What Chekhov Left Unsaid

Osip Braz painted him in 1898 for the Tretyakov: a dark coat, a tired mouth, the pince-nez era already in the face. Chekhov was thirty-eight. He had six years left. He was a physician who once called medicine his lawful wife and literature his mistress, and who wrote, as his ambition grew, stories that changed what a short story could refuse to do. He did not think it the writer’s duty to solve problems. It was to state them correctly. The sentence has been quoted until it sounds like a method. On the page it is a temperament. A Chekhov story will show you a life with great care and then decline, politely, to tell you what the life was for.

Anton Pavlovich was born on 29 January 1860, 17 January Old Style, in Taganrog, a port on the Sea of Azov. His father, Pavel, the son of a former serf, ran a grocery and a choir, and was a physically harsh household god. “Our talents we got from our father,” Chekhov recalled, “but our soul from our mother.” In 1876 Pavel went bankrupt and fled to Moscow to avoid debtor’s prison. The boy was left behind to sell the family’s things and finish school, sending what money he could north, with jokes in the letters so the others would not sink. The biography explains a kindness in the later work. It does not explain the art. The art is how little of that explanation the stories require.

The 1889 photograph is already the later face, but the path into it was comic and fast. He came to Moscow, entered medical school, and supported the family with daily sketches for comic papers, often as Antosha Chekhonte. In 1884 he qualified as a physician and treated the poor for nothing. He was coughing blood by then and would not admit tuberculosis to his family. Dmitry Grigorovich, reading “The Huntsman,” wrote that the young man had a talent in the front rank, and told him to slow down. Chekhov answered that he had written like a reporter at a fire — mechanically. The letter, he said, struck him like a thunderbolt. In 1888 the collection At Dusk won the Pushkin Prize. The prize is a date. The change is a way of looking. The comic sketch had been a joke sold by the line. The mature story is still funny, sometimes. It has simply stopped winking to make sure you noticed.

The Steppe, that same year, is where the comic street sketches open into weather. A boy is sent across the grassland with a priest and a merchant. Nothing “happens” in the old sense. The air happens. A thunderstorm, an inn, a conversation that does not go anywhere a plot could use. Chekhov later called the piece odd and much too original. It was the dictionary of his poetics: attention instead of plot, and a narrative that drifts with thought. From here the stories grow longer and quieter. A rifle on the wall, he told a correspondent, must go off, or it should not be hanging there. The principle is famous. The stories themselves often refuse the bang the principle seems to promise. The shot, when it comes, is a life that fails to change. That is a harder detonation. The reader waits for a turn. The turn is that there is no turn, only a more exact picture of the room.

In 1890 he crossed Siberia to the penal colony on Sakhalin, interviewed thousands of convicts and settlers, and saw floggings and children asleep among soldiers. “There were times I felt that I saw before me the extreme limits of man’s degradation.” The Island of Sakhalin is social inquiry, not a tale. The literary aftertaste is in stories like “The Murder.” He had gone looking for a purpose after his brother Nikolai died of tuberculosis. He came back with a duty he could not joke away. The journey matters because it trained the same eye the fiction uses: look until the picturesque falls off. A convict is not a type. A child asleep in a barracks is not a symbol of Russia. They are facts the writer will not pretty. Later, when he writes peasants, he will use that refusal. The countryside, in Chekhov, is not a moral landscape. It is a place where people live badly and sometimes well, and the difference is not a sermon.

In 1892 he bought Melikhovo, a country estate some fifty miles south of Moscow, and made it a home for his parents and for his sister Maria. Peasants came at dawn. He kept medicines in a cabinet and spent hours on the road. Britannica calls those six years the most creatively effective of his life so far as short stories were concerned: “The Black Monk,” “Peasants,” “The Student,” the later trilogy of “The Man in a Case,” “Gooseberries,” and “About Love.” Village life became a subject he would not pretty. Peasants (1897), a sequence of sketches without a conventional plot, caused more stir in Russia than any other single work of his, partly because it refused the comforting picture of the countryside. The stir is historical. The method is still the point. Chekhov does not argue that the village is this or that. He lets a cramped house breathe until the reader feels the air go out of it.

Repin drew the story in 1899: bodies in a dim room, no sermon. Chekhov’s mature fiction works like that drawing. In “Gooseberries” a man who has dreamed of an estate sits fat among his bushes, and the narrator cannot bear the happiness that has cost so little thought. The argument is not against gardens. It is against the soul that mistakes a fence for a life. The story is told at night, to people who will sleep afterward, which is part of its cruelty. You are allowed to be comfortable while you hear that comfort can be a kind of deafness. “The Man in a Case” is the same weather from the other side: a life so padded against accident that it has become the accident. “About Love” completes the trio without a verdict. Love happens. It is not used. The three stories share a frame — men talking — because talk, in Chekhov, is already a plot. What they cannot say to one another is the rest of the book.

“The Student” is only a few pages and a whole poetics. A young man, cold, walking home, tells two widows the story of Peter’s denial of Christ. They weep. He walks on and feels, suddenly, that the past is connected to the present by an unbroken chain. The story does not prove the feeling. It lets the feeling arrive the way weather arrives: after a fire, after a telling, after nothing that a plot point could claim. Readers who want Chekhov to be a pessimist have to skip this one, or call it a mood. Readers who want him to be a priest have to ignore how lightly the chain is offered. He is neither. He is a writer who knows that a correctly stated evening can hold more meaning than a thesis.

“Ward No. 6” is the other short door into that eye. A provincial doctor has theories about suffering and a habit of not looking too closely at the ward he oversees. A patient talks philosophy through the bars. The doctor, in time, is put where he used to visit. The story is not a trick ending. It is a study of how an idea about pain becomes pain when the room changes. Chekhov the physician is in the furniture: the smell, the indolence of the staff, the way a diagnosis can be a way of not touching anyone. Readers have taken it as an allegory of Russia, of the intelligentsia, of the soul. The pages will bear those readings. They also work if you leave them as a hospital. The bars are real. The talk is real. The transfer from one side of the door to the other is the plot, and it is enough.

It was clear to both of them that they had still a long, long road before them, and that the most complicated and difficult part of it was only just beginning.

The stories of the last years are almost weightless and almost unbearable. In “The Lady with the Dog” a seaside affair in Yalta, which neither lover meant to keep, becomes the only true thing in two otherwise arranged lives. They meet in hotels. They cannot leave their families. The last sentence does not free them. It only says that the difficult part is beginning. Nabokov called it one of the greatest stories ever written. The greatness is the refusal to reward the feeling with a plot. There is no duel, no divorce that solves the page, no punishment that lets the reader off. Chekhov’s gun, in this sense, is sometimes a life that does not fire, and still cannot be taken off the wall. Gurov, who began the affair as a habit of boredom, discovers that he has a heart the way Onegin discovers it: too late for the social script, in time for the sentence.

Chekhov began The Seagull in a lodge among the trees at Melikhovo and finished it there in 1895. The first night, at the Alexandrinsky Theatre in St Petersburg on 17 October 1896, was a fiasco. He swore off the theatre. Two years later Konstantin Stanislavski and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko’s Moscow Art Theatre found the submerged life in the text — the mood, the unfinished gesture — and he began to write plays again. The Seagull is a play about people who talk about art because they cannot bear to talk about their lives. A young man stages a symbolist play on a lake; his mother, an actress, laughs; a girl who acted in it will later say she is a seagull, and then that she is not. The bird is stuffed and forgotten on a table. Treat that as a symbol if you like. The play is crueller. It is about how a symbol is what you reach for when the ordinary pain has no name.

Uncle Vanya is the country-house play in which nothing is restored. A professor has lived on other people’s labour; Vanya has given his years to the estate; a doctor plants forests and cannot save a life he loves. They talk, they drink, they almost shoot, they sit down to accounts. The famous ending is work: Sonya telling Vanya they will rest, they will see a bright life, they will rest. Whether you believe her is the drama. The play will not decide. Three Sisters takes the same refusal into a garrison town. Olga, Masha, Irina want Moscow the way a thirsty person wants water. They do not get there. The want is the action. Officers come and go. A fire burns. Verses are recited. The sisters are still there, talking, which is not a failure of plot. It is the plot. Desire, in Chekhov’s theatre, does not have to be fulfilled to be real. It has to be heard.

Pyotr Sergeenko photographed him with Tolstoy in Yalta in 1901. After a haemorrhage in 1897, doctors had sent him south. He built the White Dacha, planted trees, kept dogs, and was always glad to leave what he called his hot Siberia for Moscow. He married Olga Knipper, an actress of the Art Theatre, that May, mostly at a distance: she in the capital, he in Crimea. “Give me a wife who, like the moon, won’t appear in my sky every day,” he had written to his friend Suvorin. The letters that remain are among the best theatre history we have, including his irritation at how Stanislavski directed the comedies as if they were funerals. The argument is not a footnote. It is a key to the plays. If you stage them only as elegies, the laugh that Chekhov planted in the talk dies, and with it the cruelty. People in these rooms are funny because they are trapped, not because the author is kind.

All Russia is our orchard. The land is great and beautiful, there are many marvellous places in it.

The line is spoken by a student who has never had to keep an estate. The woman who owns the orchard cannot imagine her life without it. Both are telling the truth, and the play will not choose. The Cherry Orchard premiered on 17 January 1904. He had wanted a comedy, even a farce. Stanislavski insisted on a tragedy. The argument has never ended, which is a sign that the play is built to hold both. An estate is sold. An old servant is forgotten in a boarded house. A man who grew up as a peasant now owns the trees. Nobody is only a symbol.

Lopakhin weeps and drinks champagne and cannot propose. Ranevsky returns to Paris because that is her weather. Trofimov talks of the future as if talk were already a road. The axe is heard offstage. History, if you want it, is there. The people are not the lesson. That is Chekhov’s path in one movement: from the joke told for a fee, through the correctly stated problem, to a last act in which a sound does the work a speech would only spoil.

I couldn’t understand my life without that cherry orchard, and if it really must be sold, sell me with it!

Ranevsky’s cry is not a political programme. It is a person whose memory has grown into trees. Lopakhin, who buys the orchard, is not a villain with an axe. He is a man who has been waiting his whole life to be allowed to act, and who then acts in a way that breaks the room. The comedy Chekhov asked for is in that mismatch: grand feeling, practical deed, a party going on while the future is signed. If you only mourn the trees you miss the joke. If you only cheer the sale you miss the servant left behind. The play is large enough for both mistakes. That is why it is still produced as a national allegory and still works when it is only a family failing to pack.

He told Ivan Bunin, a few months before Badenweiler, that people might read him for seven years. “Why seven?” Bunin asked. “Well, seven and a half.” The joke is the man. The afterlife is the work. British readers at first found the people spineless; then Garnett’s translations, and Mansfield and Woolf, heard the unfinished tune. In Russia the plays went in and out of fashion after the revolution, then returned as canon, sometimes with Lopakhin recast as a hero of the new order. That is too much meaning for a merchant who has simply bought the trees. Chekhov’s gift is that a character can carry history without becoming a poster. The doctor’s eye is still there: symptoms, not diagnoses. The reader, like a good physician, is asked to notice. The prescription is not included.

He died at Badenweiler, in the Black Forest, on 15 July 1904, 2 July Old Style, aged forty-four. Olga later wrote that he asked for champagne, said it had been a long time, and went quiet. The body came back to Moscow in a refrigerated railway car meant for oysters, a detail that offended Gorky. Tolstoy, who outlived him by six years, had already bound Chekhov’s stories into “first quality” and “second.” The ranking is a novelist’s pastime. The useful fact for a first reader is simpler. Begin with “The Lady with the Dog.” Then “Gooseberries.” Then “The Student,” if you want the chain without the hotel. Then The Seagull or Uncle Vanya, remembering that the talk is the action. The orchard, when you reach it, will already feel like a place you have failed to keep. That failure is not the author’s trick. It is the feeling the form was built to leave in the room after the axe has stopped.