents: “He
spoke so uniquely in his own special language about the shadows, the
evening tints, the glint of the moon that you irresistibly felt the spell of his
power over nature” (W:–).
Although his friendship with Levitan was unique, Chekhov sought out
other artists whose work he admired, including Ilya Repin. In
Chekhov wrote to Modest Tchaikovsky that among the pantheon
of great living Russian artists, he ranked Repin third and Pyotr
Tchaikovsky second after Leo Tolstoy (“as for myself, I’m th”).
Tchaikovsky, in turn, had first become familiar with Chekhov in after
reading the collection Motley Stories. He told Modest that Chekhov was “a
huge talent” and wrote a fan letter that unfortunately was never received.
Knowing how much his brother liked Chekhov’s writing, Modest arranged
a breakfast meeting.
Though they had met only once, in , Chekhov decided to dedicate
Gloomy People, his third collection of stories, to Tchaikovsky. He wrote to
the composer requesting his permission. This prompted Tchaikovsky to
visit Chekhov the very next day and ask him whether he would write the
libretto for an opera he was planning to compose based on Mikhail
Lermontov’s story “Bela” from A Hero of Our Time. He had in mind an
intimate piece without the marches and processions typical of grand opera.
This would have appealed to Chekhov’s preference for artistic restraint.
However, the composer’s frequent travel abroad prevented him from
completing “Bela” before his death in .
Chekhov’s favorite work by Tchaikovsky was his lyrical opera Eugene
Onegin. Tchaikovsky’s work, reflected through Chekhov’s ironic sensibil-
ity, inspired his story “After the Theater” (), told through the per-
spective of a sixteen-year-old girl who comes home filled with jumbled
romantic fantasies after seeing the opera. With adolescent simplicity she
grasps the essence of Pushkin’s verse drama: “There is something beautiful,
touching, and poetic when one person is in love and the other person is
indifferent. Onegin is interesting because he is not at all in love, and
Tatiana is enchanting because she is very much in love, and if they both
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were in love with each other and were happy, well that, if you will, would
turn out to be boring” (W:). She also might as well have been
describing the typical romantic conflict in a Chekhov story or play.
Chekhov continued to prefer Italian opera. When he first traveled to
Venice, he rapturously described an Italian night to his family: “You want
to cry because from all corners you hear music and extraordinary singing.
The gondola floats by lit up by various colored lamps; there is enough light
to catch a glimpse of the contrabass, guitar, mandolin, violin . . . Then
comes another gondola . . . Men and women sing, and how they sing! It’s a
real opera!” (March , ; L:). Over time, however, he became
less dismissive of Russian opera and Russian singers than he had been in
his “Fragments” feuilletons. In he published two favorable reviews of
performances at the Mariinsky Theater, including comments on Glinka’s
Ruslan and Liudmilla in which he approved of the audience’s enthusiasm
for the Russian singer Ivan Melnikov.
Just as was the case during his summers at Babkino in the s, in the
s Chekhov’s intimate social circle continued to include musical artists
such as Lidia Mizinova and her friend Varvara Eberle. Mizinova, with
whom Chekhov had an arm’s-length romantic relationship for ten years,
yearned to become an opera singer and traveled twice to Paris with Eberle
to take singing lessons. It was only Eberle, however, who found success.
She debuted as Tatiana in Eugene Onegin at the Bolshoi Theater and
eventually became a soloist in Mamontov’s company, performing together
with Chaliapin. When Chekhov’s doctors demanded that he move to Yalta
to ease the symptoms of his tuberculosis, he felt exiled from the lively
entertainment provided by his friends. Occasionally he would be visited by
Rachmaninoff and Chaliapin, who would sit down at his piano to play and
sing, but at other times he complained: “The piano and I – these are two
objects in the house leading a silent and perplexed existence. Why did they
put us here when there’s no one to play us?” (November , ;
L:).
In his plays Chekhov found ways to create an atmosphere that, like
music, evokes feelings that transcended words. The pauses in his stage
directions represent musical beats. Understanding this, Stanislavsky went
further. For The Seagull he created a production plan that he called a
“score.” Act I, he noted, begins with: “Distant sounds of a drunken song,
distant howling of a dog, croaking of frogs, the cry of a corncrake – help
the audience to enter into the sad, monotonous life of the characters.” In
Three Sisters Masha and Vershinin playfully court each other in a duet
of musical sounds – her “Tara-tara-tara” followed by his “Tum-tum,
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tum-tum.” And most famously in Act II of The Cherry Orchard, we have
offstage the sad, discordant “sound of a snapping string.”
In his stories too, Chekhov understood that in love and sadness, words
often fail. In “Enemies” () he tries to capture the sense of grief felt by
a doctor and his wife on the death of their child, “the delicate, elusive
beauty of human sorrow, which we will not soon learn to understand and
describe, and which, it seems, only music is able to convey” (W:–).
In “Ariadne” () Ivan Shamokhin describes the rapture he feels for the
natural beauty of his country estate as if he were literally and figuratively
listening to a piece of music:
I will die, they will nail my coffin shut, and just the same, it seems to me,
I will dream of these early mornings, when the sunshine hurts your eyes, or
the wonderful spring evenings when the nightingales and rails sing in and
beyond the garden, and the sound of an accordion floats over from the
village, and they’re playing the piano in the house, and there’s the sound of
the river – in a word, such music that you both want to cry and sing out
loud at the same time. (W:)
Similarly, Chekhov recognized Levitan’s mastery in using the visual land-
scape to convey inexpressible moods and emotions. In “Three Years”
() he recreates the experience of seeing Levitan’s Quiet Abode at an
Itinerant exhibition. Yulia Sergeevna, normally a lazy observer who thinks
all paintings look the same, is struck by a painting of a scene reminiscent of
a work by Levitan. It arouses within her a sense of melancholic déjà vu:
“And for some reason, it suddenly seemed to her that she had seen those
same clouds that stretched across the red part of the sky, and the forest,
and the fields long ago and many times; she felt lonely, and she wanted to
walk, walk, walk down the path: and where the sunset’s glow was, there
rested the reflection of something unearthly, eternal” (W:). The land-
scape evokes in her a mood that is pensive, profoundly moved, and
connected to things beyond expression. There is no better description of
the impact of a Levitan painting.
When Stanislavsky said that “Chekhov on stage was not only a poet but
also a sensitive director, critic, painter and musician,” he was recognizing
that Chekhov’s dramas, like a work of art or a musical piece, conveyed the
ineffable. In doing so, Chekhov was embracing a modernist aesthetic that
was emerging in all the art forms – an impressionistic sensibility in which
reality only exists as something seen through the lens of individual per-
ceptions and subjective emotions.
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Fin de Siècle
Mark D. Steinberg
Fin de siècle is an elusive category. Beyond its literal meaning as the end
of a century or an age, it is typically used to suggest an end-of-era
experience, especially the experience, exemplified by Western Europe at
the end of the nineteenth century, of decay and degeneration, of malaise
and a feeling of crisis, though sometimes accompanied by a sense of the
new and possible, even of apocalyptic rebirth. In Russia, this archetypal
fin-de-siècle mood appeared most strongly after the upheavals, hopes,
and crushing disappointments of the revolution. Though this peak
came later than in the West, this sensibility may have been more intense
and certainly had broader social reach. Wide circles of Russians grew
skeptical of the promises of modern progress and recognized its pathol-
ogies. Many found illusion and deceit in temporal optimism. Most
visibly, public discourse after was filled with talk of catastrophe,
disintegration, sickness, disenchantment, melancholy (toska), anxiety,
and uncertainty. This was sufficiently widespread across society for
journalists to call it a “public mood” (obshchestvennoe nastroenie). As time
would show, this sense of looming catastrophe was both prophetic and a
catalyst of unprecedented upheavals.
Chekhov was dead by the time this fin-de-siècle mood fully burst forth
in Russia. In July , the Russo-Japanese war was only beginning, and
no one imagined Russia would fail so miserably. “Bloody Sunday,” the
massacre of civilians peacefully marching to the tsar with a petition of
social grievances in January , which ignited a revolution, was even less
imaginable. Consider this testimony about the radical difference in moods
before and after . Dmitry Merezhkovsky – a writer with a heightened
sensitivity to signs of decline and crisis in Russia before , indeed, who
helped nurture such moods – had left Russia for the West in ,
returning only in . He wrote in a liberal newspaper that he was
stunned by the radically changed atmosphere: walking the streets of the
capital, looking into people’s faces, and reading the daily papers, he felt all
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around him the “famous ‘feeling of the end.’” A popular magazine in
similarly described the “public mood” as “a hopeless ‘apotheosis of
groundlessness.’” This was a telling turn of phrase, borrowed from the
title of Lev Shestov’s book, Apofeos bezpochvennosti, which had been
published in . But Shestov’s message was the opposite of hopeless-
ness. In freedom from dogmatic old certainties, he found liberating pos-
sibility and hope. Modern “disenchantment,” “indeterminacy,” “lack of
clarity,” and “disorder,” he argued, was a path of freedom and creativity,
where all things become possible.
This was closer to the mood of Chekhov’s fin de siècle, which we might
think of as a first wave: an era of anxiety and uncertainty, to be sure, but
layered with feelings of openness and possibility, with a spirit of searching
and discovery. This first-wave fin de siècle might be dated from the eve of
the regicide of the “tsar-emancipator” Alexander II in , when the
young medical student Chekhov was just beginning his career as
an author.
Of course, dark breezes from the West were felt in Russia. Physicians,
psychiatrists, criminologists, and other professionals drew on European
notions of “degeneration” – a pathology of individuals translated into a
diagnosis of modern society – to explain crime, violence, prostitution,
suicide, and other social pathologies that were increasingly widespread,
especially in Russia’s cities during the rapid economic modernization that
Russia experienced starting in the s. Biomedical and cultural theories
of “deviance” and “degeneration” framed these social phenomena as
“symptoms” of societal disintegration. And they were judged simulta-
neously structural, biological, and moral. For many, in this still scientific
and positivist age, the solution was “healthification” (ozdorovlenie)
through social discipline. Perceptions of degeneration, though these
would become much stronger in the wake of the revolution, were
increasingly felt in the s and s, as Alexander III began to undo
the Great Reforms and thus crushed hopes for Russia’s renewal, and as his
son Nicholas II turned away from modern forms of civic life – though
supporting the acceleration of industrial and urban modernization –
toward an archaic ideal rooted in a myth of a more stable and happy
premodern nation.
As economic and social modernity planted deeper roots in Russia,
“civilization” produced its inevitable sources of discontent: individual lives
uprooted from traditional environments, rising materialism and consum-
erism, challenges to family and gender roles, and growing individualism.
Among widely read popular accounts of this social and moral disorder,
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likely known to Chekhov as both doctor and author, were Vladimir
Mikhnevich’s sketches about urban “moral life” for the journal
Nabliudatel’ (The Observer), republished as the Sores of Petersburg (Iazvy
Peterburga) in , Anatoly Bakhtiarov’s newspaper feuilletons that
became the Belly of Petersburg (Briukho Peterburga) in , and Nikolai
Zhivotov’s reportage in the s from his excursions into the lower
depths of urban life in the guise of a cabdriver, a waiter, a funeral
torchbearer, and a tramp. Echoing this troubled atmosphere – encourag-
ing it, critics complained – was the emergence in literature and the arts of a
“decadent” fascination with illness, perversity, decline, ruin, evil, the
occult, and death, though these themes would be much more common
and powerful after . As in the West, a decadent perspective was both
an artistic stance and an interpretation of reality.
Among the diagnoses of the harmful effects of modern civilization, of
reasons for psychological discontent, one of the most ubiquitous was
“nervousness,” a trope used by both psychiatrists and popular writers.
Many of Chekhov’s characters suffer from nervous illness, though very
often, as in “An Attack of Nerves” () and “A Doctor’s Visit” (),
not only as a symptom of modern life but as an implicit critique of its
failings, an affective reaction to harm inflicted on people’s lives, and to
their own inability to heal the world.
Perceptions of disrupted norms and blocked progress could also nurture
an emboldened search for the redemptive new. As the century approached
its end, old verities in almost every sphere of thought and life were
reconsidered. Sometimes, archaic and falling systems were replaced by
new ones that were no less all-encompassing and totalistic. Such new
forms of holistic, even absolutist, thinking could be political and social,
notably Marxism (“scientific socialism”) on the Left and nationalism on
the Right. They could be religious and moral, as in the upsurge of popular
religious movements, the turn from “rationalism” to “faith” among some
intellectuals, and Tolstoyism. They could be scientific and empiricist,
ranging from Ivan Pavlov’s physiology to new trends in psychiatry and
ethnography. But the deeper spirit, even in the creation of new systems of
unitary truth, was questioning and searching. Among intellectuals, what
was called “God-seeking” (Bogoiskatel’stvo) was a symptom of this search-
ing spirit. Knowledge and its sources were unstable and contested.
Reinvigorated positivist science sought paths to “truth” alongside antipo-
sitivist and anti-objectivist arguments about the inescapability of the
subjective in perception, and arguments that true knowledge of reality
was inaccessible to science shorn of intuition.
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Chekhov’s sensitivity to unresolvable questions, his nonjudgmental
accounts of human weakness and failing, and his hesitation before ideo-
logical or moral absolutes were all characteristics of this first-wave fin-de-
siècle spirit. As scientist and artist, Chekhov “shunned certainty,” not so
much in a despairing mood of “epistemological distress” as in a positive
awareness that there are multiple ways of knowing, and a sensitivity to the
dangers – clinical, social, moral, and even political – of assuming author-
itative mastery of the truth. At times, his perspective reached beyond his
era toward an exceptional recognition of uncertainty and ambiguity. When
a critic complained that his story “Lights” (Ogni, ) ends irresponsibly
with the narrator concluding that “you can’t figure out anything in this
world,” Chekhov insisted that this was a “great knowledge” that “the
crowd,” believing everything could be understood, failed to grasp (May
, ; L:–). Searching, rather than knowing, was a leitmotif in
the lives of many of Chekhov’s protagonists. Famously, Masha in Three
Sisters (), responding to Baron Tuzenbakh’s melancholy declaration
that even “a million years from now life will be the same as always,” insists
not that she knows what is to come, but that “a person must have faith or
be searching for it. Otherwise life is empty, empty” (W:). Searching
alone can dispel despair, though it falls short of certain knowledge or faith,
as it must.
Critics continued to complain, as Leo Tolstoy did in , that
Chekhov “has not yet reached a definite point of view.” This refusal of
“definiteness” was essential to Chekhov’s perspective and that of his time.
He saw life as multiplicity and unpredictability. He recognized and
described desire, temptation, immorality, pessimism, despair, and faith,
without moralizing. His stance was “subversive” and often ahead of his
time, it has been argued, because he rejected on principle the new
certainties and absolute systems that were being constructed around
him. This was not simple relativism or a refusal to judge. His stance grew
from positive belief: he looked for salvation in individuals rather than
groups or institutions; he despised lies and hypocrisy; he embraced science;
and, morally and politically, he insisted on the supreme value of human
dignity and freedom. This subversive and skeptical, but fundamentally
humanistic, spirit was as much a part of the first-wave Russian fin de siècle
as the totalizing systems that Chekhov resisted.
In “Lights,” an engineer on a railroad project is dismayed by the gloomy
pessimism of his student assistant, who dismisses the engineer’s enthusi-
asm for the creative and constructive “human spirit,” his belief that their
work advances “life and civilization,” by noting the inevitability of death
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and disintegration. “Ideas about the pointlessness of life, about the insig-
nificance and fleetingness of the visible world,” the engineer responds, lead
to a dead end where “everything comes to a stop! There is nowhere further
to go.” He admits that in his own youth he was “sick” with such ideas. He
remembers the end of the s and early s. Indeed, already in the
final years of Alexander II’s reign, some Russian elites, including in ruling
circles, began to feel a disenchantment with the promises of modernizing
progress represented by the Great Reforms. Alexander III’s openly reac-
tionary policies compounded feelings of hopelessness. “At the end of the
seventies,” the engineer recalls, ideas about the pointlessness of earthly
striving “were becoming fashionable among the public. Then, in the early
eighties, they began to move gradually from the public into literature,
science, and politics. I was no more than twenty-six, but I already knew
perfectly well that life is pointless and had no meaning, that everything is
deceit and illusion,” that there is no right or wrong, that life and death
have “no interest in the struggle against nature or the conception of sin:
whether you struggle or not, you will die and rot just the same.” This
existential pessimism was “alluring, a sort of narcotic, like tobacco or
morphine.” But it led, as it had in the engineer’s youth, to a contemptuous
inability to recognize the dignity and potential of every human being and
thus to “evil” actions. This is not to say there is no truth in the recognition
that everything falls before death. But this is knowledge for old people, the
engineer warned, the result of “years of inner labor,” of understanding that
grows from experience and suffering, when there is nothing left to accom-
plish. For the young and active, such thinking is a “disaster” and an
“anathema” (W:, –, , ).
We could explore the many forms of anxious but hopeful searching, the
contradictions of pessimistic recognition and determined vitality, across
the social landscape of Chekhov’s Russia. But I will pause over one
critically important leitmotif, influential across many arenas of thought
and practice, from politics to religion, and in Chekhov’s life and work: the
problem of the individual and the self. For Chekhov, an essential reality of
human experience was the persistent conflict between the desire for a fully
realized selfhood and the restrictive and crushing realities of the world.
Concerning gender and sexuality, for example, a growing number of
women, seeking more realized selfhoods, refused traditional patriarchal
strictures. Through education and professions for the elite, and indepen-
dent urban labor for the poor, but also political activism (including as
revolutionary terrorists), many women sacrificed traditional security and
honor, and even economic affluence to be independent. Alexandra
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Kollontai, whose own life was an example of this new path, would later
argue that the single working woman (kholostaia zhenshchina) was an early
model of the emerging “new women.” Feminism arose in these years as
an ideological articulation of ideas of women’s freedom and self-realization,
in both public and intimate spheres. We can see even the spread of urban
prostitution, a sphere that attracted Chekhov both personally and artisti-
cally, though viewed by many as a pathology of modern society in which
women were absolute victims, as evidence, though complex and troubling,
of changing lives and limited female agency. Some prostitutes insisted that
in sex work they found an alternative to the oppressions of domestic
service or factory labor and the patriarchal family.
A touchstone for changing attitudes and experiences around the indi-
vidual and self in nineteenth-century Russia was the concept of lichnost’, an
elusive keyword translatable as person, personality, self, selfhood, and
individual. Above all, lichnost’ was an analytical and moral category: a
definition of each human being’s essential dignity and the implied rights
this entailed. At the heart of the many currents of Russian dissidence at the
time was outrage over conditions that limited and crushed lichnost’.
Nihilists, populists, liberals, and Marxists, the major oppositional trends
in Chekhov’s Russia, can be defined, as one influential radical defined
nihilism, as “a passionate and healthy reaction . . . against the moral
oppression of the human personality [lichnost’]” in both private and public
life. When Vera Zasulich shot the Petersburg police chief and governor
in , the jury agreed with her attorney that she was justified because
she acted from “a sense of deep irreconcilable outrage for the moral dignity
of the human being.” The social reach of such ideas grew steadily. By the
start of the twentieth century, widely read newspapers and magazines
commonly interpreted such problems of modern life as prostitution,
domestic violence, hooliganism, drunkenness, and suicide as resulting
from low social regard for “human dignity” and lack of “respect for the
person” (lichnost’). So much of present reality, it was said, “degraded,”
“insulted,” and harmed the person. Chekhov’s characters often shared
these ideas and feelings, frequently at a deep emotional level. In “An Attack
of Nerves” (Pripadok, ), for example, the law student Vasil’ev, whose
sensitive and troubled spirit was an homage to the late writer Vsevolod
Garshin, suffers from “the pain of others,” especially from conditions,
prostitution in this instance, that “defiled all that we call human dignity,
the personality [lichnost’], God’s image and likeness” (W:).
Some approaches to selfhood blended distress about the harshness of
reality with anticipation of a redeemed new person in a transformed new
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society. Maxim Gorky focused on the development, suffering, and self-
assertion of his characters’ inward and social beings, sometimes echoing
Friedrich Nietzsche’s idealization of the proud, striving, exuberant, and
rebellious individual living with new identities and new values. Other
writers found a new and liberated self in aestheticist evocations of love,
beauty, and sorrow. Others explored the Dionysian side of an awakened
self: eros, brutality, madness, and death. The growing profession of
Russian psychiatry, of course, echoed and encouraged attention to the
deepest human experiences, drives, and passions.
Perhaps in Russia more than elsewhere, “decadent” feelings of civili-
zational decline and crisis were intimately tied to utopian anticipations of
a transformed life to come. Life is often hostile to human selfhood, full
of indolence and apathy, mediocrity and conceit, “stupid, naïve, unbear-
able, vulgarity [poshlost’],” to quote Chekhov’s last story, “The Bride”
(Nevesta, ). But one possible and typical answer to the world of
disappointment and incomprehension was that of Chekhov’s disen-
chanted and disgusted bride: the desire “to live,” to find a new path, to
be free, for the sake of nothing more than life itself and the high value of
the human person (W:, –). Like the dying bishop in the
story of that name (“The Bishop”; Arkhierei, ), which Chekhov
published the year before, the darkness surrounding human life inspired
the simplest but most human dream, quite distant from orthodox
theology and faith, which left so much “unclear” and “lacking”: the
dream of being just “a simple ordinary person,” “free as a bird,” in the
“open sky” (W:). The dream of realized and emancipated selfhood,
and of a society that nurtured such a life, was as essential to understand-
ing Russia’s pre- fin de siècle as the acute perception of life’s cruelty,
senselessness, and disappointment.
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The Harm That Good Ideas Do
Gary Saul Morson
Ideals kill. If Russian history teaches anything, it is the danger of idealistic
theories. In the nineteenth century, Russian intellectuals prided themselves
on their devotion to abstractions; in the twentieth, one set of ideas,
Marxist-Leninism, seized power with a commitment to making reality fit
the theory.
In The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn asked why Shakespeare’s
villains “stopped short at a dozen corpses” while Bolsheviks murdered
millions. The answer is: because Macbeth and Iago
had no ideology. Ideology – that is what gives evil-doing its long-sought
justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determi-
nation. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good
instead of bad in his own and other’s eyes. [. . .] Thanks to ideology, the
twentieth century was to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the
millions.
Looking back on the same history, Nadezhda Mandelstam commented
on how the idea of “revolution” led intellectuals astray: “The decisive part
in the subjugation of the intelligentsia was played not by terror and bribery
[. . .] but by the word ‘Revolution,’ which none of them could give up.
It is a word to which whole nations have succumbed, and its force was
such that one wonders why our rulers still needed prisons and capital
punishment.”
Nineteenth-century Russian thinkers tended to pride themselves on
their devotion to abstract ideas. While David Hume famously remarked
that, for all his radical skepticism, he enjoyed his dinner with the same
gusto, Russians often could not understand how one could stop short of
applying truths everywhere. Transforming European ideas into plans for
universal salvation, Dostoevsky observed, they discovered “the Russian
aspect” of a European idea: “It consists of those conclusions drawn from
their teachings that take on the form of an invincible axiom, conclusions
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that are drawn only in Russia; in Europe [. . .] the possibility of these
conclusions is not even suspected.”
Sensing the danger of such idealism in the years after the Russian
Revolution of , the contributors to the scandalous anthology
Signposts: A Collection of Articles on the Russian Intelligentsia () called
for more intellectual modesty. Nikolai Berdyaev described how Russian
thought managed to “give even the most practical social questions a
philosophical character; it transformed the concrete and the particular
into the abstract and the general; it saw the agrarian and labor problems as
problems of universal salvation.” Everything was a matter of “principle”:
“No other word seems to fly so readily from the intelligent’s lips,” observed
Sergei Bulgakov, “[inasmuch as] he judges everything first ‘in principle,’
which in fact means abstractly, without trying to grasp the complexity
of reality.”
This tendency did not go unchallenged. By their very nature, realist
novels are skeptical of abstractions, and so realist novels of ideas – Russian
literature’s specialty – often narrate how a simplifying theory leads to
disaster. Bazarov, Raskolnikov, and Ivan Karamazov learn to their chagrin
that human psychology is more complex than their theories had admitted.
At the end of War and Peace, Pierre at last trades his dream of an infallible
ethical theory for a sensitive understanding of particular people and
situations. He “discarded the telescope through which he had till then
been gazing over the heads of men, and joyfully surveyed the ever-
changing, eternally great, unfathomable and infinite life around him.”
Both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were themselves seduced by great ideas.
Chekhov, by contrast, remained steadfastly suspicious of theory, and that
is part of his significance in Russian cultural history. In Vasily Grossman’s
Life and Fate, Madyarov argues that “if we [Soviets] recognize Chekhov,
it’s because we don’t understand him. [. . .] Chekhov’s path is the path of
freedom. We took a different path.” While the sense of human individu-
ality in Chekhov’s stories teaches tolerance, “our Russian humanism has
always been cruel, intolerant, sectarian [. . .] and fanatical. It has always
sacrificed the individual to some abstract idea of humanity.” Chekhov, by
contrast, rejected “all these grand progressive ideas” in favor of “respect,
compassion, love for the individual.” Soviet ideology is so contrary to
Chekhov’s values that “it simply doesn’t understand him – that’s why it
tolerates him.”
Like many Chekhov characters, the narrator of “A Boring Story” ()
attributes his sense of a wasted life to his lack of “what is called a general
idea [. . .] and without this there is nothing.” He cannot grasp that it
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The Harm That Good Ideas Do
derives instead from his inability to empathize with those he loves, or that,
when his desperate ward Katya begs to know how to live, what she really
needs is for him to enter into her feelings.
The hero of “Ariadne” () ascribes his disappointment with women
to a philosophic mistake common among educated Russian men:
Yes, when Russians come together they discuss nothing but abstract sub-
jects and women. We are so intellectual, so solemn, that we [. . .] can
discuss questions only of a lofty order. [. . .] We take too ideal a view of
women, and make demands out of all proportion with what reality can give
us [. . .] and the result is [. . .] shattered hopes. [. . .] We are dissatisfied
because we are idealists.
Women became metaphysical symbols. Such idealization of women – like
idealization of peasants – was common not only among radicals but also
with conservatives like Dostoevsky.
Several of Chekhov’s stories describe a conflict between two people’s
idealism, both remote from prosaic truth. In “Excellent People” (),
the hack writer Vladimir Semyonich deploys received phrases for fashion-
able ideas, and so Chekhov can offer a catalog of intellectual enthusiasms:
“That was just at the period [. . .] when people were beginning to talk and
write of non-resistance, of the right to judge, to punish, to make war; when
some people in our set were beginning to do without servants, to retire
into the country, to work on the land, and to renounce animal food and
carnal desire.” Vladimir Semyonich quarrels with his sister, who, having
mastered hackneyed metaphors, compares her brother “at one time to an
alchemist, then to a musty Old Believer. [. . .] Her face wore a cold, dry
expression such as one sees in one-sided people of strong faith” and a
closed mind.
Occasionally, people renounced one idea only to seize another. In “An
Anonymous Story” () a terrorist who has lost faith in terrorism advises
the heroine: “If one has made a mistake and lost faith in one [idea], one
may find another. The world of ideas is large and cannot be exhausted.”
For Chekhov, the problem is not this or that idea, but the belief that
ideas define life. Perhaps Chekhov’s most remarkable treatment of this
theme is “On the Road” (), which, in narrating the story of one
person, gives a concise history of Russian idealisms. Indeed, the hero,
Grigory Petrovich Likharev, claims to typify Russianness.
We find Likharev “on the road” – en route – literally as well as
figuratively. It is Christmas Eve and a storm rages outside the inn where
Likharev and his daughter doze. A young noblewoman, Ilovayskaya,
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arrives. We learn that she manages her father’s estate, since her father and
brother are irresponsible. When she mentions that they do not believe in
God, Likharev reveals his own deepest convictions. His greatest faith is in
faith itself, which he regards as
a faculty of the spirit. [. . .] So far as I can judge by myself [. . .] and by all
that is done around us, this faculty is present in Russians in the highest
degree. Russian life presents us with an uninterrupted succession of con-
victions and aspirations, and, if you care to know, it has not yet the faintest
notion of lack of faith or skepticism. If a Russian does not believe in God, it
means he believes in something else.
In this respect, Likharev is the most Russian of Russians. “Nature has
implanted in my breast an extraordinary capacity for belief. I was in the
ranks of the Atheists and Nihilists, but there was not one hour in my life in
which I ceased to believe.” He did not accept atheism, he converted to it.
The spirit of Russian nihilism, he remarks, is to make absolute negation an
object of worship.
When the boy Likharev heard his mother say that “soup is the great
thing in life,” he ate soup ten times a day. Later “I [. . .] hired boys to
torture me for being a Christian.” His enthusiasm proved infectious, and
whatever he did, he was able to seduce others to join him.
For Likharev, as for so many Russian intellectuals, science became a
religion. As Semyon Frank remarks in Signposts, Russians misunderstand
science as a fixed body of dogma rather than a process of inquiry testing
theory against evidence. They indignantly reject “both scientific criticism
and pure, disinterested scientific thought.” “And I gave myself up to
science, heart and soul, passionately, as to the woman one loves. I was
its slave,” Likharev explains. “But my enthusiasm did not last long.” He
discovered a trap: no matter which science he chose, he always found that
it “has a beginning but not an end,” and so he could never arrive at a final
answer. That, of course, is the nature of science. But “I had no time to
suffer from disillusionment, as I was soon possessed by a new faith.” After
nihilism, he embraced populism.
When Russian youth “went to the people” in the early s, Likharev
joined them: “I loved the Russian people with poignant intensity; I loved
their God and believed in Him.” He shared, and still shares, a belief in
the Russian peasant’s deep wisdom. As the story’s readers knew, Russians,
disagreeing on everything else, revered “the people.” For the Slavophiles,
the peasants were intuitively Christian, and for the radicals, intuitively
socialist.
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For Ilovayskaya, Likharev’s enthusiasms contrast favorably with her self-
imposed, endless occupation of managing her family’s affairs. In response
to her approval, Likharev unexpectedly elucidates the costs of such a life.
Not only has he wasted his own and his wife’s fortune, suffered constant
distress, and five times found himself in prison; he has also missed the
ordinary “process of life itself. Would you believe it, I don’t remember a
single spring, I never noticed how my wife loved me, how my children
were born.”
Thinking of humanity in the abstract, he has been cruel to particular
people. He has never intentionally done evil, he explains, but “I cannot
boast that I have no one’s life upon my conscience, for my wife died before
my eyes, worn out by my reckless activity.” Her death prompted his latest
enthusiasm, the idealization of women.
As we have seen, enthusiasm for “the Russian woman” was widely
shared. When women became terrorists – and they comprised about a
quarter of the terrorist movement – they served as revolutionary icons. In
his collection of terrorist biographies (or hagiographies), Underground
Russia, Stepniak (Sergei Kravchinsky) describes Vera Zasulich, whose
attack on General Trepov catalyzed the terrorist movement, as “an angel
of vengeance, not a terrorist.” Her act illuminated what Stepniak calls “the
Terrorism” with “its divine aureola, and gave to it the sanction of sacri-
fice.” On the Right, women came to embody opposition to prevailing
materialism.
Ilovayskaya listens with special attention to Likharev’s praise of woman’s
ability to devote her life to an idea or to a man representing one. Women
follow Likharev: “I have turned a nun into a Nihilist who, as I learned
afterwards, shot a gendarme; my wife never left me for a minute in my
wanderings, and like a weathercock changed her faith in step with my
changing enthusiasm.” Like him, these women believe most passionately
in passionate belief itself. Ilovayskaya becomes infected with the same
enthusiasm and is evidently ready to follow Likharev. “For the first time
in her life she saw a man carried away, fervently believing” and “without
noticing what she was doing [. . .] gazed into his face with delight.” But he
does not ask her to join him, and as his sleigh disappears into the distance
they watch each other, his eyes, as ever, “seeking something in the clouds
of snow.”
Entranced by this romantic picture, readers today often miss one jarring
note sounding just before the story’s end. It is now Christmas, and a crowd
gathers and sings:
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Hey, you, Russian lad,
Take your thin knife,
We will kill, we will kill the Yid,
The son of misery . . .
Likharev listens with pleasure to these appalling verses, “looking feelingly
at the singers and tapping his feet in time.” He and Ilovayskaya exchange
smiles. They hear nothing but a traditional Christmas song, and he
apparently approves of anything from “the people.” But if we reflect on
Russian events just before the publication of Chekhov’s story in , we
recognize the immediate relevance of these murderous words.
Following the assassination of Alexander II (), Russia witnessed a
series of pogroms that, in contrast to earlier ones in Russia’s southern
provinces, targeted not just property but also people. We usually think of
pogroms as inspired by the government. That was true in the early
twentieth century, but the anti-Jewish riots of the early s emerged
spontaneously. Far from encouraging them, the government detected a
dangerous breakdown in public order. When the reactionary Dmitri
Tolstoy became Minister of the Interior in , he vowed to suppress
“these scoundrels” and had more than , pogromshchiks arrested.
It was the revolutionaries who welcomed pogroms as an upsurge of
popular violence that might be turned against the authorities. On August
, , the Executive Committee of the People’s Will issued a mani-
festo, written in Ukrainian and addressed to “good people and all honest
folk in Ukraine.” It begins: “It is from the Jews that the Ukrainian folk
suffer most of all. Who has gobbled up all the lands and forests? Who runs
every tavern? Jews! [. . .] Whatever you do [. . .] you run into the Jew. It is
he who bosses and cheats you, he who drinks the peasant’s blood.”
As Adam Ulam observed, such statements have “been a source of deep
embarrassment to many historians of the liberation movement. Some
break off the narrative in , largely, one suspects, to avoid dealing
with this episode.” Historians also rarely mention that terrorist heroine
Vera Figner took copies of this manifesto to circulate in Odessa.
Another member of the Executive Committee, Vladimir Zhebunyev,
reported for the Bulletin of the People’s Will on an incipient pogrom:
“Excitement grew before my eyes,” he wrote. Instead of believing in the
tsar, “now the people have begun to realize that there exist ordinary
mortals who strive manfully for their welfare. This is a great achievement
of which every revolutionary ought to be proud” (Ulam:–).
“Personally, of course I had no animosity against the Jews,” he explained,
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The Harm That Good Ideas Do
“but my thoughts and feelings have become one with the people, and I was
counting hours and minutes till the pogroms started” (Ulam:).
An article in The People’s Will reporting the pogrom in Elisabethgrad
posed a question: “Concerning the Jewish pogroms, many have been
curious about the attitude we socialist revolutionaries adopt toward such
cases of popular retribution. [. . .] We are bound to espouse the aspirations
of all those justly enraged who enter upon an active struggle, and we must
consciously seize leadership of those forces.” With his usual tact, Chekhov
makes no direct comment on the verses charming Likharev and
Ilovayskaya. But the story suggests that the Russian need to commit
oneself wholeheartedly to one cause or another can cause immense harm
not only to one’s family and followers, as Likharev realizes, but to others as
well. We may recall the nun he inspired to become an assassin. Once
indiscriminate violence becomes welcome, does the harm it entails have
any limit?
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Chekhov’s Intelligentsias
Svetlana Evdokimova
Chekhov’s association with the Russian intelligentsia was both indisput-
able and controversial. A typical representative of the intelligentsia by birth
and by profession, Chekhov made the intelligent the main protagonist of
his art, depicting a host of intelligents of all sorts – doctors, lawyers,
professors, students, engineers, and artists. While the intelligentsia
turned Chekhov into its ideal and appropriated his image as a model of
intelligentnost’ (literally, intelligentsia-ness, the highest degree of being an
intelligent), Chekhov’s portrayals of the intelligentsia and his frequent
references to it in his letters are highly ambiguous: on the one hand, he
uses the concept of intelligentnost’ almost invariably in a positive sense; on
the other hand, his portrayals of the members of the intelligentsia in his
prose and plays are, for the most part, unflattering. Thus, a counter-
opinion, one that viewed Chekhov as a passionate critic of the intelligent-
sia, emerged almost simultaneously with the intelligentsia’s appropriation
of him as its own. This counter-opinion was most forcefully articulated by
the authors of the highly provocative and influential volume Landmarks:
A Collection of Articles on the Russian Intelligentsia (Vekhi, ), which
enlisted Chekhov posthumously in its scathing attack on the modern
Russian intelligentsia. Vladimir Kataev eloquently summarizes these con-
tradictory views: “Chekhov is the quintessence of Russian intelligentnost’.
Yet he is also an antipode of the Russian intelligent. One must admit that
such contradictory conclusions could be drawn on the grounds both of the
writer’s fictional texts and of his open pronouncements.”
The question that begs for an answer and that is the focus of the present
discussion is: How could Chekhov be simultaneously the intelligentsia’s very
embodiment, its spokesman, and its harshest critic? How could he both fault
the intelligentsia for its multiple perceived flaws and use the terms intelli-
gentnost’ and intelligentnyi approvingly as a marker of refinement and
culture? We will find the reason for this seeming contradiction not so much
in any inconsistency on Chekhov’s part, but in the instability and varying
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Chekhov’s Intelligentsias
usage of the term “intelligentsia.” The term clearly does not mean the same
thing for those who view Chekhov as “the most typical intelligent of all
Russian writers” (M. Lotman) and those who perceive him as “anti-intelli-
gentsial” (Morson). The first group implies a set of values and style of
behavior associated with intelligentnost’ that are drastically different from
the way they are interpreted by the second. A representative description of
intelligentnost’ according to the former, more positive model of intelligen-
tnost’, can be found in Yuri S. Stepanov’s remarks:
Simplicity, moral principles which were clear and accessible to all and which
were formulated by Chekhov for himself and for his kin, could be consid-
ered in our time as a moral code of the contemporary Russian person.
Chekhov himself is important for us not only as a writer, but as a human
being – an example of a moral individual.
Gary Saul Morson, by contrast, describes the intelligentsia’s manners –
including smoking and dirty fingernails – its psychology, values and
assumptions very differently: “The sense of being a small and beleaguered
group, combined with a set of antagonistic moral and political ideas, led to
a rigorous code of anti-social personal behavior.” While Morson essen-
tially identifies the intelligentsia with nihilism and radicalism, other
scholars interpret it as a broader category referring to a cultured educated
stratum of society. Piotr Boborykin (–), for example, passion-
ately objected to the narrowing of the term in the aftermath of Landmarks:
“One thing is clear – that the authors of the collection have given a
concept of ‘intelligentsia’ a meaning that is either too narrow or too flexible
[. . .]. The intelligentsia for them is both ‘nihilists’ and ‘social democrats’
and ‘socialist revolutionaries’ and circles of all kinds, literary and
underground.”
Which intelligentsia shall we then consider when discussing Chekhov’s
relations with the intelligentsia and his self-awareness as an intelligent? In
order to disentangle Chekhov’s attitude to the intelligentsia, it is necessary
to determine how the concept of the intelligentsia was understood by
Chekhov and his contemporaries. Although it is not our purpose here to
engage in the futile task of precisely defining the intelligentsia, we should
note that the oppositions between the intelligentsia and the notion of an
intellectual in the European sense of the word, which became routine in
studies dedicated to the intelligentsia in the aftermath of the
Landmarks, did not exist for Chekhov.
Based on Chekhov’s fictional and nonfictional work we can distinguish
at least three distinct groups to which Chekhov refers as the intelligentsia:
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) A group of intellectual elites and carriers of culture and tradition who
(perhaps erroneously) regard themselves as autonomous and
independent of the dominant social group. This group includes
prominent cultural figures who create the intellectual and moral
foundations of society through their creative and intellectual activity,
through their dissemination of ideas and worldviews. According to its
self-proclaimed godfather, Piotr Boborykin, the intelligentsia was
represented by people “of high intellectual and moral culture.”
) A group of professional people, variably educated, such as doctors,
teachers, veterinarians, and priests, who may or may not be
characterized by the highest degree of culture. The notion of the
intelligentsia as a social group that incorporated people of the so-
called “various ranks” (raznochintsy) – that is, individuals drawn from
the nongentry strata – bears additional relevance for Chekhov, who
was extremely class-conscious and frequently commented on the
significance of his own lower-middle-class origins for his development
as a writer and human being.
) An ideologically driven faction of the intelligentsia that established
itself in opposition to the state and that might include members from
the first two groups. This is the intelligentsia in the narrow sense (as
classically defined by Richard Pipes among many others), which in
the aftermath of Landmarks was frequently identified – erroneously –
with the Russian intelligentsia as such. It is this latter group that
received the most criticism from Chekhov.
Chekhov’s letters and fictional writings record hundreds of instances of
biting criticism of the Russian intelligentsia, which attracted the attention
of his readers. A self-made man, Chekhov was probably Russia’s most
consistent individualist, and he resented the Russian radical intelligentsia
as a fundamentally anti-individualist movement. The core of his criticism
of this faction within the intelligentsia rested on the intelligentsia’s party
and group mentality, its militant rhetoric, and its hypocrisy that stemmed
from the disparity between the intelligentsia’s lofty rhetoric and its actual
passivity. As he put it in , in a letter frequently quoted by the authors
of Landmarks and later scholars: “All of the intelligentsia is to blame, all of
it [. . .]. I despise our hysterical and hypocritical intelligentsia. I don’t
believe in it even when it suffers and complains. I believe only in separate
individuals, and it does not matter whether they are peasants or intelli-
gentsia” (February , ; L:). Chekhov valued the intelligentsia as
individuals, but not en masse, as a group. Extremely sensitive to the rapid
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Chekhov’s Intelligentsias
social changes taking place in prerevolutionary Russia and to new activist
trends within the intelligentsia – what we could call the elements of the
organic intelligentsia (in Gramscian terms) struggling for hegemony and
their special interests – Chekhov objected, as early as , to the intel-
ligentsia’s search for global solutions and totalitarian methods. Referring to
the intelligentsia of the liberal Russian journal Russkaia mysl’ as “toads and
crocodiles” who “under the banner of science, art and claims of suppressed
freedom of thought will rule here, in Russia, in ways not known even at
the time of the Inquisition in Spain,” Chekhov lamented the manipulation
of the press and mass media for political goals (August , ;
L:–).
Apprehensive of the intelligentsia’s conformity on the one hand, and of
its quest for power on the other, Chekhov was especially critical of those
involved in the production and dissemination of ideology, that is, authors,
professors, publicists, journalists, and literary critics. He was equally sus-
picious of the radicals and the conservatives whose ideas served the system
of coercion and control in the interests of a particular ideology: “To hell
with the philosophy of the great men of this world! All the great sages are
as despotic as generals, and as unkind and indelicate as generals because
they are confident of their impunity” (September , ; L:). The
core of Chekhov’s criticism of the contemporary literary intelligentsia lies
in his emphasis on inner freedom and individual liberty, which he believed
to be inseparably connected to culture, and on a personal code of behavior
rather than a desire to form a “community of interests” and “solidarity”
with other members of a group: “Aren’t you suffocated by such words as
solidarity, the unity of young writers, community of interest, and so on?
[. . .] There is nothing to which this solidarity might attach itself securely
[. . .] And do we need it? No [. . .] Let’s be ordinary people, let’s treat all
equally and then you won’t need an artificially wrought solidarity” (May ,
; L:). Significantly, Chekhov stresses that inner unfreedom is
characteristic not of any particular class, but of those who lack culture,
even if they belong to educated classes: “Pharisaism, dull-wittedness and
tyranny reign not only in merchants’ houses and police stations. [. . .] I see
them in science and literature among the younger generation” (October ,
; L:). Only through sustained personal effort to rid oneself of
qualities incompatible with inner freedom might one become a person of
culture and a true intelligent.
It is not surprising that the authors of Landmarks enlisted Chekhov as
their ally in their criticism of the intelligentsia. Many of Chekhov’s
values – respect for culture and tradition, the centrality of the individual,
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tolerance, defense of personal responsibility, and personal moral
improvement – were also their own. By no means, however, did
Chekhov identify the intelligentsia solely with nihilists and radicals,
whom the authors of Landmarks painted as intolerant, fanatical, bellig-
erent, and slovenly. Most of those to whom Chekhov refers as “the
intelligentsia” – doctors, engineers, writers, professors, actors – were
hardly nihilists with dirty fingernails, and Chekhov unhesitatingly con-
sidered himself an integral part of this group: “At the actors’ congress you
will probably see the huge theater project that we are planning. We, that
is, representatives of the Moscow intelligentsia” (March , ;
L:). Although he occasionally criticized this group for their insuffi-
cient culture, Chekhov did not endorse those critics who dismissed the
intelligentsia’s humanitarian efforts. Speaking about his own role as a
medical doctor and that of other members of the intelligentsia in their
fight against cholera, he writes: “The intelligentsia is working hard,
sparing neither its life nor money; I see it every day and am moved,
but when I recall how Zhitel and Burenin poured their bile acids on this
intelligentsia, I feel a bit suffocated. In Nizhny Novgorod doctors and
cultured people in general performed miracles” (August , ;
L:).
In fact, Chekhov’s usage of the term intelligentnyi signifies for the most
part culture and education: “This is an intelligent [intelligentnyi], benev-
olent, and apparently kind-hearted person, a doctor by education”
(October , ; L:). Almost invariably he refers to refinement
and sophistication as a sign of the true intelligent: “Currently, a former
professor of Moscow university, Maxim Maximovich Kovalevsky, lives in
Paris, a wonderful, respected person, representative of the best part of the
Russian intelligentsia” (November , ; L:). Insisting that the
intelligentsia’s main task is the defense of culture, Chekhov repeatedly
equates the notion of intelligentnost’ with culture itself. Frequently criti-
cizing his own brothers and other members of the intelligentsia for their
insufficient refinement, and lamenting their disrespect for the formal and
aesthetic aspects of life, Chekhov expressed admiration for culture and the
overall sophistication that was characteristic of European life and which he
considered an integral part of the European intelligentsia.
Although he emphatically rejected those “toads and crocodiles” among
the intelligentsia who strove for cultural and political hegemony and the
advancement of a particular ideology, he did not advocate indifferentism
and withdrawal from civic activity. Rather, his models were those members
of educated classes – both Russian and Western – who did not hesitate to
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Chekhov’s Intelligentsias
interfere and publicly denounce injustice: Voltaire, Dr. Friedrich Haass
(known as the “holy doctor of Moscow”), Herzen, Korolenko, and Zola.
Indeed, for Chekhov, the true intelligentsia – as opposed to the intelli-
gentsia in the narrow sense of the word – was not a purely Russian
phenomenon, but a universal one. Fully sharing in their notion of civic
responsibility, Chekhov praised the nobility of Zola and other French
writers and intellectuals for their activism in the notorious support of
Dreyfus affair of the s. In an letter to Suvorin from Nice,
Chekhov not only outlines his uncompromising position regarding the
Dreyfus Affair, but also comments on the moral and civic responsibility of
the educated classes in general. According to Chekhov, “the best people,
leading the nation” must respond to injustices and persecutions; as did
Zola; as did Voltaire before him when he interfered in the Jean Calas case,
achieving his posthumous exoneration; as did – in the Russian context –
the philanthropist and humanist of German origin, Dr. Haass, advocating
on behalf of the prisoners of the Russian empire; as did Vladimir
Korolenko, defending the Udmurt minority peasants (the so-called
Multan Affair) who were falsely accused of committing ritual murders
(February , ; L:–).
Emphasizing the responsibility of the intelligentsia to fight against
injustice, Chekhov insists on the need to abstain from political hatreds:
“The business of writers is not to blame, not to prosecute, but to intercede
even for the guilty. [. . .] They will say: what about politics? interests of the
state? But great writers and artists should only be involved in politics to the
extent that they have to defend themselves against it” (February , ;
L:). Writing to F. D. Batiushkov from Nice in , Chekhov makes
it clear that he does not differentiate between the French and Russian
intelligentsia: “Here [in France], Zola and Dreyfus are at the center of
discussions. The majority of the intelligentsia is on Zola’s side and believes
in Dreyfus’ innocence. [. . .] Every Frenchman feels that, thank God, there
is still justice in the world, and if someone innocent is accused, then there
are those who would interfere on his behalf” (January , ; L:).
A month later he adds: “You are asking my opinion about Zola and his
trial. [. . . ] The entire European intelligentsia is on his side” (February ,
; L:). In its service to the ideas of enlightenment, culture, and
justice, the intelligentsia for Chekhov is not a uniquely Russian phenom-
enon but a universal one.
In closing, let me suggest a way to reconcile Chekhov’s contradictory
statements about the intelligentsia by acknowledging its plurality on the
one hand and its universality on the other. By focusing primarily only on
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one kind of intelligentsia – be it an ideology-bound “sect” or “order” or
other groups articulating their own elusive principles – scholars obfuscate
the complexity of the phenomenon, which in turn leads to contradictions
in assessing Chekhov’s relationship with the intelligentsia. Equally mis-
leading are common attempts to present the intelligentsia as a uniquely
Russian phenomenon, thereby ignoring the very similar processes and
trends taking place in Europe over the course of the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, which culminated in what Christophe Charle has
termed “the birth of the intellectuals.” Similar to his French contempo-
raries (such as Julien Benda), Chekhov resented militant groups within the
intelligentsia who subordinated objective truth and universal values to
their narrow political goals, and he was afraid that the modern intellectual,
absorbed by blind patriotism or the interests of the state or the struggle for
hegemony, might become completely politicized. In one of his letters,
Chekhov speaks about the necessity of rising above the particular and
subjective for the sake of the universal in all spheres of life, be it religion,
science, medicine, or literature: “The term ‘tendentiousness’ has at its
foundation the inability of people to rise above particulars” (October ,
; L:). Chekhov rejected the intelligentsia only as a tendentious
and ideology-producing group, but he identified himself with the intelli-
gentsia understood as a group of professionals and as the most educated
stratum of society. Although each country’s intelligentsia has its own
history, Chekhov’s case suggests that the boundary separating the
Russian intelligentsia from European intellectuals is rather artificial and
fluid – he was both an intellectual and a member of the intelligentsia in the
broad European sense of the word.
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Literature
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Print Culture
Louise McReynolds
When the aspiring medical student Anton Chekhov published his “Letter
to a Learned Neighbor” in the satirical journal Strekoza (The Dragonfly) in
, he stepped into the world of commercial publishing. Although since
childhood Chekhov had been writing sketches and vaudevilles, for some of
which he had earned money, this publication marked a new relationship
between himself and his literature. It would take years before he could
support himself by his writing alone, and for all the stories he would sell
that mocked the banality of commercialism, having established himself as a
professional writer Chekhov was responsible to the market forces that
reigned in the world of print. Pleasing the readership was only one of
them; publishers and their editorial boards also had to negotiate the
censorship apparatus in late imperial Russia.
Chekhov entered the print world at a particularly propitious moment.
The so-called Great Reforms that had heralded a truncated liberalism in
the s had fallen short of securing substantive limits on autocratic rule,
but they had significantly revamped print culture. The reform of censor-
ship had facilitated the growth of the commercial press, but content could
still result in the forced closure of publications. Relieved of the burden of
prepublication approval by censors from onward, publishers still had
to contend with the random “warnings” from censors naming certain
topics off-limits. These strictures were paradoxically both specific, such
as the blanket prohibition on questioning the autocratic form of govern-
ment, and vague, because readers were nonetheless made privy to the
activities of Western parliaments. The backlash that followed the assassi-
nation of Tsar Alexander II in , who was succeeded on the throne by
his antireformist son Alexander III, emboldened conservatives. The resul-
tant limitations on direct expression affected the selection of topics as well
as the choice of words, and the issuance of warnings increased. But so did
the circulation figures of the periodical press. What were editors to make of
warnings against publishing the names of horses that had won their races?
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And how could Chekhov interpret a censor’s rejection of a dramatization
of his published story “In the Autumn” in , not for its political
content but because it was “pessimistic and immoral,” featuring as it did
drunks in a village tavern? Given that publications of any era must be read
as part and parcel of the climate in which they were cultivated, this
combination of official distrust and arbitrariness provides the backdrop
for Chekhov’s coming of age in the print media. Not so much a victim of
these constraints, Chekhov fits the historiography better as a Kulturträger,
an active agent of change.
In the post-reform atmosphere, the censorship distinguished between the
“prestige” and the “popular” press, an implicit recognition of the social
changes that had resulted in a pluralism of readerships. Maintaining the
assumption that the less educated would be the consumers of the popular
press and more credulous of the written word, censors forbade these
publications to include commentary on political topics other than repri-
nting information from official sources. Such periodicals included the
commercially funded entertainment-oriented journals and the “boulevard”
newspapers, less expensive dailies that targeted urban audiences. The pres-
tige press drew from the pre-reform institution of the “thick” journal, or
substantive monthlies that were compendia of politics and literature, foreign
and domestic, directed at intellectuals and sporting the reputation of pre-
senting positions that were as politicized as possible under the circum-
stances. The combination of competition and social change affected the
post-reform offerings: censors closed the most forthright, M. E. Saltykov-
Shchedrin’s Otechestvennye Zapiski (Notes of the Fatherland) in . The
new journals whose editors and publishers aspired toward the same sort of
intellectual respect afforded their predecessors included M. N. Katkov’s
Russkii vestnik (Russian Herald), which despite its conservative editorial
attitude brought into print the giants of Russian literature in the s
and s; Vestnik evropy (Herald of Europe), which approximated
European liberalism; and Russkaia mysl’ (Russian Thought), which most
appealed to the former readers of Otechestvennye zapiski, but without that
journal’s political assertiveness. The prestige newspapers were published to
circulate nationally with coverage of topics thought to attract thoughtful
readers. This included Katkov’s Moskovskie vedomosti (Moscow News), which
never quite managed the influence he sought, and Golos (Voice), so outspo-
ken that officials shuttered it in . During the s, A. S. Suvorin’s
Novoe vremia (New Times), an editorially conservative and journalistically
substantive paper, would rise to the fore. Chekhov’s professional trek would
maneuver him, not surprisingly, from the popular to the prestige press.
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Print Culture
By authorial nature a humorist, Chekhov contributed to a plethora of
publications, and could not be pigeonholed by the political profiles of
these periodicals. Society had been successfully transformed to the degree
that many of the byproducts of the reforms made easy targets for lampoon
in the mushrooming commercial journals. This new kind of inexpensive
publication differed from the satirical periodicals that had preceded it,
exemplified by Iskra (Spark), closed by censors in because its barbs
and caricatures carried distinctively politicized nettles and targeted the
intelligentsia rather than the common citizenry. In addition to Strekoza,
the list of new commercial journals published in Moscow and St.
Petersburg and circulated throughout the empire included, among others,
Budil’nik (Alarm Clock), Oskolki (Splinters), and Zritel’ (Spectator), while
the multinational port city of Odessa produced Maiak (Lighthouse), and
readers in the ersatz capital of the Caucasus Tiflis (Tbilisi) enjoyed Falanga
(Phalanx). A glance at Chekhov’s first bit in Strekoza profiles the new
reader: framed as a letter from a provincial landowner to his new neighbor,
whom a friend had characterized as a “scholar,” the writer expresses the
desire to meet him and muses about science in order to establish a
relationship. Humans cannot be descended from apes, he opines about
Darwinism, because then gypsies would parade them around on ropes and
charge money from onlookers. Chekhov deployed a particularly deft touch
that poked fun at traditionalists without disdaining them. His reputation
as a transformational realist writer had its beginnings in the astute obser-
vations evident in his early vignettes.
In tune with the effects of modernizing forces, Chekhov also exploited
the potential for satirical sendup in the expanding commercial journalism.
In March he mocked up a “calendar” in Budil’nik, a play on the
popular almanacs many journals contained. “Remarkable Events of the
Day,” set in the style of the grid that separated the topics on the page,
made light of the notion of “newsworthy” events with such headlines as
“there will not be an eclipse of the sun” and the sarcastic jibe that “lawyers
felt the pangs of conscience today”; the section on “daily lunch” offered
“fried goose, à la Prince Meshchersky,” indicting the reactionary publisher
who threatened to “put a period” to end the reforms. Even more acerbic
were his takedowns of the advertising agencies upon which his publica-
tions depended for income. Before joining Suvorin’s Novoe vremia in
, Chekhov spoofed his publishing company’s ads: “In the Clouds,”
a novel in fourteen parts, the continuation of “In the Mountains” and “In
the Woods”; “A Dictionary of , Slavophile-Russian Words,” with
the note that it was necessary for reading Rus’, the Slavophile paper. By
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using the press to parody itself, he underscored its crucial role in modern
life and how he himself and other journalists mediated it for their readers.
The satirical journal for which Chekhov wrote most often was Oskolki,
to which he contributed more than short pieces between and
. Published in St. Petersburg by N. A. Leikin, a writer whose eye for
seeing the comic in the ordinary nearly matched Chekhov’s, Oskolki was
accepted by some as the heir to Iskra because of the quality of the wit,
though it lacked the political edge. Whereas censorship undoubtedly
played some role in the journal’s modes of expression, its choice to pen
comic vignettes of daily Russian life was governed even more by its attempt
to be a periodical that could instruct without didacticism and entertain
without buffoonery. Chekhov moved on to other media; the incredibly
prolific Leikin continued apace.
The print culture of post- Russia reflected the new realities of a
modernizing world in which tastes evolved according to the variety of
pluralistic audiences. Realism, the literary genre in which Chekhov
showed himself to be a transformational writer, developed in large measure
from the new journalism because the lean, informative prose necessary for
reporting trained readers to develop new expectations about written depic-
tions of people and events. Technology also affected expectations about
media through advancements in photography and the capacity for period-
icals to reproduce images comparatively inexpensively. Niva (Cornfield),
the most popular of what were often referred to as “thin” journals, enjoyed
a circulation of , in , more than twice that of its rivals.
Vsemirnaia illiustratsia (Illustrated World) had its own engraving bureau
and editorial offices in both of the capitals. A pioneer in reproductions, it
sent eight photographers to cover the Russo-Turkish War of –,
setting the standard for bringing historical events into the public domain.
Like the news itself, the prolific use of illustrations likewise affected
readers’ expectations of facticity.
The misnomer of “thin” suggests that these mass-oriented magazines
served as an alternative to the intellectual compendia that played such an
important role in circulating ideas, especially before . These “thin”
periodicals sought instead a different sort of readership. Daily newspapers
would often have supplements that enhanced their reach. Knizhki nedeli
(Books of the Week) began to appear monthly as an addition to the quasi-
populist Nedelia (Week) from . A recipient of multiple warnings from
censors, this newspaper used its standing to attract contributors to its
supplement, such as noteworthies from the populist camp Saltykov-
Shchedrin and Gleb Uspensky, as well as others who could be considered
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to lean in that direction, Nikolai Leskov and Lev Tolstoy. In , in
concert with other changes in the culture of print, Nedelia added travel
literature and science, broadening its appeal to a larger, more diverse
readership. Another such journal, Detskoe chtenie (Reading for Children),
began in with an editorial platform designed to teach young people
to respect education and responsibility. Generously illustrated, it became
increasingly less programmatically didactic and more a source for popular
science as well as literature. Chekhov published in both these journals.
The daily newspaper, though, enjoyed the widest reach and exercised
the greatest influence. Chekhov honed his ability to find humor in reality
when he ventured from essayist to reporter, first for the “boulevard” daily
Peterburgskaia gazeta (Petersburg Gazette), whose circulation topped
, when Chekhov joined. In addition to his amusing feuilletons, he
sometimes covered news stories, such as the trial of I. G. Rykov, a
small-town banker from Skopin, Riazan Province, who had been running
what amounted to a Ponzi scheme, and in the course of a decade had
embezzled approximately six million rubles from depositors. Reporting
from the Moscow court room, Chekhov recreated the spectacle for readers
in the imperial capital with his fine eye for the details necessary to translate
the affair from legalese into human interest. The special appeal of this trial
came from the sheer sums of money involved, compounded by the
ignorance most Russians had about capitalist banking. The women in
the audience, “five times the number of the men, did not come to
understand but rather to behold, as they run their binoculars across the
faces of the frightened mice in the courtroom.” What people understood
was that while other national banks were tendering depositors percent
interest, the Skopinsky Bank was offering more than double that, at
percent, which Rykov advertised widely in the national press. Because the
witnesses had no better grasp of the financial finagling than would most
readers, Chekhov essentialized the accused as “Skopin Americans,” the
personification of capitalism as conspicuous corruption. Defendant Ivan
Gavrilov “had once eaten lobster bordelaise, drunk real Burgundy, and
traveled in carriages wearing the finest fashions. Even his countrymen
(zemliaki) have trouble recognizing this epicurean-dandy in his new suit,
rough prison garb.” The “boulevard” press itself took the stand in the
person of N. I. Pastukhov, publisher of Moskovskii listok (Moscow Sheet),
charged with accepting a bribe to keep from exposing the fraud; Pastukhov
convinced the court otherwise. The courtroom functioned as a theater, and
Chekhov, already an aspiring dramaturg, kept his focus on the delightfully
histrionic Rykov, the secret of whose success as a scalawag becomes clear
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through his antics. Pleading for mercy, Rykov begged jurors to be allowed
to “weep at the grave of my dying wife, bless my children, and retire to a
monastery where I can lament my sins.” When the jury dispatched him
instead to Siberia, he “blanched, and then his face turned red as he
clutched his hands to his heart.” These amusing descriptions made the
coverage accessible and informative about the judicial system that had been
reformed according to Western models, and it sorted through the confu-
sion about the workings of that other Western import, capitalism.
Writing most often as “Antosha Chekhonte,” the nickname bestowed
by a teacher when he was a student at the Taganrog gymnasium, Chekhov
had created a persona for his writer-self distinguished from his doctor-self
while he continued to practice medicine. That shifted in , when he
first began to write for Novoe vremia. Suvorin offered him not only a raise,
but a better-heeled and better-educated audience, and with this upgraded
position he decided to sign his own name. The critical difference can be
read in the first story he wrote for Novoe vremia: “Requiem,” a sketch
about a village shopkeeper who refers to his deceased daughter as a “harlot”
(bludnitsa) in the note he had submitted asking that she be remembered in
the Orthodox service, her requiem. The priest takes offense, but the
shopkeeper finds no shame in the word because the daughter, an actress,
had admittedly been one, and “God in his mercy had forgiven the harlot,
as read in the life of Holy Mary of Egypt.” No humor laces the shop-
keeper’s pathos, and Chekhov’s work adopts a gravity that continued to
evolve. Awarded the Pushkin Prize in for At Dusk, a collection of
sixteen short stories, thirteen of which had appeared first in Novoe vremia,
Chekhov had graduated to the prestige press. Although his relationship to
Suvorin became tarnished by the latter’s politics, the author recognized the
debt he owed to the publisher, and they continued their friendly corre-
spondence. Chekhov had also begun to publish in Moscow’s Russkie
vedomosti (Russian News), known as the “professors’ newspaper” because
of its seriousness of intellectual and liberal political purpose.
The Pushkin Prize proved a turning point for Chekhov. Although he
never abandoned commercial, mass-oriented fare, he continued to evolve
as a writer of renown, publishing his first novella, “The Steppe,” in
Severnyi vestnik (Northern Herald) in . Subtitled “The Story of One
Journey,” it echoed the author’s own trip to Ukraine the year before, but
in fictional format. He took his most eventful, and arduous journey in
, to the island prison of Sakhalin off the coast of Japan. Activating
both of his personas, one a medical doctor and the other a man of letters,
he spent months interviewing Russian prisoners accused of a multitude of
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crimes. Intending to produce a sort of ethnographic survey as well as an
exposé of the execrable conditions under which the convicts lived, he
ultimately serialized the first nineteen chapters in Russkaia mysl’ in
–. All twenty-three chapters appeared as a single volume in
. Sakhalin Island gave Chekhov gravitas as a public figure, one with
deep concerns about Russian society. He would soon join the pantheon
that included Tolstoy and Maxim Gorky as writers who spoke the truth of
social conditions to the power of the autocracy.
Two of his best-known short stories, “Ward Six” () and “Lady with
a Lapdog” (), appeared first in Russkaia mysl’, which underscores the
narrative arc of Chekhov from a popular humorist to a writer of social
substance. However valid this trajectory, it obscures his continued associ-
ation with the popular press. For example, at the request of publisher S. N.
Khudekov, he wrote a story for the Christmas edition of Peterburgskaia
gazeta in . He published in Vsemirnaia illiustratsia as well as Russkie
vedomosti, because it was through the combination of readerships that he
exercised influence in the culture of print. Fittingly, his final short story,
“The Betrothed,” appeared in the December issue of Zhurnal dlia
vsekh (Journal for Everyone). Opening in , Zhurnal dlia vsekh strove to
bring the best current talents to readers in a small format, featuring such
writers as Gorky, Alexander Kuprin, and Leonid Andreev, authors whose
work, like Chekhov’s, had an unmistakable journalistic tinge. Dead from
consumption before the Revolution ushered in the next wave of
reforms and the explosion of the periodical press, Chekhov had already
played his instrumental role in mediating between fact and fiction, posi-
tively affecting expectations of the printed word.
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Embarrassment
Caryl Emerson
In Chekhov’s story “Death of a Government Clerk,” a civil servant,
Chervyakov, sneezes in a theater, splattering the bald pate of the general
one row ahead. Not able to forget the incident nor to apologize for it
sufficiently, the clerk dies. In a story written fifteen years later, “The Man
in a Case,” the priggish village schoolteacher Belikov is publicly laughed at
by the young woman he is courting; he takes to his bed and does not
survive the month. These are the best-known Chekhovian characters who
literally die of embarrassment. But such extreme resolutions, usually cast in
a comic mode, are not the most creative use that Chekhov makes of the
socially awkward moment. More challenging is the final scene in his
novella The Duel (), where von Koren, a zoologist and social
Darwinist, hesitates to say farewell to the dissolute Layevsky he had fired
at and almost killed (and who has now reformed) because “that would be
embarrassing” – but at Samoilenko’s urging he thinks better of it, pays a
final visit, and thus succeeds in overcoming his pride out of scientific
respect for evidence he cannot explain. The challenge can be less cerebral,
however, and even mundane. Such is the mortified refrain of the two
younger brothers in “Anna on the Neck” (), trying to restrain their
alcoholic father: “Papa, that’s enough . . . Papa, don’t!” There is no
melodrama here, no grand abstract ideas, no modified outcome to the
scene regardless of how often it repeats, just a desire to sink through
the floor.
Chekhov admitted to adding a “Gogolian-Dostoevskian” intonation to
his story of the sneezing clerk. But overall, his treatment of clumsy or inept
behavior is not Gogol’s. Gogolian narrators are hyperbolic, so spectacle is a
welcome and predictable part of the show. Such “spectacular” energy, with
its scandals and showdowns, is a constant on both sides of the Romantic-
Realist divide. Pushkin and Lermontov had their duels of honor, Tolstoy
his public confessions and moral outrage, Dostoevsky his self-conscious
murderers and exhibitionist buffoons. But Chekhov, an attentive healer in
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the era of small deeds, commands above all a complex form of empathy.
His narrative gestures are subtle, excruciating, somehow performed back-
stage, cumulative or corrosive rather than climactic, hard to classify and
even harder to see. Michael Finke begins his study Seeing Chekhov with the
remark that in the nineteenth-century literary tradition, a fondness for
extravagant performance inside one’s fictions often went hand in hand
with authorial self-exposure – and Chekhov, who admitted to “autobio-
graphophobia,” had an “inclination for privacy” that could be considered
“rather unRussian.” A desire for privacy and the impulse to hide need not
be ethical (as is, say, shame) nor even always interpersonal (as is envy). But
embarrassment is usually diremptive; that is, it separates me from what
I ideally want to be and is felt as an infraction, however incidental, that
should be set right.
The thesis of this chapter is that Chekhov’s particular empathetic
genius can be effectively accessed through his scenes of “negative specta-
cle,” that is, his depiction of people caught in situations where they wish
they did not have an audience, but they do. Embarrassment is rich in
moral instruction. One can be moved, improved, and even made more
compassionate by witnessing social failure and humiliation, in oneself
and others. For readers are not only eager voyeurs of the discomfort
suffered by others (as Dostoevsky was prone to believe), nor are they
always instantaneously “infected” by a straightforward feeling fixed in the
artwork (as Tolstoy preferred). Processing an uncomfortable moment
takes time. Social awkwardness occupies considerable space in Chekhov’s
plots – perhaps, as Jeffrey Brooks suggests, a result of his apprenticeship
in the newspapers. Unlike pricey subscription venues, newspapers were
hawked on the street. That market required faster, shorter, more self-
contained fare than did elite patrons of the thick journals that serialized
the novels of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Like the detective thriller, embar-
rassment provides universally accessible entertainment without complex
philosophy or sophisticated moral paradox. But the sentiment can also
turn dark and unexpectedly fertile.
Consider Chekhov in the context of the self-conscious emotions: shame,
guilt, embarrassment, and pride. Unlike the primary emotions (joy, fear,
anger, sadness, disgust, surprise), which emerge in an infant’s first eight
months and can be measured by standardized facial expressions, the self-
conscious subset is “secondary,” that is, dependent on the internalization
of rules, cultural norms, and goals. Embarrassment, a social emotion
wedged between shame and shyness, arises early and in two phases. First
it appears as an “exposed” social emotion: the young child senses someone
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out there and does not like it, even when nothing is negative or frightening
(this is its border with shyness). Around three years of age, it becomes also
an “evaluative” emotion involving judgment (its border with shame).
Charles Darwin wrote about embarrassment in , indexing it with
blushing. But change in facial color is only one factor. Usually the whole
body is pulled in: hand gestures (plucking at one’s hair or clothes),
shuffling the feet, sweating, stammering, giggling or grinning foolishly,
averting the eyes, ducking the head. Embarrassment, alas, is not a snapshot
or eureka moment but more like a film clip, durative and corporeal. It can
play out on several levels in a literary work: between characters inside the
story, between characters and the narrator, between the story and its
author or the story and its readers. Lessons are differently learned at
each level.
Sometimes embarrassment accrues not to the perpetrator, recipient, or
witness of an act but solely to the incident itself. An example is the ardent
kiss mistakenly bestowed on the shy, unprepossessing army captain
Ryabovich by an unknown young woman in a dark room (“The Kiss,”
). For the woman it was a fleeting error, instantly forgotten. For
Ryabovich, however, it becomes a precious memory, persuading him that
his life too is capable of beauty and mystery – until he wakes up from that
illusion, which causes him fresh humiliation. The kiss had become a thing,
a symbol. The simplest, most mechanical types of embarrassment are
impersonal in this way, and in Chekhov’s Russia were often related to
official status. In the sketch “Fat and Thin,” two former classmates
meet by chance in a railway station. The reunion is mutually ecstatic, until
the thin man discovers that his fat friend exceeds him by five ranks in the
civil service. He crumples in obsequious awe. More than the clerk
Chervyakov, who at least had sneezed (albeit at a general), the thin man’s
embarrassed plight is caused solely by a preexistent structure, Imperial
Russia’s Table of Ranks. In both vignettes, the higher-ranking personage
is no less embarrassed than the underling on the lower rung. But since the
little man seeks ever more humiliation, the higher-up finally loses patience.
This no-exit Gogolian economy quickly reduces to puppetry.
Less formulaic than reflexes to rank is personal embarrassment arising
from actual deeds. A person is caught in a lie, slip-up, or socially unac-
ceptable thing. Or something happens between two people that is fine
between them – but not if a third party witnesses it. Sometimes the
character inside the story is clueless about the clumsiness or wrongness
of the deed; the wake-up call is meant for the outsiders (narrator or reader).
Take the trifle, “Joy.” Kuldasov, a fourteenth-rank civil servant,
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announces to his stunned family that he has been written up in the papers
like a famous man. No matter that it was for drunkenness; he runs out,
thrilled, to tell his friends. The story is designed to embarrass not Kuldasov
(who is impervious) but the reader on his behalf. Less comic and more
intricately didactic is the story “The Beggar.” A barrister catches a
serial beggar in the street peddling a different pathetic life story each day,
and reprimands him. The humiliated beggar admits his deceit, after which
the public-spirited barrister provides the beggar, weakened by vodka and
lies, with regular work in his kitchen yard as a woodchopper. The barrister
is proud of this good deed. Two years later in a theater he meets his
beneficiary, now employed as a scribe. Recalling the humiliating repri-
mand, the scribe thanks him, but adds that in fact it was the barrister’s
cook, taking pity on a hopeless drunk, who had chopped the wood for
him. It was thanks to her generosity, and not to the moralistic rebuke, that
his soul had reformed. Chekhov ends the story there, before the embar-
rassed barrister can respond.
The device of an internal storyteller multiplies the self-conscious emo-
tions. Exemplary here is Chekhov’s so-called Little Trilogy (), a
linked cycle of tellers and listeners. Its first story, the aforementioned
“Man in a Case,” is a flat caricature: petty tyranny followed by death from
embarrassment. Its third story, “About Love,” is unbearable in its unre-
solved depth. Pavel Alyokhin, solitary landowner, relates the central emo-
tional event of his life, his passion for the married Anna Alekseyevna and
the modesty, decency, and sense of inadequacy that kept both of them,
year after year, from confessing their love. At the end of his story Alyokhin
regrets his timidity, insisting that love must reason from some perspective
“higher than happiness or unhappiness, sin or virtue, or else not reason at
all.” We are not told what that higher perspective might be. We see only
that Alyokhin is embarrassed by his prudent past behavior, not redeemed
by it. Embarrassment, after all, is an attitude, an index of one’s sensitivity
and self-critical reflexes, and it can last forever; it is not a single act or
appetite with physical contours and forward momentum like murder,
theft, violent abuse, lust, or infidelity. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky can build
spectacular plots around such assertive acts, but not Chekhov. The most
earnest, attractive people in Chekhov – and Alyokhin is one – are easily
embarrassed. For them, committing to a deed and refraining from it can be
equally awkward. So they draw back, do nothing, and do without.
Doing without is not a defense of quietism, however, nor necessarily a
moral virtue. Such Tolstoyan displays are rare in Chekhov. The middle
story of the trilogy, “Gooseberries,” is told by a veterinary surgeon. His
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object lesson is his parsimonious younger brother, a civil servant for whom
happiness and success are summed up in owning a rural estate with a
gooseberry patch. Watching his brother gloat over his first bowl of this
unripe homegrown fruit, the veterinarian is acutely embarrassed – but
recounting the scene to his two friends, he adds that on that night he had
realized his brother in himself. He too had grown complacent, lazy in
thought, happy as if hypnotized, because “the unhappy bear their burdens
in silence.” Suddenly the veterinarian goes up to Alyokhin and entreats
him not to be content with life, to forget about happiness, to do good.
After this inappropriate outburst, the three friends fall awkwardly silent.
This is the zone of redemptive embarrassment, which is as close as
Chekhov comes to offering his characters a revelation or conversion
experience. The necessary leap is not into faith or freedom (such destina-
tions are far too melodramatic), but into a confused, often inarticulate
empathy. Activity in this zone is precarious, vulnerable, and high risk, as is
natural for any gesture wedged between shyness and shame.
At its least productive, the zone of embarrassment can utterly fail to
provoke empathy. It can collapse into anger and contempt, as occurs in the
story “Enemies.” A rural doctor’s only child has just died of diph-
theria. The doorbell rings; it is the nobleman Abogin, who entreats the
doctor to save his critically ill wife. Hearing of the doctor’s tragedy, Abogin
is embarrassed by his inopportune request – but not for long; he insists,
desperately, that the doctor honor his oath and accompany him home,
some eight miles distant. Upon arriving at the manor house, it is discov-
ered that the wife had feigned illness to run off with a lover. Abogin is
aghast and humiliated. The doctor is disgusted. Deceived husband and
bereaved doctor confront each other in reciprocal fury. Commenting on
their rage, Chekhov’s tone is unsurprised, impartial, and profoundly sad.
“The egoism of the unhappy was manifestly at work in both of them,” he
writes. “The unhappy are selfish, spiteful, unjust, cruel . . . Unhappiness
does not draw people together but wrenches them apart.” The protago-
nists, each sunk in his own undeserved grief, respond to one another in a
manner (Chekhov writes) “unjust and unworthy of the human heart.”
Elsewhere, Chekhov muffles his own ethical voice and leaves the heroes
to cope on their own. “House with a Mezzanine” () juxtaposes the
narrator, a landscape artist and visionary, with Lida, a rural schoolteacher
and social activist. Lida is strongminded and nonsentimental; socially, her
mode of operation is to embarrass others for their idleness. When her
younger sister and the artist fall in love, Lida immediately sends her sister
away. The artist is ashamed of his earlier tirades – the sign of a positive
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Chekhovian hero – but now there is no one to hear; the plot has been
simply suspended. Similar devices of suspension and awkward departure
also resolve the plot in Chekhov’s first major post-Sakhalin fiction, The
Duel (), to which we now return.
From the first episode onward in this story, every person but one is
embarrassed. The army doctor Samoilenko is ashamed of his incorrigible
kindness and good deeds. The amiable deacon laughs boisterously at
everything, because laughter diffuses hostile, awkward moments.
Nadezhda (Layevsky’s companion) is mortified because she is idle, bored,
useless, a burden, and furthermore has been flirting with the local police
inspector. Layevsky’s embarrassment is the most chronic: out of money,
out of love, desperate to escape this miserable Black Sea town for a new
single life in the glamorous northern capitals, he is terrified that the others
will learn of his plan (which they do). The exception to this pattern of self-
denigration is the ambitious and disciplined von Koren. Until the final
farewell scene, he has science, maps, and theory at his back, not feelings.
Among the wonders of this novella is the fact that von Koren and
Layevsky, dueling partners, understand and profile each other perfectly.
Dissipated, perverted, lazy, feeble, prone to fault literature for his own
weaknesses: von Koren’s portrait of his opponent is correct. Despot,
exterminator, illusionist as regards the human race: Layevsky on von
Koren is correct as well. Only after Layevsky spies Nadezhda in intimate
relations with the police inspector does all-consuming embarrassment for
himself – up to then his full-time job – give way to empathy for her.
Donald Rayfield, in his discussion of this novella, remarks that this pivotal
moment in Layevsky’s life “is perhaps the only place in Chekhov where
Christian love moves in when sexual love is dead.” About sexual love
having died the text does not say, but that Layevsky reacts to being
deceived with a sense of his own responsibility for another’s fall: this for
Chekhov is a moral triumph. Such a redemptive, other-directed move,
emerging out of embarrassment for the other rather than rejection or anger
based on possessiveness, alters the texture of all conflicts in the story,
paving the way for von Koren’s tentative apology, and departure.
Rayfield notes that The Duel is “virtually drama transposed into story-
telling,” perhaps “even more dramatic than Chekhov’s plays.” This
intriguing judgment permits a closing comment on the four great plays,
all of which share constant subtexts of acute embarrassment. Comedy is a
time-honored way of handling this emotion. In Uncle Vanya, that most
excruciating state of being – unrequited love – is dragged out into public
view as both Vanya and his niece Sonya act against their stable selves
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(unhappy, perhaps, but stable) by falling in love. The Seagull is a veritable
carousel of humiliating rejections: Konstantin by Nina, Nina by Trigorin,
Masha by Konstantin, Arkadina by Trigorin, the steward’s wife Polina by
Doctor Dorn. But Three Sisters is the play most thoroughly permeated by
collapsed private hopes constantly, humiliatingly exposed. If the three
sisters Olga, Masha, and Irina radiate any one intention from the stage,
it is: “I don’t want anyone to see me being this way.” Their standing
embarrassment is their adored brother Andrei, who failed them and
himself. He in turn is mortified for having let them down, for not
becoming a professor, for handing his life over to his toxic wife Natasha,
who enters the play timidly and ashamed but ends up its absolute tyrant.
And here, perhaps, is one key to Chekhov’s revolutionary dramaturgy.
Two basic embarrassment situations are acknowledged by most emotion
theorists. The first is deed-based (caused by the agent, or actor); the second
is witness-based (where the person who observes or overhears is the one
made awkward). The self-conscious emotions play out differently in
privately consumed prose than on the stage, where a live audience looking
on is part of the aesthetic contract. Spectators may laugh, weep, clap, boo,
but what they do not do is look away. This is part of Chekhov’s gift: to
create plays in which any embarrassing gesture – no matter how intimate,
small, and transitory – can be made public, and yet no one is allowed to
sink through the floor.
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Tolstoy
Rosamund Bartlett
On January , , on the eve of the Moscow Census, Tolstoy began
his new career as a Christian missionary by publishing a newspaper article.
In it he earnestly exhorted the student census takers, one of whom was the
young Anton Chekhov, to overcome their fears of filthy slums and show
their inhabitants brotherly love by talking to them about their lives. As it
happened, Chekhov was himself then living in straitened circumstances
with his impoverished family in the city’s red-light district. On the
strength of the “Supplementary Questions to the Personal Forms of the
Statistical Census Suggested by Antosha Chekhonte” that the budding
doctor published in the Alarm Clock a few days later in order to earn a few
kopecks, the notion that within a few years he would be discussed in the
same breath as Tolstoy as one of Russia’s leading contemporary writers
would to both have seemed highly improbable. This was one of Chekhov’s
earliest publications, and included such typically irreverent lines as:
. Is your wife blonde? brunette? chestnut? a redhead?
. Does your wife beat you or not? Do you beat her or not?
. How much did you weigh when you were ten years old?
. Do you consume hot drinks? yes or no? (W:)
It may be safely assumed that Tolstoy read none of the juvenilia Chekhov
published in such lowbrow comic journals as the Alarm Clock. He greatly
enjoyed the stories that began appearing in after the young writer’s
graduation to St. Petersburg newspapers, however, and still largely pre-
ferred these earlier works when he came to compile a list of what he
regarded as Chekhov’s thirty best stories in , dividing them into first
and second rank.
Although Chekhov never got over his awe of Tolstoy as an artist, and to
the end of his life idolized this “great writer of the Russian land,” in
Turgenev’s memorable phrase, he was not afraid to challenge this most
formidable of father figures as a thinker when the time came. This required
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considerable sangfroid given that he wrote apparently slight short stories
rather than long, searching novels, lived a life truncated prematurely by
tuberculosis that was almost half as long as Tolstoy’s, and was thirty-two
years younger than him. Chekhov’s robust but typically understated
engagement with Tolstoy’s philosophical and moral ideas revealed him
to be more than equal to the task, however. As it turned out, his
interrogation of Tolstoy’s uncompromising moral and ethical universe
cut to the heart of his own unresolved questions, while his authorial self-
effacement and refusal to provide resolutions in his fiction showed the way
forward for artistic growth in the twentieth century, as modernist writers
like Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield were excited to discover. It
was an unlikely achievement for a writer who entered the hallowed Russian
literary establishment through the back door.
Chekhov may have drawn on Gogol’s love of the absurd for his comic
stories, emulated Pushkin’s straightforward, lucid manner of exposition,
and found inspiration in the poetry of Turgenev’s episodic tales of rural
life, but it was Tolstoy who made the largest imprint on his prose. This
can be firstly felt in Chekhov’s literary language. He followed Tolstoy by
writing in an unpretentious, unadorned Russian that seems astonishingly
contemporary, even in the twenty-first century, avoiding abstractions,
foreign locutions, and rhetorical ornamentation. Secondly, as might be
expected from a young author who forged his artistic identity in
Tolstoy’s imposing shadow, Chekhov underwent a distinctly
“Tolstoyan” phase just as he was reaching literary maturity. As the
narrator declares in the story “Good People” (), this was “just at
the period – in the eighties – when people were beginning to talk and
write of non-resistance, of the right to judge, to punish, to make war;
when some people in our set were beginning to do without servants, to
retire into the country, to work on the land, and to renounce animal food
and carnal love” (W:, –). This crisply articulated sentence
replaces a long and involved passage about Tolstoyan ideas six times
longer, which Chekhov excised when he came to revise the story at the
end of his life. He was the first to acknowledge Tolstoy’s hold over him.
As he wrote to his friend and editor Alexei Suvorin in , “there was a
time when I was strongly affected by Tolstoy’s philosophy; it possessed
me for six or seven years and I was affected not so much by his
fundamental ideas – with which I was already familiar – than by the
way in which he expressed them, his very reasonableness, and no doubt a
species of hypnotism peculiar to him” (March , ). Examples of
stories from Chekhov’s early period which seem to be colored by
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Tolstoyan ethical concerns include “A Nightmare” (), “The Beggar”
(), “The Letter” () and “An Unpleasantness” ().
He also himself admitted that there was a degree of Tolstoyanism, as
well as echoes of Anna Karenina , in his story “The Name-Day
Party” ().
Chekhov never wavered in his reverence for Tolstoy as a novelist. In
he placed Tolstoy at the top of the humorous “Literary Table of
Ranks” he published in the journal Fragments, and a few years later in
private correspondence he named him above Tchaikovsky and Repin as
the most important living Russian artist (classifying himself, with typical
self-deprecation, as occupying either the th or th position). From
scattered comments in Chekhov’s letters we can ascertain that he returned
repeatedly to Tolstoy’s fictional masterpieces. In the autumn of , for
example, he remarked on the enjoyment he was deriving from waking up
and reading War and Peace in the middle of the night (“you read with such
curiosity and such naive surprise, as if you’ve never read it before”
[October , ; L:]). Something of the nature of Chekhov’s
admiration for Tolstoy’s writing may be gleaned from the sentiments
expressed in his unfinished fragment “The Letter” (): “Between the
lines as you read, you see a soaring eagle who is little concerned with the
beauty of his feathers. Thought and beauty, like hurricanes and waves,
should not pander to usual, conventional forms” (W:–). Like so
many in late imperial Russia, Chekhov also hailed Tolstoy as the nation’s
true moral leader. In December , after Tolstoy launched a campaign
to provide famine relief for millions of starving peasants following the
failed harvest that year, Chekhov proclaimed him to be “not a man, but a
giant, a Jupiter” (L:). As he wrote to one correspondent on December
, , “you need the courage and authority of a Tolstoy to swim
against the current, defy the prohibitions and the general climate of
opinion, and do what your duty calls you to do” (L:). “In my life
I have never respected anyone as deeply, one could even say as devotedly,
as Lev Nikolaevich,” Chekhov declared unequivocally to one of Tolstoy’s
disciples in (November , ; L:). By this time he had
followed Tolstoy’s inspiring example by contributing himself to the famine
relief project, provided medical treatment for hundreds of peasants in the
villages close to his Melikhovo estate, particularly during a cholera epi-
demic, and built several schools.
Chekhov was nevertheless far from uncritical of Tolstoy’s philosophy.
As a trained doctor who believed in science and modern technology, he
grew increasingly impatient with Tolstoy’s dogmatic views, particularly
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after he returned from his momentous journey to the penal colony on
Sakhalin in . The feelings Chekhov expressed about Tolstoy’s
novella The Kreutzer Sonata in his letters are indicative in this respect.
Before he left, he was irritated by Tolstoy’s “arrogance in discussing
matters about which he understands nothing,” such as “syphilis, found-
ling hospitals, women’s distaste for sexual intercourse and so on,” while
marveling at the story’s virtues, which rendered its faults “so insignificant
that they waft away practically unnoticed, like feathers on the wind”
(February , ; L:). When he returned, however, he found the
novella “ridiculous” (December , ; L:). As he confessed to
Suvorin in , he could never become a Tolstoyan himself: “I love
beauty above all in women, and culture in the history of mankind, as
manifested in carpets, sprung carriages and sharp-witted thought”
(August , ; L:).
Chekhov had already begun to counter Tolstoyan philosophy in his
fiction by this point, beginning with “A Boring Story” (), which can
be construed as a response to the existential questions raised in Tolstoy’s
“The Death of Ivan Ilych” (). In his fictional masterpieces “Gusev”
(), “The Duel” (), and “Ward No. ” (), Chekhov
proceeded to question the central Tolstoyan idea of nonresistance to evil.
His method was typically oblique and subversive. “It seemed that” is
Chekhov’s constant refrain in his mature stories. What is actually the case
is the unspoken counterpoint that he prods his reader to discover through
deciphering the layers of irony. Illusion and self-delusion are recurring
themes in Chekhov’s work – nothing in his stories can be taken at face
value. By questioning our assumptions about what constitutes an appro-
priate topic for a short story, and sometimes focusing on what appears to
be trivial detail, Chekhov further undermines the authority of his narra-
tion, be it omniscient or first-person, and encourages us to challenge his
characters’, and consequently our own, vision of reality. He took a differ-
ent approach, however, in his story “The Student,” which may be consid-
ered an eloquent rebuttal of The Kingdom of God Is within You. This
religious treatise, Tolstoy’s magnum opus, made an immediate and pow-
erful worldwide impact when it was first published in early , includ-
ing in Russia when copies were smuggled into the country, and it is
tempting to think Chekhov read one of them. It is striking that on the
same day that spring when he completed “The Student,” he wrote a
famous letter to Suvorin in which he declared that Tolstoy’s philosophy
had ceased to influence him:
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Reason and justice tell me there is more love for mankind in electricity and
steam than there is in chastity and abstaining from meat. It is true that war
is evil and courts of law are evil, but that does not mean I have to go about
in bast shoes and sleep on top of the stove beside the labourer and his wife,
and so on, and so forth . . . (March , )
Chekhov does not criticize Tolstoyan ideas in “The Student” directly,
but the poignant account of Peter’s betrayal of Christ given by his
character Ivan Velikopolsky, a seminarist, serves as a manifesto for a
compassionate spirituality that does not exclude art and beauty. The
irony of a nonbeliever writing a story whose central event is a pivotal
moment in Christ’s Passion was not lost on Chekhov. With the story’s
clear allusions to key moments of epiphany and transcendence in War
and Peace, Chekhov seems to be celebrating the immanent spirituality
of the fiction Tolstoy now abjured, rather than that conveyed in his
explicitly Christian writings. He foresaw that rigid adherence to
ascetic Tolstoyan ideals must inevitably lead to a rejection of life itself
and offered a defense, in “The Student,” of human frailty, tolerance,
multiplicity of perspective, irrationality, and paradox – elements that
had little place in Tolstoy’s new utopian spirituality. The pointed
quotation from Jesus’ lament over Jerusalem in Luke with which
Chekhov closes his farewell to Tolstoyanism in the letter to Suvorin,
moreover, speaks to his affection for the archaic Church Slavonic
Bible’s beauty as a literary text – a quality sacrificed in Tolstoy’s own
radical translation of the Gospels, with its deletions of material not
relevant to his rational creed.
Chekhov proceeded to question other central tenets of Tolstoy’s
worldview in subsequent stories. If “My Life” and “The House with
the Mezzanine” (both written in ) contain a veiled criticism of
idealistic Tolstoyan notions about how the intelligentsia should relate to
the peasantry, “Peasants,” written the following year, takes a more
confrontational stance. Chekhov’s father had been born a serf, and
Chekhov’s fictional portrayal of Russian peasants was decidedly unvar-
nished. Their description as people who lived worse than beasts, and who
were “coarse, dishonest, filthy, and drunken” contrasted sharply with the
idealized fictional representation of peasants by conscience-stricken gen-
try writers of the Populist generation. Chief among them was Tolstoy,
who condemned the story as a “sin before the people,” despite the fact
that Chekhov’s narrator ultimately points the finger at the iniquities of
the Tsarist regime:
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Yes, it was terrible to live with them, but they were still human beings; they
suffered and wept like human beings, and there was really nothing in their
lives for which no justification could be found. The hard labour making the
entire body ache at night, the cruel winters, the poor harvests, the over-
crowding – yet there was no help at hand or prospect of it coming from
anywhere. (W:)
Tolstoy retained great respect and affection for Chekhov but was still
appalled by the story five years later, commenting that of million
Russian peasants, Chekhov had “taken only the darkest features.”
Chekhov, meanwhile, dismissed the eccentric views Tolstoy expressed in
his polemic What is Art? () as outdated and boring (January , ;
L:–).
Through the “story within a story” structure of his story
“Gooseberries,” Chekhov went on to confront the moral preached in
Tolstoy’s parable “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” (), which
suggests that people need only as much land as it takes to bury them.
Chekhov’s absurdly named storyteller Ivan Chimsha-Gimalaisky does
not explicitly refer to Tolstoy’s story, but his declaration that “it’s a
corpse that needs six feet of earth, not a person” would have sufficed as
an allusion. Finally, in four stories that may be deemed variations on the
theme of Anna Karenina in different registers, Chekhov responded
eloquently and delicately to Tolstoy’s strident ideas about marriage and
adultery. From the parody of “A Calamity” () and “Anna Round the
Neck” () to the more nuanced and serious reflections that permeate
“About Love” () and “The Lady with the Little Dog” (), this
was his most sustained dialogue with Tolstoyan morality. Chekhov
refused steadfastly to pass judgment, but in his ambiguous, post-
Darwinian, post-Nietzschean world, adulterous heroines do not have to
pay for their transgressions with death.
The two authors finally met in person in , upon Tolstoy’s insis-
tence. “He is very gifted and most likely has a kind heart,” Tolstoy reported
to his son Lev a few weeks after Chekhov’s visit to his Yasnaya Polyana
estate, “but he still has not defined his own point of view.” Inscrutable as
usual, Chekhov commented little, other than to say that Tolstoy had made
a “marvellous impression” on him, that he had felt as relaxed as if he had
been at home, and that their conversations had been easy (October ,
; L:). Chekhov’s general preference was to listen and observe, as he
did in another memorable encounter with the great writer two years later
when Chekhov was recovering from a lung hemorrhage. “I had a visit in the
clinic from Lev Nikolaevich,” he wrote to a friend, “and we had an
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exceptionally interesting conversation – exceptionally interesting for me at
any rate, because I listened more than I spoke. We discussed immortality”
(April , ). Chekhov’s personal and literary relationship with
Tolstoy remained one of the most important of his life, as he attested in
a much-quoted and moving letter he wrote on January , :
I fear the death of Tolstoy. If he were to die, a large empty space would
appear in my life. In the first place, there is no other person whom I love as
I love him; I am not a religious person, but of all faiths I find his the closest
to me and the most congenial. Secondly, when literature possesses a
Tolstoy, it is easy and pleasant to be a writer; even when you know that
you have achieved nothing yourself and are still achieving nothing, this is
not as terrible as it might otherwise be because Tolstoy achieves for
everyone. What he does serves to justify all the hopes and aspirations
invested in literature. Thirdly, Tolstoy stands proud, his authority is
colossal, and so long as he lives, bad taste in literature, all vulgarity,
insolence and snivelling, all crude, embittered vainglory, will stay banished
into outer darkness. He is the one person whose moral authority is
sufficient in itself to maintain so-called literary fashions and movements
on an acceptable level. Were it not for him the world of literature would be
a flock of sheep without a shepherd, a stew in which it would be hard for us
to find our way.
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French Literature
Sergei A. Kibalnik
Chekhov once joked that he spoke “all languages except for foreign ones”
(August , ; L:); yet he knew Latin, had studied German, and
came, after some struggle and several trips to France, to read French
fluently. Through the mouth of his protagonist in “A Boring Story,” he
defined for himself what primarily attracted him to French literature:
“I will not say that French books are either talented, or intelligent, or
noble. But they are not as boring as Russian ones, and in them it is not a
rarity to find the principal element of art – a sense of personal freedom,
which Russian authors lack” (W:). Among his French contempo-
raries, moreover, were such writers as Guy de Maupassant, who, as
Chekhov put it, “has made such enormous demands as an artist of the
word that it is no longer possible to write in the old way.” In borrowing
contemporary motifs from French writers, and in creatively adapting their
new techniques to his own artistic purposes, Chekhov as a rule refracts
them beyond recognition. At the same time, it is as though he “endows”
these motifs with values established by the Russian literary classics, which
he in turn refines. This chapter will examine several of Chekhov’s inter-
textual borrowings and latent polemics with the major French writers of
his time – Gustave Flaubert (–), Émile Zola (–), and
especially Guy de Maupassant (–).
Flaubert and Zola: Intertexts
“As a young prose writer,” Vladimir Kataev observes, “Chekhov’s encoun-
ter with French prose was of a polemical nature. [. . .] The hero of his
‘Swedish Match’ calls his mistress ‘Nana,’ and Chekhov uses the titles of
Zola’s novels – ‘My Nana,’ ‘The Happiness of Women’ – ironically as the
titles for his own stories.” Antosha Chekhonte also frequently turned to
those works of French literature that he considered anachronistic in order
to subject them to overt or covert parody. For example, he travesties the
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superficial adventurousness of Jules Verne (“The Floating Islands,” ),
or the “hyperbolic passions,” the “lush maxims and incredible plot twists”
of Victor Hugo (“ Passions, or A Horrible Night,” ).
In Chekhov’s mature period, these polemics become both more sub-
stantive and more covert. Chekhov’s The Duel () initially resembles
the second part of Anna Karenina, but later develops along the lines of
Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (). Laevsky finds himself in the role of
Tolstoy’s Vronsky – burdened by his life with Nadezhda Fyodorovna,
whom he has taken from her husband. The heroine betrays Laevsky with
the police bailiff Kirillin; unlike Emma Bovary, she is motivated not by
passionate love but by boredom and vague “desires.” Kirillin – a partial
parody of Flaubert’s Rodolphe and Maupassant’s Duroy (from Bel-Ami) –
turns out to be “rude, though also handsome.” As she tries to break
things off, another would-be lover immediately appears on the horizon –
the young Achmianov, a distant echo of Flaubert’s Leon. Nadezhda
Fyodorovna, however, is distinguished from her literary prototype by
the periodically recurring feeling that “she is a petty, vulgar, trashy,
insignificant woman” (W:–). Whereas in Madame Bovary the
husband Charles largely blends with the provincial environment, in The
Duel Laevsky serves as a kind of double to Nadezhda Fyodorovna –
another Emma, no less selfish, who suffers even more acutely from the
bourgeois milieu.
Whereas Flaubert places an interval of time between Emma’s breakup
with Rodolphe and the appearance of Leon, Chekhov concentrates the
action; Achmianov jealously trails Nadezhda Fyodorovna, and finally
brings Laevsky to the scene of her rendezvous with Kirillin. The scene
recalls Maupassant’s Bel-Ami, where Duroy himself leads the police com-
missioner (in The Duel, Kirillin serves, by contrast, as police bailiff ) to the
apartment where his wife Madeleine is having a secret rendezvous with the
minister Laroche-Mathieu. After the duel, Laevsky begins to profess some-
thing like Dostoevsky’s idea that all people are responsible for each other:
“They had only continued what he had begun; they were his accomplices
and disciples. [. . .] He’d taken away her husband, her circle of acquain-
tances, her homeland and had brought her here – into the heat, fever and
boredom; day in day out, she would have to reflect, like a mirror, his own
idleness, depravity, and lies” (W:). The Duel, then, can be read as
Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina with a bifurcated Emma or Anna,
whose hero, Laevsky, corresponding distantly to Flaubert’s Charles – or
rather Tolstoy’s Karenin in Anna’s labor scene – is reborn as he comes to
accept responsibility, in the face of death, for his partner’s fate.
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.
Another even more evident intertext for Madame Bovary and Anna
Karenina can be found in the story “The Grasshopper” (), where
Osip Dymov, Chekhov’s version of Charles or Karenin, is portrayed much
more attractively than his literary prototypes. It is Dymov, not his wife
Olenka, who dies on the heels of her infidelity, and Olenka, not having
appreciated Dymov’s selflessness, ultimately finds herself in the woeful
position of Krylov’s fabled dragonfly. Here Chekhov has rewritten the
tragic story of the heroine’s search for an ideal love along the lines of
Krylov’s fable “The Dragonfly and the Ant,” which inspires the title of his
own story. Behind his heroine’s disdain for her bourgeois environment,
Chekhov discerns a basic selfishness that Flaubert did not see in Emma,
though Emma’s search resulted in tragedy not only for herself but for her
whole family.
Chekhov’s later prose includes another Flaubertian hypertext, in which
he overcomes Flaubert’s sense of the tragedy of life through irony and
laughter. Chekhov’s irony here, however, does not serve to discredit his
heroine, but rather to give her at least some of the share of happiness that
she has earned through her capacity for all-consuming love. Thus, in the
story “The Darling” (), Chekhov “translates” the heroine of Flaubert’s
Un Cœur Simple () onto the “erotic-psychological plane,” generating
his own form of “hagiography.”
Chekhov’s textual engagements with Zola are less numerous and more
dissonant. A “veiled polemic,” for example, with Zola’s Doctor Pascal
() “unfolded in Chekhov’s ‘Big Volodya and Little Volodya,’ which
he wrote in almost simultaneously with his reading of the novel.” In
his story, Chekhov explores the idea expressed in a letter to A. S. Suvorin
that Zola should have depicted the young Clotilde’s liaison with old Pascal
not as love but as perversion (November , ; L:).
Chekhov and Maupassant
Though at first glance Chekhov’s “A Boring Story” () and
Maupassant’s Une Vie () are in no way connected, a closer look
reveals hidden links. Maupassant’s novel ends with the maid Rosalie
bringing the heroine Jeanne her granddaughter, whose mother has died
during childbirth. As she does so, Rosalie pronounces a maxim that the
author seems to endorse (all the more as it is a near-exact quotation from a
letter to Maupassant from Flaubert): “You see, this is how life is: not as
good, but also not as bad as one believes.” The hero of Chekhov’s story
seems to dispute this belief, though indirectly. Reflecting on his
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approaching death, he expresses a similar but different idea, which he
attributes not to Maupassant but, falsely, to the historical figure A. A.
Arakcheev: “I think of myself, of my wife, of Lise, Gnekker, my students,
people in general; my thoughts are mean, petty, I am insincere with
myself, and at these times my outlook can be expressed in the words of
the famous A.A. Arakcheyev from one of his intimate letters: ‘All that is
good in the world cannot be without the bad, and there’s always more bad
than good’” (W:).
What significance is there in the camouflaged polemic between the
Russian scientist and the French maid? Nikolai Stepanovich’s phrase is
addressed to himself and is prompted by the loneliness into which he has
withdrawn, having “no family now, and no desire to bring it back again”:
“It is clear that these new, Arakcheevian thoughts that have taken up
residence in me are neither casual nor temporary but have taken possession
of my whole being” (W:). Rosalie expresses her thought, not remark-
able for its depth, at a crucial moment for Jeanne, who has suffered a great
deal. Whereas Rosalie, being only a maid, is able to find words to support
her mistress in a difficult moment, Chekhov’s professor finds no such
words either for his daughter Liza or his ward Katya. By subjecting his
character to an unfavorable comparison with Rosalie, Chekhov therefore
simultaneously develops the idea (shared by Maupassant) of the harmful-
ness of bookish knowledge of life.
Chekhov’s hero’s misfortune is that he has “recently” become “so
indifferent to everything” that “it is positively all the same to him where
he goes.” After receiving a telegram informing him of his daughter’s secret
marriage to an apparently devious suitor, he himself emphasizes: “It is not
the deed of Liza and Gnekker that frightens me, but the indifference with
which I meet the news of their wedding.” It is true that Nikolai
Stepanovich himself, like many of Chekhov’s critics, attributes his despair
to the absence of “a general idea” (W:–). But it was also with good
reason that Chekhov explained in a letter to A. N. Pleshcheev that his
character “relates too carelessly to the inner lives of those around him;
while people around him cry, make mistakes, tell lies, he calmly pontifi-
cates about the theater, about literature; had he been of a different kind,
Liza and Katya might not have perished” (September , ; L:).
As Chekhov indicates, Nikolai Stepanovic’s problem lies in both his
indifference and his selfishness. The former he repeatedly acknowledges
to himself, and the reader can infer the latter from the fact that Nikolai
Stepanovich is in no hurry to go to Kharkov; that he is therefore late in
making inquiries about Gnekker; and, most importantly, that he never
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asks his daughter about what is happening with her, even when she weeps
loudly at night. In his selfishness he somewhat recalls Mr. Walter of
Maupassant’s Bel-Ami (), whose daughter Suzanne runs away with
Georges Duroy. In both cases, the fault evidently lies in the father’s utter
lack of interest in, or mutual understanding with, the daughter. Chekhov’s
hero’s stated preference for “French books,” therefore, is also realized in
the story’s intertextual aspect: “A Boring Story” turns out to be a hybrid
hypertext of two Maupassant novels at once. In this case, finding solidarity
with Maupassant, Chekhov shifts the emphasis to a problem that
Maupassant presents only in a latent form, namely, the problem of human
callousness, the hardening of the heart that alienates his character from
others, while also preventing him from understanding those closest to him,
even those for whom he still seems to care.
Chekhov’s “A Woman’s Kingdom” () presents yet another variation
on the plot of Maupassant’s Une Vie. Here Chekhov develops the situation
in which a heroine like Jeanne would have found herself if she had not
married but had lived instead up to the age of twenty-five without her
parents and with the responsibility of running her own estate. The con-
nection with Maupassant is emphasized in the story through an explicit
dialogue with the French writer. Having become unexpectedly rich and
remaining alone, Anna Akimovna “cannot think of what to do with
herself.” The lawyer Lysevich, who has read more than enough French
literature, advises her: “You, my dear, must not vegetate, must not live like
everyone else; you must savor life, and light debauchery is the sauce of life.”
The heroine, meanwhile, having grown up in a working environment,
strives for something else: “I’m lonely, lonely, like the moon in the sky,
and a waning moon too, and, whatever you say, I’m certain of it, I feel that
this waning can only be replenished by love in the ordinary sense”
(W:–). In response, Lysevich tells the heroine about
Maupassant’s “latest,” which has “intoxicated” him. Judging from his “long
introduction,” he seems to be speaking of Maupassant’s novel Notre Coeur
(), which depicts a “modern woman,” “irresistible through the art of
seduction,” but incapable of truly loving anyone but herself. In the end it
turns out that Maupassant’s Mariolle needs, for the fullness of life, to die of
passionate love for one unusual woman while also making use of the selfless
love of another, simple woman. Meanwhile, listening to Lysevich’s retell-
ing, Anna Akimovna reflects that “there is no need to live badly if you can
live beautifully.” Chekhov’s latent polemic with Maupassant, which
emerges in these words of the heroine, can also be detected in the phrases
of Lysevich: “All the new literature, in the manner of an autumn wind in a
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chimney, groans and howls: [. . .] ‘Ah, you will surely perish, and there is no
salvation for you!’ This is fine, but I would prefer a literature that teaches
you how to escape from prison” (W:, ).
In , Chekhov rewrote Maupassant’s Une Vie once again, this time
almost without any significant plot transformations, in the story “At Home”
(“V rodnom uglu”), incidentally written in Nice, that is, in places described
more than once by Maupassant himself. In Une Vie, the seventeen-year-old
Jeanne goes with her father to the Normandy estate that has been
bequeathed to her; in Chekhov’s story, the orphaned twenty-three-year-
old Vera Kardina returns after some years to her estate on the Donetsk road.
Obeying her parents’ choice, Jeanne marries Julien, who is attracted by her
wealth. Being older than Jeanne, Vera realizes that she does not love Dr.
Neshchapov, but decides nevertheless to follow her aunt’s advice and marry
him, reluctantly submitting to life’s inertia. Chekhov deems it unnecessary
to narrate the heroine’s future, since it is clear that Vera will live her life with
a man who is alien to her. The thought that expresses her mood at the end,
and that corresponds vaguely with Rosalie’s maxim, has a much more
pessimistic ring: “Evidently happiness and truth exist somewhere outside of
life” (W:, emphasis added). The expression “outside of life” is some-
what reminiscent of Maupassant’s short story “Le Horla,” in which this
word, “Horla,” refers to an unknown being that enters into people and
draws them away from the world. Meanwhile, the expression itself can be
understood as “Le hors là,” that is, “external,” “located beyond the borders of
reality,” “beyond.” In this way, Chekhov, in a camouflaged way, contrasts
his heroine’s worldview with Maupassant’s. If the French writer’s “beyond”
represents terror and danger to human beings, Vera imagines it as the only
possible place for human happiness.
Chekhov was able to overcome his onerous reputation as the “Russian
Maupassant” only by turning to drama. Yet Chekhov’s plays continue
their inner dialogue with Maupassant in a manner no less polemical than
in his prose. This dialogue is overt in Chekhov’s Seagull. Already in the
first act, Treplev, referring to Maupassant’s essay “Lassitude” (), says
that he is fleeing the mundane morality of modern theater “as Maupassant
fled from the Eiffel Tower, which was crushing his brain with its banality”
(W:). The second act begins with Dorn reading aloud from a Russian
translation of Maupassant’s story “Sur L’eau.” When Maupassant refers to
the “capturing” of novelists by society women, which comes dangerously
close to describing Arkadina’s relationship with Trigorin, Arkadina takes
the book and begins to read it herself, but then immediately becomes
distracted and stops reading. Maupassant’s never-read text “contains in
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embryo the scene from Act Three” in which Arkadina once again holds
Trigorin back in his infatuation with Zarechnaya.
Over the course of the play, the nearness of Chekhov’s characters to the
images of Maupassant’s “Sur L’eau” decisively spills into the subtext.
When comparing the two works, it becomes clear that all of The
Seagull’s characters are to some extent preprogrammed by Maupassant.
Trigorin, for example, is oppressed by the artificiality of the writerly
existence as the endless copying of life’s impressions. Arkadina and
Shamrayev are variations of the self-satisfied philistine. Sorin, like Dorn,
feels that his entire life seems to “flow past in a small dark room,” while
like Treplev, he is endowed with horror at “the monotony and poverty of
earthly joys,” to quote Maupassant. All these types are characterized vividly
and in detail in Maupassant’s story.
Treplev is also reminiscent of the heroes of Maupassant’s novels, who are
aware of the insatiability of their feeling not only when unrequited but even
when requited. In this respect, his paradoxical twin is Nina: both are endowed
with the unfortunate gift of loving more the more their love is rejected; and
Masha and Polina display the same kind of love in a parodied and reduced
way. At the same time, Trigorin, who at the end of the play stubbornly denies
even the memory of his love for Nina, in this sense becomes similar not only
to Dorn and Arkadina, but also to Nina, who in her last conversation with
Treplev hears only her own pain. These characters’ emotional deafness and
“symphonic indifference” leads directly to the tragedy of Treplev’s suicide,
which takes place almost before their eyes. If Maupassant most often wrote
about the “properties of passion” – and in “Sur L’eau” about the phantom of
love as a means of overcoming loneliness and satisfying the “need for power” –
then Chekhov unveils the “heavy drama” not simply of “impassivity” but
more importantly of callousness to one’s loved ones.
Diverging from Maupassant, even in his own dramaturgy, Chekhov
contrasts the French writer’s tragic individualism with the consciousness,
which Chekhov adapted from Dostoevsky and Tolstoy (and which
Flaubert also latently presents), of the mutual responsibility of each person
not for everyone in general but for specific people whose fate is intertwined
with theirs. Like Flaubert and Maupassant, Chekhov rejects the comforting
deceptions of the Romantics while also rising above the tragic sense of life as
a realm of evil and meaninglessness. With his belief in the human ability to
overcome tragedy inwardly and, consequently, in life, the Russian writer
leaves the reader in a cathartic state of purification and hope.
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Modernism and Symbolism
Lindsay Ceballos
Introduction
Chekhov’s most productive literary years in the s coincided with a
new period of Russian intellectual life and culture. It was during this time
that those populist critics who regularly questioned the moral and social
utility of Chekhov’s stories found a more implacable object of censure, a
new current of art that seemed to embody an even more precipitous
degeneration of the Russian critical realist tradition. The founders of this
new current, who referred to themselves variously as decadents,
Symbolists, idealists, or simply “new people,” included the poets
Konstantin Bal’mont (–), Zinaida Gippius (–),
Dmitry Merezhkovsky (–), and Fyodor Sologub (–).
This was a generation of artists who imbued their work with such world-
historical significance and religious striving as to take the high-sounding
words of Chekhov’s eponymous “Black Monk” () in earnest: “You
will accelerate the path [of humanity] towards eternal truth by a thousand
years – this is your lofty service” (W:). This chapter will examine the
unsteady and volatile relationship of these modernist poets with
Chekhov – at once an object of veneration, a cultural antagonist, a fellow
traveler, and the very embodiment of Russian modernity itself, which, as
the Symbolists increasingly believed in the years after Chekhov’s death,
was hovering on the verge of historical cataclysm.
The late-century literary scene
In the last decade of the nineteenth century Chekhov’s work occupied a
fraught position between the populist, socially progressive “realist” critics
on the one hand and the new idealist or Symbolist movement on the other.
Though the influential populist critic N. K. Mikhailovsky (–)
had long been critical of the absence of social engagement in Chekhov’s
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art, which he described in as merely the “idealization of the absence
of ideals,” it was under his editorial watch at The Northern Herald that
A. N. Pleshcheev (–) brought Chekhov into the journal, facili-
tating the publication of “The Steppe” () and “A Dreary Story”
(), and therefore stretching the “democratic” tendency of the journal.
Unlike Mikhailovsky, who viewed Chekhov’s perceived lack of “a
unifying idea” with cautious disapproval, the young poet Dmitry
Merezhkovsky, in his first-ever article for The Northern Herald, applauded
Chekhov for bucking the materialist-philosophical trend that informed
critical realism (thus prompting the editors to append a note clarifying the
essay’s divergence from their aesthetic views). Chekhov, Merezhkovsky
wrote, “shows that one can be a free poet without limits [. . .] while also
sincerely empathizing with human sadness, commanding a refined con-
science, and speaking out on the ‘cursed’ questions of contemporary life.”
Merezhkovsky’s admiration for Chekhov was equally evident in his land-
mark essay, “On the reasons for the decline and new currents in Russian
literature” (), in which he rewrote the history of nineteenth-century
realism as a prelude to a new idealist or religious symbolic art. According to
Merezhkovsky, Chekhov was the exponent of a new kind of realism that
was poised to merge with its idealist antithesis. “From weighty mundanity
and ethnographic sketches, from the commercial papers of the positivist
novel,” he wrote, Chekhov “is returning to the form of ideal art.” The
idea of building symbolic art with the material of everyday life would
become a key feature of second-wave Symbolism in the next century.
Chekhov’s indeterminate position between the “realists” and the “ide-
alists” was further complicated by his contributions to the New Times, the
pro-establishment paper owned by A. S. Suvorin (–). If
Mikhailovsky’s problem with Chekhov, however, stemmed from the lat-
ter’s association with Suvorin and his nonalignment with the social mis-
sion of realist art, Akim Volynsky (–), who assumed editorship
of the Northern Herald in , took exception, by contrast, to the traces
of utilitarian influence in Chekhov’s prose. “It would be better,” wrote
Volynsky in , “if Mr. Chekhov broke with the dominant, vulgar
routine in our life, if he ended up on that spiritual and cerebral elevation to
which the voice of time calls the whole of the young literary generation of
Russia.” The critic’s hostility arose also in part from Chekhov’s new
relationship with the journal Russian Thought in the spring of , the
same year that a falling-out with Suvorin ended his activity at the New
Times. But despite what seems like Chekhov’s attempt to disentangle
himself from both democratic and conservative outposts, Volynsky
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Modernism and Symbolism
insinuated that Suvorin’s newspaper had left a stain no less powerful than
the preexisting utilitarian one. “The former freshness and richness” of
Chekhov’s early work, Volynsky wrote, “the simplicity and wholeness of
his artistic idea,” had been marred by “the unprincipled philosophizing of
his former bourgeois newspaper ‘bosses’” and “distorted [by] a lightweight,
sober liberalism, with its anti-aesthetic demands of civic tendentiousness.”
To align with the major ideological currents of the moment, Chekhov, it
seems, was both too socially conscious and not conscious enough, too
committed in his writing to both the civic and the aesthetic.
The religious renewal in art and criticism
With the founding of the journal World of Art in , the new decadent
or Symbolist current finally had a foothold in the press. The journal, which
published new poetry and photo reproductions of paintings, folk art, and
sculptures, epitomized the wide-reaching and eclectic nature of Russian
modernism at the turn of the century. On the one hand, in keeping with
the views of its editor in chief, Sergei Diaghilev (–), it advanced
an experimental program of “art for art’s sake,” emphasizing the autonomy
of artistic expression without regard to political or philosophical tendency.
On the other hand, it provided a headquarters for a renaissance in anti-
dogmatic, ecumenical spirituality, inspired by Vladimir Soloviev and
Fyodor Dostoevsky, and led by the husband and wife team of Dmitry
Merezhkovsky and Zinaida Gippius who established the Religious
Philosophical Meetings in , gatherings which brought together the
clergy and intelligentsia in contentious discussions about religion and
society. The decadent “art for art’s sake” philosophy of the journal became
somewhat incongruously intermingled with Symbolist theories of art’s
function (namely, that its source was derived from the religious impulse
in human culture), and this intermingling of aesthetic programs served as
the background for the next phase in the Symbolist reception of Chekhov.
Chekhov, meanwhile, had found success at the newly founded Moscow
Art Theater. Symbolists, with their shared fascination for the relationship
between two realms – the here and the beyond – were naturally drawn to
the stage, which for them embodied the barrier between worlds, in this
case the world of the spectators and the “other” world of ideas and
representation. Valery Briusov (–), the leader of the Moscow
Symbolists, attacked the Art Theater’s embrace of naturalism in his influ-
ential essay, “An Unnecessary Truth,” which arose out of this context of
Symbolist dualism. Theater, the Symbolists thought, should not reflect
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life back to the audience; for many Symbolists, its task was to merge actor
and spectator into a shared religious experience, facilitated by the ritualistic
origins of ancient theater. For Merezhkovsky, Briusov, and, later,
Viacheslav Ivanov (–), older forms of theater – from ancient
Greek tragedy to the commedia dell’arte – would initiate a new era of
dramatic art to rival the realism dominating the stage. These Symbolist
maîtres harbored the greater ambition of founding a theater culture
capable of transforming Russian social reality, one that would initiate a
spiritual renewal with attendant liberationist politics. The radical contem-
poraneity of Chekhov’s work appealed to them, but only if it helped to
forge a correspondence between the real world of experience and the
eternal realm of ideas.
By , Chekhov’s realism was inextricable from the theory and
practice of the Art Theater, which to World of Art critics seemed like mere
pandering rather than a true moral and artistic breakthrough. In an essay
on The Seagull and what it portended for the direction of Chekhov’s art,
the cultural critic and World of Art mainstay Dmitry Filosofov
(–) reported on a recent speech delivered by Merezhkovsky,
who “thundered against the phantasmagoric, unhealthy, and unreachable
rush for real truth in such a conventional and unreal sphere as the
theater.” The age of “Chekhovism” (Chekhovshchina) had begun, and
the “great artist Chekhov” was fading away. Filosofov intimated that the
Art Theater might even be causing moral harm to its audiences by
generating an illusion, a simulacrum of life, out of Chekhov’s plays. The
spectator “succumbs to the hypnotism of Chekhovism, and sits in the
theater subdued and meek, feeling that he himself is one of the heroes in
the play.”
If for Filosofov The Seagull presented audiences with an illusion of
reality, it also offered a taste of the Symbolist vogue in the form of
Treplev’s play. When Nina complains that there are no living people in
Treplev’s plays, he replies, “Living characters! You need to represent life
not as it is, not as it should be, but how it appears in dreams” (W:).
Such a statement could easily have been uttered by Briusov or Bal’mont,
representatives of the decadent wing of Symbolist poetry. Indeed, it has
been suggested that Treplev’s play – his first name and the title of the play
itself – was inspired by Bal’mont, a friend of Chekhov and the prince of
Symbolist poetry.
Despite poking fun at them in The Seagull, Chekhov was more inclined
to collaborate with the “decadent” wing of the Symbolist circles than with
the religious strivings of the Merezhkovskys at World of Art. In ,
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Modernism and Symbolism
Chekhov published “At Sea” (first published in ) in Northern Flowers,
an almanac edited by Briusov, an unlikely but not impossible literary
collaborator. A decadent poet and theosophist with serious interests in
the occult, Briusov worked at an ideological remove from the religious
contingent. When, on February , , Merezhkovsky invited Chekhov
to contribute to his new religious-philosophical journal, the New Path, he
wrote, “Recall that I was one of your first critics, so don’t embitter us with
a refusal!” Undoubtedly wary of Merezhkovsky’s religious zeal, Chekhov
did not accept the offer. Indeed, in the same year he was recorded as
naming all Symbolists “swindlers.”
The deaths of Chekhov and of Symbolism
Chekhov’s death occurred less than two weeks before the assassination of
the widely reviled Minister of the Interior, Konstantin von Plehve, and half
a year before the police massacre of peaceful protestors on January , ,
which became known as Bloody Sunday. As the Symbolists grappled with
the loss of Chekhov amidst national turmoil, political realities were exert-
ing a direct, though abstract effect on their views on art. Poet and leading
Symbolist theoretician Viacheslav Ivanov proposed a formula for
Symbolism in , which distinguished between reality (the deeper, more
essential layer of existence at the core of human experience) and “realism”
(which is preoccupied with the visible surfaces of phenomena), placing
“reality,” as he put it, the journey “from the real to the more real,” at the
center of the artistic method. Reviewing The Cherry Orchard, the poet,
essayist, and later leading novelist of the Symbolist movement Andrei Bely
(–) offered a technical explanation of Chekhov’s realism in this
light. Chekhov forced the spectator to “see through” everyday trifles and
habitual patterns into the terrifying chaos of real (or more real) experi-
ence. Bely would elaborate on this method in a memorial essay published
in Briusov’s new journal, Libra: “The terror of everyday, vulgar life – this is
the device of Chekhov’s methodology, thanks to which his images acquire
the precision of a drawing and remain within the realm of contempora-
neity. But then modern life becomes a swaying theatrical set and the
dramatis personae become silhouettes painted on a canvas backdrop.”
Anticipating the metatheatrical conclusion of Alexander Blok’s Puppet
Show (), Bely argued for a thoroughly modernist Chekhov who was
alive to the mysteries lurking beyond the mimetic surface.
But while for some Chekhov’s status as a Symbolist seemed confirmed,
the Merezhkovskys pushed back. Merezhkovsky, perhaps feeling fewer
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restraints after the death of a writer he obviously admired, went further
than even his World of Art colleague, the philosopher Lev Shestov who, in
, had dubbed Chekhov the “poet of despair.” Merezhkovsky pub-
lished a letter from Chekhov to Diagilev , in which the former declined a
request to become an editor at World of Art on the grounds that he could
not work, in his words, “under one roof with D. S. Merezhkovsky, who
has a definite belief – the faith of a teacher – while I have long ago lost my
faith and look only in bewilderment upon the intelligentsia’s believers”
(June , ; L:). Merezhkovsky used the letter as proof of
Chekhov’s atheism and drew parallels between Chekhov’s portraits of
the intelligentsia and Maxim Gorky’s godless tramps (bosiaki).
These efforts to confirm Chekhov’s atheism emerged during the revo-
lutionary crisis of –, when Merezhkovsky and others redoubled
their efforts to link Marxist social democrats with atheism, which they
feared as the triumph of the Feuerbachian deification of the human being.
In wishing “to show that man without God is God,” Chekhov and Gorky
had in fact shown, according to Merezhkovsky, “that man is a beast, worse
than a beast – livestock, worse than livestock, a corpse, worse than a
corpse, nothing.” Gippius anticipated her spouse’s argument by several
months. “If we decided to call Chekhov a ‘prophet,’” she wrote in ,
“then in any case he would be the prophet of negating life, the prophet of
nonexistence – and not even realized nonexistence – but simply an
inclination towards nonexistence . . .” If “Chekhov were the endpoint
of all art,” Gippius maintained, this would signify “the complete victory of
the devil’s inertia over the world – and over God.”
Merezhkovsky’s portrait of Chekhov would shift dramatically again in a
polemical essay directed toward the two dominant Symbolist camps – one
led by Briusov, the other by Ivanov – in which Chekhov emerged as a
positive model for contemporary writers. In Chekhov’s letters from his
journey to Sakhalin, Merezhkovsky identified an antidote to the disen-
gaged aestheticism and mysticism of Symbolist decline: “Chekhov was the
last of Russian writers not to bow to a dead God. Perhaps he didn’t know
the name of the living God – but he already had a presentiment of Him.”
Merezhkovsky scolded the other Symbolist camps not only for abandoning
social problems in favor of abstractions, but also for shirking their duty as
members of the Russian intelligentsia. One senses the outsized influence of
Dostoevsky in Merezhkovsky’s repositioning of Chekhov as a model for
the intelligentsia. Like Shatov in Devils, an atheist who nevertheless pro-
pounds Russia as a god-bearing nation, Chekhov’s faith in Russia pre-
cludes any possibility of abandoning God.
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Modernism and Symbolism
Conclusion
After the Symbolist current gave way to new movements and schools,
Chekhov’s image underwent an historicization among his first Symbolist
critics. In an essay commemorating what would have been Chekhov’s
fiftieth birthday in , Merezhkovsky wrote that Chekhov “was the
exact incarnation of modernity, of that instant when the past is forgotten
and the future is as yet only dreams that will all the same never come to be
in our time.” As Ivanov put it a year later, “Chekhov appears to us as the
crepuscular poet of the pre-revolutionary period.” Chekhov’s dual status
as realist and Symbolist had become a metaphor for the clash of historical
eras and of modern subjectivity itself. Chekhov, Filosofov wrote in a
memorable essay of , was the “crossroads,” the “meeting point of
romanticism and prophesy, restoration and revolution,” but his radical
contemporaneity and the revolutionary energy that emanated from it had
been destroyed by the Art Theater and the inheritors of populism. “Here
is the great tragedy of Russian life,” Filosofov lamented. “We thought that
Chekhov had ceased to be a contemporary, that he had turned into pure
crystal, into a classic [. . .] but either we deceived ourselves or life deceived
us. The living Chekhov, who could resolve tragedy into contemplation by
the mysterious power of artistic creation, has been forgotten, and in his
place Chekhovism has triumphed and flooded Russia.”
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Theatrical Traditions
Anna Muza
In the opening moments of The Seagull, Konstantin Treplev, an aspiring
author, rages against contemporary theater as a “room with three walls”
where people “eat, drink, love, walk about, and wear their jackets.” His
own dramatic opus is a fantasy about a lifeless future recited by a single
actor in a natural landscape. His mother Irina Arkadina, a well-known
actress, dismisses his piece as decadent and scoffs at Konstantin’s inability
to “write as much as a paltry little vaudeville.” Treplev’s “new forms” may
seem superior to Arkadina’s mainstream, safe repertoire, yet his oft-quoted
diatribe against the room with three walls applies, at least to an extent, to
Chekhov’s own staging of human interactions. In Chekhov’s plays, people
eat, drink, love, walk about, wear their jackets, and often confess that they
do not know how to spend their time.
Unlike Treplev’s rebellious antimimetic endeavor, Chekhov’s dramatic
innovations embrace an entire legacy of “old forms” variously adapted or
satirized but recognizable and necessary for the dramatic design. The
defining properties of Chekhov’s writing for the stage – suppressed action;
futile, unresolved conflicts; inner struggle and lack of purpose; unreliability
of language; separation between words and feelings – are intertwined with
the traditional expressive means of both “high” and “low” theater genres
and conventions of acting. Chekhov, as I will discuss below, learned his
craft through the classical canon, Shakespeare and Molière, as well as from
Russian playwrights of the nineteenth century, Griboedov, Ostrovsky, and
others, but no less important for his theatrical sensibility, as Laurence
Senelick has observed, were those “numerous, mediocre Russian vaude-
villes, society dramas, and pièces à thèse that Chekhov took in as playgoer
and reviewer throughout his lifetime.” Some of Chekhov’s borrowings
from that vast repository of enduring, recycled devices have a generic,
rather than specific, origin, while other elements in his playwriting point to
the particular inventions of his predecessors.
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Theatrical Traditions
Both as a prose writer and playwright, Chekhov relished the elemental
art of the circus and other kindred forms of unsophisticated, mostly
physical theatricality. His stories employ funny gestures, grimaces, and
exaggerated behavior. His well-known early piece “Fat and Thin” ()
reads like a script, in which the thin man’s performance of his insignifi-
cance is choreographed in detail: he freezes; his face is pulled apart by an
immense grin; he shrinks, appears narrower. Chekhov’s first full-length
work for the stage, Ivanov, opens with a gag: someone pretends to aim a
gun at Ivanov, who “gives a start and jumps up.” In the play’s finale,
Chekhov’s most conventional ending, Ivanov actually fires the gun and
kills himself, but Uncle Vanya shooting at Serebriakov and missing twice is
inherently farcical, like a clumsy clown’s act. Physical comedy is particu-
larly prominent in The Cherry Orchard, whose awkward, disoriented
characters drop things, stumble, fall, get hit on the head, and so forth.
The cast includes such barely disguised buffoons as Epikhodov, who is at
war with all material objects, and Simeonov-Pishchik, a self-described
descendant of Caligula’s horse. A perspiring glutton, Simeonov-Pishchik
has too much body; the “very thin” Charlotta, a former acrobat, lacks
corporeal substance: the two are a pair of clowns, Fat and Thin.
Like The Three Sisters before it, The Cherry Orchard also features a nearly
deaf character, an old servant only marginally aware of the dramatic “here
and now.” Deafness has traditionally been treated with comic callousness:
in Alexander Griboedov’s classic Woe from Wit (), there is a character
with the last name Tugoukhovsky, Prince Hardofhearing. However, in
Chekhov’s theater, deafness can also promote rather than restrict commu-
nication: in The Three Sisters Andrei famously tells Ferapont, “If you could
hear well, I probably wouldn’t be talking to you.” The confession may
point forward to Beckett, yet it also hearkens back to the grumpy old men
of vaudeville and farce, as does Professor Serebriakov with his gout,
medicine bottles, and chronic selfishness.
Chekhov often picks a familiar farcical detail or good old piece of stage
business and makes it serve a larger metaphoric purpose. In The Cherry
Orchard, the characters’ deafness to each other is both literal and figurative,
and their hilarious physical incompetence reflects the state of their world,
which is falling apart. Age-old props can undergo a similar semantic
expansion. The stick that accidentally lands on Lopakhin’s head in The
Cherry Orchard leaves the hero with a slapstick injury, yet the beating also
evokes the deeper trauma of his serf origin. In The Three Sisters, Masha’s
husband, trying to console his unfaithful wife, who is crushed by the
departure of her lover, puts on a beard and mustache confiscated from a
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schoolboy: the disguise taken from a silly vaudeville masks the characters’
heartbreak and partakes in the overall pattern of generic displacements in
the play, such as Tuzenbach’s unheroic death in a duel. In The Seagull, the
fluctuations of the eponymous bird between a dead and then stuffed figure
and a figure of speech epitomize Chekhov’s interchanging of the material
and symbolic. A similar preoccupation is evident in Henrik Ibsen’s The
Wild Duck (), commonly compared with Chekhov’s play, yet the
much-discussed duck remains invisible to the audience, unlike Chekhov’s
prominently displayed avian prop.
Chekhov’s “one-act jokes,” often called vaudevilles, such as The Boor,
The Anniversary, and The Proposal, involve larger-than-life buffoonery and
chaotic action, but they hinge on verbal absurdities. Chekhov excels in the
traditional comedic technique of staging fiercely argued but petty agons
which disrupt social rituals. In The Boor, the dispute between a fair widow
and her late husband’s creditor evokes the clashes of Beatrice and Benedick
in Much Ado about Nothing, while yielding an identical romantic resolu-
tion. In The Proposal, the hero is too shy to offer his hand in marriage yet
stubborn enough to disagree with his beloved on every topic that comes up
in their attempts at conversation. The quarrel of the soon-to-be-married
couple over two dogs with barely distinguishable names, Ugadai and
Otkatai, anticipates the absurd debate about the words chekhartma and
cheremsha in The Three Sisters. The barrage of insults has a physical impact
on the hysterical, collapsing characters. Vsevolod Meyerhold, always
attuned to the corporeal and grotesque, used fainting as a performative
unit or rhythmical beat of his production of Chekhov’s vaudevilles
titled Swoons.
Western comedy has habitually mocked verbal excess as an expression of
social pretense or stupidity: the babbler, the gossiper, the speechifier are
among the stock characters appearing in Shakespeare, Molière, Sheridan,
and so on. Gertrude’s rebuke to Polonius in Hamlet, “More matter, with
less art,” points to the theatrical provenance of the “wretched fool,” who
can never state things briefly or clearly. The same plea is often addressed,
almost verbatim, to Gaev in The Cherry Orchard, who will talk about
anything, be it an old bookcase, Mother Nature, or the decadents. In the
fluid verbal sphere of Chekhov’s plays, long speeches are doubly suspect,
even when they come with a lot of matter. Astrov’s lecture to Elena over
the map in Uncle Vanya has been hailed as a pioneering expression of
ecological concerns, which it is, yet within a blatantly wrong theatrical
situation: Elena is torn between her own attraction to Astrov and her
promise to act on her stepdaughter’s behalf, and when Astrov finally
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realizes that Elena’s mind is elsewhere, he switches to playing the lover. In
The Three Sisters, Vershinin, on the contrary, is a lover who wants to be a
talker: he uses every pretext to plunge into a speech and before his
departure apologizes for having talked too much. Yet the regret is instantly
overcome by an old (stage) habit: “What more can I say to you in parting?
What can I philosophize about?” Immoderate speech in Chekhov signals
not a violation of decorum but an imposition – both on others and on
stage time.
Theater has always thrived on emotionally charged, vehement scenes
that allow the actors to rise to the height of their powers and the spectators
to experience passion or terror. Chekhov, wary of posturing and acting
clichés, removes such anticipated, climactic moments from view: Treplev’s
suicide, Tuzenbach’s duel, the auction in The Cherry Orchard all happen
offstage. Nevertheless, Chekhov’s scripts allow for quite a few stormy
occasions. The presentation of Konstantin’s play ends in a theatrically
vivid scandal that is superior to the monotonous play itself. The family
gathering in Act III of Uncle Vanya, which culminates in Vanya’s shooting
at his brother-in-law, and Ranevskaya’s unruly party in Act III of The
Cherry Orchard, which leads up to Lopakhin’s announcement of the
purchase of the estate, belong among classical stage enactments of disrup-
tion and shock, such as King Lear’s wrecked ceremony of giving away his
daughters and kingdom. Intimate moments can also be intense: Masha
and Vershinin’s farewell borders on hysteria, and Vershinin has to ask Olga
to pull her sobbing sister away from him. Arkadina’s performance in a
similar situation, as she pleads with her lover Trigorin not to leave her, is
both sincere and professionally skillful: we are clearly watching a scène à
faire (which the actress concludes with an aside, “Now he’s mine,”
undoubtedly borrowed from her repertoire). This self-conscious acting
does not diminish, and perhaps even enhances, our pleasure in savoring it.
Among the sources of Chekhov’s theatrical imagination, Shakespeare is
both the most powerful and the most altered. Shakespearean reminiscences
appear in every Chekhov play: even Lopakhin, who keeps decrying his
ignorance, quotes Hamlet in The Cherry Orchard – admittedly, in a
garbled vulgar way. Hamlet informs the metatheatrical plane of The
Seagull, whose characters are given to quoting Shakespeare’s play and
reenacting, both knowingly and not, some of its famous scenes, such as
the so-called closet scene between mother and son. Chekhov’s (admittedly
odd) designation of the play that ends with a suicide as a comedy may be
read as a disavowal of Treplev’s tragic Hamletian ambition. Some allusions
are purely visual: during the fire in The Three Sisters, Natasha, one of
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Chekhov’s few more straightforward villains, crosses the stage with a
candle in sinister silence, prompting an association with Lady Macbeth.
Chekhov realized his tributes to Shakespeare’s archetypal characters and
conflicts within a drastically different dramatic system. In particular,
Chekhov’s questioning of the centrality and (self-)importance of the
protagonist, diminished and placed among a polyphonic ensemble of
dramatis personae, subverted one of the main assumptions of not only
classical but also much of contemporary drama. It is telling that the
“mousetrap” scene in Hamlet inspired Chekhov’s own, equally inter-
rupted, play within a play in The Seagull, not as a means of catching the
conscience of the king but as a way of bringing all characters together in a
shared space and time. When the characters reconvene in Act IV and sit
down to play lotto, the togetherness, the trope of playing, and the
conversation all refer back to the summer performance in Act I. Such
moments of human community, not necessarily experienced by the vari-
ously distracted characters, occur in every Chekhov play: the taking of
photographs in the first and last acts of The Three Sisters is another such
framing device. In a sense, Chekhov’s theater is at least as much about the
protagonist as it is about the chorus, even when members of the chorus
struggle to become protagonists.
А salient aspect of the Western tradition that is absent from Chekhov’s
plays is the Aristotelean “recognition” or discovery of a secret – murder,
assumed identity, illicit love – that had shaped drama from Sophocles
onward. Unlike the noble and ignoble heroes of Shakespeare, Molière,
and Ibsen, Chekhov’s characters do not discover or hide secrets, but they
are in thrall to the past and fond of keepsakes and souvenirs. Memory in
Chekhov is not only rhetorical (“Oh my youth!”) but also material, objec-
tified in such symbolic properties as the clock that the three sisters inherited
from their mother or the hundred-year-old bookcase in The Cherry Orchard.
In the nineteenth century, mass production of melodramas made unknown
parentage a popular kind of mystery, and a locket with a lock of hair or a
portrait its main container. Chekhov’s contemporary Oscar Wilde travestied
the overused prop in The Importance of Being Earnest (), where the
locket assumes the form of a handbag with inscribed locks and a lost baby.
A pointedly muted echo of the melodramatic plot is discernible in The
Seagull and The Three Sisters, in which two young women, Masha and Irina
respectively, may not be the daughters of their assumed fathers. However,
the possibility is never articulated and remains intuitive. Nobody learns (or
perhaps even knows) the truth. The inscribed medallion that Nina gives
Trigorin in The Seagull is not a memento of but an invitation to a love affair:
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the overtly erotic “charming thing,” which Trigorin kisses upon receiving,
negotiates a transition from ignorance or innocence to knowledge in the
biblical rather than Aristotelean sense.
Chekhov’s sense of his theatrical lineage informs some of the references
to his predecessors that appear in his plays, although these intertextual
links can also be more general. In The Three Sisters, the literary over-
saturation of the dramatic text, and of the characters’ minds, gestures
toward a set of values and perceptions shared by the Russian intelligentsia.
The writers more immediately relevant to Chekhov’s idea of theater are
Alexander Ostrovsky (–) and Ivan Turgenev (–). The
former, the single major Russian playwright of the nineteenth century, is
not well known outside of Russia for a number of reasons, but the extent
of his contribution to the national dramatic idiom and theater practice is
comparable to Chekhov’s. Both Ostrovsky and Turgenev are explicitly
named in Uncle Vanya, and the play’s subtitle, “Scenes from Country
Life,” indicates generic continuity. Borrowed from Ostrovsky’s play The
Ward (), the subtitle also refers to Turgenev’s A Month in the Country
(). Born into a lower middle-class, originally peasant family, Chekhov
had a personal and artistic attachment to the old gentry manor, the favorite
locale of his dramas, which he inherited from his dramaturgical fathers.
The “country” in Chekhov does not serve as a bucolic alternative to the
main space of dramatic action, as it does in such standard contemporary
plays as La Dame aux Camelias () by Alexandre Dumas fils (a
predictable part of Arkadina’s repertoire). A month in the country can
delight visitors, like Arkadina and Trigorin, but permanent residents tend
to find it less than arcadian, indeed suffocating. The elsewhere in
Chekhov’s plays – Doctor Dorn’s Genoa, Ranevskaya’s Paris, the three
sisters’ Moscow – is often urban and always verbal: the map of Africa that
hangs in Uncle Vanya’s study is a rare, random, and poorly visible material
messenger from the outside world.
Arrivals and departures, which form the structural backbone of all
Chekhov’s major plays, have traditionally served as a pretext for unfolding
and then wrapping up the dramatic plot: Hamlet starts with the hero’s
return home from Wittenberg. However, in Chekhov, Hamlet would have
traveled back to the university in Act IV, and the unhappy residents of
Elsinore would have been left to go on with their lives. The Seagull, Uncle
Vanya, and The Three Sisters all end with a stage tableau of those who stay
and, in Sonya’s words, “will live through a long, long chain of days and
endless evenings.” It is only in Chekhov’s last play that the home, the
cherry orchard itself, comes to an end together with its oldest inhabitant.
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Ineffectual and indecisive Chekhovian departures maintain the peculiar
national tradition of inconclusive and, conventionally speaking, flawed
endings that crown the comedies of Griboedov, Gogol, Turgenev, and
(occasionally) Ostrovsky. A Month in the Country, a sad comedy of
romantic pursuits and rivalries, ends in an eruption of sudden departures,
which crush the main heroine and baffle her unsuspecting husband. In
Turgenev’s play, the marriages, hastily arranged out of desperation or
cynical convenience, prefigure the generic failure of marriage that marks
(or mars) The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. In the latter,
Lopakhin’s never-realized proposal to Varya may be seen as a bitter
corrective to a happy ending – or as an emancipatory act finally liberating
the former serf from the grip of his masters.
In many ways, Ostrovsky’s The Forest () is to The Cherry Orchard
what Hamlet is to The Seagull. Ostrovsky’s satirical comedy is set on a
country estate gradually squandered by a middle-aged licentious widow.
Chekhov emulates the cohesion of the historical, social, and theatrical in
Ostrovsky’s play but not its clever, well-made plot, which remains beyond
the reach of Chekhov’s idle characters, who are incapable of enacting the
classical comedy of masters and servants. In The Forest, one of the master-
servant pairs is fake, impersonated by two itinerant actors, the tragedian
Neschastlivtsev (Unhappy) and the comedian Schastlivtsev (Happy), a duet
beloved in Russian culture. Ostrovsky ingeniously uses the ancient scheme
of assumed identity to place the two impostors inside the dramatic situation
yet also have them observe it from the outside. In The Cherry Orchard,
Charlotta occupies this liminal space: her eccentric gestures and magic tricks
contain ironic and sharp comments on the play’s action. An extremely
suggestive theatrical persona, Charlotta has something in common with
Shakespearean fools, as well as with the mysterious characters of German
Romanticism (brought up by a German lady, she quotes E. T. A. Hoffman).
In the twentieth century, Charlotta’s ageless, petite, androgynous figure has
been sometimes identified with Chaplin’s tragicomic mask.
Chekhov’s superior knowledge of theatrical traditions and conventional
devices is matched by a subtle sensitivity to the intrinsic needs of live
performance. His imports and quotations from the expressive tradition of
the stage are sometimes affectionate, sometimes skeptical, but always
significant. Rather than erase or merely parody customary tools and tricks
of the trade, Chekhov develops their dramatic potential and invests old
forms with new meanings.
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Modern Theater
Resonances and Intersections
Julia Listengarten
In his foundational study of the theater of the absurd (), Martin
Esslin points to the profound influence of Anton Chekhov’s dramatic
writing on European absurdist playwrights. He suggests that Chekhov’s
dramatic innovations – such as indirect dialogue, characters’ suppression of
“real feelings behind meaningless politeness,” and the “absurd proposi-
tions” that they believe in wholeheartedly and defend fervently – laid the
groundwork for post–World War II experimental dramatic writing that
contemplated the senselessness of the human condition. Later, Robert
Brustein, Richard Gilman, and Laurence Senelick considered the reso-
nance of Chekhov’s writing in Samuel Beckett’s plays – in how both
writers use discontinuity and disruption, and in their characters’ ability
to “hold back the darkness,” to endure despite their overwhelming feeling
of entrapment and loss. Writing his full-length plays in the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries, Chekhov was implicitly in dialogue
with other major European playwrights of his time, namely, Henrik Ibsen,
August Strindberg, and Maurice Maeterlinck. Yet the unique theatricality
of his plays transcends realist, naturalist, and symbolist conventions of the
period, placing his work outside the existing canon and anticipating
theatrical sensibilities to come in the twentieth century. Through the
critical lenses of polyphony and precarity, this essay traces Chekhov’s
engagement with innovative dramatic forms of modern theater and
explores his points of departure from his contemporaries.
Chekhov was familiar with the works of his European contemporaries
and often commented on them in letters to friends and fellow artists. He
spoke of Ibsen as his favorite writer and expressed his admiration for The
Wild Duck (), which undoubtedly inspired The Seagull (), but he
referred to Doctor Stockmann (An Enemy of the People) () as a “con-
servative” play and lamented that it remained in the Moscow Art Theater
repertoire for too long. While in Yalta, he traveled to Sevastopol in
to see the Moscow Art Theater productions of Ibsen’s Hedda
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Gabler () and Gerhart Hauptmann’s Drayman Henschel (), and
he encouraged Stanislavsky to include Maeterlinck’s symbolist drama in
the theater’s season.
When Chekhov completed his first full-length play, Ivanov (),
realism and naturalism were well established in Europe. Ibsen had trans-
formed dramatic writing by rejecting romantic sentimentality, infusing his
plays with psychological complexity, and constructing socially driven
conflicts that raised difficult questions about moral responsibility and
power dynamics in bourgeois society. Challenging the hero-villain binary
that pervaded romantic tragedies and melodrama, Ibsen created rich
characters who face the ghosts from their past, confront the self-deception
and hypocrisy of others, and disrupt social norms. Nora, in A Doll’s House
(), revolts against the patriarchal order by refusing her matrimonial
responsibility; her journey is one of self-discovery and self-affirmation.
Conversely, Hedda, in Hedda Gabler (), is unable to break the bonds
of her unbearable bourgeois existence; feeling suffocated and trapped, she
turns to self-destruction and suicide.
Similarly to Ibsen’s plays, exploration of character psychology is at the
heart of Chekhov’s drama. His characters love, despair, discover their
limitations, mourn their unrealized potential, and long for a brighter
future. Chekhov’s plays, however, are devoid of the causality and linearity
of Ibsen’s dramatic form, which embraces climactic development and
cause-and-effect relationships, and employs external plot devices inherent
in the well-made play to propel action. Instead of building a linear
progression of events and tracing a character’s psychological journey to
explore a social issue, Chekhov’s plays offer a multidimensional landscape
of voices, stories, and viewpoints in nonlinear fashion. Amid interrupted
conversations or elided responses, his characters express divergent points of
view and display different reactions to the same event. In The Seagull, the
characters contemplate their varied perspectives about art, love, and work,
which reveal their personal anxieties but also inform the intersecting
trajectories of their lives in the ensuing action. Whereas Nina is in awe
of Trigorin’s success as a writer and sees beauty and inspiration in art,
Trigorin considers his work never-ending drudgery and views his art with
cynicism and deprecation. While Nina loves selflessly and fervently, with
dangerous overabundance, Trigorin mourns the missed opportunity to
experience “young love [. . .] that sweeps you into a world of dreams,”
and Treplev, for his part, sees love as part of artistic glory, inseparable from
inspiration and success. In The Cherry Orchard (), the characters share
conflicting memories of their pasts, and their emotions over the sale of the
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orchard range from despair to bewilderment, from sorrowful acceptance to
joyful anticipation. Ranevskaya bemoans the loss of her family estate, her
“dear house” and “old ancestor.” Lopakhin rejoices over his success and
self-affirmation, declaring that “the cherry orchard is mine! Mine!” Firs, a
loyal servant and a former serf, reminisces about the stability of old days,
when the social order was enforced and the cherries were put to good use.
Anya and Petya, having no reservations about their disrupted lives, look
forward with youthful energy and optimism.
Chekhov’s interest in the multiplicity of perspectives and emotional
responses resonates with Strindberg’s propensity to upset the linear cau-
sality of realistic drama. In his preface to Miss Julie (), an exemplar of
naturalist theater, Strindberg proposes a more complex approach to dra-
matic composition by stressing the multitude of character motivations and
insisting on creating characters who are “split and vacillating.” He asserts
that “an incident in real life is usually the outcome of a whole series of
deep-buried motives” and rejects the coherent conception of a character,
offering instead characters “who are agglomerations of past and present
cultures, scraps from books and newspapers, fragments of humanity.”
Both Miss Julie, the troubled daughter of a local count, and Jean, the
count’s seemingly faithful butler, exemplify this lack of a coherent char-
acter model. Their actions, which result in a disastrous sexual encounter,
are driven by a myriad of psychological and sociological causes.
While Chekhov and Strindberg shared an interest in underscoring
multiplicity and complexity in their works, Chekhov’s plays embody a
considerably richer and more poetic multivocal sensibility than naturalist
theater ever contemplated. His polyphonic approach, which generated
nonlinear dramatic action composed of rhythmic sequences of continuity
and rupture, stillness and turmoil, quiet contemplation and outburst,
developed gradually, as the playwright moved from focusing on one central
character to an ensemble of people whose lives intertwine in an often-
unpredictable manner. Ivanov revolves around the vagaries and inner
struggles of the title character: his inability or unwillingness to care for his
dying wife, his romantic involvement with an impressionable young
woman, and the deep-seated self-loathing that leads to his suicide. By
contrast, Chekhov’s last play, The Cherry Orchard, offers a multilayered
dramatic field that includes a large group of characters with equally signif-
icant dramatic function and allows for multiple encounters, exchanges, and
fleeting conflicts simultaneously in the same narrative frame.
The absence of the hero/protagonist in Chekhov’s plays disperses dra-
matic action, disrupts the plot, generates discontinuity in dialogue, and
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accentuates the moral ambiguity of characters’ behaviors. Echoing the
Strindbergian notion that a character should be “split and vacillating,”
Chekhov further transcends the focus of late nineteenth-century social
drama on characters’ moral quests and captures a multitude of ambivalent
personalities at moments of heartbreak or life-changing decisions.
Arkadina in The Seagull loves her son but vigorously competes with him
for success and admiration. As she bandages Konstantin’s head after his
suicide attempt, she tells him that he has no talent and his work is empty
and pretentious. Trigorin cynically ruins Nina’s innocence but teaches her
a crucial lesson about perseverance and dedication to work. Landowners
Ranevskaya and Gaev cherish their memories of their family estate but
make no effort to save it from bankruptcy. Lopakhin, a successful busi-
nessman and son of a serf, admires Ranevskaya and is sorry for the
impending loss of her home, but he has no qualms about triumphantly
announcing the sale of the estate that he himself has purchased and intends
to turn into a profitable enterprise.
Eschewing the didactic moralizing of late nineteenth-century social
drama, Chekhov adopted polyphony as a feature of his dramatic narrative
to decenter his authorial voice and encapsulate life’s moments objectively
and poetically. His characters present opposing views, but no position is
granted a privileged status or bears any shadow of endorsement from the
author. Ruminating about the need to work in Uncle Vanya (), Elena
and Sonya declare their different positions about life, but they do it
without personal resentment or harsh judgment. Professor Serebryakov’s
beautiful but idle wife Elena shares a fleeting regret about the meaning-
lessness of her existence yet rejects the idea of contributing to a greater
good: “What work? [. . .] I don’t know how to do that, and it doesn’t
interest me.” A kind and generous soul, Sonya finds satisfaction in dedi-
cating her life to work and helping others. “Don’t be bored, darling,” she
implores her mother in law, “Laziness, idleness – they’re contagious.”
Philosophic exchanges about time and space, present and future, stasis and
evolution in Three Sisters () lead to heated arguments, but they remain
unresolved. Contemplating the complexities of life – “difficult, full of
unknowns, and happy” – Tuzenbach is convinced that “life will be the
same not only in two hundred years, but in a million years.” Vershinin,
conversely, expresses his belief in a brighter future, musing that “[life is]
changing in front of our eyes. In a century or two, [. . .] people will live in a
new way, a happier way.”
Described by Mikhail Bakhtin (in his analysis of Dostoevsky’s prose) as
“a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses,”
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polyphony in Chekhov’s plays is a poetic device and a way of understand-
ing reality. It imbues objectivity with artistry but also welcomes the
multitude of interconnecting stories in a play’s dramatic action and allows
for the multiplicity of beliefs and feelings that characters express directly
and indirectly – through unfinished sentences, subtle physical gestures,
uncomfortable silences, and awkward jokes. This form of polyphony
disrupts the focus on the causality and materiality of realism and natural-
ism by redirecting attention from the explicit to the hidden and unspoken.
Resonating with symbolist drama, Chekhov’s plays weave the poetic and
implicit to transcend outward appearances and convey deeper meanings
about the precarity of the human condition. Among European symbolists,
Maeterlinck in particular argued against portraying “extraordinary and
violent adventures” in theater and instead saw the essence of drama in
locating “a terrible unknown” that permeates the characters’ daily lives.
In his theatrical manifesto “The Tragical in Daily Life,” he posited that
“there is a tragical element in the life of every day that is far more real, far
more penetrating, far more akin to the true self [. . .] than the tragedy that
lies in great adventure.” In his playwriting, Chekhov, too, sought to look
inward, beyond “great adventure,” by capturing the moments in his
characters’ lives when they simply drink tea, play cards, and perform magic
tricks, often unaware of something unavoidably tragic happening to them
at that very instant. The melancholy sound of a breaking string from a
distance at the end of The Cherry Orchard reverberates as a poignant
expression of life’s ambiguity and unpredictability that operate beyond
the rational and explicable.
Chekhov’s contemporaries also noted the lyrical and mystical aspect of
his plays, as well as the writer’s ability to render life’s trivialities untrivial.
Expanding the bounds of realism and naturalism by invoking the invisible
and inexplicable, Chekhov, however, was not interested in symbolism’s
metaphysical abstractness. Unlike the symbolists, who sought to encapsu-
late the metaphysical and esoteric through supernatural figures, fantastic
dreams, and uncanny images, he revealed the vulnerable and unstable in
human life by exploring the internal life of his characters. Precarity for
Chekhov is much more immediate than the abstract symbolist concept of
the “terrible unknown” that “abides with us,” to quote Maeterlinck. In
addition to accentuating the elusive and ambiguous in everyday life, it is a
concrete, palpable psychological and social condition that fuels his char-
acters’ anxieties about being stranded in a meaningless cycle. Treplev is
caught in a web of self-deprecation and self-doubt. Voinitsky, in Uncle
Vanya, is overwhelmed by his irrelevance and worthlessness. Ranevskaya
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and Gaev are hopelessly stuck in the painful memories of their past, unable
to overcome their apathy and inertia. Andrei Prozorov in Three Sisters,
trapped in a loveless marriage, contemplates the absurdity of existence:
“No one here does anything but eat, drink, sleep and then die. [. . .] Wives
deceive husbands. Husbands lie, pretend to see nothing, hear nothing.
And the children [. . .] too become the living dead.”
As the theme of loss and abandonment threads through Chekhov’s
dramatic writing, precarity operates as a broader category that heightens
characters’ fragility, insecurity, and disillusionment across class, gender,
and age, underscoring fears of not belonging, of dispossession, of becom-
ing discarded and forgotten. Unsure of her lineage or identity, governess
Charlotta in The Cherry Orchard wistfully jokes about her itinerant expe-
riences and homelessness. The Vershinin family has no home after the fire
that ravages the town in Three Sisters. Voinitsky and Sonya are threatened
with the loss of their country home after Serebryakov proposes to sell it
and invest the money into interest-bearing funds. Having surrendered the
family estate, Ranevskaya fails to find a better solution than to return to
her self-imposed exile. Anfisa, an aged and frail nanny who took care of the
Prozorov family for thirty years, is about to be dismissed and thrown away
by insolent Natasha: “I’m getting feeble – go away, they say. Where do you
want me to go? Where can I go?” At the end of The Cherry Orchard,
faithful Firs is discarded, forgotten by the family in the abandoned house:
“It’s locked. They’re gone. They’ve forgotten me . . . Doesn’t matter . . .
Rest here . . .”
Rooted in the increasing alienation that pervaded the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries and that was powerfully reflected in the
works of modern playwrights, precarity in Chekhov’s plays often emerges
from the characters’ acceptance of the inevitable, but also from their
grotesque incongruity and self-deprecating irony, qualities which enhance
their fragility and otherness. This perception of precarity, however, differs
from the heightened sense of social estrangement that compels the char-
acters in realist and naturalist drama to challenge patriarchal norms (as in
A Doll’s House) or transgress the class hierarchy (as in Miss Julie). To
underscore the delicate, the vulnerable, and the unstable, Chekhov builds
on the tragicomic quality of his earlier one-act plays by creating a string of
characters whose personalities are both ridiculous and tragic in their
absurdity. Chebutykin’s melancholy refrain “ta-ra-ra boom dia, just one
more little day” in Three Sisters blends the drunken doctor’s self-mockery
with his despair over a wasted, purposeless life. Reduced to playing the
fool, ineffectual Gaev professes his love to a little bookcase from his
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childhood. On the brink of losing her livelihood, Charlotta anxiously plays
with an imaginary baby, singing it a lullaby before suddenly tossing the
bundle of clothes on the floor. To impress Ranevskaya, landowner
Simeonov-Pishchik swallows a handful of pills and frivolously washes them
down with kvass. Incensed by Serebryakov’s proposition to sell the estate,
Voinitsky shoots at the professor twice and misses both times. Anticipating
dreadful news from the auction, Ranevskaya invites an orchestra and
throws a dance party for the locals. Lopakhin’s long-awaited marriage
proposal to Varya turns into an uncomfortable conversation about
weather. Absurd propositions shatter moments of serious contemplation.
Disasters are averted, turning into ludicrous manifestations of admiration
or jealousy. Rituals are subverted, and jubilant anticipation becomes
interrupted by the characters’ incongruous behaviors. These moments that
weave the serious with the joyous, desperation with irony, are not intended
to express the characters’ intentional rupture with their social milieux or
generate exaggerated emotional responses; they often appear anticlimactic,
casual, unforeseen, and accidental.
Subversion of expectations, avoidance of conflict, and indirect commu-
nication are among the principal markers of Chekhov’s dramatic writing
that became the foundation for further theatrical experiments in Western
drama. As Elinor Fuchs reminds us, modern drama combines the realist
and modernist lines of critical reading. The former is often framed as “the
illusionist presentation of social and class issues, and [. . .] of psychological
character,” whereas the latter embodies “the allegorical and theatricalist.”
Chekhov’s plays exist at the intersection of these principles. Rooted in
objective representation, they transcend the trivial, the banal, and the
commonplace frequently embedded in the illusionistic presentation of life.
Compelled to capture the depth of humanity beyond the obvious and
rational, however, Chekhov avoids the symbolists’ fascination with allegory
and mysticism or the intentional theatricality that would characterize the
works of Bertolt Brecht or Luigi Pirandello. His theatricality is lyrical,
poetic, and contemplative, focusing on the inner lives of people. Drawing
on the theatrical innovations of his contemporaries – but departing from
dramatic norms and conventions – Chekhov created a groundbreaking
dramatic style that embraces the polyphonic, underscores the precarious,
and anticipates the artistic sensibilities of generations to come.
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Chekhov’s Moscow Art Theater (–)
Sharon Marie Carnicke
Chekhov’s fame as a playwright and the early history of the Moscow Art
Theater (MAT) are inextricably intertwined. By the turn of the twentieth
century, Chekhov had become an influential prose writer, but his plays
had succeeded primarily in provincial theaters outside of Russia’s two
capitals. By the cofounders of the MAT, Vladimir Nemirovich-
Danchenko and Konstantin Stanislavsky, had articulated a broad program
for theatrical reform, but they needed Chekhov’s innovative drama to
showcase the full range of their artistic goals. While the MAT’s premiere
production of A. K. Tolstoy’s Tsar Fyodor Ivanovich in October had
successfully demonstrated the new realist approach to visual design, the
play did not fully support Stanislavsky’s radical ideas on acting. Without
the fledgling MAT, Chekhov might well have given up writing for the
stage. Similarly, without Chekhov, the MAT might have remained a local
Russian theater rather than the international standard bearer for produc-
tion and acting that it became. They clearly needed each other.
Chekhov’s Theatrical Struggles
As a boy, Chekhov developed a passion for theater. After moving to
Moscow for medical school, he built his social life by regularly attending
performances and befriending actors. Just as he had begun his career as a
prose writer with short comic pieces, he began playwriting with one-act
“jokes,” as he called his vaudevilles. Staged widely throughout Russia’s
provinces, Chekhov’s comedies earned a substantial income, prompting
him to advise his older brother Alexander to write a few plays as a
guarantee of financial security.
Chekhov’s first major play, Ivanov, premiered in at a private
theater, the Korsh, in Moscow. Audiences and critics misunderstood the
title character so entirely that they seemed to Chekhov to be reacting to
someone else’s play. After revisions, Ivanov was restaged at the Imperial
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Chekhov’s Moscow Art Theater (–)
Alexandrinsky Theater in St. Petersburg in with similarly disappoint-
ing results. That same year the imperial theaters’ literary committee
rejected Chekhov’s second full-length play, a comedy titled The Wood
Demon, as “a beautiful dramatization of a novella, but not a play.”
The committee’s comparison of The Wood Demon to a novella illus-
trates how Chekhov’s innovations in drama went against the grain of
nineteenth-century theatrical conventions. He rejected action-packed
melodramas told by star actors in favor of stories featuring the subtle
interactions of a tightly knit group of people in ordinary circumstances.
He uses apparently trivial details of quotidian life to reveal the inner lives
of his characters, who are neither heroic nor villainous, but can be
buffoons. He blends comic and tragic moments in ways that confound
traditional dramatic genres.
Undeterred by the committee’s rejection, Chekhov wrote his next play,
The Seagull, calling it “strange” and “terribly out of step with stage
conventions” (W:). The famous comic actress Elizavyeta
Levkeyeva selected The Seagull for her benefit performance at the
Alexandrinsky Theater. While she had entertained her fans with the broad
comedy of Chekhov’s “jokes,” she puzzled and disappointed them by
choosing a work as subtle as The Seagull. On opening night, they booed
the play, and Chekhov fled from the theater in embarrassment. While the
production later garnered a modicum of success with more general audi-
ences, Chekhov vowed never to write for the theater again.
The Founding of the Moscow Art Theater
By Nemirovich-Danchenko (a noble by birth) was a successful
playwright and theater critic. In he had been appointed director of
the only professional actor training program in Moscow, the Philharmonic
Society’s Drama School. Appalled by the artificiality of professional acting,
insufficient rehearsal time, the poor standards of scenic design, and lack of
respect for the playwright, he resolved “to reconstruct [theater’s] whole
life; . . . to change at the root the whole order of rehearsals and the
preparation of plays; to subject the public itself to the regime essential to
our purpose.” In he chose the talented amateur actor Stanislavsky as
his partner for this endeavor.
Born into the wealthy Alexeyev family of factory owners, Konstantin
had been performing for twenty years under the stage name of Stanislavsky
when Nemirovich-Danchenko contacted him about theatrical reform.
Stanislavsky was a striking actor: handsome, over six feet tall, with
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prematurely white hair, a dark mustache, and bushy eyebrows. In , he
had founded the Moscow Society of Art and Literature, which quickly
became a focal point for theater despite its amateur status. The two men
met on June , , in an eighteen-hour meeting that began at a
restaurant, the Slavyansky Bazar, and ended at the Alexeyev estate outside
Moscow. As the next day dawned, they agreed upon a revolutionary plan
for a new kind of theater company. As Stanislavsky recalled: “Our plan for
our new enterprise was radical. We rebelled against the old style of acting,
‘theatricality,’ spurious emotion, declamation, overacting, against stupid
conventions in the staging and the sets, against stardom which marred
ensemble work, against the whole way performances were put together,
and the triviality of the repertoire of the time.”
Theatrical reform at the MAT meant, first of all, creating artistically
unified productions. Nemirovich-Danchenko saw the play as the scaffold-
ing for an artistic vision that would be communicated through all elements
of the production from design to acting. At the MAT sets were no longer
assembled from furniture in stock but were built to support the main idea
of the play. Motley, unmatched assortments of clothes provided by actors
were also replaced with costumes designed to further the production’s
vision. In The Seagull, when the actress Arkadina complains that she
cannot afford to buy her son a new suit because she must provide her
own costumes, she alludes to one of the many realities in professional
theater that the MAT successfully reformed. Because visual unity was so
crucial to reform, the cofounders hired Viktor Simov as their chief
designer. He had previously worked with Stanislavsky’s Society of Art
and Literature and in the coming years would design the productions for
all of Chekhov’s major plays at the MAT.
The MAT also drew on new theatrical developments from France and
Germany, particularly the realism of the French naturalist director André
Antoine at his Théâtre Libre (Free Theater) in Paris and the use of
perspective, the illusion of depth on stage, as developed by the Duke
Georg of Saxe-Meiningen’s court theater. Detailed historical research
insured the realist reproduction of medieval manners and style in Tsar
Fyodor Ivanovich. The troupe even combed the provinces in a private
railway car to find genuine fabrics and objects to bring medieval Russia to
life in their performances. Simov rejected two-dimensional painted back-
drops in favor of credible three-dimensional environments on stage to
frame the actors’ work, and the codirectors used Saxe-Meiningen’s tech-
niques to stage crowd scenes that were stunningly effective.
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Chekhov’s Moscow Art Theater (–)
Restaging The Seagull
When Nemirovich-Danchenko won the coveted Griboyedov Prize for
drama in , he stunned the judges by telling them that they should
have given the award to Chekhov. Nemirovich-Danchenko also realized
that The Seagull, with its innovative dramatic structure and a central
character who calls for theatrical reform, would be perfect for the MAT.
A perceptive critic, he had observed that Chekhov’s plays suffered primar-
ily from conventional productions that did not suit his artistry. After
seeing an production of Uncle Vanya in the Ukrainian city of
Odessa, Nemirovich-Danchenko observed that “the public applauded,
the actors were called before the curtain, but . . . there was nothing of that
new reflection of life which a new poet had brought to his play.” The
Alexandrinsky production of The Seagull had also suffered from a
conventional production.
In April Nemirovich-Danchenko began an aggressive campaign to
persuade Chekhov to give the MAT permission to stage The Seagull. Still
deeply pained by its St. Petersburg premiere, Chekhov refused.
Nemirovich-Danchenko persisted, arguing that the MAT would give the
play “a conscientious production without banalities” and that such a
treatment “with fresh talents, free of routine, will be a triumph of art.”
Chekhov relented in June, and in September Stanislavsky began to prepare
a detailed promptbook that set out, through words and illustrations, all the
elements for the planned production: his interpretations of the story and
characters; the sets and props to be used; the actor’s movements around
the stage; even notations on how many seconds the actors were to hold
kisses and pauses. Nemirovich-Danchenko directed the rehearsals, adjust-
ing Stanislavsky’s plan to the pragmatic realities of the Ermitazh Theater
that they had rented for the MAT’s first season.
The MAT staged The Seagull with great attention to realistic detail.
Drawing inspiration from André Antoine, its three-dimensional sets
looked like real rooms with the fourth wall removed to allow audiences
to eavesdrop on the lives of the characters. Realistic props and costumes
that characterized the roles further anchored the illusion of reality. Even
more stunningly, Stanislavsky exceeded his European models by melding
realism in design with extraordinarily credible acting. He demanded that
each actor create “the human spirit of the role,” a phrase that Stanislavsky
used throughout his career as director and master acting teacher. In The
Seagull actors engaged in quotidian behaviors, like blowing their noses,
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wiping sweat from their faces, and cleaning their teeth and nails. They
appeared oblivious of the audience as they spoke to each other. Sometimes
they even turned their backs on the auditorium, as they did in Act I when
they watched Treplev’s play within a play.
One realist strategy that the directors used for Chekhov’s plays was
pauses in speech. These lapses in conversation matched the many ellipses
that Chekhov uses in his texts to reflect the fact that people do not always
speak their inner thoughts. The codirectors began to refer to these inner
thoughts as “inner monologues,” taking place in the minds of the charac-
ters during the pauses. As Nemirovich-Danchenko explains, “a pause is
not something that is dead, but is an active intensification of experience.”
He likened the spoken lines that emerge from a character’s inner mono-
logue to the tip of an iceberg of thoughts, the majority of which remain
submerged. Literary scholars and actors also call these hidden thoughts
“subtexts.” Pauses soon became a hallmark at the MAT that was frequently
mocked and parodied by its detractors.
The Seagull opened on December , , after a record number of
twenty-four regular and three dress rehearsals. Stanislavsky played
Trigorin, and the cast included his wife Maria Lilina as Masha,
Chekhov’s future wife Olga Knipper as Arkadina, and the future avant-
garde director Vsevolod Meyerhold as Treplev. On opening night,
Nemirovich-Danchenko vividly recalls the tense mood backstage as the
first-act curtain closed:
There was a silence, a complete silence both in the theatre and on the stage,
it was as though all held their breath [. . .]. This mood lasted quite a long
time [. . .] Then suddenly, in the auditorium something happened. It was as
if a dam had burst, or a bomb had exploded – all at once there was a
deafening crash of applause from all: from friends and from enemies.
The performance had made theatrical history, and, to this day, a simple
sketch of a seagull serves as the logo for the MAT. Over the years, the
production of The Seagull was performed sixty-three times on the
MAT’s stage.
Because of illness, Chekhov did not see the MAT production of The
Seagull until after the company’s first theatrical season had closed, when
the actors staged the play for him in an empty, unheated local theater with
no sets and only a few props. He was not particularly impressed, feeling
that the pace of the production was too slow and ponderous due to the
actors’ many pauses in speech.
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Chekhov’s Moscow Art Theater (–)
Chekhov as the Moscow Art Theater’s Resident Playwright
Following the success of The Seagull, Nemirovich-Danchenko and
Stanislavsky assumed that Chekhov would give them another play, but,
unbeknownst to the company, Chekhov had already submitted Uncle
Vanya to their competitor, the Maly Theater. He had significantly revised
and restructured The Wood Demon into the economically elegant Uncle
Vanya by using vaudevillian touches to subvert melodrama. When the
imperial theaters’ literary committee requested major revisions, the
offended Chekhov gave the play to the MAT instead. Stanislavsky again
wrote a detailed promptbook that Nemirovich-Danchenko used for
rehearsals. Stanislavsky played Dr. Astrov, and Knipper played Yelena.
The play opened on October , , in a production that emphasized
the tragic hopelessness of the characters rather than their comic potential,
thus contributing to Chekhov’s reputation for pessimism. Uncle Vanya
appealed greatly to audiences and remained in the theater’s repertory for
performances.
Chekhov had again missed Uncle Vanya’s premiere due to illness, but
this time he saw a full production in the spring of , when the
company toured to Yalta. He was so pleased with the work that he wrote
his next two plays, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, specifically for the
company. The very names of the characters in Three Sisters, in fact, gesture
toward the actors whom Chekhov intended for certain roles. Thus, he
describes Stanislavsky’s height in the name Vershinin (which means “pin-
nacle”) and linguistically winks at Meyerhold’s Germanic roots by naming
his character with the equally Germanic name of Tuzenbach. Chekhov
further solidified his relationship with the MAT in May when he
married Knipper, whom he had first admired during the early rehearsals of
The Seagull. Their marriage was often conducted at a distance, with
Chekhov away for health reasons and Knipper bound to Moscow for
her career.
Rehearsals for Three Sisters began in December , while
Nemirovich-Danchenko was away on family business. Consequently,
Stanislavsky was its sole director. At times, rehearsals were stormy, espe-
cially when Knipper insisted on playing Masha as an adulterous, melodra-
matic heroine. In letters, Nemirovich-Danchenko backed Stanislavsky,
advising Knipper to emphasize Masha’s happiness with having fallen in
love. Chekhov agreed: “My sweet, Masha’s confession in Act III is not
really a confession but a frank conversation. Play it nervously, but not
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despairingly, don’t cry out, smile now and then, and most importantly,
feel the exhaustion of the night. And also, feel you are smarter than your
sisters, or at least that you consider yourself to be smarter.” The produc-
tion premiered on January , , and was performed times
through May , . It was revived for the company’s – tours
to the USA, and in Act I was performed for the gala performance
celebrating the MAT’s thirtieth anniversary. While playing Vershinin for
the gala, Stanislavsky suffered a massive heart attack on stage, bringing his
career as an actor to its end.
Following the premiere of Three Sisters, Nemirovich-Danchenko and
Stanislavsky begged Chekhov for a new play, but given his deteriorating
health, progress on The Cherry Orchard was exceedingly slow. Once
completed, the company’s interpretation clashed with the author’s inten-
tions in a number of ways. When the play was first read to the company,
the actors, men and women alike, wept at its sad story, while Chekhov, for
his part, insisted that he had written a farcical comedy. Nemirovich-
Danchenko and Simov created a realistic staging despite Chekhov’s and
Stanislavsky’s growing interest in symbolism as a viable theatrical style.
Finally, the MAT treated the dispossessed landowners as the play’s central
characters, with Stanislavsky taking the role of Gayev and Knipper the role
of Ranyevskaya, thus turning the play into a lament about the loss of an
estate. Chekhov disagreed. The central characters, in his view, were the
self-made merchant Lopakhin (played by Leonid Leonidov) and the
eccentric governess Charlotta (played by Yelena Muratova). While clashes
over the play are often used to argue that Stanislavsky did not understand
Chekhov’s plays, the truth was more complex, involving the disagreements
inherent in any artistic collaboration and Chekhov’s increasing impatience
with others due to the progress of his illness.
The Cherry Orchard premiered on the author’s last name day, January
, . Thin and weak, Chekhov was helped to the stage to take a bow.
Over the years, the production was performed , times and was
included in the MAT’s – tours to the USA, inspiring a new
generation of American actors. Chekhov died in the following summer
of .
Epilogue
While the collaborative relationship between Chekhov and the MAT
lasted only until the author’s death, its artistic legacy continues to evolve.
The MAT survived the Bolshevik Revolution and Stalinist censorship; it
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Chekhov’s Moscow Art Theater (–)
blossomed during Khrushchev’s so-called “thaw” in Soviet arts and
Gorbachev’s “glasnost”; it faced the stultified atmosphere under
Brezhnev and the commercialization of theater after the fall of the Soviet
Union in . The company now faces new restrictions on art in Putin’s
Russia. During that long history, Chekhov’s plays suffered the normal
vicissitudes of artistic and thematic trends and tastes. The MAT accord-
ingly restaged their productions of Chekhov to suit the times.
Stanislavsky’s and Nemirovich-Danchenko’s original productions of
Chekhov’s plays were performed by the MAT actors well into the first
decades of the twentieth century. Since then, starting in , new pro-
ductions have been mounted in nearly every decade. In the twenty-first
century, Chekhov’s name continues to brand the international reputation
of the MAT for having instituted its broad-ranging theatrical reforms.
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Afterlives
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Soviet Contexts
Radislav Lapushin
Throughout the decades of Soviet culture, there was no single defining
image of Chekhov but rather a multitude of complementary and often
contradictory images. This chapter aims to illuminate, though by no
means exhaustively, something of the vast range of Chekhov’s presence
in the Soviet Union, from official spheres to dissident ones, and through
several major intellectual and artistic voices of the post–World War II era.
Influenced and inspired by Chekhov, these figures, in turn, shaped the
perception of his personality and works for years to come.
In his essay “My Chekhov” (), the émigré writer and sociologist
Alexander Zinovyev (–) recalled his childhood:
It seemed that there was no first acquaintance with Chekhov because
Chekhov had been, as it were, ever present in our life. At any rate, when
as an eleven-year old peasant boy I found myself in a tiny room in a damp
basement in Moscow, I already knew about the fate of Chekhov’s Vanka
Zhukov and wrote letters to my mother in the village which were very
much like Vanka’s letter “to grandfather in the village.” [. . .] I simply could
not escape familiarity with Chekhov’s works [. . .] We studied Chekhov at
school, performed him as part of after school activities, watched him at
theatres and cinema, and listened to outstanding performances based on his
works over the radio and at live shows.
This personal account speaks of how closely, almost intimately, the lives of
ordinary people in the USSR were intertwined with Chekhov’s legacy,
beginning with their early years.
To become a part of this daily life, that is, to be accepted into the Soviet
pantheon of Russian classical literature as its youngest member, Chekhov
needed to pay the price of appropriation by the prevailing ideological
discourse. A landmark of this painstaking process was Vladimir Ermilov’s
influential biography of Chekhov published in the “Lives of Remarkable
People” series in . Ermilov skillfully coined a number of ideologically
rigid formulations that were subsequently plugged into all sorts of genres
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(criticism, journalism, textbooks) by other writers: “creator of the new,
great democratic literature,” “artistic representative of ‘little people,’ their
friend and advocate,” “the new epic hero (bogatyr’) of Russian literature.”
Ermilov’s was a Chekhov who, alongside the revolution’s “stormy petrel”
Maxim Gorky, had “heard the breath of the coming storm.” Similarly,
speaking of Chekhov’s “Ward Six,” Ermilov concluded: “It’s difficult to
overemphasize the social importance of this work’s contribution to the
psychological preparation for the Revolution, the mobilization of all forces
of protest, and the hatred of monarchy.” The book’s rousing coda made
the marriage of Chekhov and the new Soviet life irrevocable and eternal:
“And in our every new victory, there will be seen through his work, his
truth, and his dreams, the bright genius of a simple Russian man, Anton
Pavlovich Chekhov.”
Even in the most rigid political times, however, there remained many
readers able to dissociate their Chekhov from clichés and political slogans
while applying his work to the world around them in a subversive way.
For the Soviet discourse at large, “Ward Six” served as an indictment of
Tsarist Russia and a point of favorable comparison between the “dark”
past and the “bright” present. Conversely, in her conversation with Isaiah
Berlin in , Anna Akhmatova, famously not a fan of Chekhov, used
this story as a secret code allowing her to communicate her situation in
the postwar decade to an outsider. As Berlin recalled, “she told me
something of her experience as a condemned writer: of the turning away
of some whom she considered faithful friends, of the nobility and
courage of others; she had reread Chekhov whom she had once con-
demned so severely, and said that at least in Ward Six he had described
her situation accurately, hers and many others.” The phrase “at least in
Ward Six” bears repeating. Here Akhmatova treats Chekhov, who died in
, as her contemporary, as a writer who could have – and should
have! – known her “situation” ahead of time and who, as she claims,
indeed did. For Akhmatova, prophetic foreknowledge was something to
be expected from a great writer, and Chekhov apparently rose to this
status in “Ward Six.”
Boris Pasternak grew gradually in his appreciation of Chekhov. In
, the then-popular dramatist Alexander Gladkov recorded his con-
versation with Pasternak in Chistopol, where both writers were evacuated
during the war: “For a long time now I have preferred Pushkin to
Lermontov, Chekhov to Dostoevsky and even to Tolstoy.” Soon after
the war, in a letter from May , , Pasternak described the protag-
onist of his work in progress (the future Doctor Zhivago) as “a doctor of
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Soviet Contexts
the kind Chekhov was or could be.” On the pages of the completed
novel, this Chekhovian doctor explains his admiration of his “prototype”:
“What I have come to like best in the whole of Russian literature is the
childlike Russian quality of Pushkin and Chekhov, their modest reti-
cence in such high-sounding matters as the ultimate purpose of mankind
or their own salvation. It isn’t that they didn’t think about these things,
and to good effect, but to talk about such things seemed to them
pretentious, presumptuous.” Zhivago’s (and in this case, it is fair to
say Pasternak’s own) Chekhov could not be more different from
Ermilov’s: “modest reticence,” allegiance to artistic vocation above all
else, and the vocal advocacy of privacy and independence. This Chekhov
is not just opposed to his official image – he exists outside of any kind of
ideological framework, which makes him even more heretic and heroic in
his own discreet way. It is also symptomatic that this Chekhov is assigned
a place right next to Pushkin – the highest possible position in the
hierarchy of Russian literature – and, along with Pushkin, is contrasted
with the other Russian classics (Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky) who
“looked restlessly for the meaning of life, and prepared for death and
drew conclusions.”
Another image of Chekhov from the same period, which did not make
it through the barriers of censorship and thus remained unknown to the
broad Soviet readership until the times of Perestroika, appears in Vasily
Grossman’s epic novel Life and Fate, completed in . Here, Chekhov is
the subject of an intense argument “at tea” among representatives of the
Soviet intelligentsia living in evacuation during the war. One of them,
Madyarov, expresses Grossman’s own vision of his beloved author:
“Chekhov took Russian democracy on his shoulders, the still unrealized
Russian democracy. Chekhov’s path is the path of Russia’s freedom. [. . .]
Chekhov is the bearer of the greatest banner that has been raised in the
thousand years of Russian history – the banner of a true, humane, Russian
democracy, of Russian freedom, of the dignity of the Russian man.”
With his message of freedom and “humane” democracy, Grossman’s
Chekhov is a tragic protagonist of Russian history and, simultaneously, a
one-man political institution and social movement. What a striking vision
of the writer who famously avoided any involvement in politics! The
novel’s unorthodox presentation of Chekhov was, of course, not the main
reason for its banishment in , but it certainly contributed, if we
consider Madyarov’s statement that the State “simply doesn’t understand
Chekhov – that is why it tolerates him.” Several decades later, in his essay
on Chekhov, a similar sentiment would be articulated with respect to the
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later period of Soviet history by a prominent writer of the new generation,
Andrei Bitov: “I was always surprised how our regime permitted classical
Russian literature to exist. None of the dissident texts seemed to me as
disruptive for the regime as this literature.”
The loving, intimate, and almost religious attitude toward Chekhov
characteristic of the intelligentsia at large is well captured in the diary of
Evgeny Schwartz, the iconic dramatist, whose plays, including The Shadow
() and The Dragon (–), couched questions of authoritarian-
ism and freedom in the language of the fairy tale. In , he wrote: “I
love Chekhov. In fact, to say I love him is an understatement. I do not
believe that those people who say they do not like him are real, authentic
people. When people around me speak highly of Chekhov, I feel such
pleasure, as if they are talking about someone dear and close to me,
someone I know on a personal and intimate level.” In his Lectures on
Russian Literature, Vladimir Nabokov offers a strikingly similar account:
“It was quite a game among Russians to divide their acquaintances into
those who liked Chekhov and those who did not. Those who did not were
not the right sort.” Indeed, admiration of Chekhov appeared to be a
common thread between pre- and postrevolutionary Russia as well as
between the Soviet Union and the West.
For Schwartz, as for many others, Chekhov was not just a worshiped
writer but a moral authority of the highest caliber. On May , ,
shortly after Stalin’s death, Schwartz noted in his diary: “We sense lies like
no one else. No one has been tortured by lies like us. That is why I so
deeply love Chekhov, whom God has blessed with the gift to always speak
the truth.” This entry resonates with the famous “program” Chekhov
formulated in his letter to Alexei Pleshcheev from October , : “My
holy of holies is the human body, good health, intelligence, talent, inspi-
ration, love and complete freedom – freedom from violence and lies, no
matter what form these two last may take.”
Chekhov’s prescience was not uncontested among major authors of the
Soviet period. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in The Gulag Archipelago
(–), emphasized the extreme discontinuity between Chekhov’s
Russia and the new Soviet reality of Stalinist purges:
If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing
what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in
forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that
prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings [. . .], not
one of Chekhov’s plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes
would have gone off to insane asylums.
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For Solzhenitsyn, Chekhov’s characters (and by extension, their creator)
appeared helplessly shortsighted and naive in the context of what was to
come. Schwartz, however, established Chekhov’s relevance and prescience
with respect to a different kind of torture – a torture by lies. Chekhov’s
“freedom from violence and lies” served as an antidote and a weapon
against such torture.
Even during the more lenient times of the Thaw and the subsequent
“stagnation,” this “freedom from violence and lies” continued to attract a
new generation of nonconformist writers to Chekhov. In his then-
unpublished seminal essay, “My Chekhov of the Fall and Winter of
: Subjective Notes,” Friedrich Gorenstein (–), reflected on
his “personal” Chekhov, whom he urgently needed at the time surround-
ing the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia:
In life, Chekhov was looking for the real truth, the truth without limits and
up to the minutest detail, the truth, which would be as tangible as an
inescapable boring autumn rain in the Moscow suburbs; he was looking not
for paths to some final great victory ever-disappearing in the misty distance,
but rather for the daily, mundane, yet still great victories that were achiev-
able in our everyday lives.
It is revealing that, at a time “when violence and animosity are running the
show in all the corners of our small planet,” Gorenstein summoned
Chekhov, his refuge and interlocutor, the “Hamlet of Russian prose,” the
writer of “unusual tragic power.”
Unlike Gorenstein, who chose the path of emigration, his contemporary
Yuri Trifonov (–) strove to achieve his artistic goals within the
Soviet system. In his transition from “a Soviet writer to a writer of the
Soviet period,” Trifonov looked up to Chekhov as a guiding light.
“Chekhov radically transformed the realm of form,” wrote Trifonov in
his article “Truth and Beauty”: “he discovered the great power of what is
not fully said.” Trifonov’s biographer is justified in calling this short
article a “literary manifesto of his future art,” though it would be
shortsighted to understand this in the narrow sense – as indicating
Trifonov’s use of various Chekhovian devices and themes: his leaving of
deliberate lacunae for the reader to fill in, or his exploration of the overall
futility of revolutionary ideas. The affinity between these two writers lies
deeper: in their quiet resistance to any kind of dogmatism, whether official
or “liberal”; in the poetic quality of their prose; and in their treatment of
such “eternal topics” as time and memory.
“Eternal topics” is the title of one of Trifonov’s last short stories, part of
his posthumously published cycle The Overturned House. Although, unlike
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Chekhov’s prose, this cycle is overtly personal, it is Chekhovian in its tone
and spirit: “Time is eclipsing the past with an ever-thickening veil, through
which it is impossible to see no matter how hard you try. Because this veil
is within us ourselves”; “Everything is artfully intertwined and if you pull
a thread in the mouth of the river, it will certainly reveal itself and tremble
in the river’s head.” This last passage readily evokes the metaphor of the
“unbroken chain” from Chekhov’s short story “The Student,” which
connects the past and the present: “As soon as one touches one end, the
other end moves” (the title of Trifonov’s article on Chekhov, “Truth and
Beauty,” is also a reference to this story). Similarly, when Trifonov tries to
explain the workings of memory, he does it with the help of Chekhov’s
imagery: “Like an artist, memory selects details. There is nothing integral,
continuous about memory, but it strikes sparks: it sees the neck of a
broken bottle glistening on the dam under the moon as Chekhov’s
Trigorin did when he was describing a summer night.” Moreover, in
one of these stories, Chekhov makes a cameo appearance:
Chekhov could have lived until the war. He would be sitting as an old man
evacuated to Chistopol [where he could have been Pasternak’s neighbor!],
reading newspapers, listening to the radio, eating as best as he could with
food rationing cards, writing something important and much-needed for
that time with his weakening hand, reacting to the liberation of Taganrog.
But how would he have seen his past life left in the twilight of days? His
uncle Vanya? His cut-down orchard? His Olga who dreamed “If only we
could know! If only we could know!” As soon as we come to know
something, it seems to disappear in the fog. After all, by the time of
Chistopol, Anton Pavlovich might have come to know quite a few things
which his poor Olga could not even dare to think of. But then, he had come
to know it – and so what? He still would not know the main thing: how
would the war end? And we know this, too . . .
Trifonov’s living, breathing Chekhov is miles away from both Ermilov’s
“epic hero of Russian literature” and Grossman’s “bearer of the banner of
Russian democracy.” He is simply a man who has passed through time
with dignity and is not exempt from the limitations imposed on human
nature. In the end, perhaps this description is not even as much about
Chekhov as it is about the limits of human foresight and comprehension: if
Chekhov could not know, who could? In any case, it seems that Chekhov
would appreciate this humble image of himself.
Through the decades of the Soviet period, Chekhov remained not
simply a classical author but a living presence in the lives of the era’s most
important cultural figures, for many of whom, as both a writer and a
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person, Chekhov became simultaneously the most approachable and the
most unattainable ideal. Sergei Dovlatov, another famous émigré admirer
of Chekhov, summed it up well in his aphoristic manner: “One can revere
Tolstoy’s mind, delight in Pushkin’s elegance, appreciate the moral quest
of Dostoevsky, the humor of Gogol, and so on. However, it is only
Chekhov whom one wants to resemble.”
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Chekhov in England
Olga Tabachnikova
With his elusiveness, lack of didacticism, and authorial restraint,
Chekhov provides the ideal ground for creative appropriation. Looking
in Chekhov’s perfect mirror, one sees one’s own reflection, reinventing
one’s own Chekhov. For this reason, if Chekhov’s writings are indeed
distinguished by a magic plasticity that absorbs and accommodates
interpreters and their agenda, then looking at national interpretations
can often tell us more about those nations’ cultural imagination than
about the original Chekhovian texts. “The emergence of the English in
the twentieth century as an enlightened public is epitomized in their
response to Chekhov,” wrote the English scholar Stephen le Fleming in
, and it is with this formidable claim in mind that we can trace the
appropriation of the Russian writer by the English. What indeed was
their “response to Chekhov” in the twentieth century, and for that
matter, in the twenty-first?
At the fin de siècle, it was the Bloomsbury Circle that displayed a
particular fascination with Chekhov’s writings. Its members, close in spirit
to their Russian counterparts of the Silver Age, were direct participants in
the crisis of European art and philosophy, the shift to Symbolism and
modernism. As a bridge between the old and the new, it was their agonies
that Chekhov had sensed and depicted so well.
Katherine Mansfield (–), who moved to England from New
Zealand, her husband John Middleton Murry (–), and the even
more famous Virginia Woolf (–) spoke about Chekhov with the
utmost enthusiasm. Mansfield especially treasured, as unique features of
Chekhov’s style, his honesty and precision, his objectivity and succinct
elegance of form. All her life Chekhov remained for her a teacher, a secret
friend, almost an idol. This admiration was so pronounced that not only in
her writing technique but also (according to some reproachful reviews) in
her plots, one hears a distinct Chekhovian echo. John Middleton Murry,
another admirer of Chekhov’s poetic lucidity, criticized English stagnancy
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Chekhov in England
and superficiality, and praised Russian spirituality: “A century of bitter
necessity has taught that nation that the spirit is mightier than the flesh,
until those eager qualities of soul that a century of social ease has almost
killed in us are in them well-nigh an instinct.” He deemed Chekhov
unsurpassed, and Chekhov’s “breach with the classical tradition” to be “the
most significant event in modern literature.”
The plays in England had a longer, more arduous journey. Chekhov’s
aesthetic innovations of bringing conflict inward, of conveying moods
rather than actions, and thus depriving his plays of external dramatism
and traditional plots, not to mention of a direct sociopolitical agenda,
made him alien to the British stage. Chekhov’s irony and subtext were lost
in translation, and he was domesticated through sentimental, melodra-
matic performances, through naturalism largely associated with
Stanislavsky, though the Moscow Art Theater did not visit England until
. The plays, however, did acquire some prominent admirers, includ-
ing George Bernard Shaw, who was among the first to recognize in
Chekhov an outstanding European playwright of the new century, and
to identify in Chekhov’s plays a tragicomic core, which was largely
invisible to the early English directors.
Paradoxically, of the English writers of that era, it was D. H.
Lawrence – not at all a fan of Chekhov (whom he called “a second-
hand writer and a Willy wet-leg”) – who, in his bold, out-of-the-box
thinking, sharp wit, and original poetic vision, was, in some peculiar
sense, closer to Chekhov than many of the enthusiastic admirers men-
tioned above. Also, for all his rejection of Chekhov and insensitivity to
Chekhovian irony, Lawrence was nevertheless among those who were
able to appreciate the innovation of Chekhov’s plays. “The plays are
exceedingly interesting. I hope you read them. Tchekhov is a new thing
in drama,” he wrote in a private letter in .
Alongside negative critical voices, for instance denouncing the produc-
tion of The Cherry Orchard in Constance Garnett’s translation by the Stage
Society in as “queer, outlandish, even silly,” there began to appear
positive reviews that recognized the artistic originality of Chekhov’s plays
instead of trying to derive a sociohistorical message. Arnold Bennett wrote
in connection with the same performance that Chekhov “has carried an
artistic convention much nearer to reality and achieved another step in the
revolution of the drama.” Though many claimed that Chekhov belonged
“to a world apart from ours, to a state of mind as foreign to that of Western
Europe as it is possible to find,” some also saw this as an advantage.
“While our Western playwrights, confined within the boundary of the
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attainable, wage a heavy-handed polemic with social institutions and
conventions, the Russians are at grips with the deepest craving of their
inner nature,” George Calderon exclaimed in . It was Calderon who
translated and staged The Seagull for the first time in Britain (in Glasgow as
early as ) and who observed that “a play by Tchekhof is a reverie, not
a concatenation of events.” Calderon was also among the first and few to
recognize the novelty of form in Chekhov’s plays rather than “a kind of
supernaturalism with inexplicable lapses into artificial soliloquies.”
Having watched Calderon’s production, one critic discerned in the play
much “more than Ibsenite symbolism.”
Still, there was an overall disbelief that the English could fall in love with
Chekhov, whose ineffectual heroes suffered from melancholia and helpless
longings. In this respect, the words of Le Fleming are instructive: “The
thank-goodness-we’re-not-like-that syndrome slides uncomfortably close
to jingoism in these pre–First World War comments on Chekhov’s
characters. The originality of Chekhov for an English audience lay at least
partly in his demand that they recognize precisely that they were like that –
an admission not easy for the builders of empire.”
World War I removed such barriers. Chekhov’s emphases on loss,
disillusionment, and nostalgia and the tragic comedy of his plays sud-
denly became native for England. As Middleton Murry wrote in ,
“today we feel how intimately Tchekov belongs to us,” and D. S.
Mirsky issued an even more general statement in : “To the stripped
and outcast mankind of today, Chekhov is the arch-seducer.” In ,
The Times described the London Lyric Theatre’s Cherry Orchard as “a
play of atmosphere, of mood, of those vague feelings which we English
are reluctant to express and hesitate to acknowledge even to ourselves.
[. . .] We may say to comfort ourselves, ‘Oh, but we are not so futile as
these Russians’; yet it seems we have enough in common with them to
feel the effect of Tchehov’s picture.” From their initial perplexity at the
lack of a clear moral message, the English gradually came to appreciate
Chekhov’s universally human appeal and novel artistic form. It can be
said to have taken at least as long in Russia, where Nemirovich-
Danchenko spoke in the s of his theater’s failure to grasp the full
meaning of Chekhov’s plays, his stylistic subtlety and unusual delicacy of
forms: “There was simply a misunderstanding of Chekhov, of his subtle
writing, of the tender silhouettes of his style. [. . .] Chekhov perfected his
realism to the level of symbol, and it was for a long time impossible for
theatre to grasp that delicate texture of his oeuvre; maybe theatre
attempted to grab him with too crude hands.”
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Chekhov in England
The first encounter of “English” and “Russian” Chekhovs on the stage
finally occurred in during the Moscow Art Theater’s first visit to
England, followed by subsequent tours in and , with perfor-
mances of the plays. This cultural encounter substantially enriched and
even transformed British theater productions of Chekhov’s works. From
appropriating Chekhov and portraying his heroes as essentially English
decadent aristocrats submerged in sentimental nostalgia, from seeing him
as a social prophet fighting for humanity, a shift was made to a tougher,
stronger, more optimistic – and more comedic – Chekhov. This meeting
helped the English to free themselves from the oppressive monopoly of
viewing Chekhov through the lens of Stanislavsky and naturalism. As
Cynthia Marsh has observed, until then Stanislavsky had been misinter-
preted in the West, and Chekhov had been misunderstood; naturalism had
won by displacing theatricality; the element of comedy had been sup-
pressed, and Chekhov’s tragicomedies had been turned into romantic
tragedies.
The second half of the twentieth century and, even more so, the first
two decades of the twenty-first, witnessed a great diversity of theatrical
interpretations of Chekhov in the UK. In the words of one scholar,
“Marxist Chekhov, postmodern Chekhov, postcolonial Chekhov: all these
readings surged from the early s onwards, reflecting the social trans-
formations of the country and the flexibility of the Russian author’s plays
to encompass different perspectives within their characters and plots.”
Indeed, among the multiplicity of rewritings of Chekhov’s plays to suit
various cultural and sociopolitical agendas, a recent production “has taken
the characters of ‘Three Sisters’ and relocated them from provincial Russia
to Nigeria between and during Biafra’s attempted secession.”
In his review about Inua Ellams’s remake of Chekhov’s famous play,
Michael Billington opines, “The result is a startlingly vivid account of
the civil war and a direct assault on British neo-colonialism. I just wish
Ellams had been less faithful to Chekhov.” A striking “mixture of
conservative, feminist, neo-colonial and postmodern understandings of
Chekhovian dramaturgy” has been characteristic of the contemporary
English theater where Chekhov himself has become a character – in a
Drum Theatre production with the telling name Chekhov in Hell –
who wakes up in our time and proceeds to lay bare the madness of twenty-
first-century Britain.
Yet, despite this somewhat free, if not frivolous, handling of Chekhov’s
legacy, there exists a certain set image of Chekhov in the English-speaking
world. The English literary critic James Wood describes Chekhov as “the
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perfect literary Englishman – a writer of the religion of no religion, of
instincts rather than convictions, a governor of ordinary provinces whose
inhabitants may be unhappy or yearning for change, but who eventually
learn to calm down and live by the local laws.” In this vein, D. S. Mirsky,
back in , assigned to Chekhov an “unusually complete rejection of
what we may call the heroic values,” which in his eyes was responsible for
the writer’s popularity in England. Wood, however, disputes this charac-
terization, which in his view implies a tendency toward the prosaic,
whereas he finds in Chekhov a good deal of the unconventional, even
brutal, despairing, and bitterly comic.
This begs the question of what constitutes heroism and heroic values.
Could heroism be concealed as much in the courage of acceptance and
resignation as in struggle and non-surrender? The Russian writer Fazil
Iskander, through the mouth of one of his characters, compared Chekhov
and Byron: “Byron is a singer of courage, but always in front of spectators
and for spectators. Chekhov, on the other hand, is a writer of delicately
and deeply concealed inner courage. Byron is externally heroic, but inter-
nally simple and monotonous. Chekhov, on the contrary, is externally
simple, but internally diverse and heroic in a hidden way.” By the same
token, it seems that for Katherine Mansfield Chekhov ultimately served as
a courageous antidote against universal necessity: “But I really suffered
such agonies from loneliness and illness combined that I’ll never be quite
whole again . . . Chekhov would understand: Dostoevsky wouldn’t. [. . .]
Chekhov has known just exactly this that I know. I discover it in his
work – often.”
Although any generalization regarding national cultural constants must
be handled with extreme care, Donald Rayfield seems to be right in
pointing out that the English affinity to Chekhov owes much to their
mutual propensity for understatement, which is central for the English
national character. What, after all, is English etiquette – the cult of good
manners, behind which there is reserve and reticence – if not the rift
between text and subtext, so typical of Chekhov? Chekhov’s agnosticism,
moreover, his status as a trained doctor and a keen gardener, all sit well
with traditional “Englishness,” as does his deep respect for the right to
privacy. In Russian, there is no word for “privacy,” no concept of a
“personal bubble.” Anna Akhmatova’s tragic notion of a “sacred borderline
in human closeness,” which can never be overcome between people, is in
English culture especially visible and untouchable, evocative of respect and
understanding rather than sadness and pain. This sacred line for Chekhov
is natural and clearly marked; one can even venture to say that all his works
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are about this insuperable line between people. His outstanding sobriety,
almost alien to the maximalist and utopian Russian cultural tradition, his
authorial ability for self-control, for remaining sober even in the most
drunken moments of life – all these are undoubtedly resonant with
English sensibilities.
Stylistically too, Chekhov’s famous brevity exists not only as a “sister of
talent” (to use his own celebrated phrase) but also as a daughter of the
same extreme sobriety:
Observing how Chekhov crossed out everything superfluous, aiming for the
utmost brevity, his friends remarked: “His manuscripts should be taken
away from him, otherwise he will leave in his stories only that they were
young, fell in love with each other, then got married and became unhappy.”
Chekhov replied to this, “But listen, this is precisely how it is in reality.”
Notably, Chekhov marked the shift from the introspective individualism
of a Romantic hero to the calm and sober individualism of “a civilized
European,” who chooses individual freedom and independence of mind.
To the agonies of tormented puritanism, with its struggle between body
and soul, he opposed the right of the individual – so little familiar to
Russian culture – to private life and personal mystery: “All personal life
rested on secrecy, and possibly it was partly on that account that civilized
man was so nervously anxious that personal privacy [lichnaya taina, or
personal secrecy] should be respected” (W:–).
It is thus not surprising that Chekhov was “for many intellectuals” in
England “a focal point of discussion, the catalyst for their reassessment of
personal values and attitudes to life.” In the words of English scholar
Stephen le Fleming, Chekhov “came to be seen as the personification of a
civilized outlook.” Equally in Russia, Andrei Bitov singled out Pushkin
and Chekhov for “being civilized,” unique in their ability “to transcend the
typically Russian abyss between artistic culture and civilization.” In this
light, Chekhov’s apparent recoil from the “cursed” questions of existence is
deceptive, for he simply approached them in a different way: not suffering
from the scary grandeur of the Idea, nor from the idiosyncrasy and chaos of
the Russian revolutionary consciousness, he revealed the sublime in the
mundane. In a nutshell: “While people are having lunch, just having
lunch, their happiness is moulded and their lives get shattered.” By the
same token, the English too are “distracted by the current private interests,
[. . .] and now, this private matter turns out to be of general concern and,
like apples removed from the tree to ripen, keeps filling of itself in posterity
with ever greater sweetness and meaning,” as Boris Pasternak’s Doctor
Zhivago thought precisely of Chekhov and Pushkin.
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In a sense, Chekhov left to us the contours of our inner lives and filled
the rest with a silence full of potentiality, a God-like silence implying our
free will. In this the “English” Chekhov is akin to the “Russian” one, as a
mirror, a litmus test, a spiritual compass. Using his template and creatively
appropriating it, any culture – including the Russian or the English – truly
encounters and even rediscovers itself. For it is into these gaps, full of
silence, that we can breathe our own life, our meanings and interpreta-
tions. This is why Chekhov’s works for us never age, for we become their
cocreators; through them we recreate our own fate.
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The American Stage
James N. Loehlin
While Chekhov is now ubiquitous in the American theater, it took him a
while to arrive. In the USA, as elsewhere in the West, Chekhov was known
for his narrative fiction well before he became a fixture on the stage.
Though initially dismissed as a Russian decadent, he was recognized in
the early twentieth century as a master of the modern short story, ranking
with Poe and Maupassant. Gaining a foothold on the stage took longer.
Experimental “Little Theatre” groups, outside the commercial Broadway
mainstream, began performing Chekhov’s farces with some success in
. But when one such downtown group, the Washington Square
Players, performed The Seagull in in Marian Fell’s translation, the
play was rejected as too gloomy for US stages. The Nation declared that “it
is hard for an American to take seriously the neurasthenic maunderings” of
Chekhov’s characters, who, the New York Tribune found, “take a purely
Russian delight in being miserable.” Chekhov’s true impact on the
American stage began only in the s, with the tours of the Moscow
Art Theater: visits with such a galvanizing effect on American acting,
playwriting, and stagecraft that their effects are still felt a century later.
In and Stanislavsky toured the Moscow Art Theater com-
pany to Europe and America with a repertoire that included Three Sisters
and The Cherry Orchard, with many cast members, including Olga
Knipper and Stanislavsky himself, playing roles they had originated two
decades before. Stanislavsky felt that the productions were rather old-
fashioned examples of the early Art Theater, and that the plays themselves
were outdated after the momentous changes of the Russian Revolution. In
a letter to Nemirovich-Danchenko, the cofounder of the Moscow Art
Theater (MAT), he admitted to feeling embarrassed playing the tearful
farewell of Vershinin and Masha in Three Sisters: “After all we’ve lived
through, it’s impossible to weep because an officer is going away and his
sweetheart is staying behind.” Americans, however, found that moment
electrifying: “To see it is to feel a knife cut clean through the heart,” wrote
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.
Oliver Sayler. Lee Strasberg, who would create the Actors Studio, wrote,
“The simple reality of that good-bye, of two people clinging to each other,
will stay with me always.” Harold Clurman, a founder of the Group
Theatre, wrote of The Cherry Orchard, “I shall never forget the heartbreak –
not without its humor – when Stanislavsky, as Gayev in the original
production, reached ineffectually for his handkerchief” as the Ranevskys
left their ancestral home. Strasberg and Clurman carried their memories
of the MAT Chekhov productions into their own transformative work in
the American theater.
While the company also performed works by other authors, the
Chekhov productions were the most influential on the US tours, which
visited New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, and half a
dozen other cities. With a total of nearly performances in the USA, the
MAT was seen by thousands of people, and their carefully orchestrated
productions made a huge impression. The plays were performed in
Russian, with audiences dependent on written synopses and translations,
which were offered along with the purchase of tickets. Therefore, it was the
emotional power of the acting, the precision of the staging, and the subtle
interplay of the ensemble that came through most clearly, rather than the
nuances of Chekhov’s writing. But perceptive critics recognized that
Chekhov’s dramaturgy was revolutionary. Stark Young compared
Chekhov to Shakespeare and the Greek tragedians. Noting that
Chekhov, “without saying or doing anything that would not be quite
possible in ordinary life,” achieved “a revelation of the very soul of that
given moment,” Young concluded, “the whole of The Cherry Orchard
remains suspended in one’s experience, an infectious mystery of human
living.” Shortly after his Broadway debut, Chekhov was being ranked
with the world’s greatest dramatists.
Perhaps the longest-lasting impact of the MAT tours was on American
acting style. In conjunction with the visit, American producer Morris Gest
arranged a lecture series on Stanislavsky’s “system” by MAT veteran
Richard Boleslavsky. The tours created a hunger for the kind of detailed,
emotionally truthful acting that the company presented, and teachers such
as Boleslavsky, along with other MAT émigrés, provided the foundation
for American “Method” acting. Strasberg founded the Actors Studio to try
to capture the power of the MAT productions; other versions of
Stanislavsky’s legacy were propounded by rivals like Stella Adler. While
Stanislavsky’s own approach moved beyond the emphasis on “affective
memory” (the technique of drawing on emotions associated with one’s
own past experiences) that was the mainstay of his Method followers, there
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The American Stage
is no doubt that American acting was transformed by the exposure to
Chekhov and Stanislavsky in the s. Surprisingly, this impact was not
seen very directly in American productions of Chekhov plays. The Group
Theatre planned a production of Three Sisters in the s, with Stella
Adler and Morris Carnovsky among a cast of Method stalwarts, but it
never came off. Strasberg eventually directed a Method-heavy Three Sisters
in the s, with a cast of Actors Studio veterans, including Kim Stanley
as Masha and Geraldine Page as Olga. The production was praised in New
York for its emotional truth but panned at the London World Theatre
Season for what was seen as the mumbling self-indulgence of the actors.
While the MAT tours gave Chekhov cachet in the American theater, the
initial US productions of his plays had difficulty matching their success.
The star-centered system of Broadway worked against the ensemble acting
and orchestrated direction the plays required. The most successful at
achieving the desired effect was Eva Le Gallienne, whose Civic Repertory
Company produced three of the major plays between and . Le
Gallienne consciously built her company on the MAT model in order to
bring an ensemble approach to Chekhov: “A group of people, intimately
related to one another by a sincere and affectionate attitude toward the
work to be expressed, have a better chance of projecting the true essence of
Chekhov’s plays, than, let us say, an all-star cast of superlative actors, all
intent on projecting themselves as individuals.” Nonetheless, when
Chekhov was seen in New York, it was often in showy productions with
starry casts. Notable among these was a Seagull featuring the glam-
orous Broadway couple Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne as Trigorin and
Arkadina. Their suavity and wit, honed in Molnar, Shaw, and Noël
Coward, revealed Chekhov’s humor and provided a racy panache that
delighted audiences expecting Russian gloom. Stage magazine commemo-
rated the way the Lunts “overrode the brooding, introverted Chekhov
legend” with “a brilliantly played, brilliantly adapted revival of a moss-
grown masterpiece.” In Guthrie McClintic directed Three Sisters
with a cast led by Katherine Cornell, Judith Anderson, and Ruth Gordon;
it ran for performances on Broadway and weeks on tour, the
longest run of any US Chekhov production to date. These productions,
as well as an imported Uncle Vanya with Laurence Olivier and Ralph
Richardson, showed that Chekhov could succeed in the American com-
mercial theater as a star vehicle.
Chekhov’s drama, with its emotional nuance and detailed poetic natu-
ralism, had a profound effect on the writing of plays in the USA. Clifford
Odets, Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman, and Tennessee Williams all
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absorbed Chekhov’s influence. In the s Odets was called upon to
rework Chekhov translations for playability, and his own work reflected
his interest in Chekhovian dramaturgy. New York Times critic Brooks
Atkinson described Odets’ play Paradise Lost as a “Chekhov inter-
lude,” noting that “Mr. Odets has discovered that the contemporary
middle class in America faces the same blank wall that stood before the
futilitarians whom Chekhov was describing at the beginning of the cen-
tury, and he has consciously aped the centrifugal Chekhov technique.”
Miller, though more obviously indebted to Ibsen, admired Chekhov, in
particular the balance between the psychological and social in his work, a
balance Miller felt was distorted by “the Chekhovian legend in our
theatre . . . of an almost sentimental man and writer whose plays are
elegies, postscripts to a dying age.” Lillian Hellman shared Miller’s view
that Americans did not really know Chekhov: “We know only something
we call ‘Chekhovian,’ and by that we mean a stage filled with sweet, soupy,
frustrated people, created by a man who wept for their fate,” she wrote, in
an introduction to a collection of Chekhov’s letters. Her most clearly
“Chekhovian” play, The Autumn Garden, about a group of defeated
characters languishing in a Gulf Coast resort, makes her own critical
perspective on the characters clear. The American dramatist who most
fully embraced the mournful/lyrical dimension of Chekhov was Tennessee
Williams, who declared Chekhov his favorite playwright. The lost Belle
Reeve plantation of A Streetcar Named Desire is a memory of the Ranevsky
estate in The Cherry Orchard, and the relation of Blanche Dubois and
Stanley Kowalski a pathologized version of Madame Ranevskaya and
Lopakhin. The poetic impressionism of Williams owes much to
Chekhov, and one of his last plays was an adaptation of The Seagull.
While Chekhov had become a pervasive influence in the American
theater by mid-century, Broadway productions remained rare. As the
regional repertory system grew in the USA in the postwar years,
Chekhov became a staple for the theater world beyond New York. With
its ensemble casts, bittersweet emotions, and “classic” status, Chekhov was
an ideal addition to the repertory for nonprofit resident companies and
summer festivals. Regional theaters such as the Guthrie in Minneapolis,
Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., and the Alley Theatre in Houston all
frequently performed Chekhov. Some of the most consistently successful
Chekhov was at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts,
where the summertime leisure of the Berkshires provided an apt atmo-
sphere for the Russian playwright: there were twelve Chekhov productions
there between and . Artistic director Nikos Psacharopoulos,
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contrary to Method traditions, had his actors play as if there were no
subtext: “What they say is exactly what they mean and this is a direct
expression of the passionate feelings that the characters have.”
Correspondingly, though the productions were conventional in appear-
ance, they were passionate in the extreme, with characters continually
leaping up on benches or throwing themselves to the floor. In The
Cherry Orchard, for instance, Psacharopoulos conceived of Madame
Ranevskaya as a character who was “hurling herself at life,” rather than
as an ineffectual idler: “she wants the orchard but she wants Paris and she
wants them both absolutely passionately.” The Williamstown produc-
tions were full of vitality and were favorites with the summer audiences.
They expressed a Chekhov that was not historically situated, but univer-
sally human; a Chekhov of raw emotions suited to vigorous
American acting.
The latter part of the twentieth century featured Chekhov productions
that were more experimental in nature, whether reflecting scenographic
and directorial influences from the international theater or edgy perfor-
mance techniques from the off-Broadway avant-garde. The productions of
Romanian-born Andrei Serban had elements of both. He created elegant,
abstract stagings, dispensing with realistic scenery in favor of effects like
silhouetted factory chimneys appearing on the cyclorama at the end of The
Cherry Orchard, or a Japanese bridge in a Noh-influenced Seagull.
At the same time, the performances often broke with naturalism for
extreme effects of comedy or grotesquerie. In The Cherry Orchard, staged
at Lincoln Center in , a young Meryl Streep grabbed attention as
Dunyasha with comic pratfalls and a near-striptease, while Raul Julia’s
Lopakhin literally smashed up the furniture in his triumph over buying the
orchard. Serban staged a Beckettian Uncle Vanya at the experimental La
Mama theater in with acting guru Joseph Chaikin in the title role.
The production was striking both for its labyrinthine environmental set
and its odd acting choices, such as Vanya sitting on the Professor’s lap
during the play’s climax, speaking his lines in a sing-song voice. Frank
Rich complained in the New York Times that “the performances com-
pound the set’s flaw by reducing the stature of Chekhov’s characters to that
of scurrying rodents.”
Even more aggressively postmodern were the s Chekhov projects of
The Wooster Group, a downtown performance collective directed by
Elizabeth LeCompte. The company deconstructed Three Sisters into a pair
of plays, Brace Up! and Fish Story, employing an array of disruptive tactics.
Live video close-ups fragmented the actors’ bodies and faces; a narrator
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spoke stage directions into a microphone; clips from pop culture sources,
notably the film Godzilla, paralleled the onstage action. Casting choices,
including a septuagenarian Irina, subverted traditional expectations, while
highly emotional moments in Chekhov’s text were given a purposefully
flat and toneless delivery. In Fish Story – based only on the last eight pages
of Chekhov’s text – the fates of the Prozorov sisters were intertwined with
those of a Japanese traveling theater troupe as documented in the film
Geinen. The company’s precisely choreographed movement, innovative
stagecraft, and quirky creativity made the productions compelling, but
their relationship to Chekhov’s text was almost arbitrary; as David Allen
put it, in a Wooster Group performance, “the ‘text’ was like a site to be
invaded and occupied. The company built its own performance on
the ruins.”
A number of US playwrights have adapted or remade Chekhov’s works,
or written their own quasi-Chekhovian plays. The first prominent adap-
tation was Joshua Logan’s The Wisteria Trees, which reset The Cherry
Orchard to the American South; it was a Broadway success in with
Helen Hayes in the lead. It introduced the topic of race in American
Chekhov, with the Firs role played by the African American actor Alonzo
Bosan, although the Lopakhin character was depicted as a white carpet-
bagger. Many American Chekhov adaptations are simply playwrights’
“versions” based on literal translations. David Mamet did several of these,
one of which, Uncle Vanya, was the basis for a workshop performance by
Andre Gregory that became the successful film Vanya on nd Street, one
of the most popular and influential examples of modern American
Chekhov. The Seagull alone has produced Tennessee Williams’ The
Notebook of Trigorin (), Steven Dietz’s The Nina Variations (),
Tina Satter’s Seagull: Thinking of You (), and Aaron Posner’s Stupid
Fucking Bird (). This last adaptation has been widely produced
nationally since its debut at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre in
Washington, D.C. Stupid Fucking Bird resets Chekhov’s drama of art
and love in a contemporary American context, laced with metatheatrical
wit. When asked, in the play’s famous opening exchange, why she always
wears black, the character “Mash” replies, not that she is in mourning for
her life, but merely, “Black is slimming.” The central character, Con, a
version of Chekhov’s Konstantin, frequently breaks the fourth wall to
address his dilemmas directly to the theater audience: “Is this funny to
you? Enjoying my pain? Do you have any idea what happens next? Do
you? Well, for those of you not so well versed in th century Russian
Drama, this is where I die.” Another quasi-Chekhovian play,
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Christopher Durang’s Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, blends
characters and situations from multiple Chekhov plays in a contemporary
setting. A Broadway hit, it won the Tony Award for Best Play in .
Top US playwrights like Annie Baker, Sarah Ruhl, and Tracy Letts have all
done their own versions of Chekhov’s plays.
On the modern American stage, questions of representation, equity, and
inclusion have made Chekhov look very different from the traditional
productions of the past. In the s, the Public Theatre did a ground-
breaking Cherry Orchard with an all-black cast led by James Earl Jones as
Lopakhin. However, compared to Shakespeare, Chekhov has been less
frequently adapted to other settings or performed with “nontraditional”
casting. Recent productions that challenged those norms included Regina
Taylor’s Drowning Crow, a African American Seagull set on the Sea
Islands off South Carolina, and El Nogalar, a Cherry Orchard by
Tanya Saracho set in contemporary Northern Mexico. Pig Iron Theatre
Company’s Chekhov Lizardbrain () took off from Three Sisters in an
exploration of autism. Halley Feiffer’s Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow
Moscow Moscow () recast Three Sisters across lines of race and gender:
“We wanted to cast a diverse group of people for this play, not only
because representation is, of course, important, but also because . . . we
want to illuminate how universal this story is.” Feiffer’s updating of the
play’s language and situations was explicitly an attempt to remake
Chekhov for twenty-first century America. “There was something so
inherently millennial about the way these three women behave,” Feiffer
said, commenting on the characters’ entitlement and self-obsession, but
also their capacity for love, compassion, and growth – evidence that after
more than a century on the American stage, Chekhov’s characters continue
to evolve.
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Chekhov in East Asia
Heekyoung Cho
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, East Asian cultures
such as Korea, Japan, and China enthusiastically translated and read
foreign literary texts in the process of constructing new modern literary
forms. Russian literature was arguably the most popular foreign literature
during this time, in part because of Russia’s geographical proximity and its
political and military engagements with East Asia, such as the Russo-
Japanese War and the Russian Revolution. The tremendous popularity
of Russian literature in East Asia, however, can also be explained by the
strong sympathies that East Asian writers felt for the political and moral
questions that preoccupied Russian writers and their characters.
Literature played a significant role of political intervention in modern
East Asian societies in which political speech was severely controlled. The
role of Russian literature in the Tsarist regime had some resonance in the
Japanese metropole, in colonial Korea, and in semicolonized China,
where writers expressed their opinions circuitously through literary works.
In colonial Korea and China in particular, Russian literature was consid-
ered morally superior to other Western literature and was labeled “a
literature for life,” an art for life’s sake that had greater social and moral
import than the literature of other countries. East Asian writers’ enthusi-
astic engagement with Russian literature was a manifestation of their own
desire for an activist form of literature. Russian literature was not consid-
ered simply another “more developed” civilizational technology that East
Asian writers had to compete with or emulate; rather, it was deemed an
alternative model that could help them create a new kind of literature of
their own.
It was in this broad context that Anton Chekhov and his literary works
were introduced to East Asia. Chekhov was one of the three most fre-
quently translated Russian writers, in tandem with Tolstoy and Turgenev,
in modern Japan and Korea. In China as well, “the most published
prerevolutionary Russian writers [. . .] from to were Tolstoy,
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Chekhov in East Asia
Chekhov and Turgenev, with Dostoevsky a distant fourth.” Although
translations and scholarly studies of Chekhov (and of Russian literature in
general) became more diverse and professional in East Asia toward the end
of the twentieth century, his work was most prominent there early in the
century. Chekhov’s short stories and plays had more impact on East Asian
short stories and new theater movements in the first few decades of the
twentieth century than at any other time. In what follows, I focus on the
understanding of Chekhov and his works in early-twentieth-century Japan
and Korea, after providing some titles of translations to provide a sense
of which of Chekhov’s texts were first rendered into Japanese, Korean,
and Chinese.
In Meiji and Taishō Japan (–), translations of
Chekhov’s stories were published in Japanese. The first two were
“Tsuki to hito” (“Moon and People,” ; in Russian, “Dachniki”
[“Vacationers”]), and “Shashinchō” (“Album,” ; in Russian
“Al’bom”), both translated jointly by Senuma Kayō and Ozaki Kōyō. In
addition to individual stories, anthologies of Chekhov’s work contrib-
uted significantly to his position in Japan as a prominent literary figure.
The most important anthologies published in Japan in the s were
Senuma Kayō’s Chehofu kessaku shū (Chekhov’s Masterpieces, ),
Maeda Akira’s Tanpen jisshu Chehofu shū (Ten Short Stories from
Chekhov, ), and Hirotsu Kazuo’s Seppun hoka hachihen (“The Kiss”
and Eight Other Stories, ). An extensive collection of Japanese trans-
lations of Chekhov’s work began to be prepared by Akita Toshihiko and
others at the Shinchōsha publishing company in , and the full ten
volumes were published by .
Chekhov was first translated in Korea in when his story “The
Album” (“Sajinchŏp”) appeared in Chin Hangmun’s translation. The first
Korean anthology of his stories, Ch’ehop tanp’yŏnjip (Chekhov’s Short
Stories), translated by Kwŏn Posang, was published in . The first
Chinese translation of Chekhov’s work was “The Black Monk,” translated
by Wu Tao in . Lu Xun and his brother Zhou Zouren’s translations
of “At a Country House” and “In Exile,” and Bao Tianxiao’s translation of
“Ward No. ,” were published in . In , twenty-three Chekhov
stories, including “Fat and Thin” and “Vanka,” were translated by Chen
Jialin and Chen Dadeng. As was the case with Korean translations, early
Chinese translations of Russian literature were rendered indirectly from
other languages, in particular from Japanese and English.
The availability of Japanese translations significantly affected how
Koreans and Chinese perceived Russian writers and their works. In the
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early twentieth century many Korean and Chinese intellectuals pursued
their higher education in Japan and read Russian texts in Japanese. This
was more frequently the case for Korean intellectuals since Korea was
Japan’s colony from to . The introduction of Chekhov into
Japanese culture was accompanied by the immense popularity of the
anarchocommunist writer Pyotr Kropotkin (–), who rejected
the critical view of many of his contemporaries in Russia that Chekhov
was morally indifferent or lacking in ideals. Kropotkin contended that
Chekhov was “by no means a pessimist in the proper sense of the word; if
he had come to despair, he would have taken the bankruptcy of the
‘intellectuals’ as a necessary fatality,” but instead, Chekhov “firmly believed
that a better existence was possible – and would come.”
This image persisted through Meiji and Taishō Japan, as Kropotkin’s
Russian Literature (), which contained his essays on Chekhov, was read
widely by Japanese intellectuals and was included in the private collections
of such prominent Japanese writers as Natsume Sōseki and Akutagawa
Ryūnosuke. Kropotkin’s book was rendered into Japanese in and was
republished five times by . His essays on Chekhov were translated
and introduced individually even before the Japanese translation of the
entire volume, by Sōma Gyofū in “Chehofu ron” (A Study of Chekhov,
), and by Maeda Akira in “Che-hofu shōden” (A Short Biography of
Chekhov, ). Kropotkin’s view of Chekhov as a fundamentally optimis-
tic author who allowed for the possibility of redemption was therefore the
basis of many Koreans’ first contact with Chekhov’s work, whether in the
late s in Japan or the early s in Korea.
Among quite a few comments on Chekhov written by Korean intellec-
tuals, the two most important introductions in the early s were Chu
Yosŏp’s “Nosŏa ŭi tae munho Ch’eekhop’ŭ” (“The Great Russian Writer
Chekhov,” ) and Pak Yŏnghŭi’s “Ch’ehop’ŭ hŭigok e nat’anan nosŏa
hwanmyŏlgi ŭi kot’ong” (“The Agony of Russia’s Disillusioned Period as
Described in Chekhov’s Dramas,” ). The piece by Chu Yosŏp, a
Korean short story writer, consists of both an analysis of Chekhov’s literary
works and a short biography. Chu mentions at the outset that
“Shakespeare and Tolstoy were introduced to the Korean literary world
some time ago. But now I would like to provide the biography of a great
Russian short story writer, Anton P. Chekhov, along with his short
stories.” He summarizes the changes in Chekhov’s stories after by
following the common distinction between the early humorous style and
the later more pessimistic style. He goes on to highlight Chekhov’s
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Chekhov in East Asia
sharpness and originality in perceiving and depicting the almost unnotice-
able minutiae of everyday life.
In his introduction, Chu compares Chekhov to Guy de Maupassant,
whom he believes Chekhov greatly resembles. He points out that the two
writers’ “attitudes toward life are objective and sincere, and their writings
are concise and lucid. Both like writing stories with trivial subject matter
and try to suggest all of life through them.” However, Chu then begins to
emphasize the stark differences, arguing that “when we compare these two
writers’ stories, they have a completely different sensibility. In other words,
Maupassant’s stories are artistic (yesuljōk) and sensuous (kwannŭngjōk), but
those of Chekhov are human-life-engaged (insaengjōk) and psychological
(simnijōk).” He adds that “Chekhov’s stories are something like clear
autumn weather, but Maupassant’s possess something like the energy
emanating from the ripening of nature on a spring hill. Maupassant uses
thick touches of colors, and Chekhov uses only light touches. Chekhov is
simple and plain but Maupassant splendid.” He concludes by declaring
that “Maupassant has a French style, but Chekhov’s color is Russian in all
respects.” Chu’s sensual and impressionistic assessment is intriguing, but
what is most noteworthy is how he inflates the dissimilarities between two
writers’ individual styles into national traits, which shows that, prior to
Chu’s invocation of them, some stable set of associations must already have
attached to Russian and French literature.
In fact, these associations actually come from Maeda Akira’s essay
“Chehofu shōden” (“A Short Biography of Chekhov”), which introduced
Chekhov to Japan. Chu’s essay is fundamentally a translation of
Maeda’s, supplemented by a few additional sentences at the beginning.
When rendering the content into Korean, Chu borrowed many specific
terms from Maeda, such as “human-life-engaged,” “psychological,” “artis-
tic,” and “sensuous.” Moreover, as mentioned above, Maeda’s text had for
its part already relied significantly on Kropotkin’s view of Chekhov as
ultimately optimistic. Maeda and Chu largely agreed with Kropotkin’s
affirmative view, but they did not entirely share his approach to national
character and its relation to Chekhov and Maupassant’s work. Kropotkin
explains that Chekhov’s “nearest relative is Guy de Maupassant, but a
certain family resemblance between the two writers exists only in a few
of their short stories,” while Chekhov’s “manner” and “mood [. . .] are
entirely his own.” “There is all the difference between the two writers,”
Kropotkin argues, “which exists between contemporary France and Russia
at that special period of development through which our country has been
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passing lately.” Kropotkin underscores the different socioeconomic con-
texts in which France and Russia were situated at specific historical
moments. However, Maeda and Chu transform these environmental and
historical differences into differences of enduring national characters, and
then take the distinctions between the two authors’ works as symptomatic
of these presumed differences in national character.
The essentialized contrast between the characteristics of French and
Russian literatures, established in Maeda and Chu’s essays based on
Kropotkin, became amplified in the second major Korean essay on
Chekhov (“The Agony of the Disillusioned Period of Russia Described
in Chekhov’s Dramas,” ), composed by Pak Yŏnghŭi, a writer of
proletarian literature. Pak eulogizes Russian literature by stating that “since
the nineteenth century, Russian literature has been in a truly close rela-
tionship to life, and has shown us a new world of existence and thought
within our own human life. The majority of Russian literature is the
confession of Russia, and embodies real and important lessons for human
life.” After accentuating Russian literature’s close connection to life, he
then contrasts it with French literature:
Russian literature is so close to life that we can say that while French
literature is splendid and beautiful, Russian is gloomy, and while French
is “thought” (sasang), Russian is “life” (saenghwal). If the former is the
“truth” of this world, the latter is a cry for “the revolution of life” and “the
reconstruction of life.” Turgenev talked about it; Chekhov cried for it;
Dostoevsky declared it; and Tolstoy yearned for it.
Pak’s explanation of French and Russian literatures clearly resonates
with those of Maeda and Chu. However, we can also see that the adjective
“human-life-engaged,” which Maeda and Chu employ, is interpreted from
a proletarian literary perspective in Pak’s expression “the revolution of life.”
Nevertheless, Pak’s term here should be understood more in the sense of
“betterment of the future.” In the context of his essay, the term does not
signify actual revolution; rather, Pak considers “a cry for ‘the revolution of
life’” to be the defining characteristic of Russian literature as a whole. In his
essay, the differences between individual writers are thus weakened, and
their commonalities in their connection to “the revolution of life” are
underlined. From Pak’s perspective, Chekhov and other prominent
nineteenth-century Russian writers are neither gloomy nor pessimistic
but are advocates of the “revolution” and of the “reconstruction” of
existence. This demonstrates how Kropotkin’s relatively optimistic view
was taken farther in Korean intellectuals’ understanding of Chekhov.
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Chekhov in East Asia
In Korea, Chekhov’s reputation remained robust through the colonial
period, but in Japan, Lev Shestov’s more pessimistic appraisal of Chekhov
became influential, particularly in the s. However, although
Shestov’s description of Chekhov as a “poet of hopelessness,” a killer “of
human hopes,” gained some support in Japan, it never established a
foothold in Korea. It is difficult to say exactly why this was so, though
it was not an exceptional case in colonial Korea, where few criticisms of
Western literature had been imported at the time. Because Korea had been
colonized by Japan, not by Western powers, it is not surprising that the
empowerment associated with Western literature was embraced in a pre-
dominantly affirmative mode. Despite some differences, the overall image
of Chekhov as a literary figure and the understanding of his works were
quite similar in Japan and Korea up to the mid-s. This context
formed the intellectual background to Japanese and Korean writers’ trans-
lation and appropriation of Chekhov’s stories, and continued to affect their
understanding of Chekhov in later periods. In China, as in Korea, the
assessment of Chekhov as a pessimist never became a dominant view. We
can also see the strong impact of Kropotkin’s view in Chinese intellectuals’
early introductions of Chekhov.
Lu Xun and Zhou Zouren explained that “although pessimistic in his
view of the contemporary world, Chekhov still cherished hopes for the
future.” In the following decades, all other significant Chinese critics of
Chekhov’s work would advocate this view.
Modern East Asian writers – as the example of Chekhov’s readership
shows – projected the image of the literature that they themselves envi-
sioned onto Russian literature, which they thereby created to fit their own
purpose. Of course, it is problematic to view Russia as a seamless part of
the West vis-à-vis Asia. Indeed, East Asian intellectuals perceived Russia as
an alternative to Western modernity, as is clearly seen in the relations of
Russian-Japanese anarchist communities in nineteenth- and early-twenti-
eth-century Japan – relations that also affected the introduction and
translation of Russian literature. Many colonial Korean and Chinese
intellectuals considered Russian literature to be “an acceptable alternative
to ‘the West.’” Examining East Asian literatures in relation to Russian
literature helps us understand those shared desires for social justice, as well
as the awareness in East Asian cultures of available alternatives even during
this turbulent time.
Against this backdrop, Chekhov appealed profoundly to East Asian
writers who were seeking the potentials of literature in a tumultuous
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modern era, for he had lived during difficult, oppressive times, and his
works reflect those periods through the twin lenses of hope and despair. In
reading Chekhov to help understand and explain their own times and
ideas, East Asian writers created and discovered an image of Chekhov as a
writer who, having fully plumbed the dangers and catastrophes of modern
life, had managed to remain cautiously hopeful nonetheless.
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Film
Justin Wilmes
We generally associate Anton Chekhov with his contributions to world
literature and theater, but cinema and television have arguably played no
less a role in solidifying Chekhov’s place in the cultural imaginary. His
works have been adapted to the screen more than any other playwright in
history with the lone exception of William Shakespeare and, depending on
how wide a net is cast, these adaptations number in the many hundreds to
over a thousand. As in theater, cinematic treatments of Chekhov yield a
wide spectrum of interpretation, ranging from light vaudevillian comedy to
austere tragedy, each transposition enriched by the time and cultural
context in which it was produced. This chapter, by no means offering a
comprehensive analysis of Chekhov’s afterlife in film, will trace key ten-
dencies and contributions to the tradition of adapting Chekhov from page
to screen – first in Russian and then in world cinema.
Chekhov in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema
Within the rich tradition of Russian film adaptations of Chekhov, the first
known specimen was the short silent comedy Romance with Double Bass in
(dir. Kai Hansen), based on the comedic story of the same
name. Chekhov’s light vaudevillian works would be especially popular in
the silent film era, lending themselves to gesture, physical comedy, and the
operatic acting styles of the period, while his major plays and more
complex works would become prevalent later in the century. The paragon
of Chekhov adaptation in the silent film era is Ranks and People () by
the celebrated avant-garde director Yakov Protazanov with Mikhail Doller.
As the title suggests, its three vignettes satirize subservience to rank and
power in Russian culture. Shot in three parts, Protazanov’s almanac film
depicts the stories “Anna on the Neck” (), “Death of a Government
Clerk” (), and “The Chameleon” (), and is perhaps Protazanov’s
answer to Murnau’s satirical, class-oriented masterpiece The Last Laugh
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(). Later Soviet works, including those of Isidor Annensky, would
take inspiration from the film’s mise en scène and characterization. Such
grotesque and theatrical interpretations, however, would be curtailed in
the Stalinist period, with directors like Annensky taking on a more
conservative, realist approach and a narrower set of satirical targets.
Generally, the prevalence of Chekhov adaptations in the highly censored
Soviet film industry can be explained, first, by the relatively safe – polit-
ically speaking – comedy of manners that runs throughout Chekhov’s
oeuvre, with its emphasis on universal human foibles; on the other hand,
Chekhov’s portraits of the late Russian empire’s “decaying aristocracy”
would provide welcome fodder for Soviet ideologues.
The conservative shift in aesthetics and ideology under Stalin in the
s inevitably affected Chekhov adaptations, though the period is not
without its achievements. Most notable are the works of Isidor Annensky,
whose debut film The Bear – an adaptation of yet another one-act
vaudeville by Chekhov – was released in under the tutelage of
Sergei Eisenstein. Annensky would go on to adapt two more of
Chekhov’s works, The Wedding () and Anna on the Neck (),
the latter being perhaps his most enduring contribution to the canon.
Moving away from the theatrical caricaturing of silent-era comedies,
Annensky presents largely literal, realist transpositions of Chekhov’s works
to the screen, filmed primarily in fixed, medium shots with little cinematic
innovation. But what Annensky’s adaptations of Chekhov lack in filmic
expression, they compensate for with extravagant sets, attention to period
details, and high production value.
The Russian director who perhaps contributed more than any other to
the Chekhov film tradition is Iosif Kheifits. His three Chekhov adapta-
tions, The Lady with the Dog (), In S. City (), and The Duel
(), are among the most successful works in the canon. Kheifits’ The
Lady with the Dog – arguably the pièce de resistance of all Chekhov film
adaptations – won several international awards, including two Special
Prizes at the Cannes Film Festival, and inspired a celebratory essay
by the legendary Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman among many other
critical and scholarly appraisals. The Lady with the Dog embodies the
expressionism, craftsmanship, and psychological introspection of Thaw-
era cinema. Among its many strengths are stunning cinematography, high-
contrast black-and-white photography, and moving performances by the
great Alexei Batalov and Iya Savvina as Gurov and Anna (see Figure ).
In contrast to many of his predecessors in Soviet adaptation, Kheifits
embraces the cinematic over the verbal, transposing internal monologues
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Film
Figure Scene from The Lady with the Dog
(, Kheifits/Lenfilm)
and other literary devices into subtle gestures, close-ups of facial expres-
sions, and visual leitmotifs. The opening shot of the film frames the idyllic
Crimean coast before zooming in on a glass bottle littered in the sea,
evoking Chekhov’s mixture of beauty and vulgarity. After first consum-
mating their affair in the hotel, Anna sits weeping before a candle flame
while Gurov blithely spits out the seeds from a watermelon at the adjacent
table. In this way, the director uses Chekhov’s dramatic details to translate
omniscient narration into potent visual cues that portray the emotional
disconnection of the characters. Such skillful cinematic transpositions
occur throughout the film, often in silence or accompanied by minimal
dialogue. Kheifits’ subsequent adaptations of Chekhov are similarly mem-
orable and considered classics of Soviet cinema – in particular The Duel
(), starring the iconic Vladimir Vysotsky as the hyperrational, utili-
tarian Von Koren.
Among dozens of well-made Soviet adaptations from the s and
s, Andrei Konchalovsky’s Uncle Vanya () stands out as another
tour de force, with inspired performances from stars of the Soviet screen
Innokenti Smoktunovsky as Vanya and Sergei Bondarchuk as Astrov. Like
Kheifits’ Lady, Konchalovsky’s Vanya achieves the philosophical moods of
Chekhov’s major works through exquisite pacing, minimalism, and subtle
performances. As in Chekhov’s original, the film carefully orchestrates the
tragicomic mood, alternating its somber reflections with farcical and absurd
episodes. The poetic cinematography rewards the viewer and in part
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redeems the doleful narrative. For aspiring directors and actors, films like
Kheifits’ Lady and Konchalovsky’s Vanya are instructive examples of the
centrality of mood in staging and screening Chekhov. While some films
overpower the poetic dimensions of his work with too-boisterous comedy
or cheapen its meanings with sentimental deliveries, these directors strike a
masterly balance. Other distinguished Chekhov adaptations from the
period include Abram Room’s Late Flowers (), Yuly Karasik’s The
Seagull (), and Emil Loteanu’s A Hunting Accident ().
Along with Annensky and Kheifits, the third most “Chekhovian”
Russian director is likely Nikita Mikhalkov, whose adaptations An
Unfinished Piece for Mechanical Piano () and Dark Eyes () remain
popular works of the period. The more artistically successful of the two, An
Unfinished Piece for Mechanical Piano, is derived primarily from Chekhov’s
early play Platonov (). Perhaps more than any other filmmaker,
Mikhalkov’s adaptations capture the Chekhovian sense of desperation
lurking beneath the surface of merriment, the atmosphere in which
“people are sitting at a table having dinner, while at the same time [. . .]
their lives are being torn apart,” as Chekhov reportedly said of his work. It
is worth noting that, in addition to direct adaptations of the writer’s works,
Chekhovian dramaturgy has enjoyed a fruitful afterlife in a more diffuse
form, crossing over from literature and theater into cinema, and heavily
influencing such important film auteurs as Mikhalkov and Kira Muratova.
Many of Mikhalkov’s own scripts are highly Chekhovian in style and
mood, with portrayals of declining gentry, ensemble scenes, and orches-
tration of tragic and comic – most notably his Oscar-winning Burned by
the Sun ().
With the changing attitudes and aesthetics of Perestroika and nascent
postmodernism, looser and more experimental film treatments would
begin to emerge, increasingly free of rigid paradigms of fidelity and realism.
Among the first Russian works to interpret its source text more freely is
The Black Monk (), the debut film of celebrated director Ivan
Dykhovichny. While diverging little from the plot and dialogue of
Chekhov’s story, The Black Monk marks a break from the aesthetic
conservatism of most of its Soviet predecessors. The protagonist, Andrei
Kovrin, a brilliant scholar with overwrought nerves, returns to the country
estate of his surrogate family and his childhood home. As Kovrin’s mental
state becomes increasingly untethered from reality, he begins to have
visions of a monk who convinces him that he is a genius, chosen by
God to save mankind. In Dykhovichny’s bold vision, a floating camera
drifts freely through the lyrical, dilapidated country estate shrouded in a
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Film
Figure Scene from The Black Monk
(, Dykhovichny/Mosfilm)
perpetual mist. Through trance-like voiceovers, Kovrin’s thoughts drift
between memories, dreams, and his conversations with the black monk
(see Figure ).
With a surreal and dreamlike ambiance visually crafted by Vadim
Yusov, who was also cinematographer for several films of Andrei
Tarkovsky, The Black Monk fits squarely in the tradition of phenomeno-
logical explorations of Russian arthouse directors such as Tarkovsky and
Alexander Sokurov. As in many of Tarkovsky’s works, one detects an
ideological subtext in The Black Monk, namely, a rebuttal of the prevailing
rationalism and materialism of the Soviet period. As scholar Alyssa
Deblasio observes, the haptic dimensions of the film – its disorienting
camera movement, dreamlike voiceovers, mists, and unnerving musical
score – create an affecting mimesis of human consciousness and a sophis-
ticated portrait of madness. In this way, Dykhovichny’s film demonstrates
the unique potentials of cinema to capture the sensations of human
consciousness in a way that the written word and theater cannot. Among
other prizes, the film would win Special Prize for Cinematography at the
Venice Film Festival in .
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In the post-Soviet period, the most notable addition to the Chekhov
film canon is Kira Muratova’s Chekhovian Motifs (). Like Protazanov’s
Ranks and People and Mikhalkov’s Dark Eyes, Muratova’s film combines
multiple Chekhov stories into a single narrative, joining the plots of the
short satirical works “Difficult People” () and Tatiana Repina ().
Chekhovian Motifs is arguably the freest adaptation of Chekhov in Russian
cinema, as the world of the film is more recognizably Muratovian
than Chekhovian.
In Chekhovian Motifs, Muratova amplifies the elements of farce and
commedia dell’arte in Chekhov’s works, using these sketches of a provin-
cial family and wedding as material for her own radical estrangements,
metatextual irony, and Bergsonian, mechanical repetitions. Perplexing to
some, beloved by others, Muratova’s inimitable directorial style accentu-
ates the absurd dimension of human experience, leaving little possibility
for viewer identification. Critic Zara Abdullaeva observes: “Muratova films
the early Chekhov, but radicalizes the means of perception, returning a
sense of singularity and ritualistic event to this over-performed art.”
Muratova’s farcicality and extreme caricatures hearken back to the film
and stage performances of Chekhov by the Russian avant-garde in the early
twentieth century. Other significant film adaptations of Chekhov in the
post-Soviet period include Ward Number Six (, Shakhnazarov) and
Brothers Ch (, Ugarov).
Chekhov’s Afterlife in World Cinema
As in theater, Chekhov has had a prolific afterlife in world cinema. In
Little Lili (, Miller), a French adaptation of The Seagull, young
aspiring artists navigate their romantic lives and careers in the contem-
porary French film industry. In Mansion on the Lake (, Peries), a
Sri Lankan adaptation of The Cherry Orchard, a wealthy family falls on
hard times and is forced to move back to its provincial estate. The
Australian film Country Life (, Blakemore) transposes Uncle Vanya
to the Australian provinces following World War I. Here, while many
of the central concerns of Uncle Vanya remain intact – ambivalence to
country life, regrets of lives unlived, and unrequited love, Blakemore
adapts the play to probe a range of issues central to Australian identity
in the period: the idealization and longing for England and traumas
stemming from the country’s participation in the war, among others.
Blakemore’s film illustrates the complex interplay of sign systems inher-
ent to film adaptation of literature, particularly across cultures and time
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Film
periods, as well as the potential for localized meanings that Chekhov’s
archetypal works afford.
Among the best-known international screen adaptations of Chekhov is
Louise Malle’s Vanya on nd Street (), whose unique production
history, postmodern framing, and other aesthetic innovations have
inspired numerous scholarly studies. Vanya on nd Street portrays the
rehearsal performances of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya in the then-abandoned
New Amsterdam Theater on nd Street in New York City. The film grew
out of a real-life workshop of the play over a period of four years by a group
of well-known actors in New York City, including Wallace Shawn,
Julianne Moore, and director Andre Gregory. The opening scene shows
the cast walking to the theater amid the sights and sounds of the streets of
s New York. Next, quasi-documentary footage depicts the mundane
chatter of the actors while director Gregory gives a tour to a small group of
guests. With no indication of where the real world ends and the play
begins, the actors’ conversation slips seamlessly into the opening dialogue
of the play, leaving viewers to catch on.
The film continues to shift subtly between actor performances and
metafictional footage – shots of the audience and director, a brief dinner
party for the cast and crew between acts, and so forth. Perpetually breaking
the fourth wall, the actors are dressed in ordinary street clothes and drink
from “I < NY” coffee mugs during the performance. In this way, Vanya
on nd Street lays bare its own theatricality, not merely as a sophisticated
wink to viewers. By dissolving the boundary between theater and life, it
gestures to the continued relevance of Uncle Vanya in the modern world
and provides a master class in Stanislavsky’s Method, as the actors merge
imperceptibly with their characters. Translated by Vlada Chernomordik,
adapted by David Mamet, directed by Andre Gregory, filmed by Louis
Malle, and transposed to s New York, Vanya on nd Street is a
striking example of the manifold mediations inherent in film adaptation.
While it sacrifices little of the substance of Chekhov’s original dialogues
and plot, it cuts out its more arcane elements, such as Latin phrases and
lesser-known references to Russian culture. As scholar Christophe Collard
argues, by constantly drawing attention to its many metatextual layers,
Malle’s film underscores “the semiological strange-loopishness” of adapta-
tion and, in so doing, rejects a traditional source text–oriented approach in
favor of a target-text approach.
A final example from contemporary world cinema, Winter Sleep ()
by Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, now figures among the most
celebrated film adaptations of Chekhov, having won the coveted Palm
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d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. The film, set in contemporary Turkey,
is based on Chekhov’s story “The Wife” (), and portrays Aydan, a
self-involved former actor and wealthy landowner, in his quotidian
conflicts with his tenants, wife, and sister. While ostensibly a well-
respected member of the community, Ayden is in fact generally despised
for his pompous and self-righteous views. His much younger wife, Nihal,
tries to find meaning through community involvement and philan-
thropy. But when she organizes a fundraiser for a local school, Ayden
criticizes the effort and tries to control it. On the brink of divorce, Ayden
decides to depart for Istanbul for a few months to work on his book
project, only to return in the final scene and plead with Nihal to
reconcile. Ceylan’s film masterfully captures the psychological ambigui-
ties and philosophical dilemmas that run throughout Chekhov’s writing.
Every action is subjected to agonizing self-doubt, every motive ques-
tioned and open-ended, leaving the viewer to ponder the characters and
their disputes long after the final credits. In addition to its psychological
rigor, the film’s greatest strength is its organic pairing of setting and
theme. The protagonist’s crisis and reevaluation of his life unfold organ-
ically amid the stark winter and rock formations of austere Cappadocia
(see Figure ). Celyan’s first critical sensation, Once Upon a Time in
Anatolia (), is also part Chekhov adaptation, drawing plot elements
and dialogues from the stories “The Examining Magistrate” () and
Figure Scene from Winter Sleep
(, Ceylan/Pinema)
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Film
“The Beauties” (). In interviews Ceylan cites Chekhov – and
Russian literature more broadly – as a primary influence on his artistic
and philosophical outlook.
As a way of concluding, we can consider a scene from Ryûsuke
Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car (; based on Haruki Murakami’s short
story of the same name), which tells the story of a theater director
mounting a production of Uncle Vanya for the stage. In the film, an actor
complains that he has been miscast as Vanya and asks why the director
himself, a skilled actor, did not take on the role. The director replies that
he lacks the moral courage. “Chekhov is terrifying,” he explains. “When
you say his lines it drags out the real you . . . I can’t bear that anymore.”
But he counsels his actor to “respond to the text” as he would to a living
person. “The text is questioning you,” he explains. “Yield yourself, and
respond.” As long as actors and directors continue to find the courage to
yield themselves to Chekhov’s texts, this international film tradition will
continue to pose its probing and terrifying questions.
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In Translation
Chekhov’s Path into English
Carol Apollonio
The Early Decades
Chekhov entered English modestly, beginning with isolated stories in the
s on both sides of the Atlantic: in the United States in Isabel Hapgood’s
translation of the story “At Home,” and in England in anonymous
translations of two stories in . Stateside, Leo Weiner, better known for
his twenty-four-volume collection of the Complete Works of Leo Tolstoy
(–), included one Chekhov story in a anthology of Russian
literature. The same year British translator and critic R. E. C. Long produced
the first collection of Chekhov stories in English, “The Black Monk” and
Other Stories, following it with another collection in . Despite some
mistakes and stylistic infelicities, Long’s versions were influential during their
time, possibly because he was one of the first critics to introduce Chekhov to
Anglophone readers with his article “Anton Chekhov.” Like subse-
quent critics, Long stressed the elements of pessimism and fatalism in
Chekhov’s works. According to Russian scholar M. A. Shereshevskaya, this
taste for darker elements predominated in English-language collections for
decades to come, as did a tendency to chaotic chronology.
During the early twentieth century, translators in both the USA and
Britain were also showing interest in Chekhov’s plays. As early as – the
year of The Seagull’s premiere in St. Petersburg – Constance Garnett, who at
the time was just beginning her monumental corpus, wrote the author
requesting permission to translate it. And in , anticipating a possible
visit by the Moscow Art Theater to Britain, she began working on The
Cherry Orchard. Despite her efforts, the first Chekhov play to be staged in
England was George Calderon’s The Seagull with the Glasgow Repertory
Company, in . Garnett’s The Cherry Orchard followed soon after, in a
production by the Stage Society in . Calderon’s translations of these
two plays were published in , Garnett’s two volumes of Chekhov plays
in . Meanwhile, in the USA, The Cherry Garden appeared in in a
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In Translation
translation by Max S. Mandell, and Marian Fell came out with four plays in
; her The Seagull was performed on Broadway in . Like Fell’s two
Chekhov story collections, these have been roundly condemned for
their howlers and sloppiness, notably by Kornei Chukovsky in his
A High Art. As can be the case, the poor quality of Fell’s translations has not
reduced their appeal to publishers uninterested in paying for copyright.
Despite efforts to publish a much larger number of Chekhov’s works,
Garnett had only managed to place three minor stories by . Between
and , even as she produced seven volumes of Dostoevsky, she
continued to seek a publisher for Chekhov, finally signing on with Chatto.
Between and , she produced thirteen volumes of Chekhov’s
stories ( stories in all), two of the plays, and two of the letters. Of the
stories, were appearing in English for the first time. As for the plays,
like other translators of Chekhov’s plays, Garnett found it difficult to
achieve “speakable” dialogue. A letter to her son David gives a
glimpse into her struggle:
A fine hash English actors would make of ‘The Sea-Gull’! and you know it
isn’t a Sea-Gull – but a Lake Gull – and what ought it to be called? The
names of water birds sound very unromantic – puffin, for instance. You
can’t have a heroine drawing tears from the audience by saying ‘I am a
Puffin! No, that’s wrong etc etc [sic]’ Sea-Gull’s bad enough. Gull alone is
impossible. Imagine a girl saying ‘I am a Gull etc.’ Do advise me.
Despite these kinds of obstacles, Garnett’s translations of Chekhov’s prose,
with their scope, craft, reliability, and fluent English style, set a standard
for excellence that has not dimmed a hundred years after their original
publication.
In parallel with Garnett, and not without a competitive spirit, S. S.
Koteliansky, a recent Russian political émigré, worked with English col-
laborators to produce translations of Russian literature, including three
Chekhov story collections: one with John Middleton Murry () and
two with Gilbert Cannon ( and ). Koteliansky also published
editions of Chekhov’s notebook, letters, and, with Leonard Woolf, an
influential collection of memoirs about the writer. His collections, like
those of Garnett, are easily available online, through Project Gutenberg
and the Internet Archive.
The Postwar Period
After a fallow period that persisted until after World War II, the s and
s witnessed a renewed interest in Russian literature in the Anglophone
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world. A new generation of critics, biographers, and translators emerged,
with strong grounding in the language and an unprecedented degree of
scholarly sophistication. Avrahm Yarmolinsky initiated this new era in
with The Portable Chekhov, a collection of twenty-eight stories, two
plays, and a selection of letters. His subsequent The Unknown Chekhov
() offers a selection of early stories, two versions of the sketch “On the
Harmful Effects of Tobacco,” and diverse nonfictional materials. These
collections – the first to present Chekhov’s writing in chronological order –
introduced readers to an unfamiliar Chekhov: a brilliant humorist, intrepid
traveler, and craftsman of astonishing range. Yarmolinsky’s grasp of the
nuances of the original text, plus his boldness in deploying colloquialisms,
allows him to individualize the speech styles of Chekhov’s characters to a
degree not seen in his predecessors’ translations.
The strongest institutional force during this period was Penguin, which
commissioned a remarkable series of translations for its Russian Classics
beginning in . Ronald Wilks and Elisaveta Fen, respectively, trans-
lated prose and drama; Ann Dunnigan translated one volume of short
stories and one of plays; and David Magarshack – better known for his
Dostoevsky and Tolstoy translations – translated one volume of Chekhov’s
short stories. Archival research by Catherine McAteer has illuminated the
hands-on and often intense dialogues between editors, translators, and
readers. In the versions that emerged from that process between
and , Fen’s plays have been praised for their combination of
reliability and lively colloquial language, and have been performed regu-
larly over the years. Ronald Wilks’s translations of the short stories,
published by Penguin in chronologically organized collections during the
s, have enjoyed a similar authority.
A number of individual Chekhov collections appeared in parallel with
the Penguin series. Yet they, and in fact Penguin’s Chekhov, are dwarfed
by Ronald Hingley’s monumental achievement, the nine volumes of the
Oxford Chekhov – three of drama and six of prose – which came out
between and . Hingley’s versions are among the most author-
itative, yet freest interpretations of Chekhov. His ambitious deployment of
colloquialisms, though not uncontroversial among purists, conveys the
diversity of characters’ speech styles and gives a sense for Chekhov’s
complex narrative style – a task that had eluded his predecessors.
Harvey Pitcher’s translation of the early stories with James
Fortsyth (Chuckle with Chekhov) directed welcome attention to the writer’s
comic side – the first such collection, apparently, since Isaac Goldberg and
Henry Thomas Schnitkind’s Nine Humorous Tales. Chuckle with
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In Translation
Chekhov, Pitcher’s subsequent The Early Stories – with Patrick
Miles (), and The Comic Stories (), are miniature masterpieces
that continue in Hingley’s tradition, featuring a rich vocabulary, impecca-
ble comic pacing, and a fine sense for dialogue.
Drama and Adaptation
Chekhov’s major translators have generally tried their hand at both the
prose and the plays, but the versions that have taken root on the stage have
generally been done by translators specializing in his drama. This may be
related to genre; the most successful prose translations have featured a
subtle treatment of the relationship between narrator and character, a
feature absent in the plays. Stark Young initiated the trend toward “speak-
able” translations of the plays beginning in the late s. That trend
continues unabated to the present day, with directors choosing and
adapting scripts for the needs of their production, sometimes taking more
credit as translators than they have earned. It is next to impossible to track
all the versions. In Munir Sendich’s very useful bibliography of works by
and about Chekhov in English (–), for example, in the thirty-
seven entries for The Cherry Orchard, only thirteen translators are listed;
editors are far better represented. The wording can be murky – for
example, the phrasing “English version by” such notables as John
Gielgud suggest a qualitative difference from entries “translated by.”
Translation also borders uneasily with adaptation; Chekhov’s plays are
living things that the theater has made its own and transposed into any
number of new settings and situations – a process that continues well into
Chekhov’s second century. Peter Henry’s Chekhov bibliography lists
twenty-one “versions and adaptations” in English just for the period
between and ; the question of whether this is a trend is worth
further study. Prominent translators of Chekhov’s plays, in addition to
those who also worked in prose, include Sharon Carnicke, Ann Dunnigan,
Michael Frayn, Michael Heim, Paul Schmidt, and Laurence Senelick.
Letters and Non-Fiction
The two indispensable collections of Chekhov’s letters in English are
Michael Heim and Simon Karlinsky’s Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought
() and Rosamund Bartlett and Anthony Phillips’s A Life in Letters
(). Chekhov’s longest book, Sakhalin Island, has been translated three
times, most recently and reliably in Brian Reeve’s thoroughly annotated
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version, which has been reissued several times. The book has been
attracting renewed attention as a pioneering early study in statistics and
demographics and as an untapped source of insights about Chekhov’s life
and times.
Post-Soviet Period
The end of the Soviet Union in coincided with radical changes in
political, cultural, economic, and technological forces worldwide, all affect-
ing the dynamics of translation. The Internet has eased communication
and access to materials. Chekhov’s original texts are easily available online
in authoritative versions, along with an abundance of archival materials,
memoirs, and criticism. New funding sources for translation, including
retranslations of classics, have emerged in Russia, notably the Mikhail
Prokhorov Foundation and the Institute of Literary Translation.
Expiration of copyright has meant that older translations, including
Garnett’s, are widely available online on such platforms as the Internet
Archive and Project Gutenberg – helpfully filed under the translators’ as
well as the author’s names. On the debit side, some undiscriminating
commercial publishers continue to publish out-of-copyright translations,
many of which are mediocre in quality.
This is a shame, as excellent new translations and editions continue to
emerge. The early works have been receiving welcome attention. Three
collections appeared at the turn of the twenty-first century: Shelby Foote’s
edition of seventy early stories in Constance Garnett’s translations; Peter
Sekirin’s The Complete Early Chekhov in four volumes; and Peter
Constantine’s The Undiscovered Chekhov – translations of early stories that
were known to scholars, but not to a broad readership.
The prolific translating team of Richard Pevear and Larisa Volokhonsky,
known for their literalistic strategy and conservative approach to Russian
syntax, have collaborated with Richard Nelson on new versions of the four
major plays (–). Their newest Chekhov prose collection, Fifty-
Two Stories, came out in .
Recent projects have brought welcome attention to the art of transla-
tion, notably Cathy Popkin’s Norton Anthology of Chekhov’s
stories, which combines classic translations with newly commissioned
versions. Uniquely among such collections, the book draws readers’ atten-
tion to translation by providing comparison passages, bios for each trans-
lator, an introductory note about the translation at the beginning of each
story, and even an index of the stories by translator. In , the Anton
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In Translation
Chekhov Foundation launched the Early Chekhov Translation Project, an
ambitious, internet-based effort to produce new translations of all of
Chekhov’s early stories.
Chekhov’s Language
In the Anglophone critical tradition, Chekhov has often been credited with
creating a “poetics of mood.” The sense of unanchored emotionality that
some Anglophone readers sense in Chekhov’s style is rooted in his unique
mastery of specific features of the Russian syntax and vocabulary for which
there are no equivalents in English. His prose is distinctively poetic,
constructed with a sense for sound, rhythm, and pacing that inhere in
the language beneath the denotative lexical level. Scholar Radislav
Lapushin identifies a defining feature of Chekhov’s style as a poetics of
“inbetweenness.” The important things are not said, but felt between the
words. A look at how translators grapple with specific features of
Chekhov’s language should clarify how this works in English.
Impersonal Expressions
The Russian language can convey emotional states and actions without
anchoring them to a specific individual. English demands that a person be
identified. In “The Lady with the Dog,” the two protagonists, who are
soon to become lovers, find themselves outside, oppressed by the heat:
Весь день хотелось пить [. . .]. Некуда было деваться
(W:–). Literally: “Every day [absent subject] wanted to drink.
There was nowhere to put [one]self.” In Chekhov’s Russian the state of
thirst and the need to escape infuse the environment, transcending the
characters’ individual experience. Translators offer different solutions:
It was a thirsty day [. . .]. One did not know what to do with oneself.
They were thirsty all day [. . .]. They did not know what to do with
themselves.
All day long Gurov was plagued with thirst [. . .]. There was no escaping
from the heat.
Gender
In Russian, all nouns carry the attribute of gender. Chekhov places his
characters in a close relationship with natural features of the environment,
nouns that share their gender. This is particularly noticeable with his
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female protagonists. Olga, the heroine of “The Grasshopper” or “The
Butterfly” (Poprygunia), has had a summer fling with a landscape artist.
But autumn has arrived, bringing rain, a chill in the air, and the end of
their love. The artist, depressed and disillusioned, looks on the Volga river
bank, which has shed its summer beauty: “. . . вороны летали около
Волги и дразнили ее: «Голая! голая!»“ (W:). “Volga” (like
“river”) is feminine in gender, along with its adjective, “naked” (golaya),
which phonetically echoes the heroine’s name (Olga):
. . . the ravens flew along the Volga mocking her: “Bare! Bare!”
. . . crows flew above the river taunting its nakedness with their raucous caws.
. . . the crows flew over the river, teasing it: “Bare! Bare!”
As this example suggests, in Chekhov’s story the key elements involved in
this kind of linguistic play are often morally loaded. The heroine’s guilt,
seen through the disillusioned hero’s point of view, fills the landscape.
Furthermore, as Hingley’s translation manages to convey, the text’s pho-
netic richness and musicality often contribute to the force of the message.
Narrative Point of View
In Chekhov’s stories, the boundary between the narrator’s consciousness
and that of the characters can be fluid. For example, in the famous
Orianda scene in “The Lady with the Dog,” the lovers sit on a bench
and observe the eternal roar of the sea below them, and their consciousness
merges with that of nature. Translators must choose from a range of
options in the English tense system, none of them incorrect:
Так шумело внизу, когда еще тут не было ни Ялты, ни
Ореанды, теперь шумит и будет шуметь так же
равнодушно и глухо, когда нас не будет (S:).
So it must have sounded . . . so it sounds now . . . and it will sound.
The sea had roared . . . it was roaring now, and it would go on roaring.
This muffled thunder rose . . . so it roars and will roar.
So it had sounded before . . . so it sounded now and would go on
sounding.
“Will” marks the characters’ consciousness; “would” the shift to the
narrator.
These features of Russian style – impersonal expressions, gender, and
point of view – allow for a level of ambiguity in the placement of the
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In Translation
human consciousness not only interpersonally with other voices in the
text, but also within nature itself, and the cosmos. English lacks this
flexibility, which requires that translators introduce a specificity absent in
the original. It is here, in the space between Chekhov’s Russian text and its
many English equivalents, that the work of interpretation begins.
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Afterword
Chekhov’s Endings
Robin Feuer Miller
Despite Chekhov’s laconism, brevity, and pellucid prose, he is a shape-
shifter.
Placing Chekhov squarely within any context is difficult; his appeal is
universal but hard to define. The endings of his stories suggest one locus of
the quiddity of Chekhov’s creative vision. His endings – all portraying
closure itself as fiction – also imply a framework for characterizing what is
innovative about the endings of his plays. “Whoever invents new endings
for plays will discover a new era. I can’t take these banal endings!” writes
Chekhov to Suvorin (June , ; L:).
Emerging from an age of eloquent ideologists, Chekhov embraces
unadorned candor and the unvarnished authenticity of each individual.
Chekhov’s endings confront us with a living tapestry containing within
its weave strands that, while contradictory, do not negate each other.
They are analogous to the final couplet of a Shakespeare sonnet – sending
a shaft of sudden, unfinalized meaning, an irruption, up through the
preceding lines.
Through his endings, Chekhov critiques and transforms the brush-
work of the nineteenth-century literary tradition, rendering questions
and big themes of his predecessors, especially Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and
Tolstoy, in a new key. They become the context against which Chekhov
creates, the sand that nucleates new pearls. The ironies, epiphanies, and
moral, religious, and ethical truths with which that triumvirate fre-
quently end their works dissolve in Chekhov into variegated, minutely
framed, novel snapshots of experience, a perennial awareness of the
fragility of any insight.
We often read Chekhov, especially his endings, as coolly adhering to
laconicism, to carefully structured representation: “In [Chekhov’s] view
every work of literature should theoretically be a system of interconnected
elements, in which nothing can be replaced by anything else; otherwise,
the entire system collapses.” Yet Chekhov, that supposed systematizer,
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Chekhov’s Endings
writes in a letter, “in short stories, it is better not to say enough than to say
too much, because . . . because . . . I don’t know why!” (January , ;
L:). Saying little, or just barely enough – the practice of succinct
writing – emanated not from carefully reasoned theory but from instinct.
Nikolai Mikhailovsky, however, finds no such careful system of laconism,
but an irritating randomness: “He [. . .] does not live in his works but
seems to stroll past life picking out at random now this and now that. But
just why this and not that?” These are the motions of a desultory, well-fed
chicken waddling down a seed-strewn path.
Yet Virginia Woolf, Chekhov’s astute reader, discovers in precisely this
performance of randomness what is new about Chekhov’s endings: their
inconclusiveness separates him from the contexts of the past, launching his
prose into the future:
We are by this time [] alive to the fact that inconclusive stories are
legitimate; [. . .] though they leave us feeling melancholy and perhaps
uncertain, yet somehow [. . .] they provide a resting point for the mind, a
solid object casting its shade of reflection and speculation. The fragments of
which it is composed may have the air of having come together by chance.
Certainly it often seems as if Tchehov made up his stories rather in the way
that a hen picks up grain. Why should she pick here, from side to side,
when so far as we can see, there is no reason to prefer one grain to
another?”
To place the ending of any Chekhov story in one context is immediately to
realize it might fit better elsewhere.
Chekhov’s endings encapsulate his brand of realism: although the range
of characters he depicts is broad, the mode of representation is minimalist.
Nabokov, with his predilection for surprise, famously captured this con-
textual elusiveness, this tension between range and mode, when he pee-
vishly remarked: “When I imagine Chekhov [. . .] all I can make out is a
medley of dreadful prosaisms, ready-made epithets, repetitions, doctors,
unconvincing vamps, and so forth; yet it is his works which I would take
on a trip to another planet.” Like Balzac, Chekhov’s oeuvre embraces a
sprawling mass of humanity, but where Balzac’s human comedy is clut-
tered with things and descriptive abundance, Chekhov’s canvas, equally
broad, remains, paradoxically, minimalist. Yet Chekhov’s minimalism,
laconism, impressionism, and understatement, taken whole, represent an
abundance of characters, situations, and social fabrics that far exceeds those
of Turgenev, Dostoevsky, or Tolstoy. Chekhov’s endings throb with
unclassified sounds, silences, gestures, and overtones, evoking a continuum
of brief rest notes in an ongoing score. Willa Cather, identifying realism’s
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essence, could have been describing Chekhov: “It is the inexplicable
presence of the thing not named, of the over-tone divined by the ear but
not heard by it.”
Chekhov reportedly told Bunin that upon completing a story, one
should cross out the beginning and the end. “It is there that we writers
lie most of all.” Did Chekhov follow his own advice, or did he only make
his endings “seem” as if he did? Chekhov’s advice is no witticism or simple
challenge for brevity, but instead offers a philosophical clue to his endings.
They are not closures but moments occurring in medias res. Concepts like
aporia, chronos, kairos, apophatic, cataphatic, and pleroma can deepen
readings of Chekhov’s endings, yet Chekhov eschewed such terms even
when his work was redolent of them. Please read, savor, and contemplate
the following endings. To rephrase Lord Jim, “in the Chekhovian element,
immerse!”:
Towards morning, I fell asleep and dreamt of a frog sitting in a shell,
moving its eyes. At midday I was awakened by thirst and looked for my
father: he was still walking up and down and gesticulating.
(“Oysters,” )
The little horse chews, listens, and breathes on the hands of her
master . . .
Iona gets carried away and tells her everything . . . (“Grief,” )
Agafya suddenly jumped up, shook her head, and walked toward her
husband with a firm step. She had, it seems, summoned up her strength
and made up her mind. (Agafya, )
And Grisha, bursting with the impressions of the new life he has only
just discovered, is given a spoonful of castor-oil by his mama. (“Grisha,”
)
Lulled by sweet hopes, he was sound asleep an hour later . . . He dreamed
of a stove. On the stove sits Grandfather [. . .]; he’s reading the letter to the
cooks . . . Eel paces near the stove, wagging his tail . . . (“Vanka,” )
Laughing, winking at the green patch and wagging her finger at it, Varka
creeps up to the cradle and bends over the baby. Having smothered it, she
lies down quickly on the floor, laughs with joy that now she can sleep, and a
minute later is sleeping the sleep of the dead . . . (“Sleepy,” )
Ferrying across the river [. . .] he gazed at his native village [. . .], he kept
thinking of how truth and beauty guiding human life back there in the
garden and the high priest’s courtyard carried on unceasingly to this day,
and had in all likelihood and at all times been the essence of human life and
everything on earth, and the feeling of youth, health, strength [. . .] and an
ineffably sweet anticipation of happiness [. . .] gradually took possession of
him, and life seemed wonderous, marvelous, and filled with lofty meaning.
(“The Student,” )
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Missyus, where are you? (“The House with the Mezzanine [An Artist’s
Story],” )
And ten minutes later Burkin was asleep. But Ivan Ivanych kept sighing
and turning over from side to side; then he got up, went outside again, and
sitting in the doorway, lighted his pipe. (“The Man in a Case,” )
His pipe lying on the table smelled strongly of stale tobacco, and Burkin
could not sleep for a long while, and kept wondering where the oppressive
smell came from.
The rain tapped on the windowpanes all night. (“Gooseberries,” )
By now the sun had set; its glow died away on the road above. It grew
dark and cool. Lipa and Praskovya walked on, and for a long time they kept
crossing themselves. (“In the Ravine,” )
And it seemed that, just a little more – and the solution would be found,
and then a new, beautiful life would begin; and it was clear to both of them
that the end was still far, far off, and that the most complicated and difficult
part was just beginning (“The Lady with the Little Dog,” ).
And when she said this, she spoke timidly, afraid she would not be
believed . . . And indeed, not everyone did believe her. (“The Bishop,”
)
And finally:
The officer [. . .] tilts one end of the plank. Gusev slides down it, flies off
headfirst, does a somersault in the air and – in he splashes! [. . .]
He moves swiftly toward the bottom. Will he reach it? [. . .] Now he
meets a shoal of little pilot-fish [. . .] Then another dark hulk looms – a
shark. [. . .] It glides under him and he sinks onto its back. Then it turns
belly upwards [. . .] languidly opening its jaw with the two rows of fangs
[. . .]
Overhead [. . .] clouds are massing on the sunset side [. . .] The sky turns
a delicate mauve. Gazing at this sky so glorious and magical, the ocean
scowls at first, but soon it too takes on tender, joyous, ardent hues for which
human speech hardly has a name. (“Gusev,”)
Why give such space to Chekhov’s direct fictional voice? To suggest that
his endings are alive, their laconism containing layers of uncertainty that
are not inconclusive but instead radiate overlapping contexts and mean-
ings. The structure of a joke or humorous anecdote depicts misery, even
tragedy; temporary peace emanates from telling one’s grief to an attentive
but nonhuman body; or, telling one’s story brings relief to the speaker but
discontent to the audience; a body seamlessly continues its physical
experience after death; beauty and comfort lurk in the bloody devouring
of one body by another; epiphanies of interconnectedness are undercut by
the word “seemed.” The variations are unlimited, but a basic, restless,
continuous rhythm emerges, subverting the sense of an ending.
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Some of these endings exude intertextualities with Turgenev,
Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. “Agafya” and “House with a Mezzanine” are
redolent of Turgenev, and at first glance could almost be his. “Agafya”
depicts themes and characters similar to “Ermolai and the Miller’s Wife,”
yet Chekhov’s ending, unlike Turgenev’s, where the two male characters
simply burrow into the hay and fall asleep, pulses with narrative innova-
tion: Agafya enacts an entire drama in the final moments under the
simultaneous three-way gaze of the narrator, Savka, and Agafya’s husband.
Leaving a trail of dew in the grass, crossing a field, fording a river, falling to
the ground, rising, and deliberately moving forward, despite the confining
bonds of the male gaze in triplicate. The last sentence of “The House with
a Mezzanine” lurches dangerously close to sentimentality, as Turgenev
frequently does, especially in the last sentence of Fathers and Children,
while concisely crystallizing, also like Turgenev’s novel, complex social
debate. Chekhov’s story frames are likewise distinctly Turgenevian: “First
Love” and “Bezhin Meadow” spring to mind. Yet in Chekhov’s trilogy, the
frame plot enacted by the friends contains its own embedded, unresolved
drama: each narrator finds relief through telling, but his listener remains
restless. The frames offer no Turgenevan closure. Do Chekhov’s endings
thus inspire restlessness, or do we share the storyteller’s relief? Can their
reputed “openness” encompass our simultaneous satisfaction and disrup-
tion, our reassurance and perturbation?
“The Student,” Chekhov’s favorite story, bears marked traces of the
ending of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Dostoevsky’s short story
endings often depict epiphanies and conversions, both negative and pos-
itive; but in Chekhov such revelations are inherently unstable from the
outset. As profound as is the student’s epiphany about the interconnec-
tedness of individuals through time – no matter how powerfully Biblical
narratives can reverberate in the present – his insight remains precarious.
Although genuine, it is undercut by Chekhov’s trademark term “seemed,”
a portal through which enters an entirely different set of inferences
and experiences.
Most significant is Tolstoy’s presence; implicit dialogues emerge among
their stories. “The Lady with a Dog” and several other Chekhov stories are
most richly experienced in the context of Anna Karenina, whereas the
ending of “Gusev” resonates with “Kholstomer” (). Tolstoy’s reader
experiences closure, relief, and wonder at the devouring of the dead horse
by the wolf and her cubs, although the didactic contrast with
Serpukhovskoy’s useless corpse reduces Kholstomer’s death to a familiar
Tolstoyan trope. At the end of “Gusev,” it is the sympathetic hero whose
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body – with no demarcation suggested between Gusev’s life and death –
enters the water to be devoured by a shark and a school of pilot-fish. The
scene, bare of simple teaching, conveys terrible beauty and harmony,
enacted under a sky for whose colors we have no precise words, nor are
there words to summarize the moment being depicted. There is no
concluding moral, but something more eternal, complex, irreducible. It
is War and Peace, with its three endings, which comes to mind most
powerfully. The novel proper and the First Epilogue in their unfinished
immediacy seem to foreshadow the end of a Chekhov play, whereas the
ending of Tolstoy’s Second Epilogue suggests infinite, unknowable, eternal
processes and interactions of time, space, and matter – for which “human
speech hardly has a name.”
The richest context for considering Chekhov’s endings lies between the
congruent, competing insights of medicine and art. Numerous Chekhov
stories read as case studies of individuals experiencing particular, physical
situations such as starvation, cold, illness, sleep deprivation, insanity,
depression, and child abuse. Chekhov described his separate love for his
mistress (art) and his wife (medicine), but it is their permeation and the
way one profession informs the other that embodies his quintessence. This
permeation is succinctly visible in his endings. Vladimir Kataev identifies
the influence of Chekhov’s medical-school professor, G. A. Zakharin, who
urged the application of scientific methods and medical knowledge to each
case, but always in the context of the individual: “Basic to Zakharin’s
teaching was the rigorous individualization of each case [. . .] and the
uncompromising rejection of stereotypes in treatment. There were no
illnesses ‘in general,’ there were specific sick people.” Chekhov’s stories
reflect this truth.
Janet Malcolm’s beautiful metaphor claiming that Chekhov’s deepest
insights exist within a protective “bark of the prosaic” is inadequate: the
tree’s bark consists of matter identical to its core. It is all one:
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom, or the bole?”
Chekhov’s banalities and his original insights coexist in his endings,
forming an organic whole, like the negative and positive charges on
an atom.
Their cumulative effect reverberates and interacts associatively in our
minds. In The Sense of an Ending Frank Kermode explores the concept of
aevum, the mode of existence imagined to be experienced by angels, a
variety of duration “neither temporal nor eternal [. . .] but participating in
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both the temporal and the eternal.” Although usually applied to angels,
Kermode also identifies aevum as the time order of fictional characters who
seem to operate in time but are actually independent of it. Chekhov’s
endings hover in the time-space of this aevum. That region ascribed to
angels and fictional characters, however, is a space equally inhabited by
readers! Because each of Chekhov’s endings exhibits a burst of some kind
into something that is yet to come, they reflect an aevum.
Kermode posits that “all novels imitate a world of potentiality, even if
this implies a philosophy disclaimed by their authors. They have a fixation
on the eidetic imagery of beginning, middle, and end, potency and
cause.” But what if, in considering the endings to Chekhov’s stories –
not to mention of his plays – one takes the idea of the eidetic more literally
as it appears in its most common usage: “eidetic memory,” that image of
an object that is retained in your memory, in your mind’s eye, for a few
moments after you close your eyes. Of course, one remembers works of
literature as a whole in any genre with an eidetic memory. But with
Chekhov it is his actual endings that display, rather than closure, a
spectacular vividness, an immediacy that propels them into our eidetic
memory, that remain in our mind’s eye, bonding with our own private
experience, and that deliver no typical “sense of an ending.” Instead,
Chekhov’s endings reverberate there with the potential to merge with
others, forming a series of overtones composed of the fictive and the real,
of endings that themselves could be beginnings, but are most likely mid-
dles. His endings are points on a continuum, brushstrokes on an expand-
ing canvas, and not conclusions. They vibrate with overtones. In this they
differ from the endings of his Russian literary predecessors and claim a
context all their own. Chekhov’s endings shape-shift time and space to let
us apprehend the real, and, occasionally, the eternal.
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.
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Notes
Foreword
*
This text is an abridged transcript of remarks made in a public conversation
with the editor at Harvard University, on March , .
Chapter
The letters from Chekhov’s family members are drawn from A. P. Kuzicheva,
Chekhovy. Biografiia sem’i (Moscow: A.R.T., ).
Chapter
Literaturnoe nasledstvo, vol. , ed. K. P. Bogaevskaya, L. R. Lansky, and N.
D. Efros (Moscow: Akademiia nauk USSR, ), –.
Ibid., .
A. S. Suvorin, Russko-iaponskaia voina i russkaia revoliutsiia. Malenkie pis’ma
- gg (Moscow: Algoritm, ), .
Chapter
See Janet Malcolm, Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey (New York: Random
House, ), –.
Rebecca Boyle, “The Death of Anton Chekhov, Told in Proteins,”
Distillations (August , ), www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/the-
death-of-anton-chekhov-told-in-proteins (accessed November , ).
Anton Chekhov and His Times, ed. Andrei Turkov, trans. Cynthia Carlile and
Sharon McKee (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, ), –.
Letopis’ zhizni i tvorchestva A. P. Chekhova, vol. . (–September ),
ed. A. P. Kuzicheva (Moscow: IMLI RAN, ), .
Mikhail Chekhov, Anton Chekhov: A Brother’s Memoir, trans. Eugene Alper
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ), –.
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Notes to pages –
Ibid., –; –.
A. P. Kuzicheva, Chekhov: Zhizn’ otdel’nogo cheloveka (St. Petersburg:
Baltiiskie sezony, ), .
N. I. Gitovich, Letopis´ zhizni i tvorchestva A. P. Chekhova (Moscow:
Khudozhestvennaia literatura, ), .
Ibid., , .
Chapter
Gregory Freeze, “The Soslovie (Estate) Paradigm and Russian Social History,”
The American Historical Review . (February ), –: .
The Russian merchant soslovie (kupechestvo) had little in common with the
large, dynamic bourgeois class central to European cultures and economies.
The majority of merchants (kuptsy) were conservative, and often culturally
closer to peasants than to the aristocracy.
Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Ascribing Class: The Construction of Social Identity in
Soviet Russia,” The Journal of Modern History . (December ),
–: –.
Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, Structures of Society: Imperial Russia’s “People of
Various Ranks” (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, ), .
Alfred Rieber, “The Sedimentary Society,” Russian History ./ (),
Festschrift for Leopold H. Haimson, –: .
Ibid., –. The peasantry was, however, divided into numerous sub-
categories both before and after the emancipation.
Andrzej Walicki, A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to
Marxism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, ), –: .
Rieber, “The Sedimentary Society,” .
Ibid., –; Freeze, “The Soslovie (Estate) Paradigm,” .
Julie de Sherbinin, Chekhov and Russian Religious Culture: The Poetics of the
Marian Paradigm (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, ), .
Chapter
Theodore H. von Laue, “A Secret Memorandum of Sergei Witte on the
Industrialization of Imperial Russia,” The Journal of Modern History .
(March ), –: .
P. A. Zaionchkovskii, Pravitel’stvennyi apparat somoderzhavnoi Rossii v XIXv
(Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Mysl’,” ), .
A. I. Reitblat, Ot Bovy k Bal’montu i drugie raboty po istoricheskoi sotsiologii
russkoi literatury (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, ), .
K. F. Golovin, Russkii roman i russkoe obshchestvo, nd ed. (St. Petersburg:
Izdanie A. F. Marksa, ), .
E. A. Dinershtein, “Fabrikant” chitatelei A. F. Marks (Moscow: “Kniga,”
), –.
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Notes to pages –
See Jeffrey Brooks, “The Young Chekhov: Reader and Writer of Popular
Realism,” in Reading in Russia: Practices of Reading and Literary
Communication, –, ed. Damian Rebecchini and Raffaella Vassena
(Milan: Ledizioni, ), –.
I. M. Orlov, Moskovskii Khudozhestvennyi teatr: Legendy i fakty (opyt khoziaist-
vovaniia) – gg (Moscow: Izd-vo A.R.T., ), –.
Ibid., .
Louise McReynolds, Russia at Play: Leisure Activities at the End of the Tsarist
Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), n.
Nancy Mandelker Frieden, Russian Physicians in an Era of Reform and
Revolution, – (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), .
Reitblat, Ot Bovy k Bal’montu, .
Donald Rayfield, Anton Chekhov: A Life (New York: Henry Holt and
Company, ), .
Elise Kimerling Writschafter, Social Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb:
Northern Illinois University Press, ), –.
Ibid., .
Chapter
Notebook of Anton Chekhov, trans. S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf (New
York: The Ecco Press, ), .
Anton Chekhov, The Cook’s Wedding and Other Stories, trans. Constance
Garnett (New York: Macmillan, ), , .
Anton Chekhov, Peasants and Other Stories, trans. Constance Garnett (New
York: Doubleday, ), .
Chapter
Quoted in Barbara Alpern Engel, Women in Russia, – (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, ), .
Jane T. Costlow, “The Pastoral Source: Representations of the Maternal
Breast in Nineteenth Century Russia,” in Sexuality and the Body in Russian
Culture, ed. Jane T. Costlow, Stephanie Sandler, and Judith Vowles
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, ), .
Priscilla Roosevelt, Life on the Russian Country Estate (New Haven: Yale
University Press, ), .
William Wagner, “The Trojan Mare: Women’s Rights and Civil Rights in
Late Imperial Russia,” in Civil Rights in Imperial Russia, ed. Olga Crisp and
Linda Edmondson (Oxford: Clarendon, ), –.
Barbara Alpern Engel, Breaking the Ties That Bound: The Politics of Marital
Strife in Late Imperial Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), –.
Barbara Evans Clements, A History of Women in Russia: From Earliest Times to
the Present (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), .
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Ibid., .
Richard Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism,
Nihilism, and Bolshevism, – (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
), .
Ibid., .
Costlow, “The Pastoral Source,” .
Chapter
Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in
Fin-de-Siecle Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), –.
A. P. Chudakov, “‘Neprilichnye slova’ i oblik klassika,” Literaturnoe obozrenie
(), .
Emile Zola, Therese Raquin, trans. Andrew Rothwell (New York: Oxford
University Press, ), –.
Caryl Emerson, “Chekhov and the Annas,” in Life and Text: Essays in Honour
of Geir Kjetsaa on the Occasion of His th Birthday, ed. Erik Egeberg, Audun J.
Morch, and Ole Michael Selberg (Oslo: Slavisk-Baltisk Avdeling,
Universitetet i Oslo, ), .
Chapter
Chekhov: pro et contra, ed. I. Sukhikh (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo khristians-
koi gumanitarnoi akademii, ), .
Chekhov v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia lit-
eratura, ), .
Doklad Serpukhovskogo uezdnogo zemskogo Sanitarnogo soveta uezdnomu sobra-
niu (Moscow: Tipografiia Inozemtseva, ), –.
Chekhov v vospominaniiakh, .
Chapter
Interview with Braunschweig, www.youtube.com/watch?v=orOtUWmDE
(accessed January , ).
Simon Karlinsky, “Huntsmen, Birds, Forests, and Three Sisters,” in Chekhov’s
Great Plays: A Critical Anthology, ed. Jean-Pierre Baricelli (New York: New
York University Press, ), .
Rudzkii, “Notes on Russian Forestry,” cited in Jane Costlow, Heart-Pine
Russia: Walking and Writing the Nineteenth-Century Forest (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, ), .
Ivan Turgenev, “Khor i Kalynich,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v
dvadtsati vos’mi tomakh, vol. (Moscow: Nauka, ), .
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Notes to pages –
Vladimir Korolenko, “V golodnyi god” and “V kholernyi god,” in Sobranie
sochinenii (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, ), col. .
Karlinsky, “Huntsmen, Birds, Forests,” .
Chapter
Ivan Leontev-Scheglov, quoted by Mikhail Neviadomsky (Miklashevsky),
“Bez krylevm,” in Iubileinyi chekhovskii sbornik (Moscow: Zaria, ), .
A. S. Glinka (Volzhsky), Ocherki o Chekhove (St. Petersburg: Tipografia
M. M. Stasulevicha, ).
Iury Aikhenvald, Chekhov. Osnovnye momenty ego proizvedenii (Moscow:
Ottisk iz zhurnala “Nauchnoe Slovo,” ), –.
Konstantin Mochulski, Krizis voobrazheniia. Stat’i. Esse. Portrety (Tomsk:
Vodolei, ), .
See Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag,
), –.
Maurice Blanchot, L’Amitié (Paris: Gallimard, ), .
Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary, ed. Simon
Karlinsky (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), –.
Frederic Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, I, trans. G. Handwerk
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, ), .
See Karlinsky, Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought, .
Ibid., .
Ludwig Büchner, Last Words on Materialism and Kindred Subjects (London:
Watts & Co., ), .
Chapter
S. N. Bulgakov, “Chekhov kak myslitel,” in Pro et contra, Tvorchestvo A.P.
Chekhova v russkoi mysli kontsa XIX-nachala XX veka (–) (St.
Petersburg: Izd-vo Russkogo khristianskogo gumanitarnogo instituta, ),
, .
A. A. Izmailov, “Vera ili neverie (religiia Chekhova),” in Pro et contra, Tvorchestvo
A.P. Chekhova v russkoi mysli kontsa XIX-nachala XX veka (–) (St.
Petersburg: Izd-vo Russkogo khristianskogo gumanitarnogo instituta, ), .
V. B. Kataev, “Evolutsia i chudo v mire Chekhova,” in Anton P. Cechov –
Philosophische und religiöse Dimensionen im Leben und im Werk, ed. B. Kataev,
Rolf-Dieter Kluge, and Regine Nohejl (Munich: Verlag Otto Sagner, ),
–.
Cathy Popkin, “Historia Morbi and The Holy of Holies in Scientific and
Religious Discourse and Chekhov’s Epistemology,” in Anton P. Cechov –
Philosophische und religiöse Dimensionen im Leben und im Werk, ed. B.
Kataev, Rolf-Dieter Kluge, and Regine Nohejl (Munich: Verlag Otto
Sagner, ), –.
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In my reading of “Ward Six” I am deeply indebted to Yuri Corrigan’s
argument in “Chekhov and the Divided Self,” The Russian Review, .
(), –.
Christopher J. G. Turner, “Time in Chekhov’s ‘The Bishop,’” Modern
Language Review . (), –.
Chapter
Mikhail Chekhov, Vokrug Chekhova. Vstrechi i vpechatleniia (Moscow-
Leningrad: Akademiia, ), .
Anton Chekhov, “The Black Monk,” in Ward No. and Other Stories,
–, trans. Ronald Wilks (London: Penguin, ), –.
Chekhov, Vokrug Chekhova, –.
Anton Chekhov, “Ward No. ,” in Chekhov’s Doctors: A Collection of
Chekhov’s Medical Tales, ed. Jack Coulehan (Kent, OH: Kent State
University Press, ) –: .
See, among others, Gillian Beer, “‘The Death of the Sun’: Victorian Solar
Physics and Solar Myth,” in J. B. Bullen (ed.), The Sun is God: Painting,
Literature and Mythology in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
), –.
Michael Finke, Seeing Chekhov: Life and Art (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
), .
Anton Chekhov, The Duel, in The Complete Short Novels, trans. Richard
Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Everyman’s Library, ),
–: –.
Chapter
M. Mirskii, Doktor Chekhov (Moscow: Nauka, ), .
F. F. Erisman, Kurs gigieny (Moscow, ), .
Ibid., .
Russkaia zemskaia meditsina: Obzor razvitiia zemskoi meditsiny v Rossii
voobshche i otdiel’no v Mokovkoi gubernii s kratkim statisticheskim ocherkom
strany i eia sanitarnogo sostoianiia, ed. E. A. Osipov, I. V. Popov, and P. I.
Kurkin (Moscow, ), , .
N. I. Pirogov, Anatome topographica (St. Petersburg, ).
I. V. Fedorov, “Kuratorskie kartochki Chekhova-studenta,” Klinicheskaya
meditsina . (), –.
Chapter
E. Balabanovich, Chekhov i Chaikovskii (Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii,
), –.
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Notes to pages –
Ibid., .
Serge Gregory, Antosha & Levitasha: The Shared Lives and Art of Anton Chekhov
and Isaac Levitan (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, ), .
Jean Benedetti, Stanislavski (New York: Routledge, ), –.
Balabanovich, Chekhov i Chaikovskii, .
Chapter
D. Merezhkovskii, “Peterburgu byt’ pustu,” Rech’ (December ), .
Ashkinazi, “Ot individualizma k bogostroitel’stvu,” Novyi zhurnal dlia vsekh
(April ), .
Lev Shestov, Apofeos bezpochvennosti (St. Petersburg, ).
Daniel Beer, Renovating Russia: The Human Sciences and the Fate of Liberal
Modernity, – (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), esp.
Chapters –.
Vladimir Mikhnevich, Iazvy Peterburga: Opyt istoriko-statisticheskogo issledovaniia
nravstvennosti stolichnogo naseleniia (St. Petersburg, ); Anatolii Bakhtiarov,
Briukho Peterburga: obshchestvenno-fiziologicheskie ocherki (St. Petersburg, );
N. N. Zhivotov, Peterburgskie profili, vols. (St. Petersburg, –).
Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution, –, ed. Catriona
Kelly and David Shepherd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –.
Ibid., –.
Quoted by Aileen Kelly, “Chekhov the Subversive,” New York Review of Books
(November , ).
For example, Simon Karlinsky, “Introduction: The Gentle Subversive,” in
Letters of Anton Chekhov, ed. Simon Karlinsky (London: Harper & Row,
), –.
A. Kollontai, “Novaia zhenshchina,” Sovremennyi mir (), –.
S. Stepniak-Kravchinskii, “Podpol’naia Rossiia,” in Sochineniia, vol.
(Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, ), www.lib.ru/PRIKL/
STEPNYAK/podpol.txt (accessed September , ).
Protsess Very Zasulich: sud i posle suda, ed. G. A. Gallanin (St. Petersburg,
), –.
See Self and Story in Russian History, ed. Laura Engelstein and Stephanie
Sandler (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ).
Olga Matich, Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russia’s Fin de Siècle
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, ).
Chapter
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, –: An Experiment
in Literary Investigation, I–II, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper
and Row, ), .
Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope: A Memoir, trans. Max Hayward
(New York: Atheneum, ), .
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Notes to pages –
Fyodor Dostoevsky, A Writer’s Diary, trans. Kenneth Lantz (Evanston:
Northwestern UP, ), vol. , .
Signposts: A Collection of Articles on the Russian Intelligentsia, trans. Marshall
S. Shatz and Judith E. Zimmerman (Irvine: Charles Schlacks, ), .
Ibid., .
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Ann Dunnigan (New York: Signet, ),
.
Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate: A Novel, trans. Robert Chandler (New York:
Harper and Row, ), –.
Anton Chekhov, “Ward Six” and Other Stories, trans. Ann Dunnigan (New
York: Signet, ), .
Anton Chekhov, “The Darling” and Other Stories, trans. Constance Garnett
(New York: Ecco, ), –.
Anton Chekhov, “The Duel” and Other Stories, trans. Constance Garnett
(New York: Ecco Press, ), , .
Anton Chekhov, “The Lady with the Dog” and Other Stories (New York: Ecco,
), .
Anton Chekhov, “The Chorus Girl” and Other Stories, trans. Constance
Garnett (New York: Ecco Press, ), .
Ibid., –.
Ibid., –.
Signposts, .
Chekhov, “The Chorus Girl” and Other Stories, .
Ibid., .
Ibid., .
Anna Geifman, Thou Shalt Kill: Revolutionary Terrorism in Russia, –
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), .
S. Stepniak, Underground Russia: Revolutionary Profiles and Sketches from Life,
nd ed. (New York: Scribner’s, ), .
Chekhov, “The Chorus Girl” and Other Stories, –, .
Ibid., .
Adam B. Ulam, In the Name of the People (New York: Viking, ), .
Ibid., .
Ibid., .
Ibid., –.
Ibid., .
Chapter
V. B. Kataev, Chekhov plius . . . Predshestvenniki, sovremenniki, preemniki
(Moscow: Iazyki slavianskoi literatury, ), –.
М. Lotman, “Intelligentsiia i svoboda (k analizu intelligentskogo diskursa),” in
Russkaia intelligentsia i zapadnyi intellektualizm, ed. B. A. Uspenskii (Moscow:
O.G.I., ), .
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Notes to pages –
I. S. Stepanov, Konstanty. Slovar’ russkoi kul’tury. Opyt issledovaniia (Moscow:
Iazyki slavianskoj kul’tury, ), .
Gary Saul Morson, “The Intelligentsia and Its Critics,” in A Companion to
Russian History, ed. Abbott Gleason (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, ), .
P. Boborykin, “Podgnivshie ‘Vekhi’ (Konspekt publichnoi liktsii),” in Vekhi:
Pro et Contra (St. Petersburg: Izdatel-stvo Russkogo Khristianskogo gumani-
tarnogo instituta, ), .
Richard Pipes, “The Historical Evolution of the Russian Intelligentsia,” in
The Russian Intelligentsia, ed. Richard Pipes (New York: Columbia University
Press, ), .
For similar examples, see L:; L:; L:; L:; L:.
On the code of behavior that Chekhov advocates, see S. Evdokimova, “Russian
Binaries and The Question of Culture: Chekhov’s True Intelligent,” in
Chekhov’s Letters: Biography, Context, Poetics, ed. Carol Apollonio and Radislav
Lapushin (Lanham: Lexington Books, ), –. See also Gary Saul
Morson, “Prosaic Bakhtin: Landmarks, Anti-Intelligentsialism,” Common
Knowledge . (), –.
Christophe Charle, Birth of the Intellectuals, – (Cambridge: Polity
Press, ).
Chapter
A. P. Chekhov, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii i Pisem, ed. S. D. Balukhatyi et al.,
vol. (Moscow: Gos. izd-vo kudozh. lit-ry, –), .
Budil’nik, (), .
Zritel’, (), .
Petersburgskaia gazeta – (November –December , );
Petersburgskaia gazeta (December , ).
Chekhov began at Oskolki for kopecks a line, and Suvorin offered . Leikin
congratulated him on the move upward, although “Chekhonte” continued to
write intermittently for Oskolki. Chekhov, Polnoe Sobranie, .
“Panakhida,” Novoe vremia, (February , ), .
Chapter
Michael Finke, Seeing Chekhov: Life & Art (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
), , .
Anthony J. Steinbock, Moral Emotions: Reclaiming the Evidence of the Heart
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, ), –.
Jeffrey Brooks, The Firebird and the Fox: Russian Culture under Tsars and
Bolsheviks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –.
Self-Conscious Emotions: The Psychology of Shame, Guilt, Embarrassment, and
Pride, ed. June Price Tangey and Kurt W. Fischer (New York: The Guilford
Press, ).
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Notes to pages –
Michael Lewis, “Embarrassment: The Emotion of Self-Exposure and
Evaluation,” in Tangey and Fischer, Self-Conscious Emotions, –,
esp. –.
Donald Rayfield, Understanding Chekhov: A Critical Study of Chekhov’s Prose
and Drama (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, ), .
Ibid., .
Chapter
L. N. Tolstoi i A. P. Chekhov. Rasskazyvaiut sovremenniki, arkhivy, muzei . . .,
ed. A. S. Melkov (Moscow: Nasledie, ), –.
Adrian Hunter, “Constance Garnett’s Chekhov and the Modernist Short
Story,” Translation and Literature, (), –.
Anton Chekhov, A Life in Letters, ed. R. Bartlett, trans. R. Bartlett and
A. Phillips (London: Penguin Classics, ), –.
Ibid, –, .
For further details, see Thomas Winner, “Čexov’s ‘Ward No. ’ and
Tolstoyan Ethics,” Slavic and East European Journal . (), –.
Chekhov, A Life in Letters, .
For further details, see Rosamund Bartlett, “Tolstoy’s Fiction: Its Spiritual
Legacy,” in Tolstoy and Spirituality, ed. Predrag Cicovacki and Heidi Nada
Grek (Boston: Academic Studies Press), , –.
L. N. Tolstoi i A. P. Chekhov, , .
Anton Chekhov, About Love and Other Stories, trans. R. Bartlett (Oxford:
Oxford World’s Classics, ), .
For further details, see Caryl Emerson, “Chekhov and the Annas,” in Anton
Chekhov’s Selected Stories, ed. Cathy Popkin (New York: Norton, ),
–.
L. N. Tolstoi i A. P. Chekhov, .
Chekhov, A Life in Letters, –.
Ibid., .
Chapter
A.P. Chekhov v vospominaniakh sovremennikov, ed. N. I. Gitovich (Moscow:
“Khudozhestvennaia literatura,” ), .
V. B. Kataev, Chekhov plius. Predshestvenniki, sovremenniki, preemniki
(Moscow: Yazyki slavianskoi kul’tury, ), .
See R. Nazirov, “Parodii Chekhova i frantsuzskaia literatura,” in Chekhov i
Frantsiia (Moscow: Nauka, ), –: –.
Ibid., –.
K. A. Subbotina, “Zola,” in A.P. Chekhov. Entsiklopediia (Moscow:
Prosveshchenie, ), .
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Notes to pages –
Guy de Maupassant, Une Vie (Paris: Société d’Éditions Littéraires et
Artistiques, ), .
V. Lakshin, “Chekhov i Mopassan pered sudom L. Tolstogo,” in Chekhov i
Frantsiia (Moscow: Nauka, ), .
Jean Bonamour, “‘Chaika’ i Mopassan,” in Chaika. Prodolzhenie poleta
(Moscow: A. A. Bakhrushin, ), –: .
Z. Papernyi, “Smysl i bessmyslitsa zhizni u Chekhova i Mopassana,” in
Chekhov i Frantsiia, .
Chapter
N. K. Mikhailovskii, “Ob ottsakh i detiakh i o g. Chekhove,” in Literatura i
zhizn’. (Pis’ma o raznykh raznostiakh) (St. Petersburg, ), –: .
First published in .
D. S. Merezhkovskii, “Staryi vopros po povodu novogo talanta,” Severnyi
vestnik (), –: . On Merezhkovsky and Chekhov, see S.
Povartsov, “Liudi razhnykh mechtanii,” Voprosy literatury (), –.
D. S. Merezhkovskii, O prichinakh upadka i o novykh techeniiakh sovremennoi
russkoi literatury (St. Petersburg, ), .
A. L. Volynskii, “Literaturnye zametki,” Severnyi vestnik (), –:
.
E. D. Tolstaia, “‘Vdokhnovennyi didakt’ i ‘simpatichnyi talent.’ Akim
Volynskii o Chekhove,” De visu . (), –.
A. L. Volynskii, “Literaturnye zametki. Sovremennaia russkaia belletristika,”
Severnyi vestnik (), –: .
Valerii Briusov, “Nenuzhnaia pravda,” Mir iskusstva (), –.
D. V. Filosofov, “Teatral’nye zametki. Chaika,” Mir iskusstva – (),
–: .
Ibid., .
Ibid., .
A. Ninov, “Chekhov i Bal’mont,” Voprosy literatury (), –:
–.
A. M. Dolotova, “Pis’ma D. S. Merezhkovskogo k A. P. Chekhovu,” in
Chekhoviana. Chekhov i serebrianyi vek, ed. M. O. Goriacheva and A. P.
Chudakov (Moscow: Nauka, ), –: .
A. Serebrov (Tikhonov), “O Chekhove,” in Chekhov v vospominaniiakh
sovremennikov (Moscow, ), –: .
Viacheslav Ivanov, “Two Elements in Contemporary Symbolism,” in Selected
Essays, ed. Michael Wachtel, trans. Robert Bird (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, ), .
E. A. Polotskaia, “Neokonchennaia stat’ia o ‘Vishnevom sade’ Chekhova,” in
Literaturnoe nasledstvo (Moscow: Nauka, ), : –.
Andrei Belyi, “Vishnevyi sad,” Vesy (), –.
Andrei Belyi, “Chekhov,” Vesy (), –: .
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Notes to pages –
Lev Shestov, “Tvorchestvo iz nichego,” Voprosy zhizni (), –.
D. S. Merezhkovskii, “O Chekhove,” Vesy (), –: . This essay
was revised and incorporated into “Chekhov i Gor’kii,” in Griadushchii kham
().
Anton Krainyi [Gippius], “Eshche o poshlosti,” Novyi put’ (),
–: .
Anton Krainyi [Gippius], “Vishnevye sady,” Novyi put’ (), –:
.
D. S. Merezhkovskii, “Asfodeli i romashka,” V tikhom omute (St. Petersburg,
), –: , .
D. S. Merezhkovskii, “Brat chelovecheskii,” in Chekhovskii iubileinyi sbornik
(Moscow, ), –: .
Viacheslav Ivanov, “Dostoevskii i roman-tragediia,” Russkaia mysl’ (),
–: .
D. V. Filosofov, “Byt’, sobytiia i nebytie,” in Iubileinyi chekhovskii sbornik
(Moscow: Zaria, ), –: –.
Chapter
Anton Chekhov, Chekhov, The Major Plays, trans. Ann Dunnigan (New York:
Signet Classics, ), .
Ibid., .
Laurence Senelick, “Offenbach and Chekhov; or, La Belle Elena,” in Reading
Chekhov’s Text, ed. R. L. Jackson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
), .
Chekhov, The Major Plays, .
Ibid., .
Chapter
Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (New York: Vintage Books, []
), .
Richard Gilman, Chekhov’s Plays: An Opening into Eternity (New Haven: Yale
University Press, ), .
March , ; Anton Chekhov, A Life in Letters, ed. Rosamund Bartlett,
trans. Rosamund Bartlett and Anthony Phillips (London: Penguin Books,
), .
Anton Chekhov, Chekhov: The Major Plays, trans. Jean-Claude van Itallie
(New York: Applause, ), .
Ibid., .
Ibid., .
August Strindberg, “Preface to Miss Julie,” in Strindberg Plays: One, trans.
Michael Meyer (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama), .
Ibid., , .
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Notes to pages –
Chekhov, Major Plays, .
Ibid., –.
Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl
Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), .
Maurice Maeterlinck, “The Modern Drama,” in Theater of the Avant-Garde,
–: A Critical Anthology, ed. Robert Knopf (New Haven: Yale
University Press, ), .
Maurice Maeterlinck, “The Tragical in Daily Life,” in Theatre/Theory/Theatre,
ed. Daniel Gerould (New York and London: Applause, ), .
See Vsevolod Meyerhold in “Naturalist Theater and Theater of Mood,” in
Chekhov: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert Louis Jackson (Englewood
Cliffs: Prentice Hall); see Andrei Bely in Russian Symbolist Theatre: An
Anthology of Play and Critical Texts, ed. Michael Green (Ann Arbor: Ardis,
).
Maeterlinck, “The Modern Drama,” .
Chekhov, Major Plays, –.
Ibid., .
Ibid., .
Elinor Fuchs, The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theater after Modernism
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), .
Chapter
A. P. Chekhov, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo khudozhest-
vennoi literatury, ), .
Vladimir Nemirovitch-Dantchenko [sic], My Life in the Russian Theatre,
trans. John Cournos (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., ), .
Konstantin Stanislavski, My Life in Art, trans. Jean Benedetti (London:
Routledge, ), .
Nemirovitch-Dantchenko [sic], My Life in the Russian Theatre, .
V. I. Nemirovich-Danchenko, letter to A. P. Chekhov, April , in
Tvorcheskoe nasledie, vol. (Moscow: Moskovskii khudozhestvennyi teatr,
), –; the italics are Nemirovich-Danchenko’s.
Nemirovitch-Dantchenko [sic], My Life in the Russian Theatre, .
Ibid., –.
Cited in Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem: Sochineniia, vol. , .
Chapter
Aleksandr Zinov’ev, “Moi Chekhov,” Zvezda (), –.
Vladimir Ermilov, Chekhov (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, ), , , .
Ibid., .
Ibid., .
Ibid., .
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Notes to pages –
Isaiah Berlin, Personal Impressions (New York: Viking Press, ), .
See Nikolai Vil’mont, O Pasternake: Vospominaniia i mysli (Moscow: Sovetskii
pisatel’, ), –.
Alexander Gladkov, Meetings with Pasternak: A Memoir, trans. Max Hayward
(London: Collins and Harwill Press, ), .
Boris Pasternak, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. (Moscow: Slovo, ),
.
Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, trans. Max Hayward and Manya Harari
(New York: Pantheon Books, ), .
Ibid.
Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate, trans. Robert Chandler (New York: Harper &
Row, ), –.
Ibid., .
Andrei Bitov, “Moi dedushka Chekhov i pradedushka Pushkin,” in
Chetyrezhdy Chekhov, comp. Igor Klekh (Moscow: Zapasnyi vykhod, ),
–: .
Evgenii Shvarts, Zhivu bespokoino . . . Iz dnevnikov (Leningrad: Sovetskii
pisatel’, ), .
Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature (Orlando: A Harvest Book,
), .
Shvarts, Zhivu bespokoino, .
Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters, ed. Rosamund Bartlett, trans. Rosamund
Bartlett and Anthony Phillips (London: Penguin Classics, ), .
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, –: An Experiment in
Literary Investigation, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper & Row,
), vol. –, .
Fridrikh Gorenshtein, “Moi Chekhov oseni i zimy goda. Sub’ektivnye
zametki,” in A. P. Chekhov: Pro et Contra. Antologiia, ed. I. N. Sukhikh (St.
Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo khristianskoi gumanitarnoi akademii, ), vol. ,
–: .
Ibid., .
The title of the monograph by N. L. Leiderman and M. N. Lipovetskii, Ot
“sovetskogo pisatelia” k pisateliu sovetskoi epokhi: Put’ Iuriia Trifonova
(Ekaterinburg: Izdatel’stvo AMB, ).
Iurii Trifonov, “Pravda i krasota,” in A. P. Chekhov: Pro et Contra. Antologiia.
V. , ed. I. N. Sukhikh (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo khristianskoi gumanitar-
noi akademii, ), –: .
Semion Ekshtut, Iurii Trifonov. Velikaia sila nedoskazannogo (Moscow:
Molodaia gvardiia, ), .
Iurii Trifonov, Oprokinutyi dom (Moscow: Panorama, ), .
Ibid., .
Ibid., .
Ibid., –.
Sergei Dovlatov, “Zapisnye knizhki (–),” in Chekhov. Il’f. Dovlatov.
Iz zapisnykh knizhek (New York: Alexandria Publishing: ), .
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Notes to pages –
Chapter
S. le Fleming, “Coping with the Outlandish: The English Response to
Chekhov’s Plays –,” in Chekhov on the British Stage, ed. P. Miles
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –: .
J. M. Murry, “Preface,” in Anton Tchekhov and Other Essays by Leon Shestov,
trans. S. Koteliansky and J. M. Murry (Dublin and London: Maunsel and Co.
Ltd., ), x.
J. M. Murry, “The Method of Tchehov,” Athenaeum (April , ), –:
.
Harry Moore, ed., The Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. (London:
Heinemann, ), .
Ibid., vol. , .
Cited in le Fleming, “Coping with the Outlandish,” .
Jacob Tonson (Arnold Bennett), “Books and Persons,” The New Age . (June
, ), .
Cited in Jan McDonald, “Chekhov, naturalism and the drama of dissent,” in
Miles, British Stage, –: .
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., .
Ibid.
Le Fleming, “Coping with the Outlandish,” .
J. M. Murry, Aspects of Literature (London: William Collins Sons and Co.,
), .
D. S. Mirsky, “Chekhov and the English,” The Monthly Criterion (),
–: .
Cited in le Fleming, “Coping with the Outlandish,” .
V. I. Nemirovich-Danchenko, Statii. Rechi. Besedy. Pisma (Moscow, ),
.
See C. Marsh, “Chekhov Re-Viewed: The Moscow Art Theatre’s Visits to
Britain in , , and ,” in Miles, British Stage, –.
D. Augusto Arboleda, “British Chekhov: An Analysis of the United
Kingdom’s st Century National Identity through Contemporary
Reinterpretations of Anton Chekhov’s Plays” (PhD thesis, University of
Roehampton, ), .
M. Billington, “Three Sisters Review – Inua Ellams Transfers Chekhov to
Nigeria,” The Guardian (December , ), www.theguardian.com/stage/
/dec//three-sisters-review-inua-ellams-chekhov-lyttelton-theatre-lon
don (accessed December , ).
D. Augusto Arboleda, “British Chekhov,” .
James Wood, The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (London:
Jonathan Cape, ), .
See Mirsky, “Chekhov and the English,” .
F. A. Iskander, Siuzhet sushchestvovaniia (Moscow: Podkova, ), .
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Notes to pages –
J. M. Murry (ed.), Katherine Mansfield’s Letters to John Middleton Murry,
–. (London: Constable, ), .
Donald Rayfield, Understanding Chekhov: A Critical Study of Chekhov’s Prose
and Drama (Bristol: Bristol University Press, , vii.
B. M. Eikhenbaum, “O Chekhove,” in O proze, ed. I. Yampol’skii
(Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, ), –: .
Le Fleming, “Coping with the Outlandish,” .
Ibid.
A. Bitov, “Moi dedushka Chekhov i pradedushka Pushkin,” in Chetyrezhdy
Chekhov, ed. I. Klekh (Moscow: Emergency Exit, ), –: .
G. Ars, “Iz vospominanii ob A. P. Chekhove,” Teatr i iskusstvo (),
.
Quoted in Simon Karlinsky, Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters
and Commentaries (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, ), .
Chapter
The Nation (June , ), ; New York Tribune (May , ), .
Laurence Senelick, Stanislavsky: A Life in Letters (London: Routledge, ),
.
Oliver Sayler, The Russian Theatre (New York: Brentano’s, ), .
Lee Strasberg and Robert H. Hethmon, Strasberg at the Actors Studio (New
York: Theater Communications Group, ), .
Sharon Marie Carnicke, “Stanislavsky’s production of The Cherry Orchard in
the US,” in J. Douglas Clayton, ed., Chekhov Then and Now (New York:
Peter Lang, ), .
Stark Young, “Many Gods,” North American Review (March ), .
Eva La Galliennne, “Preface,” in The Plays of Anton Chekhov, trans. Constance
Garnett (New York: Carlton House) , ix.
Laurence Senelick, The Chekhov Theatre: A Century of the Plays in Performance
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), .
Brooks Atkinson, New York Times, December , .
Arthur Miller and Robert A. Martin, The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller
(Harmondsworth.: Penguin Books, ), –.
Lillian Hellman, The Selected Letters of Anton Chekhov, trans. Sidonie Lederer
(Hopewell: Ecco Press, ), xxiv.
Austin Pendleton, “An Appetite for Joy,” interview in The Actor’s Chekhov:
Nikos Psacharopoulos and the company of the Williamstown Theatre Festival, ed.
Jean Hackett (Newbury: Smith and Kraus, ), .
Ibid., .
David Allen, Performing Chekhov, (London: Routledge, ), .
Frank Rich, New York Times, September , .
Sheila Rabillard, “The Work of the Theatre: The Wooster Group Adapts
Chekhov’s Three Sisters in Fish Story,” in Adapting Chekhov, ed. J. Douglas
Clayton and Yana Meerzon (London: Routledge, ), –.
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Notes to pages –
Allen, .
Aaron Posner, “Stupid Fucking Bird,” TheatreForum (), .
Posner, .
New York Times, July , .
Chapter
This chapter is based on my book Translation’s Forgotten History:
Russian Literature, Japanese Mediation, and the Formation of Modern
Korean Literature (Harvard University Asia Center), and my journal
article “Rethinking World Literature through the Relations between Russian
and East Asian Literatures,” Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture
Review, vol. : – (https://cross-currents.berkeley.edu/e-journal/issue-
/cho).
Mark Gamsa, The Reading of Russian Literature in China: A Moral Example
and Manual of Practice (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ), .
For the full list of translations, see Meiji, Taishō, Shōwa hon’yaku bungaku
mokuroku (Index of Translated Literature in Meiji, Taishō, and Shōwa Japan),
ed. Kokuritsu Kokkai Toshokan (Tokyo: Kazama shobō, ), –.
Lian Shu Li, “Chekhov Studies in China,” in Chekhov Then and Now: The
Reception of Chekhov in World Culture, ed. J. Douglas Clayton (New York:
Peter Lang, ), .
Pëtr Kropotkin, Russian Literature (London: Duckworth & Co., ), .
Yanagi Tomiko, “Chehofu—Meiji Taishō no shōkai hon’yaku wo chūshin
ni” (The Introduction and Translation of Chekhov in Meiji and Taishō
Japan), in Ōbei sakka to nihon kindai bungaku (Western Writers and Modern
Japanese Literature), ed. Fukuda Mitsuharu, Kenmochi Takehiko, and
Kodama Kōichi (Tokyo: Kyōiku syuppan senta, ), –.
Sōma Gyofū’s “Chehofu ron” (A study on Chekhov)was serialized in the
Tōkyō Niroku Shinbun (Tokyo Niroku News) from September to October
, . Nakajima Michimasa, Nihon ni okeru Che-hofu shoshi: –
(A Bibliography of Chekhov in Japan: –) (Nagoya: Maruzen
Nagoya shuppan sābisu sentā, .), .
Chu Yosŏp, “Nosŏa ŭi tae munho Ch’eekhop’ŭ” (The great Russian writer
Chekhov), Sŏgwang (July ), .
Ibid., –.
Ibid., .
Maeda Akira, “Che-hofu shōden” (A short biography of Chekhov), in Anton
Chekhov, Tanpen jisshu Che-hofu shū (Chekhov’s Ten Short Stories), trans.
Maeda Akira (Tokyo: Hakubunkan, ).
Kropotkin, Russian Literature, .
Pak Yŏnghŭi, “Ch’ehop’u hŭigok e nat’anan nosŏa hwanmyŏlgi ŭi kot’ong”
(The agony of the disillusioned period of Russia described in Chekhov’s
dramas), Kaebyŏk (The Creation) (February ), .
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Notes to pages –
Leon Shestov, “Anton Tchekhov (Creation from the Void),” in Anton
Tchekhov and Other Essays (Dublin: Maunsel and Co. Ltd., ), –.
Ibid., –.
Li, “Chekhov Studies in China,” .
Sho Konishi, Anarchist Modernity: Cooperatism and Japanese-Russian
Intellectual Relations in Modern Japan (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia
Center, ), –.
Gamsa, The Reading of Russian Literature in China, .
Chapter
This film and, indeed, the majority of films discussed in this chapter are
readily available online, most with English subtitles for pedagogical purposes
and non-Russian speakers.
Ilia Gurliand, “Vospominaniia o Chekhove,” Teatr i iskusstvo (),
–: .
Alyssa Deblasio, “Ivan Dykhovichny’s The Black Monk (): Madness,
Chekhov, and the Chimera of Idleness,” in The Filmmaker’s Philosopher:
Merab Mamardashvili and Russian Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, ), –.
Zara Abdullaeva, “Sarai ili magazin. Chekhovskie motivy, rezhisser Kira
Muratova,” Iskusstvo kino (November ).
Christophe Collard, “Chekhov among Friends: Mamet’s Vanya, or,
Adaptation through a Russian Looking-Glass,” in Crossings: David Mamet’s
Work in Different Genres and Media, ed. Johan Callens (Newcastle upon
Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, ) –: .
interview with Nuri Bilge Ceylan, www.youtube.com/watch?v=yw_
oOrcww (accessed May , ).
Chapter
M. A. Shereshevskaia, “Perevody (proza i pis’ma), Chekhov v Anglii,” in
Chekhov i mirovaia literatura: V kn., Literaturnoe Nasledstvo, vol. , ed.
Z. S. Papernyi and E. A. Polotskaia (Moscow, ), –: .
Richard Garnett, Constance Garnett: A Heroic Life (London: Sinclair-
Stevenson, ), .
Munir Sendich, “Anton Chekhov in English: A Comprehensive Bibliography
of Works About and By Him (–), Part II: Translations,” Russian
Language Journal / Русский язык ./ (), –: –.
Peter Henry, Anton Chekhov in English: . . (Oxford: Northgate
Books, ), –.
Anton Chekhov, “The Lady with the Dog,” in “The Lady with the Dog” and
Other Stories, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Ecco, ; translated in
), –: .
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Notes to pages –
Anton Chekhov, “The Lady with the Little Dog,” in “About Love” and Other
Stories, trans. Rosamund Bartlett (RB) (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
), –: –.
Anton Chekhov, “The Lady with the Pet Dog,” in Forty Stories by Anton
Chekhov, trans. Robert Payne (RP) (New York: Vintage Classics, ),
–: .
Anton Chekhov, “The Grasshopper,” trans. A. E. Chamot, in “The
Grasshopper” and Other Stories (New York: Books for Libraries, ),
–: .
Anton Chekhov, “The Butterfly,” in “Ward Number Six” and Other Stories,
ed. and trans. Ronald Hingley, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ;
translated ), –: .
Anton Chekhov, “The Grasshopper,” trans. Ivy Litvinov, in Anton Chekhov’s
Short Stories, ed. Ralph E. Matlaw (New York: Norton, ), –: .
Chekhov (trans. Garnett), “The Lady with the Dog,” .
Anton Chekhov, “The Lady with the Dog,” tr. Ivy Litvinov, in Anton
Chekhov’s Short Stories, ed. Ralph E. Matlaw (New York: Norton, ),
–: .
Chekhov (trans. Payne), “The Lady with the Pet Dog,” .
Anton Chekhov, “The Lady with the Little Dog,” trans. Richard Pevear and
Larissa Volokhonsky, in Anton Chekhov’s Selected Stories, ed. Cathy Popkin
(New York: W. W. Norton & Company, ), –: .
Afterword
Peter M. Bitsilli, Chekhov’s Art: A Stylistic Analysis, trans. Toby W. Clyman
and Edwina Jannie Cruise (Ann Arbor: Ardis, ), .
Quoted in Robert Louis Jackson, “Introduction,” in Chekhov: A Collection of
Critical Essays, ed. R. L. Jackson (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, ),
–: .
Virginia Woolf, “The Russian Background,” in Books and Portraits, ed. Mary
Lyon (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovic, ), –: .
Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions (New York: Harper & Row, ), .
Willa Cather, “The Novel Demeuble,” The New Republic (April , ),
–.
Ivan Bunin, About Chekhov: The Unfinished Symphony, ed. and trans. Thomas
Gaiton Marullo (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, ), .
All passages from Anton Chekhov, Anton Chekov’s Selected Stories: A Norton
Critical Edition, ed. Cathy Popkin (New York: W.W. Norton, ); except
“Oysters,” from Anton Chekhov’s Short Stories, ed. Ralph E. Matlaw (New
York: W.W. Norton, ).
Excerpted in Popkin, ed., Chekhov’s Selected Stories, .
Janet Malcolm, Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey (New York: Random
House, ), .
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Notes to pages –
W. B. Yeats, “Among School Children,” in The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
(New York: Macmillan, ), –.
Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction with a
New Epilogue (London: Oxford University Press, ), –.
Ibid., .
W. H. Auden, The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden (New York: Random
House, ), .
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Further Reading
Suggestions for further reading follow the chapter structure of the volume with an
emphasis on relevant sources for the English-language reader.
Family and Friends (Biographical Contexts)
Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary. Trans.
Michael Henry Heim and Simon Karlinsky (); reprinted, Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, .
Apollonio, Carol. Simply Chekhov. New York: Simply Charly, .
Bartlett, Rosamund, ed. Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters. Trans. Rosamund
Bartlett and Anthony Phillips. New York: Penguin Books, .
Anton Chekhov: Scenes from a Life. London: Free Press, .
Finke, Michael. Freedom from Violence and Lies: Anton Chekhov’s Life and
Writings. London: Reaktion Books, .
Seeing Chekhov: Life and Art. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, .
Gordon McVay, ed. and trans. Chekhov: A Life in Letters. London: Folio Society,
.
Gregory, Serge. Antosha & Levitasha: The Shared Lives and Art of Anton Chekhov
and Isaac Levitan. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, .
Hingley, Ronald. A New Life of Anton Chekhov. New York: Knopf, .
Rayfield, Donald. Anton Chekhov: A Life. New York: Henry Holt, .
Illness and Death
Altshuller, I. N. “About Chekhov.” Trans. Eugene Alper. In Michael Finke and
Julie de Sherbinin (eds.), Chekhov the Immigrant: Translating a Cultural Icon.
Bloomington, IN: Slavica, . –.
Coope, John. Doctor Chekhov: A Study in Literature and Medicine. Chale, Isle of
Wight: Cross Publishing, .
Finke, Michael. “Heal Thyself, Hide Thyself: Why Did Chekhov Ignore His
TB?” In Michael Finke and Julie de Sherbinin (eds.), Chekhov the
Immigrant: Translating a Cultural Icon. Bloomington, IN: Slavica, .
–.
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Further Reading
Malcolm, Janet. Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey. New York: Random House,
(esp. chapter ).
O’Connor, Katherine T. “Chekhov’s Death: His Textual Past Recaptured.”
In Elena Semeka-Pankratov (ed.), Studies in Poetics, commemorative
volume. Krystyna Pomorska (–). Columbus: Slavica, .
–.
O’Connor, Katherine. “Anton Chekhov and D. H. Lawrence: The Art of Letters
and the Discourse of Mortality.” In Carol Apollonio and Radislav Lapushin
(eds.), Chekhov’s Letters: Biography, Context, Poetics. Lanham, MD:
Lexington Books, . –.
Rabeneck, Leo. “Chekhov’s Last Moments.” Trans. Harvey Pitcher. The Bulletin
of the North American Chekhov Society . (), –; rept. Times Literary
Supplement ( July ).
Class
Confino, Michael. “The Soslovie (Estate) Paradigm: Reflections on Some Open
Questions.” Cahiers du Monde russe ., October–December ,
–.
Fitzpatrick, Sheila. “Ascribing Class: The Construction of Social Identity in Soviet
Russia.” The Journal of Modern History . (), –.
Freeze, Gregory L. “The Soslovie (Estate) Paradigm and Russian Social history.”
The American Historical Review . (), –.
Rieber, Alfred J. “The Sedimentary Society.” Russian History ./, Festschrift
for Leopold H. Haimson (), –.
Smith, Alison K. For the Common Good and Their Own Well Being: Social Estates
in Imperial Russia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, .
Wirtschafter, Elise Kimerling. Structures of Society: Imperial Russia’s “People of
Various Ranks.” DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, .
Money
Anan’ich, Boris V. “The Russian Economy and Banking System.” In Dominic
Lieven (ed.), The Cambridge History of Russia, vol. , Imperial Russia
–. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . –.
Antonov, Sergei. Bankrupts and Usurers of Imperial Russia: Debt, Property, and the
Law in the Age of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, .
Gatrell, Peter. The Tsarist Economy, –. London, B. T. Batsford, .
Senelick, Laurence. “Money in Chekhov’s Plays.” Studies in Theatre and
Performance . (), –.
Todd, William Mills, III. “The Ruse of the Russian Novel.” In Franco Moretti
(ed.), The Novel, vol. , History, Geography, Culture. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, . –.
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Further Reading
Politics
Florinsky, Michael T. Russia: A History and an Interpretation, vols. New York:
Macmillan, .
Offord, Derek. Nineteenth-Century Russia: Opposition to Autocracy. Harlow:
Pearson, .
The Russian Revolutionary Movement in the s. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, .
Seton-Watson, Hugh. The Russian Empire, –. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
.
Troyat, Henri. Chekhov. Trans. Henry Heim. London: Hamish Hamilton, .
Peasants
Frank, Stephen P. Crime, Cultural Conflict, and Justice in Rural Russia, –.
Berkeley: University of California Press, .
Frierson, Cathy A. Peasant Icons: Representations of Rural People in Late
Nineteenth-Century Russia. New York: Oxford University Press, .
Gaudin, Corinne. Ruling Peasants: Village and State in Late Imperial Russia.
DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, .
Moon, David. The Russian Peasantry, –: The World the Peasants Made.
London: Longman, .
Worobec, Christine D. Peasant Russia: Family and Community in the Post-
Emancipation Period. Princeton: Princeton University Press, .
The Woman Question
Clements, Barbara Evans. A History of Women in Russia: From Earliest Times to the
Present. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, .
Engel, Barbara Alpern. Women in Russia, –. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, .
Engelstein, Laura. The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-
de-siècle Russia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, .
Stites, Richard. The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism,
Nihilism, and Bolshevism, –. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, .
Sex
Bruford, W. H. Chekhov and His Russia. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
.
Miller, Melissa. “Chekhov and Zola’s Naturalism.” The Russian Review .
(), –.
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Further Reading
“Какая роскошь! Darwin as Artist in Chekhov’s Fiction.” The Russian Review
. (), –.
“‘The Name-Day Party’: Reconceiving Childbirth in Chekhov and Tolstoy.”
The Slavic and East European Journal . (), –.
Moeller, Peter Ulf. “Cechov in the Debate on Sexual Morality.” In Postlude to the
Kreutzer Sonata: Tolstoy and the Debate on Sexual Morality in Russian
Literature in the s. Trans. John Kendal. New York: E. J. Brill, .
–.
Environmentalism
Costlow, Jane. Heart-Pine Russia: Walking and Writing the Nineteenth-Century
Forest. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, .
Miller, Melissa. “Seeing Oil.” In Catherine Evtuhov and David Moon (eds.),
Environment as History in Russia and the Soviet Union. New York: Berghahn,
forthcoming.
Moon, David. “The Debate over Climate Change in the Steppe Region in
Nineteenth-Century Russia.” The Russian Review . (), –.
Nelson, Amy. “The Body of the Beast: Animal Protection and Anticruelty
Legislation in Imperial Russia.” In Jane Costlow and Amy Nelson (eds.),
Other Animals: Beyond the Human in Russian Culture and History.
Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, . –.
Newlin, Tom. “At the Bottom of the River: Forms of Ecological Consciousness in
Mid-Nineteenth Century Russian Literature.” Russian Studies in Literature
. (), –.
Novosad, Elena. “Zagriaznenie Volgi neft’iu.” Voprosy istorii estestvoznaniia i
tekhniki (), –.
Sakhalin Island
Beer, Daniel. The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile Under the Tsars, Chapter .
New York: Vintage, .
Chekhov, Anton. Sakhalin Island. Trans. Brian Reeve. London: Alma Classics,
.
Conrad, Joseph. “Chekhov as Social Observer: The Island of Sakhalin.” In Toby
W. Clyman (ed.), A Chekhov Companion. Westport: Greenwood Press,
. –.
Gentes, Andrew. “Sakhalin as Cause Célèbre: The Re-signification of Russia’s
Penal Colony.” Acta Slavica Iaponica (), –.
Popkin, Cathy. “Chekhov as Ethnographer: Epistemological Crisis on Sakhalin.”
Slavic Review . (), –.
Valenčius, Conevery Bolton. “Chekhov’s Sakhalin Island as Medical Geography.”
In Michael Finke and Julie de Sherbinin (eds.), Chekhov the Immigrant:
Translating the Cultural Icon. Bloomington: Slavica, . –.
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Further Reading
Philosophy
Bykova, Marina F., ed. “Tolstoy and Chekhov: Philosophy Invested in
Literature.” Special issue of Russian Studies in Philosophy . ().
Shestov, Lev. Chekhov and Other Essays. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
.
Tabachnikova, Olga, ed. Anton Chekhov Through the Eyes of Russian Thinkers:
Vasili Rozanov, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii and Lev Shestov. London: Anthem
Press, .
Religion
Corrigan, Yuri. “Chekhov and the Divided Self.” The Russian Review . (),
–.
de Sherbinin, Julie. Chekhov and Russian Religious Culture. Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, .
Kataev, Vladimir, Rolf-Dieter Kluge, and Regine Nohejl, eds. Anton P. Čechov:
Philosophische und Religiöse Dimensionen im Leben und im Werk. Munich:
Verlag Otto Sagner, .
McVay, Gordon. “Anton Chekhov: The Unbelieving Believer.” Slavonic and East
European Review . (January ), –.
Swift, Mark Stanley. Biblical Subtexts and Religious Themes in Works of Anton
Chekhov. New York: Peter Lang, .
Science
Finke, Michael. Seeing Chekhov: Life and Art. Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
.
Klapuri, Tintti. Chronotopes of Modernity in Chekhov. Berlin: Peter Lang, .
Rayfield, Donald. Anton Chekhov: A Life. London: Harper Collins Publishers,
.
Vucinich, Alexander. Science in Russian Culture. Stanford: Stanford University
Press, .
Medicine
Beer, Daniel. Renovating Russia: the Human Sciences and the Fate of Liberal
Modernity. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, .
Engelstein, Laura. Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-
Siècle Russia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, .
Finke, Michael. Seeing Chekhov: Life and Art. Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
.
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Further Reading
Frieden, Nancy Mandelker. Russian Physicians in an Era of Reform and Revolution,
–. Princeton: Princeton University Press, .
Joravsky, David. Russian Psychology: A Critical History. Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
.
The Arts
Gregory, Serge. Antosha & Levitasha: The Shared Lives and Art of Anton Chekhov
and Isaac Levitan. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, .
Haldey, Olga. Mamontov’s Private Opera: The Search for Modernism in Russian
Theater. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, .
King, Averil. Isaak Levitan: Lyrical Landscape. Suffolk: Antique Collectors’ Club,
.
Valkenier, Elizabeth. Russian Realist Art: The Peredvizhniki and Their Tradition.
Ann Arbor: Ardis, .
Fin de Siècle
Brooks, Jeffrey. The Firebird and the Fox: Russian Culture under Tsars and
Bolsheviks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (esp. Chapter ).
Figes, Orlando. Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia. New York:
Metropolitan Books, (esp. Chapters and ).
Matich, Olga. Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russia’s Fin de Siècle.
Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, .
Steinberg, Mark D. Petersburg Fin de Siècle. New Haven: Yale University Press,
.
The Harm That Good Ideas Do
Geifman, Anna. Thou Shalt Kill: Revolutionary Terrorism in Russia, –.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, .
Shatz, Marshall S., and Judith E. Zimmerman, eds. and trans. Signposts:
A Collection of Articles on the Russian Intelligentsia. Irvine: Charles Schlacks,
.
Stepniak, Sergei. Underground Russia: Revolutionary Profiles and Sketches from Life,
nd ed. New York: Scribner’s, .
Ulam, Adam B. In the Name of the People. New York: Viking, .
Chekhov’s Intelligentsias
Charle, Christophe. Birth of the Intellectuals, –. Cambridge: Polity Press,
.
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Further Reading
Evdokimova, Svetlana. “Russian Binaries and the Question of Culture: Chekhov’s
True Intelligent.” In Carol Apollonio and Radislav Lapushin (eds.),
Chekhov’s Letters: Biography, Context, Poetics. Lanham: Lexington Books,
. –.
Morson, Gary Saul. “The Intelligentsia and Its Critics.” In Abbott Gleason (ed.),
A Companion to Russian History. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, .
–.
Pipes, Richard, ed. The Russian Intelligentsia. New York: Columbia University
Press, .
Print Culture
Brooks, Jeffrey. When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature,
–. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, .
Dinershtein, E. A. A S. Suvorin: chelovek, sdelavshii kareru. Moscow: Rossiiskaia
politentsiklopediia, .
McReynolds, Louise. The News under Russia’s Old Regime: The Development of the
Mass-Circulation Press. Princeton: Princeton University Press, .
Ruud, Charles A. Russian Entrepreneur: Publisher Ivan Sytin of Moscow –.
Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, .
Tolstoy
Bartlett, Rosamund. “Tolstoy’s Fiction: Its Spiritual Legacy.” In Predrag
Cicovacki and Heidi Nada Grek (eds.), Tolstoy and Spirituality. Boston:
Academic Studies Press, . –.
Tolstoy: A Russian Life. London: Profile Books, .
Bykova, Marina F. “Editor’s Introduction – Tolstoy and Chekhov: Philosophy
Invested in Literature.” Russian Studies in Philosophy . (), –.
Emerson, Caryl. The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, .
Lakshin, Vladimir. Tolstoi i Chekhov, vol. ed. Moscow: Moskovskie uchebniki,
[] .
Mangold, Matthew. “Space and Storytelling in Late Imperial Russia: Tolstoy,
Chekhov, and the Question of Property.” Russian Review (January ),
–.
Melkov, A. S. ed. L. N. Tolstoi i A. P. Chekhov. Rasskazyvayut sovremenniki,
arkhivy, muzei . . . Moscow: Nasledie, .
Opul’skaya, L. D., Z. S. Papernyi, and S. E. Shatalov, eds. Chekhov i Lev Tolstoi.
Moscow: Nauka, .
Rayfield, Donald. Understanding Chekhov: A Critical Study of Chekhov’s Prose and
Drama. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, .
Speirs, Logan. Tolstoy and Chekhov. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
.
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Further Reading
Winner, Thomas. “Čexov’s ‘Ward No. ’ and Tolstoyan Ethics.” Slavic and East
European Journal . (), –.
French Literature
Bonamour, J., V. B. Kataev, T. B. Kniazhevskaia, and V. I. Lakshin, eds.
Chekhoviana: Chekhov I Frantsiia/Tchékohviana: Tchékhov et la France.
Moscow: Nauka and Institut d’études slaves, .
Kataev, V. B. Chekhov plius. Predshestvenniki, sovremenniki, preemniki. Moscow:
Yazyki slavianskoi kul’tury, .
Miller, Melissa. “Chekhov and Zola’s Naturalism.” Russian Review . (),
–.
Rukalski, Z. “Maupassant and Chekhov: Differences.” Canadian Slavonic Papers
. (), –.
Modernism and Symbolism
Corrigan, Yuri. “Chekhov on the Meaning of Life: After Romanticism and
Nihilism.” In Shun-Liang Chao and John Michael Corrigan (eds.),
Romantic Legacies: Transnational and Transdisciplinary Contexts (Routledge
Studies in Comparative Literature). New York: Routledge, . –.
Green, Michael. The Russian Symbolist Theatre: An Anthology of Plays and Critical
Texts. Ann Arbor: Ardis Publishers, .
Jackson, Robert Louis, ed. Chekhov: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood
Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, .
Shcherbenok, Andrey. “‘Killing Realism’: Insight and Meaning in Anton
Chekhov.” Slavic and East European Journal . (), –.
Tabachnikova, Olga, ed. Anton Chekhov through the Eyes of Russian Thinkers:
Vasili Rozanov, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii and Lev Shestov. London: Anthem
Press, .
Theatrical Traditions
Anna Muza. “The Marriage of Figaro, the Marriage of Lopakhin: The Hero’s
Revolt.” In Carol Apollonio and Angela Brintlinger (eds.), Chekhov for the
st Century. Bloomington: Slavica Publishers, . –.
Senelick, Laurence. “Offenbach and Chekhov; or, La Belle Elena.” In R. L.
Jackson (ed.), Reading Chekhov’s Text. Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, . –.
The Chekhov Theatre: A Century of the Plays in Performance. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, .
Winner, Thomas G. “Chekhov’s Seagull and Shakespeare’s Hamlet: A Study of a
Dramatic Device.” American Slavic and East European Review . (),
–.
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Further Reading
Modern Theater: Resonances and Intersections
Brustein, Robert. The Theatre of Revolt: Studies in Modern Drama from Ibsen to Genet,
rev. ed. Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, Ivan R. Dee Publisher, [] .
Gilman, Richard. The Making of Modern Drama, rev. ed. New Haven: Yale
University Press, [] .
Gottlieb, Vera, and Paul Allain, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Chekhov.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, .
Klapuri, Tintti. Chronotopes of Modernity in Chekhov. Berlin: Peter Lang, .
Schumacher, Claude, ed. Naturalism and Symbolism in European Theatre,
–. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, .
Senelick, Laurence. The Chekhov Theatre: A Century of the Plays in Performance.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, .
Whyman, Rose. Anton Chekhov. London: Routledge, .
Chekhov’s Moscow Art Theater (–)
Balukhatyi [sic], S. D., ed. The Seagull Produced by Stanislavsky. Trans. David
Magarshack. London: Methuen, .
Benedetti, Jean. The Moscow Art Theatre Letters. New York: Routledge, .
Carnicke, Sharon Marie. Stanislavsky in Focus: An Acting Master for the Twenty-
First Century, nd ed. New York: Routledge, .
Merlin, Bella. Konstantin Stanislavsky. New York: Routledge, .
Soviet Contexts
Dalos, György, with the collaboration of Andrea Dunai. The Guest from the
Future: Anna Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin. Trans. Anthony Wood.
London: John Murray, .
Durkin, Andrew. “Trifonov’s ‘Taking Stock’: The Role of Čexovian Subtext.”
Slavic and East European Journal . (), –.
Grinberg, Marat. “Hesped: Five Years Later” [on Friedrich Gorenstein’s Essays].
Slovo/Word (), –.
Parts, Lyudmila. The Chekhovian Intertext: Dialogue with a Classic. Columbus:
Ohio State University Press, .
Tabachnikova, Olga. “‘The world is ugly and people are sad’: On Chekhov’s
Ethics and Aesthetics in the Works of Sergei Dovlatov.” In Joe Andrew and
Robert Reid (eds.), Essays in Poetics, vol. . Chekhov and Others. Keele, UK:
Keele Students Union Press, . –.
Chekhov in England
Allen, David. “Chekhov in England.” In David Allen (ed.) Performing Chekhov.
London: Routledge, . –.
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Further Reading
Arboleda, D. Augusto. “British Chekhov: An Analysis of rhe United Kingdom’s
st Century National Identity through Contemporary Reinterpretations of
Anton Chekhov’s Plays.” PhD thesis, University of Roehampton, .
Miles, Patrick, ed. Chekhov on the British Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, .
Mirsky, D. S. “Chekhov and the English.” The Monthly Criterion (), –.
The American Stage
Allen, David. Performing Chekhov. London: Routledge, .
Clayton, J. Douglas, ed. Chekhov Then and Now: The Reception of Chekhov in
World Culture. New York: Peter Lang, .
Meister, Charles W. “Chekhov’s Reception in England and America.” The
American Slavic and East European Review . (), –.
Senelick, Laurence. The Chekhov Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, .
ed. Wandering Stars, Russian Émigré Theatre:–. Iowa City, Iowa
University Press, .
Chekhov in East Asia
Cho, Heekyoung. “Rethinking World Literature through the Relations between
Russian and East Asian Literatures.” Cross-Currents: East Asian History and
Culture Review (), –. https://cross-currents.berkeley.edu/e-jour
nal/issue-/cho (accessed October , ).
Translation’s Forgotten History: Russian Literature, Japanese Mediation, and the
Formation of Modern Korean Literature. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia
Center, .
Clayton, J. Douglas, ed. Chekhov Then and Now: The Reception of Chekhov in
World Culture. New York: Peter Lang, .
Gamsa, Mark. The Reading of Russian Literature in China: A Moral Example and
Manual of Practice. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, .
Konishi, Sho. Anarchist Modernity: Cooperatism and Japanese-Russian Intellectual
Relations in Modern Japan. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center,
.
Film
Burry, Alexander. “From Prison to Paradise: Michael Blakemore’s Transposition
of Uncle Vanya.” Literature/Film Quarterly . (), –.
Deblasio, Alyssa. “Ivan Dykhovichny’s The Black Monk (): Madness,
Chekhov, and the Chimera of Idleness.” In The Filmmaker’s Philosopher:
Merab Mamardashvili and Russian Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, . –.
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Further Reading
MacKay, John and Rita Safarianitis. “Chekhov on Screen: Lady with the Dog
() and Vanya on nd Street ().” In Michael C. Finke and Michael
Holquist (eds.), Approaches to Teaching the Works of Anton Chekhov. New
York: The Modern Language Association of America, . –.
Meerzon, Yana. “Interrogating the Real: Chekhov’s Cinema of Verbatim. Ward
Number Six in Karen Shakhnazarov’s Film Adaptation.” In J. Douglas
Clayton and Yana Meerzon (eds.), Adapting Chekhov: The Text and its
Mutations. New York: Routledge, . –.
Palmer, James. “Mastering Chekhov: Heifitz’s The Lady with the Dog.” Literature/
Film Quarterly . (), –.
Stam, Robert. “Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation.” In Robert
Stam and Alessandra Raengo (eds.), Literature and Film: A Guide to the
Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, .
–.
In Translation
Beasley, Rebecca. Russomania: Russian Culture and the Creation of British
Modernism, –. Oxford: Oxford University Press, .
Chekhov, Anton. Anton Chekhov’s Selected Stories. Ed. Cathy Popkin. NY:
Norton, .
Chukovsky, K. I. The Art of Translation: Kornei Chukovsky’s “A High Art.” Trans.
and ed. Lauren G. Leighton. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, .
Garnett, Richard. Constance Garnett: A Heroic Life. London: Sinclair-Stevenson,
.
Leighton, Lauren G. Two Worlds, One Art: Literary Translation in Russia and
America. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, .
May, Rachel. The Translator in the Text: On Reading Russian Literature in English.
Evanston: Northwestern University Press, .
McAteer, Catherine. Translating Great Russian Literature: The Penguin Russian
Classics, forthcoming. Baltimore: Routledge, .
Rayfield, Donald. “Chekhov.” In Peter France (ed.), The Oxford Guide to
Literature in English Translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, .
–.
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Index
Abdullaeva, Zara, Bakhtin, Mikhail,
absurd, theater of the, Bakunin, Mikhail, –
Academy of Sciences, Baldwin, James, xxiv
Chekhov’s withdrawal from, Ball, Benjamin,
Actors Studio (New York), ballet, ,
Adorno, Theodor, xxv Balmont, Konstantin, ,
affective memory, See Method acting Balzac, Honoré de Balzac,
agnosticism, Beccaria, Cesare,
Aikhenvald, Yuly, Beckett, Samuel, xxiii, ,
Akhmatova, Anna, , Waiting for Godot, xxiv
Akira, Maeda, – Bely, Andrei,
Aksakov, Sergei, Bennett, Arnold,
Alarm Clock, , Berlin, Isaiah,
Alexander II, Tsar, , , , , , , See Bernard, Claude,
Great Reforms Bitov, Andrei, ,
assassination of, , , , , , , , , Blakemore, Michael,
Blanchot, Maurice,
Alexander III, Tsar, , , , –, –, Blok, Alexander,
, , Bloomsbury Circle, , –
Alexandrinsky Theater, , , Blues, The, xxi, xxiii
anatomy, , , , , Boborykin, Piotr, –
Anderson, Judith, Bogdanov, Alexander,
Andreev, Leonid, , , Boleslavsky, Richard,
animal cruelty, , –, See environmentalism Bondarchuk, Sergei,
Annensky, Isidor, Bosan, Alonzo,
antibiotics, botany, , , , –
antisemitism, , , – Bourget, Paul,
Antoine, André, – Braunschweig, Stéphane,
Antokolsky, Mark, Briusov, Valerii, –
Anton Chekhov Foundation, Brooks, Jeffrey,
Arakcheev, A. A., Brustein, Robert,
Aristotle, – Brylkin, A. D.,
Arkhangelsky, Pavel, , Bulgakov, Sergei, , –,
astronomy, , Bunin, Ivan, , ,
atheism, , , , , , Byron, Lord, ,
Atkinson, Brooks,
Aurelius, Marcus, Calderon, George,
avant-garde, , , , , , See modernism Camus, Albert, xxi
capitalism, , , , , , , , –
Badenweiler, –, Carnot, Sadi,
Bakhtiarov, Anatolii, Carver, Raymond,
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Index
Cather, Willa, “Cold Blood”, –
censorship, , , –, –, , , “Darkness”,
“Darling, The”, ,
census of , , –, “Day in the Country, A”,
Ceylan, Nuri Bilge, , – “Death of a Government Clerk”, , ,
Chaikin, Joseph,
Chaliapin, Fyodor, “Difficult People”,
Charle, Christophe, “Doctor’s Visit, A”, ,
Chekhov, Alexander (brother), –, , , Duel, The, , , , , , , ,
, –, , , , –
Chekhov, Egor Mikhailovich (grandfather), , film adaptation, –
Chekhov, Evgenia (sister), “Enemies”, , ,
Chekhov, Georgy (cousin), “Excellent People”,
Chekhov, Ivan (brother), , – “Fat and Thin”, , ,
Chekhov, Mikhail (brother), , –, , , Gloomy People,
– “Good People”,
Chekhov, Mikhail (cousin), “Gooseberries”, –, , ,
Chekhov, Nikolai (brother), , –, , , “Grasshopper, The”, , –
, , “Grief”,
Chekhov, Pavel Egorovich (father), –, , “Grisha”, –
, “Guide for Those Who Wish to Take a Wife”,
Chekhov, works by,
“About Love”, , “Gusev”, , –
“About Women”, , “Happiness”,
“After the Theater”, “Head Gardener’s Story, The”,
“Agafiya”, , , “House with a Mezzanine”, , , ,
“Anna on the Neck”, , , –
film adaptation, “Huntsman, The”, ,
Anniversary, The, “In Exile”,
Anonymous Story, An, , , “In Passion Week”,
“Anyuta”, , –, , “In the Autumn”,
“Ariadne”, , , “In the Ravine”, xxvi, –, , –, ,
“At A Hypnotic Séance”, ,
“At Home”, “Intrigues”,
“At Sea”, “Ionich”, ,
“Awkward Business, An”, Island of Sakhalin, The, , , , , ,
Bear, The, , , , ,
“Because of Little Apples”, Ivanov, –, –, , , –,
“Beggar, The”, ,
“Bet, The”, “Joy”,
“Betrothed, The”, xxvi, , , , “Kiss, The”,
“Big Volodia and Little Volodia”, , “Lady with a Lapdog”, xxii, , , , ,
“Bishop, The”, xxvi, , –, , –, –
“Black Monk, The”, , , –, , Kheifits film adaptation, –
“Letter to a Learned Neighbor”, , ,
film adaptation, – “Letter, The”,
“Boring Story, A”, , , –, , , “Lights”, , –, –
, –, “Literary Table of Ranks”,
“Calamity, A”, “Malefactor, A”,
“Case History, A”, –, , – “Man in a Case”, , , ,
“Chameleon, The”, “Mire, The”, ,
Cherry Orchard, The, , –, , , , Motley Stories,
, , , , , , –, My Life, –, , , ,
–, –, –, –, “My Nana”,
–, –, , , “Name-Day Party, The”, ,
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Index
Chekhov, works by (cont.) Chekhova, Maria (sister), , –, , , ,
“Naturalists’ Conference in Philadelphia, , –
The”, Chernigovets, F. V.,
“Nervous Breakdown, A”, , , , , Chernyshevsky, Nikolai
What is to Be Done?, ,
“New Villa, The”, Chertkov, A. D.,
“Nightmare, A”, China,
“On Christmas Eve”, and Russian literature, –,
“On Easter Eve”, and Sakhalin,
“On the Estate”, reception of Chekhov in,
“On the Road”, , – translation of Chekhov in,
“Out of the Frying Pan into the Fire”, Christ, Jesus, xxiv, –,
“Oysters”, Christianity, xxiv, , , , , , ,
“Peasant Women”, –, , , ,
Peasants, The, , Chudakov, A. P.,
Platonov, Chukovsky, Kornei,
Proposal, The, cinema, , , –
“Reed Pipe, The”, Clausius, Rudolf,
“Requiem”, , Clements, Barbara Evans,
“Romance with Double Bass” Clurman, Harold,
film adaptation, Collard, Christophe,
Seagull, The, , –, , , , , , comedy, xxi, , –, , , , ,
, , –, , –, , , , , See vaudeville
–, , , , , –, physical comedy, ,
, , commedia dell’arte, ,
“Sleepy”, , , conservationism, , , See environmentalism
“Steppe, The”, , , , , Constantine, Peter,
“Student, The”, xxiv, , , , , Cornell, Katherine,
Tatiana Repina, Coward, Noël,
The Peasants, Crimean War, , ,
“Thieves”, Cynicism, xxii, ,
Three Sisters, xxii, xxv, , , , , , ,
, , , , –, , , Dargomyzhsky, Alexander,
–, , –, , Darwin, Charles, , See Darwinism
Three Years, , , , Darwinism, , , , , , , See
Uncle Vanya, , , , , , –, evolution
, –, , , , , , Deblasio, Alyssa,
deforestation, –, See environmentalism
film adaptation, degenerative theory, , –, –,
Country Life (), Diaghilev, Sergei, ,
Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, Dietz, Steven,
Vanya on nd Street, , Dokuchaev, Vasily,
“Unpleasantness, An”, Doller, Mikhail,
“Vanka”, , , , Domostroi, ,
“Ward Six”, , , –, –, Doroshevich, Vlas, ,
–, –, , , , Dostoevsky, Fyodor, xxiii, xxvi, , , , ,
film adaptation, –, , –, –,
“Wedding, The” , , , , , , –,
film adaptation, , , , , –, –,
“Wife, The”, , ,
“Woman Question”, Brothers Karamazov,
“Woman’s Kingdom, A”, , , – Notes from the House of the Dead,
Wood Demon, The, , Dovlatov, Sergei,
Chekhova, Evgenia Yakovlevna (mother), –, Dragonfly, ,
, , Dreyfus case, xxv, ,
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Index
Dumas-fils, Alexandre, Gorenstein, Friedrich,
Dykhovichny, Ivan, – Gorky, Maxim, xxv, , , , , , ,
,
Eberle, Varvara, Great Reforms, , , , , –, , ,
ecology, See environmentalism , , See Emancipation Reform of
economy, Russian, , –, –, , –,
, Greek tragedy, ,
Eichenwald, Yuri, Gregory, Andre,
Eisenstein, Sergei, Griboyedov Prize,
Ellams, Inua, Griboyedov, Alexander, , –,
Emancipation Reform of , , , , , Grigorovich, Dmitry,
–, , , See peasantry, serfdom Grossman, Leonid,
embarrassment, as theme, , – Grossman, Vasily,
England, , –, , Life and Fate, , –
British stage, , –, Group Theater (New York), –
environmentalism, –, , Gyofū, Sōma,
Epicureanism,
Erisman, Fyodor, , , Haass, Dr. Friedrich,
Ermilov, Vladimir, – Hamaguchi, Ryûsuke,
erosion, , See environmentalism Hansen, Kai,
Esslin, Martin, Hauptmann, Gerhart,
estate (soslovie), – Hayes, Helen,
evolution, , , , , , , Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, xxvi,
famine of -, , –, , Heidegger, Martin, xxi
Faulkner, William, xxiii Hellman, Lillian, –
Feiffer, Halley, Herzen, Alexander,
Fet, Afanasy, horticulture, , , –
film, See cinema Hugo, Victor,
Filosofov, Dmitry, , Hume, David, xxi,
fin de siècle, , , –, hygienics. See medicine, hygienics
Finke, Michael, ,
Flaubert, Gustave, –, Iakovenko, Vladimir,
Fontanne, Lynn, Ianson, Y. E.,
Foote, Shelby, Ibsen, Henrik, , , , –, , ,
Fragments (Oskolki), , –, ,
–, idealism, , , , –, –
Frieden, Fyodor von, industrialization, Russian, –, , , , ,
Fyodorov, Nikolai, , , ,
intelligentsia, Russian, , –, , , ,
Garshin, Vsevolod, , , –, , , , ,
Gaucher, Nikolaus, , –
germ theory, , Iordanov, Pavel,
Gest, Morris, Iskander, Fazil,
Gielgud, John, Ivanov,
Gilman, Richard, Ivanov, Viacheslav, –
Gippius, Zinaida, , , Izmailov, Alexander,
Gladkov, Alexander,
Glinka, A. S. (Volzhsky), Japan,
Glinka, Mikhail, and Russian literature, ,
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, fisheries in Sakhalin, –
Gogol, Nikolai, , , , , , , reception of Chekhov in, ,
Goncharov, Ivan, translation of Chekhov in,
Gorbachev, Mikhail, view of Russia,
Gordon, Ruth, Jaspers, Karl, xxi
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Index
Jones, James Earl, Lucretius,
Julia, Raul, Lunt, Alfred,
Kafka, Franz, xxiii, Maeterlinck, Maurice, , , –
Kaigorodov, Dmitry, Malcolm, Janet,
Kant, Immanuel, – Malle, Louis,
Karasik, Yuly, Malle, Louise,
Karlinsky, Simon, , Maly Theater (Moscow), ,
Kataev, Vladimir, , , Mamet, David,
Kavelin, Konstantin, Mamontov, Savva, –,
Kennan, George, Mandelstam, Nadezhda,
kenosis, Mansfield, Katherine, , ,
Kermode, Frank, – Marsh, Cynthia,
Khrushchev, Nikita, Marx, Adolf, ,
Kierkegaard, Søren, xxi, , Marxism, xxv, –, , , , , ,
Kiselev, Alexander, ,
Kiselyova, Maria, Marxist-Leninism, ,
Kliuchevsky, Vasily, – materialism, , –, , –, ,
Knipper, Olga, –, , , –, , ,
Koch, Robert, Matthiessen, F. O., xxii
Kollontai, Alexandra, Maupassant, Guy de, , –, ,
Konchalovsky, Andrei, –
Korea, , Maxwell, James Clerk,
and Russian literature, , McAteer, Catherine,
reception of Chekhov in, – McClintic, Guthrie,
translation of Chekhov in, medicine, , , –,
Korolenko, Vladimir, –, , , as a developing field, –, –
Korovin, Konstantin, as theme in Chekhov’s work, –
Korsh Theater, –, Chekhov as patient, –
Kovalevsky, Maxim, Chekhov’s practice of, , , –, , ,
Kropotkin, Pyotr, , – , , ,
Krylov, Ivan, Chekhov’s training in, , , , –,
Kuprin, Alexander, , ,
environmental approach to, , –,
Land and Liberty (revolutionary party), –
– hygienics, , , , –,
Landmarks, See Signposts (Vekhi) institutions of,
Lapushin, Radislav, Melikhovo, , , ,
Lavrov, Pyotr, – and Chekhov’s altruism, , –, –
Lawrence, D. H., Chekhov Letters Museum,
le Fleming, Stephen, , , Chekhov’s estate, –, , ,
Le Gallienne, Eva, Melville, Herman, xxiii
LeCompte, Elizabeth, merchant class, , , , , , ,
Leikin, Nikolai, , , –, Merezhkovsky, Dmitry, –, –
Leonidov, Leonid, Method acting, –, ,
Leontiev, Ivan (Shcheglov), –, Meyerhold, Vsevolod, ,
Lermontov, Mikhail, , , Michelangelo,
Leskov, Nikolai, , , Middleton Murry, John, –
Levitan, Isaac, , , –, Mikhailovsky, N.K., , –,
Levkeyeva, Elizaveta, Mikhalkov, Nikita, ,
Liebig, Justus von, Mikhnevich, Vladimir,
Lilina, Maria, Miller, Arthur, –
Lincoln, Abraham, Mirsky, D. S., ,
Logan, Joshua, Mizinova, Lidiia (Lika), ,
Loteanu, Emil, Mochulsky, Konstantin,
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Index
modernism, , , , , , , , O’Neill, Eugene, xxi
–, , Odets, Clifford, –
Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), , , , Olivier, Laurence,
opera, , –, –,
Molnar, Ferenc, optics, , –
Moore, Julianne, Ostroumov, Professor Alexei,
Morozov, Savva, clinic,
Morrison, Toni, xxiii Ostrovsky, Alexander, , , –
Morson, Gary Saul,
Moscow, , , , Page, Geraldine,
and Chekhov family, –, painting, See visual arts
arts scene, , , , Pascal, Blaise, ,
Bolshoi Opera, Pasternak, Boris, –
census, Pasteur, Louis,
Higher Women’s courses, Pavlov, Ivan,
Moscow Historical Museum, peasantry, –, –, , –, –,
Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and –, –, , , –, ,
Architecture, –, See Emancipation Reform of
Moscow Society of Art and Literature,
Moscow Zoo, People’s Will (revolutionary party), –, ,
red-light district,
Moscow Art Theater, , , , , –, personality, concept of, , ,
, , –, –, pessimism, , , , –, ,
effect on American theater, – Peter I, Tsar, ,
Moscow University, , , , , Petersburg Gazette (Peterburgskaia gazeta), ,
Multan affair, philosophy, xxi–xxvi, , , –, ,
Murakami, Haruki, –, , –, , , ,
Muratova, Kira, , ,
Muratova, Yelena, Pirogov, Nikolai, , –, ,
Murchison, Roderick, Plehve, Konstantin von,
Murnau, F. W., Plekhanov, Georgii,
music, –, –, , See also Blues Pleshcheev, Alexei, –, , ,
Poe, Edgar Allan,
Nabokov, V. D., polyphony, , –
Nabokov, Vladimir, , Popkin, Cathy,
nationalism, Russian, –, , –, populism, , , –, –, , ,
Nekrasov, Nikolai, , –, , , ,
Nemirovich-Danchenko, Vladimir, , –, positivism, xxiv, –, , , –,
, –, , See scientism
Neviadomsky, Mikhail, Posner, Aaron,
New Times (Novoe vremia), –, , , , postmodernism, , ,
Potapenko, Ignaty,
Newlin, Thomas, precarity, , –
Nicholas I, Tsar, prestige press, See thick journals
Nicholas II, Tsar, , , , print culture, , , –,
Nietzsche, Friedrich, xxi, xxvi, , , –, and income, –
, progressivism, Russian, See atheism, idealism,
nihilism, , , –, , , , , Marxism, nihilism, revolution, scientism,
–, , socialism
Nikol’sky, V. I., Protazanov, Yakov, ,
nobility (dvorianstvo), , , –, –, Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph,
–, Przhevalsky, Nikolai,
Northern Herald (Severnyi vestnik), , , Psacharopoulos, Nikos, –
Notes of the Fatherland (Otechestvennye Zapiski), psychiatry, , , , , , –,
, publishing, See print culture
Comp. by: K.VENKATESAN Stage: Proof Chapter No.: Index Title Name: Corrigan
Date:31/10/22 Time:17:22:46 Page Number: 312
Index
Pushkin Prize, , Schwartz, Evgeny,
Pushkin, Alexander, , , , –, science, , –, See anatomy, astronomy,
, botany, degenerative theory, evolution,
horticulture, medicine, optics,
Rabeneck, Leo, psychiatry, thermodynamics,
Rachmaninoff, Sergei, scientism, , , ,
Rayfield, Donald, , , Scriabin, Alexander,
raznochinets, , Seagull, The, ,
realism, , , , , , –, , Sechenov, Ivan, , –
, –, , , , Sekirin, Peter,
–, –, , , , Sendich, Munir,
, Senelick, Laurence, ,
religion, –, , , , –, Sentimentalism, xxii
Serban, Andrei,
Repin, Ilya, , , serfdom, , –, , –, , , , See
Revolution, Russian peasantry
ideological ferment, , –, –, , sex authority, ,
–, –, , –, , , sexuality, , –, –,
, , Shakespeare, William, xxiii, , , , , ,
of , , , , –, , , , , , , ,
of October , , , , Hamlet, –, –,
Richardson, Ralph, Macbeth,
Romanticism, xxi–xxiii, , , , , , Much Ado About Nothing,
Shaw, George Bernard, ,
German Romanticism, Shawn, Wallace,
Room, Abram, Shereshevskaya, M. A.,
Rozanov, Vasily, , Shestov, Lev, –, , ,
Russian News (Russkie vedomosti), , – Shiller, Nikolai,
Russian Orthodox Church, –, , , Signposts (Vekhi), , , –
–, Simmel, Georg, ,
Russian Thought (Russkaia mysl’), , , Simov, Viktor, ,
Russo-Japanese war, , , , Smoktunovsky, Innokenti,
Rykov, I. G., – Snow, John,
Ryūnosuke, Akutagawa, socialism, –, , –, , , , ,
Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von, Socrates, xxv
Sakhalin, , , –, , Sologub, Fyodor,
and colonization, Solovyov, Vladimir, , ,
and Russian Empire, , – Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, , –
Chekhov’s book on, See Chekhov, works by, Sophocles,
Island of Sakhalin Sōseki, Natsume,
Chekhov’s census of, Soviet Union, –, , , , –
coal mines, cinema, –
journey to, , –, , , , , , collapse of, ,
–, , , , Spark (Iskra), –
Nivkh (Gilyak) people, Spencer, Herbert, , ,
penal colony, –, – St. Petersburg, , –, , , , ,
Saltykov-Shchedrin, Mikhail, , ,
Saracho, Tanya, Bestuzhev courses,
Sarasate, Pablo de, Forest Academy,
Sartre, Jean-Paul, xxi Imperial Academy of Fine Arts,
Satter, Tina, Medical Institute,
Schmidt, Fyodor, Peter and Paul Fortress,
Schopenhauer, Arthur, xxvi, , – premiere of Seagull in, ,
Schroeder, Richard, Stalin, Joseph, ,
Comp. by: K.VENKATESAN Stage: Proof Chapter No.: Index Title Name: Corrigan
Date:31/10/22 Time:17:22:46 Page Number: 313
Index
Stanislavsky, Konstantin, , , , , tragicomedy, xxi, xxv, , , , , ,
–, , –, , , , –, See comedy
–, Translators of Chekhov
Stanley, Kim, Bartlett, Rosamund,
Stepanov, Yuri, Calderon, George, ,
Stepniak-Kravchinsky, Sergei, Cannon, Gilbert,
Stoicism, , – Carnicke, Sharon,
Strakhov, Nikolai, Chernomordik, Vlada,
Strasberg, Lee, Dadeng, Chen,
Streep, Meryl, Dunnigan, Ann, –
Strindberg, August, , , –, Fell, Marian, ,
Suvorin, Alexei, xxiii–xxv, , –, –, , Fen, Elisaveta,
, , , , , , , , , Frayn, Michael,
–, , , , –, , Garnett, Constance, , –,
, –, , , Goldberg, Isaac,
Swift, Jonathan, Hapgood, Isabel,
Symbolist movement, European, , –, Heim, Michael,
, Hingley, Ronald,
Symbolist movement, Russian, , , , , Jialin, Chen,
–, , See modernism Karlinsky, Simon,
Kayō, Senuma,
Table of Ranks, , Koteliansky, S.S.,
Taganrog, , –, , , Kōyō, Ozaki,
Chekhov alone in, Long, R. E.C.,
city library, , Magarshack, David,
departure from, , Mamet, David,
gymnasium, , , Mandell, Max,
Peter I monument, Middleton Murry, John,
travel to, , Miles, Patrick,
Tarkovsky, Andrei, Odets, Clifford,
Taylor, Regina, Pevear, Richard and Volokhonsky, Larissa,
Tchaikovsky, Modest,
Tchaikovsky, Pyotr, , , , Phillips, Anthony,
terrorism, , –, , , , – Pitcher, Harvey,
thermodynamics, , Posang, Kwŏn,
thick journals, , , , Reeve, Brian,
Thomson, William (Lord Kelvin), Schmidt, Paul,
Tolstoy, A. K., Schnitkind, Henry Thomas,
Tolstoy, Dmitri, Senelick, Laurence,
Tolstoy, Leo, xxiii, , , , , , , , , Tao, Wu,
, , , –, , , Tianxiao, Bao,
–, , –, , –, Toshihiko, Akita,
, –, , , , , , Weiner, Leo,
, –, Wilks, Ronald,
“Death of Ivan Ilyich”, Xun, Lu (Zhou Shuren),
“Father Sergius”, Yarmolinsky, Avrahm,
“Kholstomer”, Young, Stark,
Anna Karenina, , –, –, , , Zhou Zouren,
, – Trans-Siberian Railway, ,
Kingdom of God is Within You, Trifonov, Yuri, –
Kreutzer Sonata, , –, Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin,
Resurrection, , tuberculosis, –, , –, , ,
War and Peace, , , , Turgenev, Ivan, , , , , , ,
What is Art?, –, –, , , –,
Tolstoyan movement, –
Comp. by: K.VENKATESAN Stage: Proof Chapter No.: Index Title Name: Corrigan
Date:31/10/22 Time:17:22:46 Page Number: 314
Index
Ulam, Adam, Wooster Group, The,
United States, xxi–xxiv, , , – World of Art (Mir iskusstva), –,
Vagner, Vladimir, , , Xun, Lu (Zhou Shuren),
Vasnetsov, Viktor,
vaudeville, , , , –, , –, Yadrintsev, Nikolai,
See comedy Yalta, , –, ,
Verne, Jules, and Chekhov’s altruism,
visual arts, , , , –, , Chekhov’s attitude to,
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), Chekhov’s house at Autka, x, , ,
Volynsky, Akim, – Chekhov’s move to,
Vysotsky, Vladimir, Yalta Charitable Society, –
Yiddish literature, xxi
Wilde, Oscar, xxii, Yŏnghŭi, Pak, ,
Williams, Tennessee, – Yosŏp, Chu, –
Witte, Sergei, Young, Stark, ,
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, xxi Yusov, Vadim,
“Woman Question”, , –, ,
women, employment opportunities, , , Zakharin, G. A.,
– Zasulich, Vera, , ,
women’s education, , –, , zemstvo (district councils), , –,
women’s movement, , –, , – Zhivotov, Nikolai,
Wood, James, Zhou Zouren,
Woolf, Leonard, Zinovyev, Alexander,
Woolf, Virginia, , , Zola, Emile, , –, , –
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