The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

In “About Love” (1898), the third rewrite of the novel, Chekhov is already parodying Tolstoy in a deeper, more spiritually satisfying way. Rather than merely supply alternative erotic andcynical contexts for the Annaplot, Chekhov now rematches entire Tolstoyan characters. “About Love” is the final story in Chekhov’s Little Trilogy. Its narrator, Pavel Konstantinovich Alyokhin, closely resembles Tolstoy’s Konstantin Levin:aloner,anintellectual turned farmerwith ahigh sense of honorand ahabitofsevereself-criticism. Thelovestory he relates to his friends concerns his unconsummated passion for Anna Alekseyevna, wife of his good friend, and he frames it with his confession, years later, that the failure to consummate this passion was probably a mistake. Chekhov’s variant bears all the marks of a clinical tragedy as he understood that genre: a tragedy of accident and timing. A Levin and a Kitty fall in love – both of them decent, proper people committed to responsible behavior – but they fall in love after the woman has married someone else. This is the plot that could easily have occurred in Anna Karenina, but Tolstoy makes sure it will not. He safely removes his attractive Kitty and disillusioned Levin from circulation until the wound caused by their mutual “accident of timing” – her rejection of his initial proposal, his pout over it – could heal on both sides. These two author’s pets

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are granted immunity, which means, a plot “timed” in their favor. Chekhov will have none of that.

Alyokhin and his Anna Alekseyevna are in love. But being neither Anna Kareninas nor Vronskys, not possessing the selfishness or the heroic initiating power required to launch the Anna plot, they continue over several years to “do the right thing,” which is to do nothing. Irritations and tensions between them increase, to their mutual distress. What energy there is, the would-be lovers spend on kindness and on respecting prior commitments, but both sense its falseness. By their decency and model self-discipline they are, of course, spared Anna’s and Vronsky’s terrible denouement. But Chekhov will not close on that pellucid moral. “About Love” still ends on a train scene. The reader must decide whether it is a victory or a defeat. In the coach, saying farewell, the two finally confess their love. Relating the story years later, Alyokhin concludes:

“I realized that when you love someone, your reasoning about that love should be based on what is supreme, on something that is more important than happiness or unhappiness, sin or virtue in the way that they are usually understood, otherwise it is not worth reasoning at all.”38

What might that supreme thing be, that replaces all reasoning? Chekhov does not say. Although the title of his story echoes Tolstoy’s imperious position-papers from his final two decades – “About War,” “About Religion,” “About Relations between the Sexes,” “About Life,” – a less Tolstoyan final verdict, unsettling in its openness, could hardly be imagined for a story about extramarital love.

A year later came the most famous Anna story in all of Chekhov, “Lady with a Pet Dog” (1899). Here too we have our share of trains and theatres. But this is a genuine love story, one of the world’s greatest, in which Chekhov mixes Tolstoyan prototypes, and at times Tolstoyan diction, to achieve a new perspective on adultery and adult responsibility. Dmitry Gurov, from whose perspective the tale is told, resembles a Vronsky, or perhaps an Oblonsky; Anna Sergeyevna, whom he meets in Yalta, is a timid, inexperienced Kitty. But there is an important difference: neither Gurov nor Anna Sergeyevna is free. Both have Karenin-like spouses: Gurov’s wife is a bluestocking intellectual, Anna Sergeyevna’s husband a “flunkey” who serves in some provincial office. The first half of the story is written in the voice zone of a Stiva Oblonsky, from a light philandering position. Anna Sergeyevna’s departure on a train back north at the end of the story’s Chapter 2 concludes that type of infidelity plot, the “successful one-time affair” that hurts no one and leaves no scars. But then the second half of the story takes both hero and heroine by surprise. It begins to resemble the expansive mid-parts of Tolstoy’s novel, where the reader realizes,

164 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature