The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

One means for adding dimensions to a work of slender compass is to evoke earlier, familiar literary worlds and fictive characters. The young Dostoevsky did this brilliantly with Gogol, and Chekhov often avails himself of this strategy. But mere isolated interjections tend to be ironic or unkind. In The Duel, for example, Layevsky is reminded of Anna Karenina’s dislike of her husband’s ears at just the moment when the white neck and curls of his own mistress are getting on his nerves. Such passing references make their point – both about Anna and about Layevsky’s lazy use of literary images for self-justification – but overall, Chekhov seeks to communicate on a plane more durable than ridicule. He wishes to examine other ways of adjusting to reality. For Chekhov is not so much a “realist” as he is an accepter of reality. His much discussed “comedic” quality probably originates here. Thus he gives us the genuine tragic accidents – “Enemies,” “The Name-day Party,” tragedies of the failure to heal or cure – and then the false tragedies, which are in fact comedic. These are situations felt as tragic by their indolent or self-pitying participants who cannot (or will not) act to change their situation, although they are free to do so. From Chekhov’s correspondence, we know that he considered such laziness to be a major vice of his age, and if his dramas were indeed the comedies he called them, it was because they built their plots out of this vice. Chekhov might have been drawn to recast Anna Karenina in just this direction, because the one thing that this tragic Tolstoyan heroine refused to do was to adjust to the reality that her own actions had brought about. By the 1880s, Anna Karenina was already an “infidelity stereotype.” The briefest reference to a plot detail (black unruly curls, meeting a future lover at a ball, squinting or screwing up one’s eyes when lying to oneself, prominent jutting ears, trains, or simply the name “Anna”) invokes the whole. Chekhov rewrote that whole several times, each time in a different key.

In the 1886 story “A Calamity,” a young woman with a sluggish, preoccupied husband is being courted passionately by a neighboring lawyer, Ilyin. He is ashamed of his behavior but attractive to her because of it. Trains are prominent

162 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

in the story – some train whistle is always interrupting his entreaties – but not as a tragic motif. The story ends as the heroine is rushing out the door to a tryst with the persistent and lovesick Ilyin; her husband wasn’t interested in hearing about her temptation, her daughter suddenly struck her as phlegmatic. The young wife is disgusted at her own duplicity, appetite, and ordinariness (to that extent she is still an “Anna”). But to balance those self-recriminating Tolstoyan moments, she is also curious, excited, and willing. Chekhov does not dismiss the seriousness and validity of lust. Like a doctor he gently probes its dynamics. The heroine will learn some sort of lesson from this “Calamity,” but it will not be a tragic one.

The same non-tragic message, albeit in a cynical key, underlies “Anna on the Neck” (1895). Anna Petrovna, eighteen-year-old beauty from a poor family married against her will to a pompous middle-aged bureaucrat, quickly perceives that her husband values her solely as a social asset and stepping stone to higher rank, the Order of St. Anna. This husband is no unexciting but inoffensive Aleksei Karenin; he is a direct descendant of Dostoevsky’s Luzhin. But Chekhov’s Anna cannot get out of the marriage in time, as Dunya Raskol-nikova did, and must adjust to her new reality. After she succeeds in pleasing the appropriate “Excellency” at a gala ball, she calls her husband a blockhead to his face and more honest relations between them are established. Her infidelities become her own business. And she is no longer visited by her nightmare, that a “storm cloud or locomotive was moving in on her to crush her.”