Reading Chekhov

Indeed, in Uncle Vanya, far from faulting Astrov for rejecting Sonya and pursuing Yelena, Chekhov suggests that Astrov can do nothing else. It isn't a matter of choosing between a good course of action and a bad one. In these matters, one has no choice. "Alas, I shall never be a Tolstoyan! In women, what I like above all is beauty," Chekhov wrote to Suvorin in 1891. The words "beauty" and "beautiful" echo throughout the play. Far from celebrating prosaic virtue, Vanya mourns its pitiful insufficiency. The action of the play is like the throwing of a stone into a still pond. The "beautiful people"-Yelena and Serebryakov-disturb the life of the stagnant household of Voinitsky and Sonya, stir up the depressed and exhausted Astrov, and then abruptly depart. The waters close over the stone and are still again. Uncle Vanya is a kind of absurdist Midsummer Night's Dream. Strange events take place, but nothing comes of them. Visions of happiness appear and dissolve. Everything is as it was before. In the heartbreaking speech with which the play ends, Sonya speaks to Vanya of her faith in a "bright, lovely, beautiful" afterlife. Real life remains luster-less, uninteresting, unbeautiful.

In a story written in 1888 called "The Beauties," Chekhov spells out what is coded in Vanya and, with characteristic originality, chooses as the vehicle for his meditation on beauty not a professor of aesthetics but a high-school boy. The boy and his grandfather are driving on the steppe on a hot, dusty summer day, and they stop in an Armenian village to visit a rich and funny-looking Armenian the grandfather knows. The boy settles himself in a corner of the Armenian's stifling, fly-filled house, resigned to a long, boring wait while the grandfather and his host drink tea. The tea is served by the Armenian's sixteen-year-old daughter, Mashya, and at the sight of her the boy feels all at once as though a wind were blowing over my soul and blowing away all the impressions of the day, with their dust and dreariness. I saw the bewitching features of the most beautiful face I have ever met in real life or in my dreams. Before me stood a beauty, and I recognized that at the first glance as I should have recognized lightning.

The boy notices that he is not the only one dazzled by the girl's beauty; even his old grandfather is affected. He compares the experience of looking at the girl to that of looking at a ravishing sunset. He also notices a feeling of painful though pleasant sadness. It was a sadness vague and as a dream. For some reason I felt sorry for myself, for my grandfather and for the Armenian, even for the girl herself, and I had a feeling that we all four had lost something important and essential to life which we should never find again… Whether it was envy of her beauty, or that I was regretting that the girl was not mine, and never would be, or that I was a stranger to her; or whether I vaguely felt that her rare beauty was accidental, unnecessary, and, like everything on earth, of short duration; or whether, perhaps, my sadness was that peculiar feeling which is excited in man by the contemplation of real beauty, God only knows.

Chekhov's powerful description of aesthetic experience (the story goes on to a second, less potent illustration of it) allows us to understand what the stakes were for Astrov and Voinitsky in their pursuit of the beautiful Yelena (as well as for Sonya in her pursuit of the handsome Astrov)-and for Chekhov himself in his apparently trivial attention to women's looks. "That peculiar feeling"-whether aroused by a poem or a painting or a piece of music or a view of the sea or a beautiful girl-was Chekhov's Holy Grail. Although he maintained a pose of ordinariness and was sincere in his valuation of "good habits, good manners, and small acts of consideration," it was the extraordinary and the uselessly beautiful that deeply stirred him.