Reading Chekhov

Contemporary critics took the line they had taken with "Lights" (and later with "The Duel"), reproving Chekhov for his hero's abrupt, unmotivated change of character. But, after enough time goes by, a great writer's innovations stop looking like mistakes; today we no longer find the transformations of Asorin and Laevsky and Ananyev jarring, and we accept the lacunae in their psychologies as normal attributes of the inhabitants of Chekhov's world. We feel, moreover, that on some level the transformations have been prepared for-and it is to this level that a new school of Chekhov criticism has been devoting itself. These critics, who are reading Chekhov's texts "with the attention accorded poetry," as one of them-Julie de Sherbinin, a professor of Slavic literature at Colby College-writes, have come upon an unexpected source of possible meaning in a lode of hitherto uninterpreted material; namely, Chekhov's repeated references to religion. It is a kind of "Purloined Letter" situation: the references to the Bible and to the Russian Orthodox liturgy have always been there, but we haven't seen them, because we took Chekhov at his word as being a rationalist and a nonbeliever. "How could I work under the same roof as Dmitri Merezhkovsky?" Chekhov wrote in July 1903 to Sergei Diaghilev, who had invited him to coedit the journal The World of Art with Merezhkovsky. "He is a resolute believer, a proselytizing believer, whereas I squandered away my faith long ago and never fail to be puzzled by an intellectual who is also a believer." And of a Moscow professor named Sergei Rachinsky, who ran a religious elementary school, he wrote (in a March 1892 letter to Shcheglov), "I would never send my children to his school. Why? In my childhood, I received a religious education and the same sort of upbringing-choir singing, reading the epistles and psalms in church, regular attendance at matins, altar boy and bell-ringing duty. And the result? When I think back on my childhood it all seems quite gloomy to me. I have no religion now." However, if we slow the pace of our reading and start attending to every line, we will not fail to pick up the clue in a remark like Asorin's "I feel as though I had woken up after breaking the fast at Easter," or in Ryabovitch's feeling that he has been anointed with oil. Indeed, we will find that whenever a Chekhov character undergoes a remarkable transformation, an allusion to religion appears in its vicinity, in the way mushrooms grow near certain trees in the forest. These allusions are oblique, sometimes almost invisible, and possibly not even conscious.

The Dupin of this new perspective is Robert Louis Jackson, professor of Slavic languages and literatures at Yale, whose writing and teaching on the religious subtext in Chekhov's stories have inspired a generation of younger critics. Chekhov was wary of critics-in "A Dreary Story" he wonderfully satirizes (through his narrator, a professor of medicine) what he calls "serious articles": In my childhood and early youth I had for some reason a terror of doorkeepers and attendants at the theater, and that terror has remained with me to this day… It is said that we are only afraid of what we do not understand. And, indeed, it is very difficult to understand why doorkeepers and theater attendants are so dignified, haughty, and majestically rude. I feel exactly the same terror when I read serious articles. Their extraordinary dignity, their bantering, lordly tone, their familiar manner toward foreign authors, their ability to split straws with dignity-all that is beyond my understanding; it is intimidating and utterly unlike the quiet, gentlemanly tone to which I am accustomed when I read the works of our medical and scientific writers.