SOURCE: "Chekhov's Realism," in Soviet Literature, No. 1 (442), 1985, pp. 154-60.

[In the following essay Palievsky discusses Chekhov's positive depiction of the common people, maintaining that the writer "formed an invisible link between a high ideal and the perceptions, requirements, tastes and foibles of the ordinary man. "]

Chekhov, viewed in historical perspective, gives the ideal of Russian literature a new impetus or, perhaps, considering the distinctive features of his work, one should say that he gives it new substance. In him, literature regains its primary solidity, restores and develops its sovereign mode of thought and image of life, and its objectivity is strengthened. Life (in all its fullness and through artistic imagery) comes into its own, asserting its primacy over dreams, negations, fantasies, impulses of the moment and projects no matter how wonderful they may be. Much more wonderful than all this is Chekhov's infinite truth of reality.

However, Chekhov, like other Russian classics, is inconceivable and puzzling outside the common ideal of Russian literature. Not to be aware of this in Chekhov is like failing to see the light that snatches Nikolai Gogol's exaggerated, grotesque characters out of unfathomable darkness or the underlying positive thrust of all the ideas that crowd Fyodor Dostoevsky's works.

And yet Chekhov's realist writing uncannily predisposes us for just that kind of self-deception. It is the price he has to pay for his objectivity at the first encounter with the reader. The reader's sense of being completely understood by the author creates an illusion that the writer is entirely on his, the reader's, side and sees the harsh world through his eyes. The author's sympathy is there all right, but it is only gradually that the reader becomes aware of a stern eye which is comparing man as he should and certainly could be with what he is.

Dostoevsky used to say that beauty would save the world, and he agonised in his search for beauty, not stopping at melodrama or stylised "lives of saints" in pursuit of the elusive beauty. These great outbursts of fantasy prompted by a distant ideal were accompanied by frustrations and failures. Chekhov, not retreating from life, discovered beauty in the most humdrum reality. He offered it for everyone to see, beauty that is unaware of itself but is perfectly real. All of a sudden, we become aware of beauty growing out of every chink and curbstone, no matter how crippled its form.

Tolstoy's perception of Chekhov's "Darling" as a "positive" character is highly revealing. To be sure, she was never "positive" in the sense of being a model to emulate; but there was indeed something irresistibly sympathetic about her, something profoundly genuine that had been superficially distorted by circumstances, lack of self-awareness, thoughtlessness, carelessness, etc. Tolstoy divined specific gift of Chekhov with amazing sharpness. Chekhov invests hundreds of similar characters, almost all the characters that come within his purview, with some "positive" and "beautiful" quality. This is true not only of his favourite type of an average member of the intelligentsia—doctor, officer, student, teacher, etc.—but also, in a rather odd way, in the most contrived and quaintest of his characters.

It is another question that these people prove to be un-worthy of themselves, so to say. They often failed life's tests, compromised, succumbed to circumstance, squandered their fortunes. But there was an element of beauty in every ordinary person (a crucial word for Chekhov), or rather, Chekhov revealed it for us. He made the ideal and the beautiful shine within them, and around them in ordinary life.

Chekhov advanced farther than other Russian classics in his formulation of "a fine man". He managed to discern the latent potential in the infinite variety of ordinary "souls", and he found a remarkable form for persuading us of this ideal, combining in a mysterious way the sternest of attitudes with great sympathy. The inspiring example of his own personality that shines through his every line and the unassuming but salutary beauty contained in each of his characters prove the reality of "the fine man" given a person's conscious will to become such.

The late J. B. Priestley wrote: "Other writers may have been as acutely observant as he was, others may have known his wealth of social experience, others again may have shared his broad compassion, his tenderness with all genuine suffering; but where else is all this combined with so exquisite a sense, amounting to genius, of what must be said and what can be left out, of a setting, an atmosphere, a situation, a character, all presented in the fewest possible strokes? We have then at one end of this man's personality the approach and methods of science and at the other end the most delicate antennae in Russian literature. He is lancing (for nothing) peasants' boils in the morning, planning a garden, a school, a library, in the afternoon, and writing a little masterpiece at night. And all done without dogmatism and theorising and bitterly-held ideology; all done with delicacy and gentle humour and compassion. So I say again that here was the model for a new kind of man, but the mould was broken before our blind mad century was five years old. There has only been one Anton Chekhov."

One can agree with everything said above except one thing: that the mould was broken. What we are dealing with is a historical task and not a fashion for Chekhov pincenez, like, say, a fashion for the Hemingway sweater and pipe. And it is a task that takes time to carry out. No one can say exactly how much time has been allotted. Gogol thought it would take two hundred years. But perhaps his romantic enthusiasm made him shorten the time? Chekhov's characters kept saying—almost a century after Gogol—that "life will be unimaginably beautiful in two hundred or three hundred years". The important thing is that the Chekhov phenomenon and his artistic world marked a dramatic step forward, towards the implementing of that task and convinced people that it was indeed possible. Moreover, Chekhov demonstrated that the accomplishment of the task and the time in which it can be coped with, depend on our awareness of its realistic nature, on our active and responsible attitude, in short, on ourselves: there can be no such thing as a definite, say, "two-hundred-year-long" period set before-hand.

Chekhov's recipe for the ideal man was self-perfection. He came to grips with that task earlier on in life than Tolstoy (as a schoolboy, some attest) and he proved by his life that a) such an attitude was absolutely necessary in a changing society, b) that it was a hard and often daunting task, and c) that notwithstanding all this, it was a feasible task.

The programme was all-embracing, and, most important of all, he fulfilled it. Bit by bit, Chekhov purged literature of lies: highfaluting, exalted, ingratiating, stilted, didactic, rhetorical, romantic, decadent, liberal, conservative, etc. (their name is legion). And he purified and cleaned the image to full transparency which some people in his time, and even today confuse with blandness and colourlessness ("he has no ideas"). Meanwhile he had all the ideas but they were blended together just as all colours are contained in invisible "white": the fullness and integrity of truth and the historical road of that truth. In this sense he was perhaps the only artist of his time who achieved a perfect balance, even in comparison with Tolstoy.

Echoes of other major writers found in Chekhov are often interpreted as influences that he gradually overcame. This is true, but it is only part of the truth. Chekhov learned from Turgenev, Leskov and Gogol (see for example, his story "The Steppe") and, most revealingly, from Tolstoy ("The Wager"). Far more important, though, was the fact that these were not just influences but intellectual encounters in which Chekhov probed the main ideas of Russian literature, testing their universality, like Pushkin, and offering new answers of his own. In doing so, he transferred them from "the realm of rarefied conjectures" into ordinary reality and, without rejecting them, corrected them in keeping with this infinite reality; through this process of interaction he pursued one big objective truth, the main goal of his searches. He undoubtedly put to the test "the superfluous man" by shifting him from the realm of "intellectual self-development" to ordinary life (the play, Ivanov), Shchedrin's "trifles of life"; some of the visions of Dostoevsky from whom he is traditionally considered to be very remote, as for example the type of Nikolai Stavrogin (in Ivanov and also in Dymov, a character in "The Steppe") and Smerdyakov (in Yasha, a character in The Cherry Orchard).

Chekhov determined the "historical age" (the literary critic Dmitri Urnov's expression) of the traditional recurring characters of Russian literature, traced their social consequences and in a way brought them to their logical conclusion. This is not to say that he robbed them of their universal human relevance; on the contrary, it became more transparent and evident; but the concrete human substance of these characters was manifested in such a historical form that the inner problems of almost every such type reached a tragic pitch and, as it were, demanded a change in the very mode of existence of the type, even if nothing dramatic seemed to happen on the surface and the "type" himself was unaware of all this.

Chekhov never imposed his views, and he avoided "conclusions", leaving every character with new possibilities to which they were drawn by circumstances and the general drift of the author's thought. But this yardstick was constantly present in the general historical direction of his characters' evolution. We could trace, for example, the evolution of Pushkin's Savelych (The Captain's Daughter) into Firs (The Cherry Orchard); the idea of loyalty as embodied in the latter character was deprived of all social meaning and foundation, and suddenly all the roles were switched.

Chekhov used the same yardstick to test ideas which were still on their way, the roads of the future.

And here the most interesting instance was Chekhov's attempt to travel the Gorky road—a whole decade before Gorky appeared on the literary scene.

Chekhov is the most consistent artist among the Russian classics. He argues only through his images. Obviously, he considers these to be the most convincing and at the same time non-obligatory arguments, leaving the reader the necessary freedom, which Chekhov himself is known to have valued above all. Such an approach was intended to evoke a response from the reader thereby educating him culturally.

Chekhov's modesty as an integral part of his personality had above all an aesthetic significance. Modesty of na ture—an old Shakespearian ideal—found in him the most consistent exponent among the world classics. His originality lay in the strictest adherence to this ideal. And even as he followed that road he revealed and formulated new principles of art.

"People are having dinner, just having dinner, and in the meantime their hapiness is being born or their lives are being broken." Or: "One must write simply: how Pyotr Semyonovich married Maria Ivanovna. That is all." These ideas of Chekhov's mean deliberate dissolving of "conceptual" thought in an image and the most rigid and disciplined control of thought by the reality of the image. The energy of the artist's thought, according to Chekhov, had to be fused, included in a network of relations, important and trivial, characteristic of given circumstances; the possibility of tracing the idea through all the trivia was a measure of its validity. In the world art of the 20th century, which was beginning in his lifetime, Chekhov went largely against the current, and this was probably a conscious decision in view of the experience of new writers like Ibsen whom he knew well.

It has often been noted that instead of writing a novel which, by all the canons of modern literature, a serious writer should have written (and which he seemed to have meant to write) Chekhov eventually chose drama as the vehicle for the important message he wanted to convey. The subsequent development of world art has shown that this too was a conscious decision of Chekhov's.

Without any doubt, he was aware of the demands of the new reality with its dramatically increased volume of knowledge that necessitated brevity of form, and together with Tolstoy, he set out to meet that challenge. It may be said that he met these new demands earlier than others by compressing his novel into a povest (long short story). "The Steppe," for example, is quite clearly a Bildungs-roman, a novel concerned with a person's formative years, which shows a great variety of roads stretching before Egorushka—something the critics at the time did not notice or did not want to notice. In prose, dramatic breakthroughs in this direction were being made by other people who wrote some unsurpassed masterpieces, for example, Tolstoy in his "Hadzhi Murad," which encompassed a whole epic within a story. But this was not so in stage drama where a new impetus was badly needed.

In drama, there was the biggest untapped potential for the "subtext" method pioneered by Chekhov in which what is left unsaid is often more important than what is said. The form of drama which did not allow the author to make any comment, the very conventionality of that form suited him best in order to introduce his innovations. Here again, as in everything, he did not follow the "synthetic" approach of poaching on other arts, but preferred to tap the inner potential of the genre. Chekhov extended all the elements of dramatic form, including action, in order to accommodate the underlying message. The message was often conveyed through an apparent discrepancy between elements (e.g. between words and actions or actions and content). On the other hand, this discrepancy indicated that all these elements are just external boundaries, outlines of the whole. And the whole, if it was to be expressed, needed something else, something that moved between these boundaries, something contained in the actor, his face, and inflections of his voice, in the translucent mise-en-scène reproducing life, the atmosphere.

In other words, his plays could not be acted poorly. Oddly enough, this was another specific trait of Chekhov's plays. He forced the stage director and the actor to be creative, but (and this is very important) not independently of the author, as in the avant garde theatre, not through "variant interpretations", but only in collaboration with the author in revealing the whole given in outline.

"You cannot judge a play without seeing it on the stage," said Chekhov.

He was particularly thorough and careful in getting rid of superfluous words, editing the monologues, as in the celebrated case involving Three Sisters when he cabled to an actor to replace an explanatory monologue with the words "A wife is a wife."

Whenever monologues appeared they expressed the opinion of the character and not the central idea of the play, although their vividness often led people to believe that it was the author's idea. For example, if a person proclaimed that "in two hundred or three hundred years, life on earth will be unimaginably beautiful" that, according to Chekhov, did not mean that this would really be so in three hundred years, but that the person did not wish to notice the life around him and, under various rhetorical pretexts, turned away from life or disdained it.

The main message was to be conveyed not through the words, but through a dramatic image augmented by various words.

Chekhov's principle, which he doggedly implemented, was that words are nothing but an empty husk without the people who utter them and who invest them with important meanings. Of course, he needed a new theatre to prove that idea, a theatre that could be called an "art" theatre in the true meaning of the word. And such a theatre was created.

Chekhov, for the first time since Pushkin, formed an invisible link between a high ideal and the perceptions, requirements, tastes and foibles of the ordinary man. Chekhov's words, "we all are the people" was no trite remark, but an expression of a well-thought-out historical programme which he pursued in his art and his life, never straying from his chosen path.