Reading Chekhov

But even to Suvorin Chekhov refused the ultimate epistolary satisfaction, the unconditional declaration of love. "This doesn't mean that you are better than all those whom I know," he felt constrained to add, "but it does mean that I have grown used to you and that you are the only one with whom I feel free." A number of memoirists have written of Chekhov's inability to get close to anyone. One must always be skeptical of such an observation, since it can simply describe the relationship of the subject and the memoirist, and not necessarily apply to the subject's other relationships. In Chekhov's case, though, the observation comes from a variety of sources, and it seems to fit. The consensus is that Chekhov was extremely charming to everyone and close to no one-not even to Suvorin, to whom he came closer to being close than to anyone else. In his last years, weakened by illness, he married a woman with whom-had he been healthy-he probably would have broken, as he had broken with all the other women in his life. It was not in his character to give his heart away.

It was also not his habit to give himself away in his work; he was not a confessional writer. But in one story at least he may have practiced a veiled form of autobiography. That story is "Kashtanka" (1887), narrated from the point of view of a female dog, and presented as a story for children. In fact, it is a dark, strange, rather horrible (as well as wonderful) fable that I, for one, would never read to a child. The story reverses the usual formula of the well-treated animal who is wrested from a comfortable home and made to endure cruel hardship until it is finally reunited with its humane original master or mistress. Kashtanka is a hungry and ill-treated animal who gets lost, is adopted by a kindly man, and then is reunited (by her own choice) with her abusive original owner. The kindly man finds Kashtanka shivering in the doorway of a bar during a snowstorm, and takes her home and feeds her. He is an animal trainer who has a circus act performed by a cat, a gander, and a pig. He adopts Kashtanka, starts teaching her tricks, for which she proves to have great aptitude, and one day brings her to the circus to perform in the act with the others. The original owner, an alcoholic carpenter, happens to be in the audience with his son, and when the two of them call to her, Kashtanka leaps out of the ring to go to them, and unhesitatingly, and even joyfully, resumes her life of privation.

Chekhov prepares for the ending by depicting the household of the kindly master as a faintly sinister place. Kash-tanka and the cat and the gander are kept in a room always identified as the little room with dirty wallpaper. An uneasiness is always present, a kind of uncanniness that reaches a climax one night when the gander utters a horrible shriek and then pathetically dies, as the dog howls and the standoffish cat huddles against her. When read as a parable of alienation-a case study of homesickness-the dog's return to the original master takes on a sort of tragic inevitability. We know that the sleek, well-groomed animal Kashtanka has become under the care of the kindly circus master will soon again be a bag of bones, beaten by the carpenter and tortured by the son. But she will be cured of her unease; she will be where she belongs, leading her own proper life, rather than a life that is not really hers.

When Chekhov wrote "Kashtanka," he was himself living an alien new life. In 1886 he had been abruptly catapulted from obscurity to celebrity. He had been taken up by literary Russia's greatest circus master and pronounced a genuine artist. ("I want to make an artiste of you," Kash-tanka's new master says to her. "Do you want to be an artiste?" And, after seeing her perform-as if he had Grig-orovich's letter to Chekhov in front of him-he exclaims, "It's talent! It's talent! Unquestionable talent! You will certainly be successful!") But being a part of Suvorin's circus act made Chekhov as tense as it made him happy. We have seen his dismay at no longer being able to produce stories the way he eats pancakes. His letters of the period have a feverish, manic quality, he seems all over the place in them, like an excited, unsure puppy. He is alternately boastful and fearful. Chekhov's letters now also begin to express an ambivalence toward writing that was to remain with him. They suggest that the literary artist, like the animal performer, is doing something unnatural, almost unseemly. Making art goes against nature. People, like animals, weren't made to perform such feats. If life is given only once, it shouldn't be spent writing. Chekhov would often talk of idleness as the only form of happiness. He said he loved nothing better than fishing. At the same time, like Trigorin in The Seagull, he was afflicted with the writer's compulsion to perpetually, ruthlessly sift life for material, to be writing something in his head all the time.