Reading Chekhov

Sonia shook her head. With a modest little smile, she explained that she painted herself and therefore recognized good art when she saw it. She had paused simply to register her appreciation. She painted on weekends and during vacations, specializing in still lifes and portraits. My journalist's portrait of Sonia as a latter-day Natasha Prozorov was taking shape. Her remarks about art contributed a nice Natashaesque touch. Of course, not everything Sonia said and did had this kind of value. In fact, most of what she said and did went unrecorded in my notebook. Journalistic subjects are almost invariably stunned when they read about themselves in print, not because of what is revealed but because of what has been left out. Journalists, like the novelists and short-story writers who are their covert models, practice a ruthless economy. The novice who wishes to be "fair" to his subjects and to render them in all their unruly complexity and contradictoriness is soon disabused. The reality of characters in fiction-and of their cousins in journalism-derives precisely from the bold, almost childlike strokes with which they are drawn. Tolstoy renders Anna Karenina through her light, resolute step, her eagerness, her friendliness and gaiety, her simple, elegant dress. He confines her thoughts and actions to a range of possibility that no person in life is confined by. Chekhov's realism, as we have seen, is of a different order; his economy is even more stringent, his strokes even blunter. His Natasha is a figure about whom we know almost nothing in particular-she is simply a concentration of coarseness and bullying willfulness. In the first act, before she shows her true colors, appearing to be only a girl from the town who feels awkward in the house of her aristocratic fiance, she undergoes a small mortification. Olga, the oldest sister, points out to her that her green sash doesn't go with her pink dress, that "it looks queer." Natasha's taste in dress has already been deplored by Masha, in something of the way Chekhov deplored the dress of German women. But, on another level, something more serious than bad taste is at issue in Olga's reprimand, namely, bad faith, as denoted by the color green and its association with the Serpent. (According to Chekhov's stage directions, Olga addresses Natasha about the sash "with alarm," suggesting that she has "recognized" Natasha.) In the story "In the Ravine," written a year earlier, and also about the takeover of a household by a ruthless daughter-in-law, Chekhov actually describes the woman in question as a snake. Aksinya had naive gray eyes that rarely blinked and a naive smile played continually on her face. And in those unblinking eyes, and in that little head on the long neck, and in her slenderness there was something snakelifc; all in green but for the yellow on her bosom, she looted with a smile on her face as a viper looks out of the young rye in the spring at the passersby, stretching itself and lifting its head.

Aksinya is perhaps the most evil character in Chekhov. In a scene that matches, and, in its shocking unexpectedness, possibly surpasses the horror of the blinding of Gloucester, Aksinya scalds to death a baby who stands in the way of her ascendancy. Natasha comes nowhere near this level of evil-ness. She is unbearable, but she would never commit murder. Aksinya is all in green, Natasha wears only a green sash-a touch of evil. My Sonia-clearly a Natasha rather than an Aksinya-might fittingly have worn a green scarf. However, I am bound to report that she wore a red scarf (over a white angora sweater). Nonfiction may avail itself of the techniques of elision and condensation by which fiction achieves its coherence, but is largely barred from the store of mythopoetic allusion from which fiction derives its potency. Even Chekhov, when writing nonfiction, doesn't write like Chekhov. The book he wrote reporting on a three-month visit to the prison colony of Sakhalin in the summer of 1890, for example, is a worthy and often interesting work, but rarely a moving one, and never a brilliant one.