![]() He was the only great Russian writer of the 19th century born to the peasantry rather than the nobility, the reason why the peasants in his stories are complex human beings, neither saints nor sinners, and as understandable as they are sometimes degenerate, rather than pegs in grand philosophies. Dostoevsky and Tolstoy from the clouds, where they wrote books meant to deluge the ground and sweep away the old order, ushering in a utopia of Christian suffering and redemption, in the former’s case, and moral rectitude, rural life, and vegetarianism, in the latter’s. Take any “dark” story and count the exclamation marks. I’m talking about the wry, playful humor that breaks through the foliage of even the darkest story: “Hundreds of miles of deserted, monotonous, scorched steppe cannot produce such gloom as one man when he sits and talks and nobody knows when he will leave,” he writes in “An Artist’s Story,” otherwise an account, included in this collection, of multiple sorrows. (He was paying for his medical education then, the “wife” to which literature was a “mistress.” Not for long.) I’m talking about “The Siren,” a lip-licking ode to food in the Russian mouth that reads like an extended version of that Gogol exultation about Ukrainian dumplings in sour cream flying into a certain gentleman’s mouth by themselves. Forget that, early on, Chekhov made his living through humor pieces, a Dickens-in-reverse who got paid only if he came in under 100 lines. But just as few could be as funny or bawdy amidst the sobriety because. kept striking me on the hand with her fan and saying, ‘Oh, you naughty man!’” Ĭhekhov was moved by great passions-I can’t think of a Russian great with more skin in the game. but I was so drunk the whole time that I took bottles for girls and girls for bottles! One of them. At a rural wedding at which he served as best man, as he wrote to his sister Maria, he “saw a lot of wealthy marriageable girls. Chekhov likes his ladies-his Lydias-of the capital sometimes he goes out with Lydia Yavorskaya, and sometimes Lydia Avilova. ![]() This isn’t a sodden aberration when no one is looking. No, he has taken the long way home: Hong Kong, Singapore, and Sri Lanka, about which he has written, to a patron and friend, “When I have children, I’ll say to them, not without pride: ‘Hey, you sons of bitches, in my day I had sexual relations with a black-eyed Hindu girl, and you know where? In a coconut grove on a moonlit night. But neither is he a brow-furrowed Marxist scribbling a manifesto as his train races back to the capital. He’s no rake on a grand tour-he’s just completed a journey that would be arduous even today: a humanitarian visit to a penal colony in the Russian Far East. I think of an 1890 photograph of a 30-year-old man returning by steamer from Asia. This isn’t the person I think of when I think of Chekhov. ![]() We wouldn’t want this kind of writing today-too un-ironic, too free with emotion, too un-relativist, too naive in thinking that the Big Questions have resolution at all. The picture lasts because it’s what we want from our 19th-century Russians: gravity, fatalism, melancholy, minds wracked by the Big Questions. ![]() Everything you know about Anton Chekhov is wrong.Ĭhekhov the downcast tubercular writing magnificently mournful plays about the declining aristocracy on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution, the king of the country whose national anthem is the minute-long sigh.
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