The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

To be sure, the novel did have some competition. In the 1850s, the ethnographic “sketch” [ocherk] and newspaper feuilleton [from Fr. “leaf” or “sheet of paper,” usually street news or gossip by a roving observer or flaˆneur] emerged as favored short forms for recording everyday life, both urban and rural. Each featured a chatty, mobile first-person narrator whose job it was to report on the local terrain. Both the “sketch” and the “leaf” grew out of periodical print genres, the gossip column and the theatre- or special-interest section of newspapers, which were widespread in the popular press that was Chekhov’s literary apprenticeship. Dostoevsky extended this form far beyond a stroll around the city. His Notes from Underground (1864), which grew out of the intent to write a hostile review of Chernyshevsky’s What is to be Done?, became philosophical satire once Dostoevsky turned over the story to an irritable, first-person voice filtered through a well-read urban columnist, trapped for some reason in a dark garret where the only newsworthy item he could report on was himself.

Chekhov was obliged to support himself by his pen and early became a master of the chatty topical sketch. In his hundreds of commissioned stories

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he parodied almost every style and genre that Russian literature had known. In his “Death of a Clerk,” a comic rewriting of Gogol’s “Overcoat,” a titular councilor inadvertently sneezes on a general during an opera performance at the Bolshoi Theatre and, unable to persuade the general to take his apology seriously, dies (literally) of shame.34 Such cameo parodies were supplanted in the mid-1880s by his first mature work, the spatial tone-poem “Steppe,” published in a serious literary journal when Chekhov was twenty-eight. After 1888, he rapidly acquired the perspective and intonation peculiar to him, one far more lyrical than parodic or chatty. Chekhov is lyrical not in the way of most lyric poets, however, but in a distinctly “clinical” way; as a medical doctor. How Chekhov looked at the follies of the body, and to what extent he felt an author had the right to intervene, diagnose, systematize, and pass judgment on those follies, will be our focus in this final section.

Tolstoy cast a long shadow on Chekhov’s generation. But not all of the mature Tolstoy struck Chekhov as reasonable – especially his theories on sexuality and illness, of obvious interest to a doctor. Together with Russia and much of Europe, Chekhov read “The Kreutzer Sonata” in 1889 and followed the ensuing scandal. In various supplemental tracts to that story, Tolstoy argued that women instinctively dislike the carnal relation, that intercourse while pregnant or nursing causes hysteria, and that celibacy within marriage would guarantee the physical and spiritual health of both parties. In response, Chekhov complained to his friend Aleksei Pleshcheyev in February 1894 that Tolstoy “out of sheer stubbornness has never taken the time to read two or three pamphlets written by specialists.” Chekhov was correct: Tolstoy had no use for specialists. Gorky reports Tolstoy saying of Chekhov that his profession spoiled him. “If he hadn’t been a doctor he would have written still better” (“Memoirs,” p. 71). In Tolstoy’s view, a clinical approach to the human condition could only blur its duties. In 1897, Tolstoy remarked that Chekhov was highly gifted but “writes like a decadent and impressionist, in the broad sense of the term.” In the winter of 1900, Tolstoy took in a performance of a Chekhov play at the Moscow Art Theatre and wrote in his diary (January 27): “Went to see Uncle Vanya and was shocked.” What shocked him he doesn’t say, but we might speculate.

The play provides no moral resolution. There is also no cumulative action, motion, or lessons learned. The old professor and his young wife Elena arrive at the beginning and depart at the end. The presence of this provocative couple throughout four acts inspires one unsuccessful declaration of love, one unsuccessful suicide, one unsuccessful seduction; in fact, “everyone in this play is a loser.”35 The closest thing to a “deed” is the professor’s fantastic proposal to sell his daughter Sonya’s estate on terms advantageous to him in his retirement. Comically impotent moments are highlighted by references to literary classics.

158 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature