Reading Chekhov

If the trip to Sakhalin yielded no work of literary distinction, its personal (and eventual literary) significance for Chekhov was momentous. He needed to go on a journey. In a letter to Suvorin written on May 4, 1889, from a rented dacha in the Ukraine, he wrote, "There is a sort of stagnation in my soul. I explain it by the stagnation in my personal life. I am not disappointed, I am not tired, I am not depressed, but simply everything has suddenly become less interesting. I must do something to rouse myself." It is impossible to know, of course, what Chekhov meant by the stagnation in his personal life, but it seems likely that his malaise was connected to the final illness (from tuberculosis) of his brother Nikolai, whom he had been nursing since March, first in Moscow and then at the dacha. The letter of May 4 characteristically makes no mention of the rigors of the death watch, but three glancing references to Nikolai tell the story of Chekhov's sense of stuckness: "I'm in a good mood, and if it weren't for the coughing painter and the mosquitoes-even Elpes formula is no protection against them-I'd be a perfect Potyomkin," and, later, "Bring me some banned books and newspapers from abroad. If it weren't for the painter, I'd go with you," and, a few lines down, "Lensky [an actor in the Maly Theater] has invited me to accompany him on tour to Tiflis. I'd go if it weren't for the painter, who's not doing any too brilliantly." Nikolai died on June 17, and in September Chekhov completed his powerful and long "A Dreary Story," about an eminent professor who comes to the end of his life and finds it frighten-ingly meaningless; he realizes that he lacks a ruling idea with which to make sense of his existence. The atmosphere of the work is like a taste of tin in the mouth, the fatigue behind the eyes produced by something unbearable. That it was written by a man in mourning is not surprising; perhaps only a man in mourning could have written a tale of such sour painfulness. Simmons speculates that Nikolai's death from tuberculosis forced Chekhov to confront the probability of his own death from the disease and, further, that "A Dreary Story" reflects Chekhov's own need for a ruling idea. On October 4, 1888, in a much-quoted letter, Chekhov had written of his independence of any such need: I am not a liberal, not a conservative, not a believer in gradual progress, not a monk, not an indifferentist. I should like to be a free artist and nothing more, and I regret that God has not given me the power to be one. I hate lying and violence in all their forms… I regard trademarks and labels as a superstition. My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and the most absolute freedom- freedom from violence and lying, whatever forms they may take. This is the program I would follow if I were a great artist.

A year later, Chekhov was no longer so comfortable with his artist's freedom. At the end of 1889, he abruptly dropped literature and began to make preparations for the six-thousand-mile journey to Sakhalin, at the easternmost end of the continent. In letters to his baffled friends, Chekhov gives various high-minded reasons for making the trip-to fulfill his debt to science, to rouse the conscience of an indifferent public-but the explanation that has the greatest ring of truth is the one he gave to Shcheglov in a letter of March 22: "I am not going for the sake of impressions or observations, but simply for the sake of living for six months differently from how I have lived hitherto."