Anton Chekhov

From Philosopedia

Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich (29 January [Old Style 17 January] 1860 – 15 July [Old Style 2 July] 1904)

Chekhov was an eminent Russian short-story writer, dramatist, naturalist, and physician.

The grandson of a serf, and the third of six children born of a grocer, he was whipped often by his father as well as by the choirmaster in church, where he was made to sing for hours while kneeling on freezing stones. When his father went bankrupt and the family departed Taganrog for Moscow in search of work, Chekhov was left to fend for himself. It was a time when many found a new church and dogma in the radical movement. As an indication of his outlook at the time, he advised a brother to refrain from force and deceit and to “work at it constantly, day and night. You must never stop reading, studying in depth, exercising your will. Every hour is precious.”

When thirty and called an “unprincipled” writer by the editor of a journal, Chekhov protested, “I have never toadied, nor lied, nor insulted. . . . I have never written a single line that I am ashamed of today.”

Upon graduating from Moscow University in 1884, he wrote that he was able to divide his time between “medicine . . . my lawful wife, and literature . . . my mistress.”

His record of humanitarian work was impressive. He wrote about a prison colony on the Siberian island of Sakhalin, basing it on a medical-statistical survey of conditions there, bringing to the public’s attention the horrors of the Russian penal system. To alleviate famine in his region in 1891—1892, he treated peasants in a clinic on his estate, helped build schools, endowed libraries, and purchased horses to be distributed to peasants for transporting grain.

Not one to believe in universal salvation, he had no faith in the intelligentsia en masse, placing his hopes on individuals because “They’re the ones who really matter.”

On a visit to Nice, he wrote in a letter, he was pleased at finding no “Marxists with their self-important faces.” His Ivanov in 1887 launched Chekhov as a dramatist, and he came to be lionized in artistic circles. His work depicted mortals subject to the depredations of time and chance, as shown in Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. In the latter work, acceptance of the loss of the orchard means new possibilities for Ranevskaya and her daughter.

Richard Gilman, in Chekhov’s Plays: An Opening into Eternity (1997), describes Chekhov’s unhappiness about Stanislavsky’s production of The Cherry Orchard: “With the exception of two or three parts nothing in it is mine. I am describing life, gray, ordinary life, and not this tedious whining. They make me either a crybaby or simply a bore.” Although Stanislavsky complained that Chekhov came to rehearsals and “messed everything up for us,” Gilman points out that Chekhov was masterful in telling us about the familiar, giving us a perspective on everyday experience which is different from the conventional assumptions, and offending cherished beliefs about ourselves and the world.

The best single source on Chekhov’s thought, according to Aileen Kelly, a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, remains the selection of his letters translated by Michael Henry Heim and introduced and annotated by Simon Karlinsky in 1973. Of particular importance, Karlinsky points out, is Chekhov’s asserting that his medical training in the empirical methods of the natural sciences had been the formative influence on his literary work. A writer, he held, should be faithful to the empirical reality of the world and of human behavior. Little wonder that he revered Tolstoy but was repelled by his didactic story “The Kreutzer Sonata,” whose treatment of human sexuality exposed the great writer “as an ignorant man who has never at any point in his long life taken the trouble to read two or three books written by specialists.”

Writers, Chekhov lamented, had only a smattering of scientific method and were prone to the delusion that mankind was on the verge of resolving the ultimate mysteries of existence. Criticized once for having taken no clear position on the question of pessimism, he retorted,

• It is not the writer’s job to solve such problems as God, pessimism, etc.; his job is merely to record who, under what conditions, said or thought what about God or pessimism.

This did not imply, Kelly added, a moral relativism. Chekhov wanted “to depict life truthfully and to show in passing how much this life deviates from a norm.” But no one can define that norm: “We all know what a dishonest deed is, but what is honour?—we do not know.” Therefore, one needs to be guided by the good that has withstood the test of time: liberation of the individual from oppression, prejudice, ignorance, or domination by his passions.

“It is obvious that nature is doing everything in her power to rid herself of all weaklings and organisms for which she has no use,” he wrote, comparing the famine and cholera threatening his region at the beginning of the 1890s with an influenza epidemic then affecting horses in central Russia. Life’s evanescence and unpredictability need to be accepted without resentment, for nature “gives a person equanimity. And you need equanimity in this world. Only people with equanimity can see things clearly, be fair, and work.” His outlook showed him to be an attentive reader of Darwin. Kelly wrote that Chekhov, like Darwin not one to be gloomy about the way things are,

• believed that the romantic yearning for a world modeled on religious or rational ideals of perfection had blinded mankind to the beauty and rich potential of the world they actually lived in. The history of Russian exploration in the Far East, which he read in preparation for his trip to Sakhalin, was “enough to make you want to edify man, but we have no use for it, we don’t even know who those people were, and all we do is sit within our four walls and complain what a mess God has made of creating man.”

“Alas! I shall never be a Tolstoyan!” Chekhov wrote to Suvorin. “In women what I like above all is beauty, and in the history of humanity, culture, which is expressed in rugs, carriages with springs, and keenness of thought.” In short, Chekhov did not accept Tolstoy’s ideal of moral perfection, which demanded the sacrifice of all the attachments and desires that distracted mankind from the pursuit of a narrowly defined good. His humanistic outlook included having a fascination for lives utterly different from his own. He dreamed of how it would feel to have “a wife, a nursery, a little house with garden paths,” or to be a country gentleman, a university professor, a retired navy lieutenant, a traveler, or an explorer.

Chekhov earned enduring international acclaim for his stories and plays. In 1888, “The Steppe,” a story in his third collection, won the Pushkin Prize. His plays became acclaimed when produced by the Moscow Art Theater. In 1901 he married the actress Olga Knipper, the interpreter of many of his characters. Three years later, he died of tuberculosis, the symptoms of which he had had for almost a decade but chose to ignore. When Tolstoy arrived at his hospital bed to discuss death and immortality, Chekhov remained unpreoccupied by ultimate questions, choosing instead to inquire about becoming a military doctor in the Russian Far East. His wife described his final moments in a scene that sounds Chekhovian. His doctor had ordered champagne to ease his breathing. Chekhov sat up, announced to the doctor in German, “Ich sterbe.”

• Then he picked up his glass, turned to me, smiled his wonderful smile and said, “It’s been such a long time since I’ve had champagne.” He drank it all to the last drop, lay quietly on his left side and was soon silent forever. The . . . stillness . . . was broken only by a huge nocturnal moth which kept crashing painfully into the light bulbs. . . . [Then] the cork flew out of the half-empty champagne bottle with a tremendous noise.

“His ideas on religion are not clear,” wrote Joseph McCabe, “but he stood well outside the Church.”

For 21st century humanities humanists, Chekhov is the person who wrote, inspiringly, that life “is given only once and one wants to live it boldly, with full consciousness and beauty.”

Chekhov died of heart failure in Badenweiler, Germany, and is buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery, Moscow, Russia.

{CE; JM; Aileen Kelly, “Chekhov the Subversive,” The New York Review of Books, 6 November 1997; RE; TRI; TYD}