Reading Chekhov

t the beginning of "The Student" (1894), Chekhov offers an arresting aural image: in a swamp "something alive droned pitifully with a sound like blowing into an empty bottle." On my first night at the Hotel Yalta, lying in bed, I heard just such a sound coming in through the window, as relentlessly as a foghorn, but because Chekhov, too, had heard the call of this night creature, I went to sleep soothed and happy. The next night, when I heard the sound again, I realized that no bird or frog could be making a sound so regular and mechanical. What I was hearing was obviously coming from a piece of machinery at the swimming pools or one of the outbuildings. My imaginings thus rearranged, I found the sound irritating and could not fall asleep for a long time. Incidents from my second day with Sonia in Moscow-of a piece with the grating persistence of the sound-came to mind. This was the day of what she called "city tour"-a drive around Moscow of the sort tour buses offer, with a canned tour guide's commentary by Sonia, which she made no effort to disguise. After an hour of what in New York would have been the equivalent of driving past the Empire State Building, the World Trade Center, St. Patrick's Cathedral, and Columbia University, I said I would prefer to receive a perhaps less global, more intimate sense of the city. For instance, could we see Chekhov's grave, and were there any synagogues in Moscow? Sonia sighed and agreed to go to the Novodevichie cemetery, where Chekhov is buried. And, yes, there were two synagogues, though it would be inconvenient to drive to them. At the cemetery, Chekhov's small, modest gravestone had a kind of Slavic Art Nouveau aspect and was in striking contrast to the ornate nineteenth-century monuments and the grandiose Soviet markers, many of them larger-than-life marble busts of the deceased.

In his memoir of Chekhov, Maxim Gorky fretted over the fact that Chekhov's body arrived in Moscow from Baden-weiler in a refrigerated railway car marked "Fresh Oysters." "His enemy was vulgarity," Gorky wrote. "He battled against it all his life. He ridiculed it, depicted it with his sharp, dispassionate pen… And vulgarity took its revenge on him with a vile trick, laying his corpse-the corpse of a poet-in a railway car for 'oysters.' " Other writers have said of the incident that Chekhov would have been amused by it-and also by another fortuitous slight to his corpse: at the Moscow train station, a number of people who had come to escort it to the cemetery followed the wrong coffin, that of a General Keller, which was being accompanied to the cemetery by a military band. But it is doubtful that Chekhov would have been amused. He was not amused at being dead. In a notebook he writes of looking out the window at a corpse being taken to the cemetery, and mentally addressing it thus: "You are dead, you are being carried to the cemetery, and I will go and have my breakfast." The incidents of the car marked "Fresh Oysters" and the following of the wrong coffin were precisely the kind of incidents without consequences that had no interest for Chekhov (in his stories and plays Chekhov sometimes creates an illusion of lifelike pointlessness, but in fact every action has a point)-and are similarly without meaning for students of his life. This ended on the morning of July 3, 1904, and whatever happened thereafter is us having our breakfast.