Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)

Transcript (PDF)

Prelude to the Twentieth Century
Presentation 5 of 13

Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)
The Seagull. Uncle Vanya. The Cherry Orchard. Three Sisters.
Interior Drama Takes the Family Stage
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, August 2, 1984

Transcript:

To bring in somebody else – I mean how do you follow Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and Blavatsky and Tolstoy? But actually, the perfect way to follow them is by bringing Chekhov on the stage. Chekhov would have loved being chosen for the anticlimactic fifth. You know the fifth business in the theater is always the mysterious element. Chekhov is very much the mysterious element in Western literature. Chekhov revolutionizes literature. He changes the forms by which the short story and the drama present themselves. And with Chekhov comes the first real experiences of the twentieth century.

Chekhov, if he had lived to be an old man, would have lived to the 1940s. As it was, he died in 1904. But that’s a date that gives us a misconception. He’s very contemporary. It’s difficult to present Chekhov because he is almost invisible and his work alone discloses his elusive personality. And so I have to choose a different tack from other lectures which you’ve had. I have to go immediately to a four-page story by Chekhov in order to deliver you an insight into his personality. The story is called An Inadvertence and this is pure Chekhov and has all of the characteristics which he as a human being and his life as a man and his position as a revolutionary in consciousness has for us. So this is a perfect example of what the personality of Chekhov is like. It’s called An Inadvertence. Forgive me for reading this, but this is the only way to introduce this elusive prey. Chekhov has been seen by more people, more critics, more political critics and literary critics than almost any other author. He’s very very difficult to approach. So here’s his short story and An Inadvertence.

“Pyotr Petrovitch Strizhin, the nephew of Madame Ivanov, the Colonel’s widow, – the man whose new goloshes were stolen last year, – came home from a christening party at two o’clock in the morning. To avoid waking the household he took off his things in the lobby, made his way on tiptoe to his room, holding his breath, and began getting ready for bed without lighting a candle.”

“Strizhin leads a sober and regular life. He has a sanctimonious expression of face, he reads nothing but religious and edifying books, but at the christening party, in his delight that Lyubov Spiridonovna had passed through her confinement successfully, he had permitted himself to drink four glasses of vodka and a glass of wine, the taste of which suggested something midway between vinegar and castor oil. Spirituous liquids are like sea-water and glory: the more you imbibe of them the greater your thirst. And now as he undressed Strizhin was aware of an overwhelming craving for drink. ’I believe Dashenka has some vodka in the cupboard, in the right-hand corner,’ he thought. ’If I drink one wine-glassful, she won’t notice it.’ ”

“After some hesitation, overcoming his fears, Strizhin went to the cupboard. Cautiously opening the door he felt in the right-hand corner for a bottle and poured out a wine-glassful, put the bottle back in its place, then, making the sign of the cross, he drank it straight off. And immediately something like a miracle took place. Strizhin was flung backwards from the cupboard to the chest with a fearful force like a bomb. There were flashes before his eyes, he felt as though he could not breathe, and all over his body he had a sensation as though he had fallen into a marsh full of leeches. It seemed to him as though, instead of vodka, he had swallowed dynamite, which blew up in his body, the house, and the whole street. …His head, his arms, his legs – all seemed to be torn off and to be flying away somewhere to the devil, into space.”

“For some three minutes he lay on the chest, not moving and scarcely breathing, then he got up and asked himself: ’Where am I?’ The first thing of which he was clearly conscious on coming to himself was the pronounced smell of paraffin. ’Holy saints,’ he thought in horror, ’it’s paraffin I have drunk instead of vodka.’ The thought that he had poisoned himself threw him into a cold shiver, then into a fever. That it was really poison that he had taken only proved not only by the smell in the room but also by the burning taste in his mouth, the flashes before his eyes, the ringing in his head, and the colicky pain in his stomach. Feeling the approach of death and not buoying himself up with false hopes, he wanted to say goodbye to those nearest to him, he made his way to Dashenka’s bedroom (being a widower he had a sister-in-law called Dashenka, an old maid, living in the flat to keep house for him). ’Dashenka,’ he said in a cheerful voice as he went into the bedroom, ’dear Dashenka!’ ”

“Something grumbled in the darkness and uttered a deep sigh. ’Dashenka.’ ’Eh? What?’ A woman’s voice articulated rapidly. ’Is that you, Pyotr Petrovitch? Are you back already? Well, what is it? What has the baby been christened? Who was godmother?’ ’The godmother was Natalya Andreyevna Velikosvyetsky, and the godfather Pavel Ivanitch Bezsonnitsin. … I. …I believe, Dashenka, I am dying. And the baby has been christened Olimpiada, in honor of their kind patroness…. I … I have just drunk paraffin, Dashenka!’ ’What next! You don’t say they gave you paraffin there?’ ’I must own I wanted to get a drink of vodka without asking you, and the Lord chastised me: by accident, in the dark I took paraffin. … What am I to do?’ ”

“Dashenka, hearing that the cupboard had been opened without her permission, grew more wideawake. … She quickly lighted a candle, jumped out of bed, and in her nightgown, a freckled, bony figure and curl-papers, padded with bare feet to the cupboard. ’Who told you you might?’ she asked sternly, as she scrutinized the inside of the cupboard. ’Was the vodka put in there for you?’ ’I… I haven’t drunk vodka but paraffin, Dashenka…’ muttered Strizhin, mopping the cold sweat on his brow. ’And what did you want to touch the paraffin for? That’s nothing to do with you, is it? Is it put there for you? Or do you suppose paraffin costs nothing? Eh? Do you know what paraffin is now? Do you know?’ ’Dear Dashenka,’ moaned Strizhin, ’it’s a question of life and death and you talk about money!’ ’He’s drunk himself tipsy and now he pokes his nose into the cupboard!’ cried Dashenka, angrily slamming the cupboard door. ’Oh, the monsters, the tormentors! I’m a martyr, a miserable woman, no peace day or night! Vipers, basilisks, accursed Herods, may you suffer the same in the world to come. I am going to-morrow! I am a maiden lady and I won’t allow you to stand before me in your underclothes! How dare you look at me when I am undressed!’ ”

“And she went on and on. …Knowing that when Dashenka was enraged there was no moving her with prayers or vows or even firing a cannon, Strizhin waved his hand in despair, dressed, and made up his mind to go to the doctor. But a doctor is only readily found when he is not wanted. After running through three streets ringing five times at Dr. Tchepharyants’s, and seven times at Dr. Bultyhin’s, Strizhin raced off to a chemist’s shop, thinking possibly the chemist could help him. There, after a long interval, a little dark and curly headed chemist came out to him in his dressing gown, with drowsy eyes, and such a wise and serious face that it was positively terrifying. ’What do you want?’ he asked in a tone in which only very wise and dignified chemists of Jewish persuasion can speak. ’For God’s sake. …I entreat you …’ said Strizhin breathlessly, ’give me something. I have just accidentally drunk paraffin, I am dying.’ ’I beg you not to excite yourself and to answer the questions I am about to put to you. The very fact that you are excited prevents me from understanding you. You have drunk paraffin. Yes?’ ’Yes, paraffin! Please save me!’ ”

“The chemist went coolly and gravely to the desk, opened a book, and became absorbed in reading it. After reading a couple of pages he shrugged one shoulder and then the other, made a contemptuous grimace and, after thinking for a minute, went into an adjoining room. The clock struck four, and when it pointed ten minutes past the chemist came back with another book and began reading again. ’H’m,’ he said as though puzzled, ’the very fact that you feel unwell shows you ought to apply to a doctor, not a chemist.’ ’But I have been to the doctors already. I could not ring them up.’ ’H’m … you don’t regard us chemists as human beings, and disturb our rest even at four o’clock at night, though every dog, every cat, can rest in peace. … You don’t try to understand anything, and to your thinking we are not people and our nerves are like cords.’ Strizhin listened to the chemist, heaved a sigh, and went home.”

“ ’So I am fated to die,’ he thought. And in his mouth was a burning and a taste of paraffin, there were twinges in his stomach, and a sound of boom, boom, boom in his ears. Every moment it seemed to him that the end was near, that his heart was no longer beating. So returning to home he made haste to write: ’Let no one be blamed for my death,’ then he said his prayers, lay down and pulled the bedclothes over his head. He lay awake till morning expecting death, and all the time he kept fancying how his grave would be covered with fresh green grass and how the birds would twitter over it. … And in the morning he was sitting on his bed, saying with a smile to Dashenka: ’One who leads a very regular religious life, dear sister, is obviously unaffected by any poison. Take me, for example. I am on the verge of death. I was dying and in agony, yet now I am all right. There is only a burning in my mouth and a soreness in my throat, but I am all right all over, thank God. … And why? It’s because of my regular religious life.’ ’No,’ said Dashenka, ’it’s because of the inferior paraffin! The man at that shop could not have given me the best quality. I am a martyr, a miserable woman. You monsters! May you suffer the same, in the world to come.’ And she went on and on. …”

So, a character. He was born in a very small town, almost a village. On one of the coasts of the Black Sea there is a huge bay called the Sea of Azov that juts up to– if you’re looking at a map usually it’s on the right of the Crimea and the Don comes flowing down from Russia and empties in from Rostov there. And Taganrog is about oh 50 miles or so from Rostov on the coast of the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea – very provincial town. There were many children. The father and mother did not particularly get along. The father was really a tyrant around the house. And in the 1860s, when Chekhov was born in January, Russia was just about to undergo a huge change. The serfs were freed by the Tsar the next year and the whole social structure of feudal aristocratic Russia was undermined in one fell stroke. It would take a generation for that to filter through. But the whole labor monumental structure that had kept Russia aristocratic and prosperous was gone overnight. And slowly, as the serfs took their place in the Russian society, the aristocratic superstructure sank and almost dissolved into this new solvent that had been freed. The last tip to survive was the Tsar himself and the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 were the final culmination of that whole movement of peoples rising from the bottom to occupy the top.

So Chekhov’s life takes place within this huge change. Actually the young Anton Chekhov survived because he was a quick witted mimic. There was such a dull, boring city. The family bickering was just endless. But young Anton distinguished himself because he could always mimic individuals. He would put on little pantomimes and people would say: “Oh that’s terrible. Do it again.”

He would write little vignettes, little humorous things and people would say don’t let anyone see this. And they’d be reading it again and again. His father went bankrupt. He was a small-time grocery clerk and fled from his creditors to Moscow taking his wife and children, except for Anton. Leaving Anton at age sixteen to finish up school and fend for himself.

And so, at the age of sixteen, Chekhov began to look out for himself. He developed those qualities that a young man must under those circumstances develop. A practical sense of what am I going to do today? And am I doing something today that will help me again next week and the month after? He began to build conscientiously a sense of life for himself. He took to the study, finally, of medicine. And Chekhov would become a doctor and eventually would become quite a credible doctor. But at the same time in order to let off steam he would write little vignettes, little descriptions, little humorous things, enlarged gags. If he had lived in Hollywood in the 40s or 50s he would have been a gag writer for Bob Hope. He was that sort of a person, but at the same time dedicated to providing for himself.

And so Chekhov developed a very strange subtle personality. He was extremely practical when it came to himself and rather like a secular knight he took care of everything around himself. He made sure that the money coming in was going to be sufficient no matter how small it was. He would cut his living down to those expenses. He never really had too many close friends. He never developed the sense of– of sexual attractiveness with the ladies. Although he had his share of affairs and eventually towards the end of his life he even became married. Chekhov was a self-sufficient individual – like a professional – alive in a sea of troubled times and troubled populations. So he became rather what we imagine the stereotype gunfire in the Old West would have been somebody who always is looking over his shoulder, covering his tracks, and preparing what he’s going to do. So this sense of attentiveness to a subtle kind of patterning which one can interpret in retrospect as structure but actually is not structure but is a sense of design in motion. Not a sense of a plan, but a sense of getting to know and exploring kind of landscape of life and willing to go here and there. And so Chekhov becomes someone who carries a compass within himself without ever checking it that kind of sense of design.

He finally put himself through school and at the age of twenty found himself in Moscow and fell in love with the great city. Moscow in 1880 had its share of slums but it also had a high life and a fine life that Chekhov had not seen before. He began in fact to write little vignettes and send them to newspapers and send them to magazines. And pretty soon Chekhov was earning as much money from this as all the rest of the members of the family including the father who somehow had fallen apart through the bankruptcy and through seeing one of his own sons sort of start to outdo him even though he was young and the father took to reading Greek Orthodox books to dressing up himself in religious costumes he became focused upon an attempt in his clumsy– I hate to use a designation like lower middle class but it carries the feature. He was a failed minor businessman who took to religion and did it very badly. Eventually the father would live apart for many years from the family and they would only be brought together after Chekhov became able to buy a huge country estate of some four hundred and seventy five acres outside of Moscow.

But Chekhov trained himself assiduously through those early years finishing medical school. He in fact became a very credible surgeon and handled some very tough cases. But Chekhov, through his literary contacts, handled a lot of free patients, artisans, writers, painters and so forth would send friends to him and then he would not charge them. In fact he noted once in one of his letters that he had made only four or five rubles in a whole month of practicing medicine, but that he had made many times that from his writings.

So life went on like this for Chekhov. He graduated from medical school in 1884. And in 1886, this very interesting minor life was suddenly changed. He received a letter from an old major writer a man named Grigorovich. And Grigorovich’s letter to Chekhov made him aware of the fact that he had within himself an uncanny talent for understanding human life. And Grigorovich who was an old man at this time white-haired distinguished. He was from the golden age of Russian writing. He was up on a par at one time with Turgenev and Tolstoy. Chekhov wrote back to D. V. Grigorovich in March of 1886:

“Your letter, my kind, ardently beloved bringer of good tidings, struck me like a thunderbolt. I nearly cried, I got all excited, and now I feel that your message has left a deep mark on my soul. …If I have a gift that should be respected, I confess before the purity of your heart that hitherto I had not respected it. I felt that I might have talent, but had got used to thinking of it as insignificant.”

And his letter goes on to say how he had just simply felt that he was living a life and meandering through, doing the best that he could. But Grigorovich’s letter had shown him that there was a quality of understanding and perception available to Chekhov that penetrated through to the very interior core of the human personality and that he had begun to evolve a writing style which was able to lay bare this personality not by drawing outlines, but by creating ambiances, moods, almost an impressionistic style, whereby the reader became committed in his emotional feeling to the experience of the reading and in this commitment began to use his own perceptive apparatus and experience to probe through these misty colors and contours that Chekhov was delivering, and to reconstruct in himself the outlines and the shapes of understanding. Grigorovich said, this is a very great talent and one which is God sent. Do not waste it.

And so Chekhov’s letter to him said that he would no longer write mediocrities. He said, it was “like a bolt from the blue” to receive your letter. “Excuse the comparison but it had the effect on me of a governor’s order to leave town within twenty-four hours: I suddenly felt the urgent need to hurry and to get out of the hole in which I was stuck. … I will stop – but not too soon – doing work that has to be delivered on schedule. It is impossible to get out of the rut I am in all at once. I don’t object to going hungry…”

Grigorovich had said, even if you have to go hungry to learn your art, devote yourself to it because you are developing here a godsent talent and this is a gift for mankind and not a personal possession which you may squander on your own entertainment.

So he writes, “All my hope is pinned to the future. I am only twenty-six. Perhaps I shall succeed in achieving something, though time flies fast. …send me your photograph. …deeply, respectful, and grateful. A. Chekhov”

So in 1886, in the early spring, he began to sense that he had a major talent and that he was committed then for the rest of his life to developing this talent. Medicine began to take more and more a back seat. And in fact almost curiously at the time that this was happening Chekhov began to experience ill health in a pattern which he as a physician knew very well what it portended. He was to suffer from tuberculosis and die from it at a very early age – forty-four years of age. So just as Chekhov received this encouragement and the star of his destiny rose over the horizon, he also saw that he was in effect a doomed man. How long he had to live was simply a question of actually probably years. He was fortunate enough to live for another eighteen years.

So Chekhov began then to contribute heavily to literary journals. One called in Russian, Novoye Vremya (The New Times). He contributed his first really fine stories. In fact the first story of any size that he contributed was called The Steppe. And it was a story of about ninety pages long. And it was an impressionistic tour of the Ukrainian-Russian steppe through the eyes of a nine year-old boy. So that the protagonist or the point of view through which the reader was looking was that of a nine year old child who was unable to shape his impressions exactly like an adult would be, and there were not many associations. So all of it was an interesting excursion in impressionistic writing – giving the natural settings, there were storms, and night adventures, and daytime adventures – all through the eyes of this nine year old. This story, The Steppe, began then to prepare him for trying his hands at other aspects. And he wrote in 1887 his first real play – Ivanov – which is still incidentally performed in theaters around the world. He had written a large four-act play called Platonov, which had been shelved and wasn’t found until the 1920s. And I think it wasn’t translated into English until probably the late 1950s or early 1960s.

But for all intents and purposes Ivanov was his first real play. He had written one-act comedy sketches, but Ivanov finally brought everything out. The play’s main character is a landowner who is about thirty years old, Nicholas Ivanov, who has a Jewish wife Sarah, and she has been cursed and abandoned by her family because she gave up her religion to marry Ivanov, a Greek Orthodox Christian. Ivanov in the meantime falls madly in love with another woman, Sasha, the daughter of a rich neighbor. And finally as he is busy seducing Sasha a lot in his mind and then once in fact in physical reality. As he is plotting this, his wife is ill and then dies. Ivanov marries Sasha, but just as this marriage is about to be celebrated, a doctor who has been following this entire story comes in and confronts him and confronts him with the total immorality of his life. The murder of a beautiful person who loved him through total neglect and the total seducing of this woman who really shouldn’t have belonged to him and Ivanov is confronted by his own meanness. One of the endings that Chekhov had was that Ivanov shoots himself.

For Chekhov this became the beginning of a very serious concern with the theater which was probably to be the hallmark of Chekhov’s greatness. But it would be some years before Chekhov would have another play produced. He became aware, by 1888, that he was in fact a very sick man. He also became aware that he had had a limited background and so he wanted to expose himself to life, not to the drinking bouts and the petty affairs that people his own age were having in Moscow. He wanted to open himself up to nature in the grandest possible way. So he took a travel tour to the south of Russia. In fact he went down to Tiflis and Baku, the cities in Azerbaijan on the other side of the Caucasian Mountains. He came back to Moscow. Wrote a few short humorous one-act plays. And then conceived of an incredible journey.

He decided that he would go to the end of the earth. And fixing on a map of Russia, eight thousand miles away, the last piece of Russian land in the world was the island of Sakhalin out in the Pacific Ocean. And Chekhov, in 1890, decided that he would go and visit this island. So he began reading up on Sakhalin Island and he found that it was in fact a penal colony for the Russian Tsarist police system. And he became interested then in the aspect that these were jailed people, sentenced to life exile, sentenced to complete alienation from all life forms which they had known. And in fact there were many such people and they were sent as a group to the end of the earth there to colonize this island and to start a new life to make a new civilization. This captivated Chekhov’s mind and he wanted to go and explore.

Now this whole region of the Soviet Union had not been traveled very much. Alexander von Humboldt in the late 1820s at the invitation of the Tsar had taken an excursion across much of Siberia. The Russian army was as late as the 1860s and 1870s still fighting skirmishes all along the southern borders of Siberia, western Siberia, and eastern Siberia, both. In fact there were very few persons outside of a military capacity, or outside of a penal prisoner capacity, that had ever traveled in those regions. So Chekhov, at the age of thirty, feeling his mortality, feeling the tremendous responsibility of having a God-given talent to understand human life, committed himself to this enormous undertaking. He went north from Moscow by train to Yaroslavl and then by boat made his way down the upper Russian river systems all the way out to Perm which is in Tataria. From Perm he caught a stagecoach, literally, like the American West, and began riding all the way out to the Lake Baikal region. Now it took him many many weeks to make this trip. He left Moscow on the nineteenth of April and it was thawing mud progressively all the way as he went further out into Siberia the thaw followed him so that he was literally in a sea of mud almost all the way.

He describes his journey to Sakhalin Island in a series of letters to friends, and at one time he suspected that the stationmaster was trying to keep him overnight to charge him for another night and told him that the road was impassable because of floods. This was the Irtysh River, outside of Tomsk in the middle of Siberia. Chekhov refused to believe him and he said he got his driver to go about three miles outside of town when suddenly he saw this enormous lake. And it wasn’t a river but it was a river that had overflowed its banks. But here and there were strips of land in this river. So they would drive along these strips of land and then plop into the water and then they would make their way getting out of the carriage and helping push and getting the horses to pull it to another strip of land. And so they made their way. And he said his pride refused to let him go back. Finally they made it to the last strip of land and they realized that they were on what appeared to be the bank of the Irtysh River. And there was a little hut there and this was where the ferry was kept but that the ferry was on the other side of the river. And so Chekhov had to spend the night in this hut on just a little spit of land. And he said he felt finally completely forlorn and alienated. He had found the horrific image that he had feared all his life, the image of loneliness because there was nothing but a little spit of slippery mud in the midst of Siberia himself. And when his two peasant companions went to sleep there he was left alone. And so Chekhov opened himself up to this most terrifying of all human feelings – infinite loneliness. He spent the night, sleepless, taking it in, feeling it, waking up the next morning and going on.

And so finally making his way down to Lake Baikal, they took a ferry across Baikal which is about eighty or ninety miles at that point and took another stage into the Amur River area just north of the northern border of Mongolia. I think it’s called Saransk. And it was at this stage of the journey that Chekhov began, then, to experience the gorgeousness of nature. It was almost as if his experience with abject loneliness had opened up the pores of his natural affinities and he said he began to experience a kind of giddy healthfulness and wholesomeness that all around him the forest, the taiga, the unending forest belt filled with birds and animals and not with men at all was just opening up for him the possibilities that perhaps human sensibility could in fact exist wide-open in nature after all and that he had been right in going through this portal.

They got to the Amur River and then took a ferry boat all the way down the Amur as it winds around and moves up towards the Pacific Ocean. And there – I can’t recall the name of the little seaport, it’s like Nikolayevich named after one of the Tsars – he came into his first view of Sakhalin Island out in the Pacific. Probably forty miles or so out in the distance. And there was a pall of smoke hanging over a little gray line. And as the boat for Sakhalin left the port of Nikolayevich, and they got out about half way to the island, they realized that they could not land because the whole island as far as they could see was covered with a series of forest fires. So they went down in between the coast of Siberia down towards Vladivostok about a hundred miles or so. And then finally cut in and landed at the Port Alexandrovich.

But all the way along Chekhov was horrified to see a complete perfect picture of hell. Every ridge was on fire and a thick pall of smoke held the sky. And as they landed at the port he realized that the psychology of all the people had changed. And this pall of gloom and this vicious undercurrent had settled on everyone. And he was to spend three months on Sakhalin Island. He said it was the perfect image of hell. Everyone there was vicious. Everyone was plotting against everyone else. There was no honesty anywhere; that the entire population of man had been turned into fiends and that nature had cooperated by just giving them this pall of smoke and fire.

But Chekhov in order to discipline himself – we have our yogis in the West too – went methodically through the population of Sakhalin Island. He took his own personal census and inventory of every single person that was there. Noted the circumstances of their lives, how they got there, and patiently schooling himself like a physician who has seen sickness and death and misery so much that he becomes a professional at treating it. Chekhov looked into the face of human horror and meanness, month after month, at Sakhalin Island, until he could understand. And in his notes, which were published in 1893, on Sakhalin Island, it so startled the world by its portrayal of the depths to which humanity can sink as a population, that it precipitated a great deal of the revolutionary fervor that was to end up just a dozen years later in the Russian Revolution.

There were prison reforms that came out of this. Much like Melville writing White Jacket there were reforms on the ships. But Chekhov, for the first time, had chronicled a journey through personal alienation to a wholesome joyousness in nature. Into the mouth of hell and had returned to tell about it. He came back by ship. There was a cholera epidemic in Japan so he couldn’t land in Japan. But he came back via Hong Kong, Singapore, Ceylon, and through the Red Sea, and back up into Moscow. He came back around Christmas time of 1890 and Chekhov came back loaded with images of man that very few people had ever seen before with a comprehensive eye. Persons who had lived in this kind of a mire were individuals for whom it didn’t occur to them that there was any kind of a contrast, any kind of a movement at all in their lives.

So when Chekhov came back in 1881 in order to get rid of the after effects of this tour to hell he took himself to the West. He went to Venice. He went to Rome. He went to Italy. He became one of these European travelers from the north for whom Italy was like a salve on his feelings. All the time writing. Chekhov wrote some four hundred short stories. About two hundred and fifty of them are world-class quality and curiously enough in his writing style they would come out in clumps three or four at a time and he began publishing in the late 1880s volumes of short stories, and by 1891 he had a number of volumes of short stories. Some of the stories had won prizes. The Pushkin Prize, the highest literary award that Russia had, went to one of his stories, The Tedious Life.

In the stories, Chekhov never gave the standard plot, never gave the picture from a beginning to some culmination. He changed the whole structural mode by which the short story is written. Instead of giving us the story, he puts us into the most crucial event in the life of someone, and gives us just enough so that we have to intuit and feel along with them to find out what significance this had, what really this turned out to be. After Chekhov, the masters of the short story would be like James Joyce, and Katherine Mansfield. A totally different way of delivering literature. Instead of telling the story, they presented the reader with a chance to explore through his own feelings and intuitions an event in the life of someone else that had a reverberation for themselves. Because Chekhov believed that there was a science of literature just like there was a science of medicine and that there were definite qualities of shared life. Remember this is the Soviet Union, the Russia rather, of Vladimir Solovyov whose religion of the Holy Spirit said that all men are part of one vast structure. We are but rhizomes from one shared reservoir. This was the Russia of Tolstoy’s wonderful developments in ethical exploration and religious insight. This was a great age in Russia.

But for Chekhov he had simply seen too much meanness, too much misery. And for him the great message of the age, Tolstoy’s message that man’s salvation lies in understanding the intricacies of nonresistance to violence. For Tolstoy, as we saw last week, it was the place within man’s character where we can finally put the finger and say it is upon this issue that we make illusion or we make wholeness of life. If we resist violence we are adding fuel to it and give it substance and shape from ourselves. If we do not resist it, if we conscientiously build so that it doesn’t occur, we explore patterns of wholesomeness. This was Tolstoy’s understanding. But for Chekhov, who loved Tolstoy as a person as a man, he could not stomach the idea of nonresistance to evil and meanness. That man should put himself up in resistance to it, but that the human personality was not something which had handles which you could just move and push around like a pawn on a board; that the human personality was a rather vague ambiguous interpenetration of feeling tones and memories, imaginations, expectations. And that it was this floating pastel mass that was a person. And the only way in which this could be grasped was through a comprehensive assessment of one’s own experience. Again and again, hundreds of times, so that one built up the sense of the science of feeling. One built up a sense of understanding the themes and the motifs of the composition of human life and stopped looking for the illusory qualities which could be labeled.

It was to this effect that Chekhov began writing stories like Ward Six. Ward Six – and we’ll just have this and then we’ll take a break – Ward Six is one of his long stories, almost a novel. Ward Six is a mental ward. The doctor in charge of Ward Six believes that we should let people go crazy, they should not be treated. So he is a Tolstoyan protagonist – not to resist the evil.

“Doctor Andrey Yefimitch Ragin, of whom we shall hear again, prescribed cold compresses for his head, ordered him to take drops of bay rum, and went away saying that he would come no more as it was not right to prevent people going out of their minds.”

But as the novel progresses Doctor Ragin becomes more and more a party to the feeling-tones of the inmates, and finds that he himself is going crazy. Unbeknownst to him but noticed by his staff and more and more this enormous shift from being the doctor to becoming one of the inmates in Ward Six.

“Andrey Yefimitch felt that the crust had risen to his throat, his heart beat painfully. ’This is absurd,’ he said, rising suddenly and going over to the window. ’Is it possible you don’t understand that you are talking nonsense?’ He wished to speak to his visitor softly and politely, but could not restrain himself and against his own will clenched his fists and raised them threateningly above his head. ’Leave me,’ he cried in a voice which was not his own. His face was purple and trembled all over. ’Begone, both of you! Go!’ Mikhail Averyanitch and Hobotov rose and looked at him first in astonishment, then in terror, for they realized that he had crossed the line and they would have to commit him.”

“It was already twilight. Ivan Dmitrievich lay in his bed with his face buried in the pillow; the paralytic sat motionless, and wept softly and twitched his lips. The fat moujik and the ex-sorter slept. It was very quiet. Andrey Yefimitch sat on Ivan Dmitrievich’s bed and listened. Half an hour passed by, but Kurbatov did not come. Instead of Kurbatov came Nikita, carrying in his arm, a dressing gown, some linen and a pair of slippers. ’Pleased put on these your honor,’ he said calmly. ’There is your bed; this way please,’ he added, pointing at a vacant bed evidently only just set up. ’And don’t take on. And with God’s will you will be well soon.’ Andrey Yefimitch understood. Without a word he walked over to the bed indicated by Nikita and sat upon it; and then seeing that Nikita was waiting, he stripped himself and felt ashamed. He put on the hospital clothing; the flannels were too small, the shirt was too long, and the dressing gown smelt of smoked fish. ’You will be all right, God grant it,’ repeated Nikita. He took up Andrey Yefimitch’s clothes, and went out, and locked the door.”

And later of course there is a horrible death. Doctor Ragin dies of an epileptic fit in the midst of the madness and the last thing he is aware of is a green film clouding over the world and he realizes he will never be cured and that for him there is no God.

I hate on this note to take a break but I need to.

What we’re doing in this series – perhaps I should make it a little clearer. This series is a part of an ongoing pattern and in this series we’re trying to broach the twentieth century. We’re trying to get a feel for the roots of our own time. And the stipulation here is that we’re almost unable to appreciate the present moments in which we live because they’re very unusual. And in fact there’s kind of like an infinite regression problem of, if we understand the beginnings of the twentieth century then we have to go back in time and back in time and so forth. And we overcame that difficulty four years ago because we started a process which, for lack of a better name, is like a yoga of civilization to take a disciplined approach keeping free of ideas as much as we can free of the ideological patterns which we all know too well and keep our feet on those existential rocks called human beings and try and walk ourselves across the ocean of time, moving from person to person to person, and not touching anything in between. So the acrobatic tightrope walk and we’ve come all the way from Homer to Chekhov and we’ve found an unbroken lineage of human beings, like ourselves, living lives like we’re living trying to in their honesty and excellence divulge for whoever would be able to see what value they found.

And we’ve noted incidentally in passing along that very few of these people have ever been appreciated in their own right. When we did the series on the nineteenth century we found that every single major figure of the nineteenth century has been misunderstood in the twentieth century: Marx, Wagner, you name it, Darwin. All of them. We haven’t wanted to draw any lines and sum this up but we began to get the implication that if our time has misunderstood all of the previous century, maybe there’s something wrong with our time. Could we have gone on a skew so far that we are no longer able to review our own origins, our own experience with honesty? It’s a possibility. We can’t dismiss it because it’s so surreal. We’re talking about maybe our civilization is mad and has no longer any rational history at all available to it.

But we’re willing to accept whatever discoveries come our way because we have all the methods and capabilities and possibilities that human beings have given us to work with. We have a huge repertoire. We can explore unknowns with nothing. We have even that capacity. So in an undaunted way we’re trying now simply to review for ourselves major figures who in a very direct line sweep into our own time. And so we find ourselves now with the fifth person in this particular pattern, Chekhov. And we find ourselves at a time in Chekhov’s life where he realized that his time was indeed extremely limited but that he had a field of human experience which he had to explore and that he hadn’t been able to thus far.

He had never had a real home. He’d lived in apartments all his life. He had taken rooms with his mother and his sister and one of his brothers Mikhail. Not the Michael Chekhov who was the actor, that was a nephew of Chekhov’s, the son of one of his brothers. Incidentally, The Life of Vladimir Solovyov that we sell in the bookstore is dedicated to that Michael Chekhov. So Chekhov wanted to experience a home life where everybody was brought back together. He settled upon a farm in the Ukraine and everything went up to the very close of the escrow and it fell through on the very day that it should have been consummated. And almost in rebound, without looking at it, he bought an enormous plot, almost five hundred acres. He bought it when it was covered with snow. He’d never seen it. Nobody had ever seen. The land had belonged to an artist who was carrying some paper on it. Chekhov got a loan from his publisher Suvorin. He had saved quite a large backlog of rubles. But even so, this farm cost thirteen thousand rubles in 1892, which was a mountain of money. But he wanted to experience having all of his family, all of his brothers and sisters, his mother and his father, his friends, the peasants who lived on the land. He often said I have peasant blood in me, myself. I have to have this contact with the country life. So he wanted to bring the entire carnival of life into one focus.

This estate was called Melikhovo. Melikhovo was south of Moscow, a little west, probably fifty miles, thirty to fifty miles. And in 1892 they went there and began. He was hungry for the experience of the wholeness of a life experience with all the family and friends and all the land and everything brought together. His shopping lists for restocking this farm was like fifty cherry trees, a hundred beeches and oaks, and seeds of every kind, flowers of every kind, roses and dahlias, and animals of every variety. In other words, it’s the list of a man who wants to see the fullness of life. What does it look like? I’ve seen the emptiness of life. I’ve seen the horror that we are prone to, the meanness to which we can sink. What about the fulsomeness? What about the wholesomeness of life? That too must be seen.

And so, Melikhovo for eight years was to be Chekhov’s home and he stocked it the best he could. He became tanned and brawny. He was physically a very fine looking man, very handsome. It was just his lungs. Tubercular as they were, were decaying. He was caving in upon himself physically. The increasing bouts with coughing up blood, the increasing shortness of breath, the nausea, the strange taste that would come in his mouth, the queasy feelings that would inhabit his body from time to time. All these were recognized by Doctor Chekhov as symptoms of an approaching end. And yet his responsibility which he felt had been given to him. The responsibility, the portable Chekhov gives the quote right in the beginning:

“My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and absolute freedom – freedom from violence and falsehood, no matter how the last two manifest themselves.”

He in a letter to a very dear friend of his said, “I don’t want to be a radical. I don’t want to be a conservative. I don’t want to be anything but as complete an artist as is possible for a man to be. I want to have the freedom to live life as fully as I may and the talent to write it out as clearly as it can be. Not to sell any bill of goods, not to establish any point, not to draw any shapes of understanding so much as to re-present, to recreate the science of artistic perception of human qualities.”

Thomas Mann towards the end of his long life in an essay on Chekhov said that he was a young man when Chekhov died and he didn’t remember anybody saying very much at the time. It was only as the impress of his work settled in on the century that they began to realize how great he was. And Mann says on Chekhov: “What were the reasons for this ignorance of him? In my case, it may be partly explained by my admiration for the great work The Long Wind, the monumental epic sustained and completed by the power of unyielding patience. By my worship of the mighty creators like Balzac, Tolstoy, and Wagner, whom it was my dream to emulate if I could. And Chekhov like Maupassant, whose work incidentally I knew much better, expressed himself in the more restrictive form in the short story which did not require years or a decade of heroic perseverance but could be tossed off by literary lightweights in a matter of days or weeks. For this medium I felt a certain scorn, little realizing what inner depth the short and concise can acquire in the hands of a genius. How brevity by embracing the whole fullness of life can rise to a positively epic level.”

If you put enough value in an experience the simple beating of the heart in its moment to moment occurrence can choreograph the universe of vision. So he says, Mann writes, “If in later life I understood this fact better than in my youth it was due mainly to my preoccupation with Chekhov’s narrative arc which is unsurpassed in European literature.”

The narrative art. Not telling us the story but delivering the interior moods and feelings of those events directly to us, so that that story occurs in us. Not in our minds but it begins to occur to us in our feeling-tones and lingers. Lingers today, lingers next week, it lingers for years and we begin to realize that we have achieved a very esoteric communication – a transformation of self from someone else to us. A communion of soul. Chekhov is very much like this kind of a universal priest administering to a flock who mostly he didn’t ever meet. Not giving sermons but giving the feeling-toned interchanges that go up to make the subtle movements of life.

At Melikhovo it became apparent to him that he had his great works yet to write and he produced, towards the end of that period, two amazingly fine plays and one which became sort of the emblem of Chekhov’s breakthrough. The first one, the emblem of his breakthrough, was that of The Seagull. The Seagull was commissioned and produced and it was an unfortunate first production in 1896. They brought a very famous aging comic actress into the production and then they decided that she couldn’t be in the production because she would not be right for the play. But the whole audience had arrived there. They were young people looking for a comic play and they realized their star for whom they had come wasn’t even going to be in it. She made a confession that she was not in the play before the play started and the whole evening started off wrong and the esoteric movements of The Seagull just completely went over everyone’s head. It was booed and hissed and caused a huge uproar. But there were some individuals who understood that The Seagull had broken ground. It presented plays within plays. It presented feeling-tones that had never been experienced before on the stage or in European literature to that point.

Foremost among those was a man named Stanislavski, who was a very great actor and he had just gotten together with another friend of his and had in fact with the Danchenko formed number of which Danchenko had formed the Moscow Art theater which is still going. At first it was called the Moscow Art and Popular Theater. And Stanislavski and Nemirovich Danchenko together – the one doing the business, the other the artistic direction – made theatrical history. And in fact the emblem for the company is the Seagull which is on the curtain. Every time it pulls apart the seagull flies.

Stanislavski went to Chekhov and said, “we understand a little of what you are doing. We want you to be free to write in this mode. You’re broaching as a pioneer feeling tones which we have never been able to experience before. Write something more.” And so Chekhov, who had just sold the rights to all of his works to a publisher named Marx, A. F. Marx – he sold them for seventy-five thousand rubles, a mountain of money. But the publisher, his new publisher, wanted to bring out a collected edition of Chekhov’s works by that summer. So Chekhov had just six months in which to collect all of his written works and they were just all in these little journals. Everything was obscure. So he had people working to trace down everything and copy them and send them to his home. And they began piling up.

And Chekhov began to spend some of his time away from his estate. His health was deteriorating. He went down to the Crimea. He went down to Yalta. And there, trying to hold himself together, he rented a little place and then he decided finally he was going to buy a villa down there. And then a little cabin perched on the top of some rocks also came up for two thousand rubles. And he bought that. And all these changes. Chekhov having to review his entire life’s work up to that point, began taking a play that he had written called The Wood Demon and redoing it. He reread it to put it in this collection. And because he was open, he was like an open sensitive field of feeling. One of the finest ever East or west. And it occurred to him that he had missed the theme that he had focused upon a dramatic structure and that what was real in there was not the dramatic structure but was a presentation of reality. And so he redid The Wood Demon and it became Uncle Vanya. And Uncle Vanya, when it came out in 1897, was so far above the theater of its time that it was almost unappreciable. Only someone of the genius of Stanislavski could have– could have seen it and understood.

Uncle Vanya, one of the really great plays of all time. I don’t have time to go into it wholly. You’ll have to read it for yourself. Uncle Vanya Vinitsky is on his estate. His sister who is now dead had married a man, a professor, and he is remarried and taken a young wife. And he’s come to live on the wife’s estate. Vanya Vinitsky can’t stand this and he says:

“ ‘I pity the paper he writes on! He’d do better to work on his autobiography. What an absurd subject. A retired professor, an old fossil. If you see what I mean. A sort of academic stuffed trout. He suffers from gout, rheumatism, migraine, and liver trouble and he’s almost bursting with envy and jealousy. The old fossil lives on his first wife’s estate. Not that he wants to live here but he can’t afford to live in town. He’s forever moaning about his misfortunes, though as a matter of fact he’s been pretty lucky. Just think what luck he’s had. The son of an ordinary parish clerk and educated at a church school, he’s collected academic degrees, and a university chair, become a person of consequence, married a senator’s daughter, and so on and so forth. None of that matters though. But you note the next point. For precisely twenty-five years the man’s been lecturing and writing about Art. And what does he understand about Art? Nothing. For twenty-five years he’s been chewing over other people’s ideas on realism, naturalism, and every other kind of tomfoolery. For twenty-five years he’s been lecturing and writing about things which every intelligent person has known all along and which don’t interest fools anyway. In other words he spent twenty-five years chasing his own shadow. And all the time what ghastly conceit, what presumption. Now he’s retired here. Not a living soul knows who he is. He’s totally obscure. In other words, for twenty-five years he’s been on the wrong job and just you watch him strut about as if he were God almighty.’ The doctor says, ‘I think you’re a bit envious.’ ‘I most certainly am. And what success with women. Casanova himself couldn’t have done better.’ ”

He’s working himself up you see.

“ ‘His first wife, my own sister, a beautiful gentle creature as pure as the blue sky above us. A fine generous girl who had more admirers than he had pupils. She loved him as only angels in heaven can love beings as pure and lovely as themselves. My own mother, his mother-in-law, still idolizes him still goes in awe of him. His second wife, she just came through here, is a beautiful intelligent woman. And she married him when already an old man and gave him her youth, her beauty, her freedom, her radiance. Whatever for? Why?’ The doctor says. ‘Is she faithful to him?’ ‘Yes, I’m sorry to say.’ ”

Uncle Vanya works himself up and finally pulls a pistol on the man and misses, point blank range. No better symbol. His own rage at the effrontery of this man having everything in life and not deserving one damn thing. And he can’t shoot him and he just collapses into sort of a silence. The professor and his young wife who does in fact love him decide to leave. And Uncle Vanya takes its place with an incredible portrayal of the way in which life doesn’t really end. It doesn’t really pan out one way or another. It sort of slides along in a glacial way and not some thread of meaning is discoverable but a whole moraine of experience keeps emerging and going on and everything changes a little and some things don’t right away. And so this feeling mood, which needs an extraordinary company to play it. The criticism often of Chekhov plays is nothing happens. Well but everything is going on. Every word, every gesture is just seething. Not with meaning so much, but with revelatory poignancy. And the characters in Chekhov’s emerge as winds in this motion. Uncle Vanya, and then the next play, The Three Sisters, just raised theater to a level that it simply had not been before.

He fell in love with one of the actresses and in fact married Olga Knipper. He checked with the doctor beforehand who just would say nothing to him; threw up his hands. And Chekhov knew himself that his time was extremely limited and he was open with his wife whom he characterized as a decent, fine woman, an excellent companion. So he moved permanently to Yalta to the Crimea with his new wife and began to moot in his mind a final work. Its title is The Cherry Orchard, and it’s probably one of the finest literary productions ever done. It’s a four-act play and he worked on it for two years and it was produced just a few months before he died in 1904 by the Moscow Art theater. His wife played the lead role, Mrs. Ranevskaya.

In The Cherry Orchard. There’s an image of the – this is 1904. By now the serfs had been freed for several generations and one rich serf after another has come into possession of the land. They have become a middle class and through their hard work and the poignancy of their judgment they have built themselves up. And at the same time as they have built themselves up through work, the aristocracy has declined through illusion. You’re thinking that these are bores. What do they know? All they do is work. And so The Cherry Orchard is the last movement, comes just one year before the 1905 revolution, and shows that poignant moment where there is still compassion between those who are coming up and those who are going down.

The old estate Chekhov wrote in his letters again and again saying this is a fine house. This is one of those houses that is so fine that new people coming in say it’s better to build a new house than try and repair the old one, it’d be cheaper. And what is prime about this estate is that there’s a huge cherry orchard that’s been there for generations. And of all the family that have been born there and lived there only this brother and sister – the sister has two daughters – have come back for the event of the sale by auction of this estate. And they arrive in early spring when the cherry orchard is in bloom. So there’s this mass of blossoming white and the women in white dresses come in and everything is this pastel. And as The Cherry Orchard as a play moves on through its four-acts there is a quality of cosmic comedy going on. Everything is funny, but not hilarious funny. It’s just incredibly funny, incredibly humorous. And Chekhov called it a comedy. But in the midst of all of this comic motion there’s the awareness that this is it. This is the end of a whole order that stretched for a thousand years in history. But it is also the beginning of an order whose future is yet unknown. That may last two thousand years in the future.

So Chekhov, in The Cherry Orchard, shows us that there are no tears to be shed in life. There is a determination to be honest in our living. To have the experiences which we have and really be there for them to live as legitimately as we can for other people who are with us in our lives. But that there is no horror or triumph. There is no fear or hopefulness at all anywhere. That in the science of life it is what it is and we, like physicians of our own being, have to tend as best we can. And not mistake it through misunderstanding its symptoms through becoming terrified of possible diseases. To miss what wholesomeness there is and to accept what death there is when it comes.

So, The Cherry Orchard has this wonderful motion to it. And in The Cherry Orchard several of the figures – I’m sorry I don’t have time to go through it all, I had it all outlined for you. One of the figures there named Trofimov who is a perennial student. He’s in his late twenties and he’s always been a student with the round clear glasses and the tousled hair and the ragged clothes and talking already of the revolution. There’s the young daughter, Anya, who is just seventeen who is a beautiful girl, a blossom. Her older sister who was adopted, Varya, who expects any moment that she will be asked to be married. And the man who is supposed to ask her to marry him is a rich peasant who has made his way up – Lopakhin. And Lopakhin has in fact, as we discover in the fourth-act bought the entire estate. And he has bought it because he is going to turn it into plots of housing. And for that the Cherry Orchard is going to come down. Twice during the play, there is a surrealistic sound heard. It’s like the twang of a metal string that is broken. Lopakhin once says it must be a cable from one of the mines far off in the distance but it is that sound of a failure of nerve of an old society which cannot take technology and work and is experienced by them as a clarion of the horrible end. But for Lopakhin it’s just one of those sounds in the work world that go on and he pays no more attention to it. The sound that goes with it is the sound of axes chopping down the cherry tree. And in the fourth act there is from time to time this eerie hollow sound.

Chekhov in one of his letters when he was almost swamped crossing one of the rivers in Siberia, noted in a letter to a friend that when the horror of death really seizes one that water has a curious sound to it. That it no longer laps or sloshes but sounds deep like coffins knocking against each other under the surface. And the chopping of the cherry trees has that kind of death cacophony. And orchestrating that is the reverberation of this metal twang of some wire, some failure of nerve that has snapped. And the old aristocracy now dispossessed totally are packing and the estate becomes more and more empty. And there’s an old servant who’s eighty-seven years old named Firs like the tree, Firs. Everyone has left. Gone on their way. Spread out into the new world. The family will never be together again. Chekhov writes the stage directions:

“The stage is empty. The sound of all the doors being locked. Then of carriages leaving. It grows quiet. In the silence a dull thud is heard. The noise of an ax striking a tree. It sounds lonely and sad. Footsteps are heard. Firs appears at the door, right. He is dressed as always in jacket in white waistcoat and wears slippers. He is ill. Firs goes up to the door and touches the handle.”

“ ‘Locked. They’ve gone.’ Sits on the sofa. ‘They forgot me. And never mind. I’ll sit here at bed. And Mr. Leonid hasn’t put his fur coat on. I’ll be bound. He’ll have gone off in his light one.’ Gives a worried sigh. ‘I should have seen to it, these young folk have no sense.’ Mutters something which cannot be understood. ‘Life’s slipped by just as if I’d never lived at all.’ He lies down. ‘I’ll lie down a bit. You’ve got no strength left. You’ve got nothing left. Nothing at all. You’re just a nincompoop.’ He lies motionless. A distant sound is heard. It seems to come from the sky. And is the sound of a breaking string. It dies away sadly. Silence follows broken only by the thud of an ax striking a tree. Far away in the orchard. Curtain.”

Chekhov died a few months later. He was given curiously by a physician in Germany at one of these health resorts. A glass of champagne, hoping to revive him. Chekhov eyed him evenly, quaffed the champagne and turned over on his side and died. It’s a curious quality to find not so much courage of facing life and death but the wholesome penetration of experiencing it exactly as it is to the very end to whatever extent it might be. Chekhov in his dramas and in his short stories brought this element for the first time to a full boil in Western literature.

Well, we’ll see a sculptor next week. Auguste Rodin.