The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

In Act III, the professor launches his self-serving plan by quoting the mayor’s opening line from Gogol’s famous play: “Gentlemen, I have invited you here to announce that we are about to be visited by a government inspector.” The joke falls flat. Later in that same explosive scene, Sonya’s uncle Vanya, enraged, shouts at the old professor: “My life’s ruined. I’m gifted, intelligent, courageous. If I’d had a normal life I might have been a Schopenhauer or a Dostoevsky. But I’m talking nonsense, I’m going mad . . .” Indeed, Tolstoy would not like this sort of comedy. And Dostoevsky – for whom madness was metaphysical and symbolic – would not have understood it either. Chekhov’s four great dramas and over six hundred short stories represent an ambitious, calculated descent from the didactic comedy of earlier centuries and from the heights of the Great Russian Novel as well. We will view this descent through two lenses: illness, and the Anna Karenina plot.

Like Dostoevsky, Chekhov was ill for much of his creative life with an incurable disease. Unlike Dostoevsky, who chose to see in his own chronic epilepsy some visionary potential or symbol (while remaining objective enough to give his disease both to a scoundrel, Smerdyakov, and to a righteous man, Prince Myshkin), Chekhov did not make a special point of trying out his consumption on his fictive characters. When he does, as in “The Black Monk” (1894), the result is distanced and chilly: the morally flawed and hallucinating hero dies in a rush of blood from the throat, presided over by an apparition of the sinister monk. But no judgment is passed on the unhappy hero.

Tolstoy despised doctors, and in this area he never missed a chance to pass judgment. He never allows his heroes to be cured by medical professionals. Freed from French captivity (which had, characteristically, disciplined his body and improved his health), Pierre Bezukhov falls ill for three months, “but despite their treatment – with bloodletting and various medicines – he recovered” (War and Peace, Book Four, Part IV, ch. 12, p. 1228). Doctors summoned in Tolstoy’s novels are useless, harmful, usually charlatans – and when examining a young girl, always lascivious charlatans. For Tolstoy, the body is a serious matter, a source of joy and our singular means to appreciate nature. But its owner is obliged to monitor it constantly, because the “animal principle” will struggle against the higher purposes of the soul. No amount of “scientific treatment” imposed upon the body from outside will cure it. The frailer, more physically vulnerable Dostoevsky needed and respected doctors, granting them considerable professional competence. But in Dostoevsky’s fiction, as in Tolstoy’s, illness is often metaphorical, melodramatic, graphically shocking. Chekhov strikes a more sober and objective note. His work features a large number of doctors, and among them – this is a new note for Russian literature – illness can be almost comic.

Realisms 159

Chekhov saw what medical people can hardly avoid seeing: that possessing a mortal body means sooner or later something will go wrong with it – it will make a fool of itself, sicken, and die. Cancer and consumption follow their own rules, of course. But the same treatment, or the same accident, can have no effect on one organism, awful consequences on another, curative effects on a third. The body is not obliged to explain itself. Thus the body cannot be conceived as a moral unit. Medical records are neither shocking nor symbolically meaningful. They are records of an organism’s rise and fall. Pain, too, is simply there; it buys nothing and redeems nothing. In what is probably the most famous passage in all of Chekhov, from his short masterpiece “Lady with a Pet Dog” (1899), we are shown how this moral blankness can actually be recruited for human well-being and hope. Gurov and Anna Sergeyevna are sitting on the beach at dawn and listening to the “monotonous muffled noise of the sea”:

It had made that noise down below when neither Yalta nor Oreanda existed; it was making that noise now, and would continue to make that noise in that same hushed and indifferent way when we are no longer here. And in that permanence, in that complete indifference to the life and death of each one of us, is perhaps concealed a guarantee of our eternal salvation, a guarantee of the constant movement of life on earth and of endless perfection.36

In Chekhov, then, pain, illness, and dying are tragic in a clinical and local sense only, not in a moral sense. Death is not punitive, and survival is more a matter of good fortune or timing than of ethical absolutes. Two stories are exemplary in this regard, among the darkest in the canon. In each, one detects a doctor’s trained eye, and a doctor’s tactful, tolerant commiseration that does not pretend to know what it cannot know.