Reading Chekhov

ina and I are sitting in an outdoor cafe a few miles down the coast from Oreanda, looking out on another spectacular vista-one on which Gurov and Anna, too, might have gazed-whose focal point is a castle called the Swallow's Nest, built in 1912 (with great difficulty, one would think) atop a rocky cliff dramatically poised over the sea. American popular music, now obligatory in all public places in Russia, fills the air, and puts the Sublime in its place. A waiter brings us Cokes and ham-and-cheese sandwiches. Nina seems to have recovered from her morning's malaise. She eats quickly, and when I offer her the second half of my sandwich-the sandwiches are huge-she accepts it readily. I don't like to think what her normal diet is. She is somewhat overweight, but carries her heaviness well on her large frame. She must have been beautiful in her youth. Her features have a classical regularity, and her cheeks have an appealing flush. Chekhov would have taken note of her. He was acutely sensitive to the appearance of women. In his letters there are constant references-usually negative-to the looks of the women he encountered. Like the women in Badenweiler, the women in Yalta provoked his derision. "I haven't seen one decent-looking woman," he wrote to Olga from Yalta in February 1900. "There are no pretty women," he wrote in September of that year. In December 1902: "I went into town for the first time yesterday… all you meet are people who look like rats, not one pretty woman, not one decently dressed." (Fifteen years earlier, writing to his sister about a visit to the Holy Mountains monastery, he paused to say about his fellow pilgrims, "I did not know before that there were so many old women in the world; had I known, I would have shot myself long ago.") Of course, there is irony in Chekhov's presentation of himself as a cold appraiser of female flesh; by the time he lived in Yalta he was clearly out of the running as a rake. But the presence or absence of physical beauty-in male as well as in female characters-rarely goes unremarked in his work. In "The Kiss," Ryabovitch's unprepossessing appearance shapes his identity and determines his fate. In Uncle Vanya, the radiantly good Sonya is similarly burdened; Astrov cannot return her love because he is put off by her plainness. ("You like her, don't you?" Yelena asks him. "Yes, I have respect for her," he replies. "Does she attract you as a woman?" Astrov pauses and then says, "No.") In an essay entitled "Prosaic Chekhov: Metadrama, the Intelligentsia, and Uncle Vanya," Gary Saul Morson, writing of Chekhov's dislike of histrionics and his regard for prosaic virtue-for "good habits, good manners, and small acts of consideration"-and reading the play as an apotheosis of the prosaic, understands Chekhov to be faulting Astrov for rejecting the estimable, plain Sonya and pursuing the useless, beautiful Yelena. "Chekhov, like Tolstoy, usually regards love based on passion or romance with deep suspicion," Morson writes, and cites the comment of the kindly Dr. Samoilenko in "The Duel": "The chief thing in married life is patience… not love but patience." But Morson's compelling essay only demonstrates the difficulty of making any generalization about Chekhov stick. Yes, Chekhov adopts the Tolstoyan position in "The Duel," but in Uncle Vanya he swerves sharply from it. In his own life, far from regarding romantic love with suspicion, Chekhov considered it the sine qua non of marriage. He could not have put the matter more plainly than he did in a letter of 1898 to his younger brother Michael (who had been urging him to marry): To marry is interesting only for love. To marry a girl simply because she is nice is like buying something one does not want at the bazaar solely because it is of good quality. The most important thing in family life is love, sexual attraction, one flesh; all the rest is dreary and cannot be reckoned upon however cleverly we make our calculations. So the point is not in the girl's being nice but in her being loved.