A New Year's resolution of mine was to get back into reading, and so this January I picked up a volume of short stories by Chekhov. This was my first introduction to his writing, and I knew nothing about Chekhov prior to this book aside from the fact that he is regarded as one of the great figures of Russian literature. While I finished the collection some time ago, I wanted to write a brief reflection on it, hence this blog post (hopefully the first of many!).
The Stories
The stories range from farcical to extremely dark, and portray a wide variety of different characters from different classes of society. They all feel extremely personal, and their characters' humanity and unique personalities come through vividly in Chekhov's prose. I really liked the 'personal' dimension to his stories — they often felt like they were honoring individual experience as opposed to moralizing or trying to push some kind of ideology. To be sure, some of them definitely feel like social commentary:
- The Cook Gets Married is a story in the perspective of a little boy in an upper-class family who sees a servant getting married and recognizes how terrible a deal she is given.
- In The Princess, a princess arrives at a monastery where she meets a former employee; the former employee tells her off, giving a full-throated condemnation of the princess' treatment of her staff and her supposedly charitable enterprises for the local population.
- In In A Country House, a man lectures an uncomfortable guest on the 'truths' of Social Darwinism — that the high status of the aristocracy was due to an inborn intelligence and virtue whose 'purity' must be preserved. The story ends with the guest revealing that he was actually not of high birth, mortifying his host and leaving him abandoned by the only remaining citizen of the town who would associate with him.
These last two stories had an almost cathartic quality in how they mock or expose the pretensions of the elite of Chekov's time (and probably of ours too).
Among the more comic stories include:
- Joy: A man rejoices at being written about in a newpaper, despite it being for having gotten drunk the previous night, falling in front of a donkey cart, and being treated for minor injuries.
- The Exclamation Point: A civil servant without much formal education is tormented by confusion about how to appropriately use exclamation points in writing.
- Romance with a Double Bass: A musician and some sort of princess happen to bathe in a river at the same time. They don't see each other, but afterwards, both discover that their clothes are missing. They run into each other, and the musician puts the woman inside the case for his double bass. Somehow the musician loses possession of the case, which is then picked up by the rest of his troupe; they open it on stage at the manor where they are to perform, causing quite a scene.
The darker stories include:
- Grief: A peasant craftsman tries to get his ailing wife to the doctor, but she dies during the journey, and he realizes how cruel he was to her and how he wasted his life.
- Volodya: A depressed seventeen-year old is infatuated with a 30 year old family friend; his advance is rebuffed and he commits suicide.
- The Name Day Party: A pregnant woman is extremely frustrated at having to entertain a large number of guests while her husband is of no help; they get into a big argument and the woman ends up having a stillbirth.
- The Kiss: An out-of-luck army officer is accidentally kissed by a woman; he spends the next year dreaming of this moment, hoping to find the woman again, but on returning to the location is unable to do so, and once again becomes hopeless (I suppose this one is less dark than just sort of sad).
A couple more 'unique' stories include Kashtanka (told in the perspective of a dog) and Grisha (told in the perspective of a toddler).
Chekhov's Life
Besides reading the stories themselves, it was also quite interesting to learn more about the author himself. Chekhov was born in 1860 to a family of the peasant class, and began writing as a way to support himself and his family after his father's grocery store business went bankrupt. He also funded his university education by writing. Parallel to his literary career, Chekhov was a practicing physician; he worked as a zemstvo doctor (more on this later), traveling to rural parts of Russia and giving treatment to the poor. As explained in the introduction to the book, his work as a doctor and travels throughout Russia gave him exposure to citizens from all walks of life — landowners, peasants, engineers, university students, and more. This diversity is undoubtedly reflected in the wide range of the short stories included in the book. The suffering portrayed in some of the darker stories may have been informed by what Chekhov saw working as a physician; this is probably doubly true for those stories that explicitly feature doctors and illness (as in Grief or in Enemies).
Favorites
I think my favorites were Volodya (for its initially charming humor and sudden, shocking ending), The Kiss (for its depictions of yearning and longing), and The Name Day Party (for its vivid portrayal of the woman's frustration). Again, I really loved the seemingly 'personal' nature of these stories. A lot of them, even the darker ones, are strangely funny sometimes. For example, in Volodya, when the main character is on a train and lost in his yearning, it is mentioned that a fellow passenger remarks “Maybe you have a toothache?”. Similarly, in The Kiss, Chekhov gives the following line to describe the army officer Rabovich:
... his face, his lynx side-whiskers, and his spectacles seemed to say: ‘I'm the most timid, the most modest, and the most colorless oficer in the whole brigade!’
Later, when he is kissed:
He completely forgot he was stoop-shouldered and colorless, and had lynx side-whiskers and an ‘indefinite appearance’ (so his appearance had once been described in a ladies' conversation, which he accidentally overheard)
I really loved some of the sentences in this book. Many of them were long, winding, lists of incredibly detailed description that somehow never felt superfluous, and often possessed an almost narration-like quality to them. For example, in In The Cart:
And for the first time in those thirteen years she pictured to herself, vividly, with striking clarity, her mother, father, brother, the apartment in Moscow, the aquarium with its fish, and all to the last detail; she suddenly heard the piano playing, her father's voice, she felt herself as she was then, young, beautiful, dressed up, in a bright, warm room, amidst her family; a feeling of joy and happiness suddenly came over her; in ecstasy she pressed her palms to her temples and called out tenderly, imploringly: 'Mama!'
What a sentence!
Other Random Thoughts
I wonder to what extent some of Chekhov's characters are representative of his own attitudes / personality. For instance, in Spring, a collection of 'ordinary folk' (a gardnener, a huntsman, a manager) are delighted by the coming of spring, but a writer is tormented by how his work could never match the beauty of the nature around him; he detests 'ordinary folk' due to their poor taste, and other writers due to his own competitiveness. Perhaps on bad days Chekhov himself felt somewhat like this, and this story is him poking fun at his own folly. Other stories feature doctors as their protagonists — in Ionych for example, a doctor takes a romantic interest in a young woman living in a new town he arrives at, but he is rejected due to her wishes to study music and become a professional pianist. The woman later returns to the town after her study and tries to associate with the doctor, but the doctor now has no interest in her, and has grown irritable, overly interested in his new wealth, hating of all the other townsfolk, and has become physically unfit and of poor temperament. Maybe Chekhov's portrayal of the doctor in this story was a way for him to exorcise some similar impulse or attitude out of himself.
There is probably much more to say about Chekhov's descriptions of class, and the connections between these descriptions to the historical context of the final decades of the Russian Empire. Several stories mention the 1861 abolition of serfdom and zemstvo programs (local governments, often in rural areas, set up to provide social and economic aid; as I mentioned earlier, Chekhov himself, like the eponymous character in Ionych, worked as a zemstvo physician). The last story of the book The New Dacha, is one that I didn't feel I understood and that seems particularly relevant to this topic. In the story, an engineer builds a summer home for his family near a village. His wife is sickly and was born to a lower class, and she tries to do good for the villagers, but the rich family and the poor villagers constantly seem to enter into some conflict or another. It is mentioned that later on, the dacha is sold to a new owner who barely interacts with the villagers at all and doesn't involve himself in their affairs; there are no issues between this new owner and the townsfolk.
A final observation: the stories in the book were arranged chronologically, and it was interesting seeing the evolution of Chekhov's writing. The more comedic sketches seem to have been written earlier, with his writing getting darker over time.