Reading Chekhov

I told the woman my problem with the television. She nodded and went to a corner cupboard, from which she withdrew a key. She used it to lock her room before following me to my room, where she pointed out a switch I had missed. I gave her a tip, for which she thanked me profusely. 1 reflected that my telephone call to New York, which cost fifteen dollars, was more than a week's pay for her-and for most of the people I had met in Russia. The comparison was the sort of trite and useless rhetoric Chekhov would sometimes put in the mouth of a character whose reformist views excited his skepticism. One such reformer is the narrator of "An Anonymous Story," a confused revolutionary nobleman, who compares a dress costing four hundred rubles to the pitiful wages in kopecks of poor women. "An Anonymous Story" is a strange, febrile work that reads as if it had been written nonstop in the state of heightened consciousness that tuberculosis has been said to induce in artists. (In actuality, the story was set aside for several years after it was started.) It begins arrestingly: Through causes which it is not the time to go into in detail, I had to enter the service of a Petersburg official called Orlov, in the capacity of a footman… I entered the service of this Orlov on account of his father, a prominent political man, whom I looked upon as a serious enemy of my cause. I reckoned that, living with the son, I should-from the conversations I would hear, and from the letters and papers I would find on the table-learn every detail of the father's plans and intentions. But the story does not live up to its promise. For reasons one can attribute only to Chekhov's own lack of enthusiasm for revolution, the narrator loses interest in his cause, becoming exclusively preoccupied with the predicament of Orlov's beautiful young mistress, Zinaida (to whom Orlov is behaving with typical Petersburg swinishness). But the opening scenes, retailing the upper-class revolutionary's masquerade as a servant-scenes that perhaps only someone who had himself been on both sides of the class divide could have written-have a special sardonic sparkle. Chekhov wrote easily about the upper classes-the term "Chekhovian" evokes faded nobility on decaying estates- but he evidently never forgot that he himself had not been gently reared. In a letter to Suvorin written in January 1889, he speaks of a "feeling of personal freedom" that "only recently began to develop in me," and continues: What writers belonging to the upper class have received from nature for nothing, plebeians acquire at the cost of their youth. Write a story of how a young man, the son of a serf, who has served in a shop, sung in a choir, been at a high school and university, who has been brought up to respect everyone of higher rank and position, to kiss priests' hands, to revere other people's ideas, to be thankful for every morsel of bread, who has been many times whipped, who has trudged from one pupil to another without galoshes, who has been used to fighting, and tormenting animals, who has liked dining with his rich relations, and been hypocritical before God and men from the mere consciousness of his own insignificance-write how this young man squeezes the slave out of himself, drop by drop, and how waking one beautiful morning he feels that he has no longer a slave's blood in his veins but a real man's. This passage is much quoted and is generally believed to be in expression of Chekhov's free-spiritedness. In fact, it sub-ilv enacts what it condemns; it is itself servile, unpleasantly x"'KK«**ting that the plebeian is innately inferior, that he needs to expunge some noxious substance within himself before he can rise to the level of the aristocrat. The image of squeezing is unpleasant. Chekhov writes here almost like a self-loathing Jew reassuring himself that he has passed. Nowhere else in his writings does he express such sentiments. It is a moment of anxiety that has no sequel. But it is a moment-like the "Karelin's Dream" letter-that flares out of the genial documents of his life like an out-of-control fire glimpsed from a moving train.