I am an avid reader of all types of genres and love exploring new authors, or rediscovering ones I have read in the past. One writer who I recently discovered and who's writing is always interesting to me is the short story writer and playwright Anton Chekhov.
What makes Chekhov stories so wonderful? When did the humorous anecdotes he wrote for money become great art? And at what point did Chekhov appreciate his talent? Bob Blaisdell’s new book, Chekhov Becomes Chekhov, focuses on the years when it became evident, first to others and then to Chekhov himself, that a literary genius had emerged.
How straightforward Chekhov stories seem, and yet how strangely moving. Like the soul as he understood it, they appear simple but are profoundly mysterious. In her splendid book Reading Chekhov, Janet Malcolm stresses how, for him, each person’s soul harbors a secret accessible to no one else. She quotes the passage in his best-known story, “The Lady with the Dog,” in which the hero, Gurov, pondering the secret love affair that constitutes his real life, imagines that one person never understands another because it is always what cannot be seen that truly matters.
Chekhov did everything to conceal his deepest self. When in his voluminous letters he must speak of himself, Chekhov either offers trivia or conveys serious information as if he were joking. He was deliberately hard to pin down.
Even when Chekhov characters wish to reveal their deepest secret, they usually find it cannot be put into words. The hero of “The Kiss” tries to tell his fellow officers about the chance event that changed his life but cannot convey what made it so transformative.
Chekhov’s plays are filled with nonconversations and so at first glance seem entirely undramatic, but in fact they are rich in drama lying just beneath the surface.
In one of Chekhov’s early stories, a grieving cabman tries to tell his fares about his son’s death, but no one pays attention. At last, he confides in his horse.
The title of this story is usually translated as “Misery” or “Anguish” because the Russian title, “Toska,” has no English equivalent. It suggests - as well as sorrow, dreariness, and loneliness - a sense of longing. Made into a verb, it means to miss someone. Toska may, indeed, be the defining emotion of Chekhov’s stories. Perhaps no one ever conveyed longing and loneliness so well.
In Chekhov’s longest story, “The Steppe,” about a journey across Russia’s endless, almost desolate plain, nature itself appears to suffer from toska: “The sky, which seems deep and transcendent in the steppes, where there are no woods or high hills, seemed now endless, petrified with dreariness.” The travelers discern in the distance a solitary poplar planted “God only knows why”.
Chekhov’s life and art were a kind of exercise in withholding. Even with the Soviet censor’s prudish cuts restored, his letters fail to disclose anything essential about him. Chekhov’s privacy is safe from the biographer’s attempts upon it. The best biographies offer hints to Chekhov’s inner life, revealed in part by the very ways he tried to conceal it.
It was in 1886 and 1887 when he emerged as a great writer and became, to his own amazement, celebrated. It is not so much Chekhov’s evolution as an artist that is interesting, but it is recognition, by Chekhov himself and others, that his works are indeed masterpieces.
The main support of his parents and siblings, Chekhov, a young doctor, managed to produce 112 short stories, articles, and pieces of humor writing in 1886 and another 66 in 1887. He also wrote long letters, some of which are themselves literary gems appearing in anthologies of Russian writing.
One letter Chekhov received in March 1886 changed his view of himself. The veteran writer Dmitry Grigorovich offered his unsolicited opinion that Chekhov was a major literary talent and urged him to take his work more seriously. Chekhov, Grigorovich asserted, should not write so hurriedly and instead make each story the work of genius it could be. From this point on, Chekhov really did begin to devote greater care to his fiction.
We can wish Chekhov was as enlightened as we are in 2024 and that he would watch his language and behavior.
When in Nice an editor asked Chekhov to write a story based on his travel impressions, Chekhov declined, saying that “I am able to write only from memory, I never write directly from observed life”.
Anton Chekhov’s biography in 1886–1887 is captured almost completely in the writing that he was doing. Reading the stories, we are as close as we can be to being in his company.
Chekhov sometimes concealed connections between his life and stories by switching genders or altering circumstances, but he confidently pierces such concealments. Of course, everything in writers’ work must have some basis in their experience, but why must the connection be direct or immediate?
So apparently simple are Chekhov’s stories that it is hard to identify what makes them masterpieces. Like poems, they suggest much more than is stated directly. Chekhov loved to give stories an unexpected turn. Just before they end, we often get a new viewpoint or learn an important fact allowing us to see events forming a second story, much deeper than the first. If one misses the turn, one does not discern what makes a good story a great one.
Waste is one of Chekhov’s great themes.
Russian life presents us with an uninterrupted succession of convictions and aspirations, and if you care to know, it has not yet the faintest notion of lack of faith or skepticism. If a Russian intellectual does not believe in God, it means he believes in something else.
However appealing and inspiring, ideology, to which the Russian intelligentsia was so susceptible, can lead to horror. In 1881 the populist People’s Will assassinated Tsar Alexander II, and Russia witnessed murderous pogroms, perhaps provoked by the fact that a Jewish woman had played a prominent part in the plot. The People’s Will cynically decided to exploit anti-Jewish sentiment to unleash popular rebellion. Two decades later it was the government that inspired pogroms, but in the early 1880s it was populist revolutionaries. On August 30, 1881, the Executive Committee of the People’s Will issued a manifesto, written in Ukrainian.
The real story is Chekhov’s gradual realization that his tales are not just funny anecdotes that pay the bills but great literature. As he explained, “I have hundreds of friends in Moscow, and among them a dozen or two writers, but I cannot recall a single one who reads me or considers me an artist.” He could not alter his rushed writing immediately, but bit by bit he did so and allows us to trace the emergence of a literary genius.
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