The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

with excitement and growing dread, that (however absurd it seemed at first) the love between our two adulterers is real. The fact that Vronsky might be a frivolous military officer unworthy of a person of Anna’s caliber, or that Anna is trying to have it all in a society where she will be lucky to have even a part, is completely unimportant; they simply love each other, as Tolstoy amply demonstrates. And love works changes. Vronsky becomes stronger, better,more self-critical. Likewise with Chekhov’s Gurov: he becomes dissatisfied with his Moscow life. He can’t forget Yalta. He tracks down Anna Sergeyevna in the city of S., after which she begins to visit him in Moscow. The “supreme thing that replaced all reasoning” now sits at the center of their lives. A rhythm is established that reflects a deep, and deepening, fidelity. The story ends on the verb “nachinaetsia,” “beginning”: they both felt that “the most complex and difficult part was only just beginning.”39

At issue here is not only that Anna Sergeyevna, however unhappy, will not commit suicide. The key to the change that Chekhov works on a Tolstoyan worldview – and, I believe, on a Dostoevskian worldview as well – can be found at the story’s end, in Gurov’s meditations en route to the hotel where Anna is waiting for him. He is explaining to his daughter how thunderstorms work. At the same time he is marveling at the inevitability of a human being having a “double life.” There is nothing pathological about this doubling. That we can act in the world not as we are “in reality” is, for Gurov, a very good thing. Our public life, “which was visible to everybody who needed to know about it, but was full of conditional truth and conditional deceit” (p. 181), was balanced by a private life, which was hidden from others and in which we are sincere. Doubleness is not duplicity. It is precisely the sincerity of what is hidden that makes tolerance so necessary and moral condemnation so difficult. “And he judged others to be like himself, not believing what he saw, and always supposing that each person’s real and most interesting life took place beneath a shroud of secrecy, as if under the veil of night. Every individual existence is a mystery . . .” (p. 181).

This entire meditation, with its binary structure and frequent repetitions, recalls Tolstoy’s style. But its moral is purely Chekhovian. Ideally for Tolstoy, there is always an integration between inner and outer. Before a spiritual epiphany can occur, the false life must be brought into line with the true life. The Tolstoyan self strives toward wholeness, even if the moment does not and cannot last. There should be nothing to hide – which is one reason why the Tolstoyan narrator grants himself such extraordinary access to his heroes’ inner lives.

The Chekhovian self is more modestly constituted. Its credo is not self-perfection and self-completion, but some other thing, perhaps acceptance of

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the “indifferent noise of the sea” that, according to some strange impersonal contract, promises us salvation. Chekhov’s truths, if he has truths, are not punitive, not public, and not symbolic. Tolstoy could not agree to this. The inadequate, makeshift, purely private and secret structures that sustain true human relations in Chekhov’s most luminous stories could not, for Tolstoy, be an acceptable moral resolution. So Tolstoy was to some extent correct when, in 1897, he remarked that Chekhov “wrote like an impressionist.” He was wholly incorrect to suggest that Chekhov wrote like a Decadent.

By the turn of the century, “getting out from under Tolstoy,” explicitly and implicitly, was a major task forthe new generation of Russian writers and artists. This “seer of the flesh” seemed far too cramped and archaic. Writers looked to Pushkin, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov for guidance. Many of them celebrated precisely what Tolstoy despised: mixed-art extravaganzas, opera, the potential of St. Petersburg as a cultural icon. But what they insisted upon most earnestly was mystery at the core of a narrative and of a self.

Chapter 7

Symbolist and Modernist world-building: three cities, three novels, and the Devil

1904–05:Russo-Japanese War, ending in Russian defeat

1905:The “first Russian revolution” (general strike, establishment of

State Duma)

1914–17:Great War with Germany and Austria (later called World War I)

1914:Zamyatin, a naval engineer, in England supervising the

construction of Russian icebreakers 1917 (spring): Strikes, war losses, and corruption at court force abdication of