Reading Chekhov

Anton Chekhov was a younger brother, but he writes here with the calm superiority of a firstborn. He himself has acquired the culture that Nikolai lacks; he does not sit around the house in his underwear and yell for the pisspot. The letters remind us of someone: of von Koren, in "The Duel." They are like notes for the speeches von Koren will make about Laevsky's hopelessness. But the priggish von Koren is not the hero of "The Duel" (as his predecessor, the priggish Dr. Lvov, is not the hero of Ivanov). Not being an actual firstborn, Chekhov evidently never felt comfortable in the firstborn's posture of superiority, and expressed his dislike of the censorious side of himself by stacking the deck against his fictional representations of it: von Koren and Lvov are "right," but there is something the matter with them; they are cold fish. Chekhov, in his relationship with his older brothers, brings to mind the biblical Joseph. Chekhov's "sourceless maturity"-like Joseph's-may well have developed during his enforced separation from the family. And like Joseph, who wept when he saw his brothers again, in spite of their unspeakable treatment of him, Chekhov's love for his big brothers transcended his anger with them; he evidently never entirely shed his little brother's idealization of them. Out of this family dynamic developed the weak, lovable figure who recurs throughout Chekhov's writing and is one of its signatures. Vladimir Nabokov saw encapsulated in this figure the values lost when Russia became a totalitarian state. In Nabokov's view (put forward in his Wellesley and Cornell lectures in the 1940s and '50s, and collected in Lectures on Russian Literature), the Chekhov hero-"a queer and pathetic creature that is little known abroad and cannot exist in the Russia of the Soviets"- " combine [s] the deepest human decency of which man is capable with an almost ridiculous inability to put his ideals and principles into action… Knowing exactly what is good, what is worthwhile living for, but at the same time sinking lower and lower in the mud of a humdrum existence, unhappy in love, hopelessly inefficient in everything-a good man who cannot make good." The emigre Nabokov goes on to write, "Blessed be the country that could produce that particular type of man… [The] mere fact of such men having lived and probably still living somewhere somehow in the ruthless and sordid Russia of today is a promise of better things to come for the world at large- for perhaps the most admirable among the admirable laws of Nature is the survival of the weakest." Seven

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