Critical Woodcuts/Chekhov, Chekhovians, Chekhovism
IN his stories and plays, to which I shall merely allude, Chekhov presents the Russian people drunk and sober, mad and sane, in squalor and in wealth; and one may like them or not, these Russian people, according to one's national affinities. In his letters, on the other hand, Chekhov presents himself with his family and friends, and, in the second volume, with the talented actress who for his last three years became his wife. He presents freely and abundantly the rich spontaneous personality which it was a matter of principle with him to exclude from his works. And I defy any intelligent reader to resist the fascination of his high spirits, his delicious humor, his artistic alertness, his critical penetration, his steady good sense, and his sensitiveness to the ideas of his time. Popularization of the letters[1] should create for him a much better informed public than he has yet had in this country. He is worth wide attention, and, in a sense, he deserves the sort of attention given to a contemporary writer who is still unfolding himself, and who has, therefore, still fresh sources of stimulation in store for us.
Had not God put a bacillus in Chekhov which terminated the career of his body in 1904 he might be alive to-day and, according to Metchnikovian standards, yet
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in the prime of life—only sixty-five last January. Even with the handicap of bodily death he is much in the literary movement as an example, as an influence, as a theorist. Yet he adequately arrived on the scene only within the last ten years. Except for a few stories and two or three plays—"The Sea-Gull" was translated by Isabel Hapgood in 1905, and "The Cherry Orchard" by Mr. Mandell, 1908, in the "Yale Courant"—his main circulation here begins sharply in 1915 and 1916, with the revived interest in the Russians occasioned by the World War.
Behind the Chekhov revival in England—from which our own is obviously imported—one sees, beside those experienced "Russians" R. E. C. Long and the Garnetts, the influence of S. S. Koteliansky and a series of significant literary collaborators of the younger set: Gilbert Cannan, Leonard and Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield and her husband, Mr. Middleton Murry. The Russian seed has fallen on fertile English ground.
Gilbert Cannan assisted Mr. Koteliansky in translating "The House With the Mezzanine and Other Stories," 1917; and I seem to scent Chekhov in Mr. Cannan's own "Stucco House," 1918. Virginia Woolf goes into ecstasies of admiration over Chekhov and "the Russian point of view" in her collection of essays, "The Common Reader." And the lecturer in Russian literature at King's College, University of London, Prince Mirsky, in his admirably lucid brief survey, "Modern Russian Literature," 1925, declares that "the late Katherine Mansfield was probably the most faithful and at the same times the most original of his (Chekhov's) disciples."
To the group of English Chekhovians one must add William Gerhardi, who has lately fluttered our dovecotes with "Futility" and "Polyglots," novels touched with Chekhovian humor in the presence of big wigs and embroidered uniforms. As a critic Mr. Gerhardi has linked himself with the group by declaring his discipleship to Middleton Murry. And in 1923 he published an extensive and intelligent study of Chekhov's art and his character, inspired, I suppose, by the letters and enriched certainly by many pertinent extracts from them. By no means incidentally he shoves Chekhov into the critical arena and eagerly backs him for genuine-artistic modernity against Henry James and his militant champion, Mr. Ford Maddox Ford, on the one hand, and, on the other, against Dostoievsky and his alleged successor in psychological profundity, Mr. James Joyce.
I have no intention of thrusting myself among these glittering blades. In general I think Chekhov's English friends have taken hold of him and presented him wisely as a fine, conscientious artist whose realism is far more subtle, suggestive and truly profound than that of more flamboyant novelists who have invaded us since the Japanese War. Andreyev and Gorky, for example. Perhaps in the excess of appreciation they push his claims a little harder than he himself would have approved against the looming figures of Gogol, Tolstoy, Turgenev and Dostoievsky.
Chekhov did a marvelous thing: he carried fine art into the newspaper and kept it there as long as he was alive. He picked up the newspaper reporter's "human interest story" and treated it with the fine scrupulosity of a great artist working on the perfection of a sonnet. He wrote innumerable little stories with a touch which made them classical, and the cumulative effect of them is large. Chekhov is a Russian classic, yet doubtless, as Prince Mirsky says, a classic of the Silver Age.
He is not to be described as an imposing elemental force. He is not a huge, originating, crushing and dominating mind. He hardly cared to be that. Between 1885 and 1904—a relatively languid generation, spiritually, between the liberalism of the '60s and the incipient Bolshevism that followed the Japanese War—Chekhov made for himself a personal ideal of sensible, sensitive civility. As an artist he sought to reflect Russian life from the point of view of a sensible, sensitive intellectual. His purpose, one may say, was to make readers see and feel the contemporary spectacle as such a man sees and feels it. He stands, then, for culture as contrasted with passion, ethical urgency, and yeasty fermentation. In respect to mood and temper, he stands in relation to Tolstoy as Matthew Arnold stands in relation to Carlyle, or Renan in relation to Victor Hugo, or, say, Mr. Santayana in relation to Royce and James.
Now the fact that Chekhov is coming into English-speaking lands twenty years after his death and is finding sympathetic and intelligent friends among the disenchanted writers of the post-war period, may greatly help us not only to see where his force lies, but also to enter more sympathetically into the minds of contemporary writers of our own time whom ruddy purposeful persons are prone to dismiss as unprofitable pessimists, dilettantes, futilitarians, belittlers of all that is venerable and august. I am thinking now of the vogue enjoyed by the Stracheyan biography, the Beerbohmian caricature, the fiction of Rose Macaulay, the Aldous Huxleyan "novel" and tale, and our in elegant and somewhat brutalized American version of the same Zeitgeist, which we may perhaps summarily designate as Menckenism.
Prince Mirsky, to whom I must refer once more, underscores Chekhov's "pessimism," his "realistic gloom," his gentle melancholy, his pity and sympathy, his consummate artistry. He links him with Turgenev in the "cult of inefficiency," and there is his dominant emphasis. Chekhov, he declares, with more than a touch of paradox,
hated the man who deserves success quite as much as the man who commands it undeservingly. Inefficiency is for him the cardinal virtue, and defeat the only halo. This attitude has been believed by some to be essentially Russian, but in its extreme expression it is certainly quite personal to Chekhov. The tendency of English literature has been the other way, but latterly, and parallel with the great vogue of Chekhov, the cult of inefficiency and the hate of Vulgar Success has spread in this country. There is nothing more Chekhovian, outside Chekhov, than Mr. Lytton Strachey's life of Cardinal Manning, with the pointed contrast between the active and obviously detestable Archbishop of Westminster and the gentle dreamer, Newman. [Newman, by the way, was less "gentle" than he is made out.]
Of Chekhov as an artist, Prince Mirsky speaks, to be sure, in the highest terms. But "Chekhovism" as an historical mood of Russia—a mood for which he appears to hold Chekhov in some measure responsible—he condemns unsparingly as "a stage of the past we have no grounds to be proud of, of a past which is largely responsible for the greatest shame of Russian history, the inglorious bankruptcy of the middle classes (intelligentsia) in 1917."
An American who does not read Russian, while at liberty to take exceptions to almost any American interpretation of Chekhov, should, I think, dissent warily from an obviously well informed and acute Russian critic. All the same, I am constrained by the full force of my own personal reaction to my author to protest against accepting pessimism, negativity or defeatism as the keynotes of Chekhov's character, and, therefore, as the logical essence of Chekhovism. The center of the man is positive. The force of his character is positive. The letters prove it.
Chekhovism is always defeated in war, but in the long run Chekhovism undermines war and returns generation after generation to its task of defeating the passions which make war possible. Negativity can perform no such stupendous work. To declare that Chekhov made "a cult of inefficiency" is a partisan's disparaging way of saying that Chekhov had an exalted, inalterable faith in humane culture, which you, for one, can't quite bring yourself to share. You probably believe that humane culture, like Christianity, is too rare, too slow. It doesn't get "results." It is too fragile for this world. It is too easily trampled under and made naught of by any uprush or inrush of vigorous barbarism.
Poor Chekhov! I take it that he is out of date in this respect only: He thought he was standing for "European culture" as against "Asiatic barbarism" If his life had been spared ten years longer he would have seen the European frock coats cast aside just as hastily as the Asiatic smocks. And if he had stood fast by his own ideals he would have withdrawn to some place "above the clouds" to laugh and weep with scorn and with compassion.
I am afraid that he was not a "joiner." He was not easily enlisted in Great Causes. He even shrank back suspiciously from membership in a literary "union." It reminded him, he said, of a German who had taught a cat, a mouse and a merlin to eat from one plate. He wrote for a conservative paper; and when some one, scenting popular sympathies in his stories, asked him if he were not slipping over toward liberalism, he replied that the question constrained him to consult his "innards." After consultation he reported that he was neither liberal nor conservative, but against pedants, nincompoops, madmen of all stripes. I think our new generation is beginning to turn toward that unnamed party which originates in negations, yet after all does come to stand for something quite definite.
Open the volume called "The Life and Letters" and you will find out quickly enough what Chekhov stood for, what serious purpose he had, in what sort of "practical" activities he was willing to be enlisted.
Descended from a peasant ancestry, familiar through his impecunious and hardworking boyhood with the Russian village, Chekhov knew intimately and revolted from the repulsive side of the Russian peasant: his ignorance, his boorishness, his inebriety, his gluttony, his dishonesty, his unbridled passionateness, his brutality, his chronic habit of slapping children in the face and clouting menials over the head with a shoemaker's last. All that aspect of "Asiatic" manners he observed and painted with merciless fidelity in scores of stories, for which he is credited with being the first unsentimental realist to deal with Russian village life.
But Chekhov quite ceased to be a peasant. He had enjoyed immense advantages: a decent and intelligent family life, full of kindly and affectionate feeling; a university training followed by a medical education; and early and lifelong association with cultivated men. He knew modern science and modern literature. He read Darwin, Spencer, Buckle; Goethe, Schiller, Hauptmann, Nordau, Nietzsche; Zola, Bourget, Daudet, Maupassant; H. B. Stowe and Thoreau; Cervantes; Ibsen; Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Grigorovich. He emerged from the peasant class into the intelligentsia. He emerged from Russia into Western civilization. And very keenly at an early age he felt responsible for conducting both his life and his art like a European gentleman who was also an intellectual.
You can see him applying that standard effectively to his own friends, to the actors in the theater, and, very significantly, to such authors as Tolstoy and Gorky. The sincerity and elevation of Tolstoy's spirit he profoundly revered: he recognized the man's essential nobility, and for that reason loved him above all other Russian writers. But Tolstoy's asceticism and his glorification of the peasant he regarded as wide aberrations from common sense. Chekhov hadn't the faintest desire to return to the peasantry. He knew it too well. He admired the talent of Gorky, befriended and helped him. At first meeting with him he was pleased with Gorky's intellectual outlook, pleased with everything about him except his peasant smock. Later he reacted against something raw, overstrained and violent in him—Maxim had a tedious tendency to "scream" under excitement and roar a man down. Chekhov had a well bred hatred of domination and could never have been duped into exchanging one tyrant for another. Chekhovism eludes tyrants.
Whether the fine spirit of a gentleman is inside a man is tested less conclusively in drawing room and club than in family life. Chekhov's relations with his parents were beautifully tender and regardful. When his future wife visited in his home she found its atmosphere delightful. His family letters, especially to his brothers, are charming. They are alive with affectionate interest. They are spontaneous, spirited, sympathetic, candid, stimulating and rich in excellent advice on the handling of artistic problems, on the payment of debts, and on the way to behave and to feel if one insists upon living with a woman to whom one is not legally married.
To one of his brothers, who is trying to write stories, he makes himself a literary coach and gives away all the little secrets of his craft. To another brother, Nicolay, the painter, he administers needed moral tonics—the poor fellow was ill and also, it seems, a little unkempt. There is a remarkable letter to this brother, dated 1886, written in response to Nicolay's complaint that he is not "understood." Anton thinks just a touch of the Dutch uncle is "indicated" by the symptoms. "The trouble with you," he says, in effect, "is that you are in a false position. You really wish to associate with cultured people and you are still dreadfully half-baked and amazingly uneducated." Then follows Anton's analysis of the responsibilities of an educated man. I wish there were space for more than a condensation of it:
Educated people, in my opinion, must satisfy the following conditions:
(1) They respect a man's personality, and therefore they are always tolerant, gentle, polite, yielding. . . . (2) They are compassionate, and not only with beggars and cats, for they grieve in their soul for what the naked eye does not see. (3) They respect other people's property, and therefore they pay their debts. (4) . . . They do not show off, they behave in public as they behave at home, they do not throw dust in the eyes of humbler people, they do not chatter, and do not make up soul-to-soul conversations when they are not asked. . . . (5) They do not belittle themselves to arouse the compassion of others. They do not play on the strings of other people's souls so that they shall sigh over and fondle them. . . . (6) . . . They do not care about such false diamonds as acquaintance with celebrities, shaking hands with the drunken P . . . Doing a farthing's worth, they do not walk about with attaché cases as if they had done a hundred rubles' worth. . . . (7) If they possess talent, they respect it. For it they sacrifice rest, women, wine, vanity . . . They are proud of their talent. . . . And also they are fastidious. (8) They foster the æsthetic feeling in themselves. . . . From woman they require, not a bed. . . . They, especially if they are artists, need freshness, elegance, humanity, the capacity for being not a . . . but a mother.
A notable program that, coming extempore from a young fellow of twenty-six, desperately busy, up to his neck in medicine, up to his neck in short-story writing for the newspapers, and already attacked by the disease which eventually carried him off. I call attention to it because it contains a good part of the ethical code of Chekhov. It is perfectly genuine. There is no windy inflation in the man—nothing to puncture. The ideas and spirit of that letter—its good sense and its sensitiveness—pervade all the family letters and all the relations of his life pretty consist ently straight through to the end. And these rules for decent behavior by no means constitute his entire conception of the obligations devolved upon a man by accepting membership in the intellectual class. Courage, gayety, vivacity and the "light touch" are clearly elements in his ideal, as they are also constant elements in his practice.
The letters to Olga Knipper I read with mixed feelings. They are a batch of ante-and-post-nuptial love letters almost too intimate for publication. An intellectual in love and in the intimacy of marriage. Piquant themes. Rather curiously, as it seemed to me, their substance is far inferior to that of the other collection. Many of them are little more than flights of caresses and salutations of the author bowing down at the "little feet" of the lady, till his forehead knocks on the floor. Nevertheless, I should defer to Chekhov's unquestionably superior knowledge of the right thing in this connection and assume that he knew what the recipient wanted, except that she herself frequently complains of his brevity and his triviality—to which he often replies with announcement that he has had his hair cut and has brushed his teeth but could not bathe.
His playful epithets are amusing: "My sweet actress," "popsey," "sweet dog," "ginger-haired dog," "my fiery dog," "my splendid spouse," "my little crocodile," "my little whale," etc. So is much of his incessant banter amusing, especially when he plays at being a brutal peasant, threatens to "smash" her if she doesn't write, reminds her that he is her "lawful husband" and has a "perfect right to beat her"—when she lets a single day go by without a letter. But all this sustained to the very end and involved, these caresses, with the distressing medical details of the progress of his disease becomes a little ghastly.
And yet I am not sure that the correspondence is not a model of what a dying gentleman's letters ought to be when he is married to a wife of whom he has grown very fond, but whom he is obliged by his principles and by his magnanimity to leave quite at liberty to absent herself all winter, following her own profession on the stage in Moscow. This much is clear: only a highly civilized man could have played Chekhov's part in that marriage with unfailing gayety and unfailing generosity.
Chekhov was tremendously industrious at all periods of his life. While he was dying he undertook the writing of his best play, "The Cherry Orchard." He put it through. "Ineffective" is a word that does not apply to the Chekhovism that one finds in the letters. With the ineffective "Russian Hamlet" of Turgenev, with the really unpractical and impotent members of the intelligentsia—idle, chattering, vodka-drinking triflers—he has personally as little in common as he has with the Asiatic manners of his peasants or with the stolidity of his bureaucrats, or with the self-satisfaction of his new bourgeoisie.
Oh, once upon a time, doubtless, he felt in himself something of the melancholy impotence of Ivanoff in the play of that name; something of the automatism expressed by the author Trigorin in "The Sea Gull"; much, perhaps, of the vague unrest expressed by the idealistic student Trophim of in "The Cherry Orchard." But Chekhov himself, as revealed in the letters, is a man who early took himself in hand, organized his aims and efforts and drove with incessant energy toward a perfectly definite goal.
But I haven't finished my account of genuine Chekhovism till I say that when Chekhov had emerged from the peasantry and had become an intellectual he proceeded then to emerge from the intelligentsia in order to become an individual and a "free artist."
The artist, too, has his ethics and his honor. "Respect yourself, for the love of Christ; don't give your hands liberty when your brain is lazy." That is pure ethics. The first principle of honor is that the artist must preserve his integrity as a spectator, letting nothing interfere with the pure objectivity of his vision. We know, of course, that "pure objectivity" is an illusion, and doubtless Chekhov did also; but there is a relative objectivity which may furnish a working principle:
It seems to me that it is not the business of novelists to solve such questions as those of God, pessimism and the like. The novelist's business is only to describe who has been speaking or thinking about God or pessimism, how and in what circumstances. . . . For writing fellows, particularly for artists, it is time to confess that one can't make anything out in this world, as once Socrates confessed and Voltaire, too. The mob thinks it knows and understands everything; and the stupider it is the wider it fancies its outlook to be. If an artist in whom the mob believes will make up his mind to declare that he understands nothing of what he sees, that in itself will be a great gain in the sphere of thought and a great step forward.
I am not a liberal, nor a conservative, nor a meliorist, nor a monk, nor an indifferentist. I should like to be a free artist and nothing more. . . . I hate falsehood and violence in all their aspects . . . Pharisaism, stupidity and arbitrariness reign not in shopkeepers' houses and prisons alone. . . . I detect them in science, in literature and in the younger generations. . . . For these reasons I nurse no particular partiality for gendarmes, or butchers, or savants, or writers, or the younger generation.
There is his skepticism.
"My Holy of Holies is the human body, health, mind, talent, inspiration, love and the most absolute freedom—freedom from violence and falsehood in whatever they may be manifested. This is the program I would follow if I were a great artist."
There is his faith.
If that is Chekhovism, I, for one, hope we are in for a long season of it.
- ↑ The Life and Letters of Anton Tchekhov. Translated by S. S. Koteliansky and Philip Tomlinson, New York, n.d.
The Letters of Tchekhov to Olga Knipper. Translated by Constance Garnett, New York, 1924.