Anton Chekhov: Basically a Saint
I was thinking about Nabokov’s lecture on Anton Chekhov this morning, because it is a reliable way to feel inspired and moved. After being subjected to some 467 days of Donald Trump’s campaign, it is nice to have one’s admiration reflex reactivated, tested, and find it working.
Chekhov was born in 1860 and became a doctor to support his family. Of Chekhov’s medical practice, Nabokov writes:
During the cholera epidemic he worked all alone as a district doctor; without any assistant he took care of twenty-five villages…Many tubercular people came to Yalta at that time, without a copper in their pockets, and they came all the way from Odessa, Kishinev, and Kharkov just because they had heard that Chekhov was living in Yalta. ‘Chekhov will fix us up. Chekhov will arrange lodging for us, and a dining room, and treatment’ (Chukovski).
That’s a lot, to be a doctor people travel across a country to visit! Chekhov founded four schools and regularly visited remote prisons to offer medical care and keep an eye out for abuses. Early in his writing career he was accepted into the elite, and he hectored them to take on his philanthropic inclinations. Chekhov knew he was talented, but in his private notebooks he wrote that his only real legacy would be the schools he started.
Nabokov acknowledges that Chekhov was not a stylish writer but decides in this case style would be trivial:
When Turgenev sits down to discuss a landscape, you notice that he is concerned with the trouser-crease of his phrase; he crosses his legs with an eye upon the color of his socks. Chekhov does not mind…
The trouser crease of his phrase! Chekhov didn’t mind because he had higher-order concerns:
the person who prefers Dostoevski or Gorki to Chekhov will never be able to grasp the essentials of…[life] or universal art. 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.
Here is a taste of what Nabokov is talking about, from one of my personal favorite Chekhov stories, “An Attack of Nerves”:
He looked with emotion at his friends, admired and envied them. In these strong, healthy, cheerful people how wonderfully balanced everything is, how finished and smooth is everything in their minds and souls! They sing, and have a passion for theater, and draw, and talk…laugh without reason, and talk nonsense…in no way inferior to himself, who watches every step he takes and every word he utters, who is fastidious and cautious, and ready to raise every trifle to the level of a problem. And he longed for one evening to live as his friends did, to open out, to free himself from his own control. If vodka had to be drunk, he would drink it….it would all be dreadful, but interesting and novel.
And from one of his most famous, “The Name-Day Party”:
Olga Mihailovna remembered how in the first months of her marriage she had felt dreary at home alone and had driven into town to the Circuit Court, at which Pyotr Dmitrich had sometimes presided…wearing his uniform and the chain of office on his breast, he was completely transformed…Everything, all that was ordinary and human, all that was individual and personal to himself that Olga was accustomed to seeing in him at home, vanished in grandeur…
There are too many great Chekhov stories to count. “In the Cart”, “Anna on the Neck”, “Gooseberries”, “About Love”, and the iconic “Lady with the Pet Dog” (about an affair that suddenly turns into a devoted relationship), “The Letter” (about a man agonizing over whether to send a harsh letter to his son), and “The Kiss”, in which Chekhov writes of an awkward soldier who has become so accustomed to being “inwardly wretched” that when he sees outwardly happy people he “no longer envied them, but only felt touched and mournful”.
Chekhov died when he was 43, on vacation in Germany and recently married. He had written around 600 stories. He covered a range of social milieus: peasants, rural landowners, lawyers, teachers, socialites, artists, children, drunkards (not to mention police, priests, organized criminals…). Whatever part of Chekhov drove him to his good deeds also animated his writing, which is often about people who have fallen short of what they once wanted. Nabokov again:
This great kindness pervades Chekhov’s literary work, but it is not a matter of program, or of literary message with him… And he was adored by all his readers, which practically means by all Russia, for in the late years of his life his fame was very great indeed.
Over a century later, you would still have a hard time finding a writer who does not adore Chekhov. What critics say about George Saunders — that his writing radiates human decency, that it makes people feel seen and feel better — is actually true of Chekhov. Almost everyone who reads Chekhov ends up personally attached to his work because there is something distinctly kind about it (and then there’s the technical accomplishments, the psychological insights, the deft details). My own copy of “The Portable Chekhov” is worn and creased. Nabokov, not a sentimental writer, said that while other writers are doomed to become names in a textbook, “Chekhov will live as long as there are birchwoods and sunsets”. As long as there are sunsets!
