I've been reading again some of Chekhov's stories. I'd forgotten, if I ever noticed, how many of them concern unhappy marriages and adultery. Chekhov's marital history does not account for this subject matter: he was born in 1860, did not marry until 1901, and died in 1904. The stories I'm thinking of—"The Grasshopper," "Anna on the Neck," "Lady with Lapdog"—were all written in the 1890s. I like to think that another aspect of his biography, that of his life as a reader, might shed some light on the question.
Tolstoy's Anna Karenina was published in book form in 1878, the year Chekhov turned 18. It's often regarded as the finest novel ever written, and it was immediately recognized as a great work. Chekhov certainly would have read it. From thirty thousand feet, what happens in Anna Karenina is that the title character cheats on her husband, which ruins her life, and she ends a suicide. Meanwhile, in a secondary plot, the upstanding characters, after many complications are resolved, marry, live happily, and prosper. The novel has an epigraph: "Vengeance is mine, I will repay."
The world according to Chekhov is about 300,000 versts from this. I doubt it's by chance that, in two of the three stories mentioned, the female strayer is named Anna. In one, the name makes it into the title, which is a double entendre: an award, the Order of St. Anna, worn around the neck, but in an undertone the sense too of "Anna is a burden" or, more colloquially, a real pain in the neck. The story is about the shifting power dynamics in a loveless marriage. Anna marries a middle-class flunky in order to elevate her poor family. Since he's the meal ticket, she's unassertive and miserable—until her good looks and personal charm make her a success in the new husband's social circle, including with those above him in the bureaucracy. She then treats him with impunity and forgets about her poor family. The story ends. It's not the upstanding people who prosper. Indeed there isn't an upstanding person in sight. When the hapless husband is seated in the train car that will carry him and Anna to their honeymoon, he receives the following physical description:
He was an official of medium height, rather stout and puffy, who looked exceedingly well nourished, with long whiskers and no moustache. His clean-shaven, round, sharply defined chin looked like the heel of a foot. The most characteristic point in his face was the absence of moustache, the bare, freshly shaven place, which gradually passed into the fat cheeks, quivering like jelly.
No one to cheer for, but not because they're both villains—to achieve that status, they'd have to be less ordinary.
The woman in "The Grasshopper" perhaps qualifies as a villain, but it's her long-suffering, decent husband who dies in the end. She then grieves hysterically, apparently to compensate for having treated him so shabbily, while his work colleagues make the necessary arrangements. "Lady with Lapdog" is one of Chekhov's late (1899) and most anthologized stories. Anna—the name again—and Gurov, vacationing in Yalta apart from their spouses, start an affair. Chekhov's education was scientific—he was a medical doctor—and the story, as much as any other, exemplifies the dispassionate intelligence, augmented by humane sympathy, that critics have compared to the bedside manner of a good physician. Here is something that happens in the world, let us observe and contemplate it rather than have any grand, moral conclusions—that, it seems, is something like what Chekhov thought. The story ends in muted, un-Tolstoyan fashion, with a faint suggestion perhaps that the author is on the side of the lovers:
And it seemed to them that in only a few more minutes a solution would be found and a new, beautiful life would begin; but both of them knew very well that the end was still a long, long way away and that the most complicated and difficult part was only just beginning.
Maybe it's just me, but once you start thinking this way you see Tolstoy looming everywhere in Chekhov. One of Tolstoy's most famous long stories is "The Death of Ivan Ilych," about a man who, suffering a terminal illness, becomes persuaded that he had wasted his life in meaningless pursuits, like advancing in his career. He tries to think of how he could have lived differently. Just before finally dying, he has a mystical revelation inspired by the religious faith and cheerful service of a lowly servant who tends to him while he suffers the humiliating indignities of his last days. This is just the kind of thing that would irritate Chekhov, who three years after "Ilych" was published wrote a long story about a dying man, a professor of medicine, who having fallen ill did not become obsessed with philosophical or religious questions but carried on with his work, which had always interested him, and died without an epiphany. Chekhov gave it the title, "A Boring Story."
The picture above is from when two of Russia's greatest writers met at Yalta in 1900. I remember reading somewhere that Chekhov, I think in a letter, said that he enjoyed their visit "because I only had to listen."
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