Dr. Chekhov's Diagnosis
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
WRITERS & WRITING Dr. Chekhov's Diagnosis By Stanley Edgar Hyman Whatever else he is, if anything, the reviewer in one of his functions is a shopping service. In those terms, the year's best...
...His sister Cleopatra dies bearing an illegitimate child by her married lover...
...A final tableau shows us Anna herself, round the neck of the world...
...The power of these calamities lies to a great extent in the heavy, fated quality of their foreshadowing, very like the prophesied dooms of Greek tragedy...
...The new translation by Barbara Makanowitzky, despite her weakness for split infinitives, is readable and vigorous, rescuing Chekhov from the musty, stilted language of Constance Garnett...
...As though we cared...
...The three best of them—"Big Volodya and Little Volodya," "Anna Round the Neck," and "The Lady with the Pet Dog"—make Payne's book worth buying...
...Anna Round the Neck," for a change, is about a woman's triumph...
...However, the longer stories written after 1890, like the novellas and plays, gave Chekhov the room he needed for greatness...
...They show the range of Chekhov's command of Russian life, from the fashionable highlife of A Woman's Kingdom, in which Lysevich tells Anna that she must marry to experience "the sweetness of the first infidelity," to the brutish world of Peasants, where marriage is a fist in the face...
...My Life is an equally complex novella about a narrator named Missail Poloznev who deserts his class, the provincial intelligentsia, to become a housepainter...
...These dramas of betrayal and cowardice are enacted in a scene of great ugliness, Russian provincial life at its most repulsive...
...The scene in which the medical student studies the location of the ribs by having Anyuta sit naked in the cold, with her ribs marked in charcoal, is overwhelming, one of the most disturbing images in literature for that ultimate crime, the crime of treating people as things...
...The deaf son's wife, Aksinya, is an adulterous monster...
...In the main plot, Laevsky, a Turgenev "superfluous man" and wastrel, resolves to desert his mistress...
...Laevsky is providentially saved— the bullet grazes his neck—and this escape and Nadezhda's sin combine to fill him with joy and to regenerate him...
...Nadezhda, mainly out of boredom and self-disgust...
...It begins like a novel by one of the British Angry Young Men, with an alienated and cynical young hero cheeking his boss and getting fired from his ninth boring clerical job...
...Big Volodya and Little Volodya" tells of silly Sophia Lvovna...
...In the first paragraph we are told that the village is famed only as the place where a deacon once ate up all the caviar at a funeral...
...It is not so good a buy as the Bantam volume (although 40 stories at $5.95 comes to less than 15 cents apiece) because many of the stories are not worth having...
...The most powerful symbolic foreshadowing is the novella's title, the ravine in which the village lies...
...Five separate footnotes explain that kasha is a porridge, and three more explain that kvass is a fermented beverage—I do not know why...
...Then the days are "oppressive, gloomy," the samovar drones "predictions of misfortune," the telephone stops working because of "the bugs and cockroaches breeding in it...
...When, at the novella's beautiful end, Lipa feeds the starving old man, we climb out of the ravine for the first time...
...the other is spineless and deaf...
...The story is strengthened by a series of powerful and resonant symbols: Gurov's vision of beautiful cold women with the lace on their lingerie like fish scales...
...The Duel is thus a fable of good growing out of evil—Nadezhda's infidelities, von Koren's murderous hatred—but it is an ironic fable...
...Von Koren indicts Laevsky as a parasitic voluptuary in three pages of blistering, brilliant rhetoric, concluding with Laevsky's typical dreams: "First he dreams he is married to the moon, then he imagines he is summoned by the police and sentenced to cohabit with a guitar...
...Payne's translation is even more fluent and readable than Miss Makanowitzky's, but he is a better translator than editor...
...Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress," Chekhov once wrote to Suvorin...
...Anna's husband is awarded the order of St...
...The last pages, in which Gurov realizes that love is a burden, almost a doom, have the bitter realism of great love poetry...
...When he catches her in bed with a lover, he changes his mind...
...This Anyuta marries for money, is taken up by society for her beauty and the roundness of her heels, and then treats her husband like a servant...
...It is not of the slightest importance, except that it breaks her heart, and ours...
...It soon turns out to be much more than that, however, and it ends as a powerful Chekhovian vision of love's victimage...
...Many of the early slight stories Payne includes are not worth the space...
...At the novella's end he is married to Nadezhda, hard-working and frugal...
...a beggar who enters the gates of Anna's house and is attacked by dogs...
...As a writer, Chekhov was always very much the doctor: compassionate but detached...
...Near the end of his life, he wrote to Vladimir Tikhonov: "I only wished to tell people honestly: 'Look at yourselves, see how badly and boringly you live!' " It is a diagnosis, but he is careful not to prescribe...
...Anna, second class, by His Excellency, who then makes the title joke, that the husband now has two Annas round his neck...
...the eternal constancy of the sea, as Gurov and Anna watch it at Yalta...
...In the subplot, Laevsky is despised and hated by a social-Darwinian zoologist, von Koren, who eventually provokes him into a duel and tries to kill him...
...The townspeople occupy themselves with torturing dogs, eating flies, hooting at Missail for becoming a worker, cheating and insulting the workers they employ, and plucking live sparrows bare...
...The other new book of Chekhov fiction, The Image of Chekhov (Knopf, 345 pp., $5.95), consists of 40 short stories selected and newly translated by Robert Payne...
...The Duel, which Chekhov mockingly characterized to A. S. Suvorin as "What a Russian salad!," is a remarkable ironic structure...
...Gleb Struve contributes an introduction, prefaces to each novella, a chronology and a bibliography...
...The last scene is deeply moving...
...His introduction attacks the familiar portrait of Chekhov in pince-nez, insists that Chekhov was "quite astonishingly handsome," and explains that these 40 stories were chosen and printed in chronological order to give us a better portrait or image, to show us "the autobiographical thread running through them...
...Chekhov knew that it is incurable...
...At Lipa's wedding, the groom cries and prays to God to avert "the inevitable misfortune," and the peasants the Tsybukins have cheated gather outside to curse the wedding party...
...In those terms, the year's best buy is Seven Short Novels by Chekhov (Bantam, 440 pp., $.95), seven novellas of the highest quality at less than 14 cents apiece...
...Missail remains hopelessly in love with Marya...
...Anyuta walks with Missail and Cleopatra's child, then, as they enter the town, she walks on ahead and pretends not to know them...
...The seven novellas are: The Duel, Ward No...
...The Lady with the Pet Dog" is about an affair between two people, Gurov and Anna, unhappily married to others...
...In the novella's final irony, Blagovo's sister Anyuta turns out to love and worship Missail, but is unable to acknowledge her love because of the class barrier between them...
...In the Ravine chronicles the terrible destruction of a contented and prosperous village storekeeper named Grigory Tsybukin...
...The strength of the work lies in the eloquence of its rhetoric, the verbal duel between Laevsky and von Koren that is more important than their duel with pistols...
...This ravine is human depravity, the gaping pit, Aksinya's maw, even her voracious and barren sexuality...
...Aksinya looks "the way a little snake looks...
...This is not to say that all of Chekhov's stories of the 1880s are inadequate...
...6, A Woman's Kingdom, Three Years, My Life, Peasants and In the Ravine...
...Laevsky is equally eloquent about von Koren as a power-mad despot, but most of his eloquence is reserved for his own worthlessness, which he describes more cruelly than von Koren does...
...When Payne quotes Chekhov's notebook entry, "Perhaps the universe is suspended on the tooth of some monster," we have all the biographical facts we need...
...Best of all is "Anyuta," written in 1886 and less than five pages long...
...Some are quite fine...
...The result of this verbal duel and suicide is to leave both parties lying dead, and to create by negation a powerful humanistic ideal, a man who would be as responsive as Laevsky without his weakness, as responsible as von Koren without his ruthlessness...
...Von Koren had called the unregenerate Laevsky a "cholera microbe," but Laevsky the drudge has not become a man, merely a harmless microbe...
...The narrator is deserted by his wife Marya, a wonderful portrait of one of those emancipated Russian women, like Lou Andreas-Salome, who habitually drove a man for two years and then traded him in...
...She seizes the business, drives away her sisterin-law Lipa and brutally kills Lipa's child, Tsybukin's only grandchild, then mistreats and starves the old man...
...The disease is the human condition, and Dr...
...Their affair starts as vacation dalliance and ends as a passion that dominates their lives...
...What we want from stories is not a picture of their author, but a vision of life...
...Blagovo, who like Marya goes calmly on his way...
...One of his sons is sentenced to Siberia for counterfeiting...
...When Lipa's child is born, he is so small, thin and pitiful that it seems unnecessary to give him a name...
...I have space to discuss only the three novellas that I like best: The Duel, My Life and In the Ravine...
...Married to one Volodya, she has an affair with the other, a singer of "Ta-ra-raboom-dee-ay," and is thrown over by him the next week...
...They also show Chekhov at the height of his fictional powers, in the 1890s, in the novella form that, like the four-act play form, gave him more scope for his architecture of the emotions than the short story form did...
...The father of Missail and Cleopatra is the town architect, who designs deformed and ugly houses that become the town's style, and takes bribes in the serene belief that "they were given him out of respect for his spiritual qualities...
...The story carefully plants material that is harvested in a superb ending...
Vol. 46 • April 1963 • No. 9
