Reading Chekhov

Driving in from the airport, we passed ugly, flimsy housing projects, which grew less ugly and more substantial as we neared the city. Nelly said that the apartments in the outlying projects, built post-Khrushchev, were incredibly tiny. The projects closer to the city, which had been built in the Stalin period, had decent-size apartments and were much coveted. My hotel, the Astoria, built in the late nineteenth century and recently renovated, was as empty as the airport. Normally, American tourists fill the city's hotels and restaurants, but fear that anti-American feeling had been aroused by our recent mindless bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade had kept them away. (I, in fact, encountered no anti-American feeling during my stay in Russia.) My handsome room was furnished with imperial-style antiques and looked out on the dull-gold dome of St. Isaac's cathedral, which was designed by an Italian architect and has a beautiful Florentine austerity. During the Soviet period, the cathedral housed a Museum of Atheism, but now it had resumed Russian Orthodox services, as churches throughout the former Soviet Union were doing. Nelly told me that under Communism belief was tolerated among those willing to remain in society's lowliest positions; but to rise in the hierarchy it was necessary to be an atheist. Atheism was the "official religion," she said. On the way to the hotel, she had pointed out a church in which the Soviets had dug a swimming pool-now being filled in.

The next morning, when Nelly asked me to propose a substitute for the visit to Catherine's palace, I had one ready, and a few minutes later Sergei pulled up in front of a small house on a narrow side street where Dostoevsky had once lived, and which was now the Dostoevsky Museum. We bought tickets and walked through a series of small rooms filled with conventional Victorian furniture and objects. If one stretched one's imagination, one could read into the slight dreariness and somberness of the rooms some connection to the author of Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. But they could just as well have been occupied by a government clerk or a retired army officer.

Chekhov never met Dostoevsky, who died in 1881, at the age of sixty, and was not drawn to his writing; as he exalted Tolstoy, he edged away from Dostoevsky. In March 1889, he wrote to Suvorin, "I bought Dostoevsky at your store, and am now reading him. Pretty good but too long-winded and too indelicate. There is much that is pretentious." And one day in 1902, while out fishing on an estate in the Urals, Chekhov said to a friend, "We're such a bone-lazy people. We've even infected nature with our laziness. Look at this stream-it's too lazy to move. See how it twists and turns, all because of laziness. All our famous 'psychology,' all that Dostoevsky stuff, is part of it, too. We're too lazy to work, so we invent things." (The friend was Alexander Tikhonov, a twenty-two-year-old student of mining engineering, who later became the Soviet writer Alexander Serebrev. His book Time and People, in which the passage appears, has not been translated into English. I quote from an extract in David Magarshack's biography.) Satiric references to "that Dostoevsky stuff" recur in Chekhov's stories. In his not all that funny sendup of detective fiction "The Swedish Match" (unlike any other story by Chekhov, it seems too long), an eager young sleuth, trying to pin a murder on the victim's elderly sister, tells the examining magistrate, "Ah, you don't know these old maids, these Old Believers! You should read Dostoevsky!" Or in "Neighbors" (1892), a pathetic loser named Vlassich is trapped in a "strange marriage in the style of Dostoevsky"-to a prostitute, naturally. But Chekhov's relationship to Dostoevsky is not quite as simple as it may appear. Literary influence is a complicated business, and does not hinge on like or dislike. It is not always conscious. There is reason to think that Chekhov, though he disliked Dostoevsky, drew on him nevertheless. "Neighbors" is one of the works in which this influence-unconscious or merely covert, who can say?-may be glimpsed.