SOURCE: Kramer, Karl D. “Short Story: The Art of Moral Revelation.” In The Chameleon and the Dream, pp. 11–27. The Hague, the Netherlands: Mouton & Co. B. V., 1970.

[In the following essay, Kramer scrutinizes the development of the short story by Chekhov and other authors, including the connection between the nineteenth century tale and the twentieth century short story.]

One of the most representative practitioners of the short story, Anton Čexov appeared at a point in the history of the genre when its fundamental qualities were undergoing refinement. Before looking at the process of Čexov's individual literary development, one needs to isolate these qualities of the genre and to indicate some of the ways in which Čexov's own refinements mark him as one of the first of modern short story writers. Like the elegiac poem, the short story is a form which shows us what a thing or person is or has been; but typically it is not concerned with showing us the process of becoming or going from. It is a literary type which has the extraordinary advantage of dispensing with time. It depicts things and beings in a state of stasis, and up to the present moment this is what it has best been able to do.

Often writers on the short story have sought its origins in Roman tales such as those of Apuleius, or at the very latest in Boccaccio's Decameron. While it is true that short works of narrative fiction have been written since Roman times, these relatively early pieces bear only the most superficial resemblances to the work done by nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers. Those who go back to Boccaccio, for instance, to seek the first great short story writer leave a great deal unexplained: where is the line of development from the fifteenth century to the nineteenth? Between Boccaccio and the modern period there had been isolated instances of short narrative fictions, such as those of Cervantes, but a tradition of such works never really became established during this four-hundred-year period.

When German, French, Russian, and American writers at the beginning of the last century began developing a tradition of such short works, they rarely turned to their purported forebear for inspiration. In a very practical sense they were making a new beginning in the short story, which was much more indebted to its bulkier companion, the eighteenth-century novel, than to Boccaccio. Viktor Šklovskij¹ has indicated a basic discontinuity between Boccaccio and the early nineteenth-century writers: the stories in The Decameron were based on previously formulated and distinctly formal plots which have circulated through the Western world for centuries, and therefore one can trace analogues for them. The interest these stories arouse and the measure of their success lie in the manipulation of the donnée—the basic framework of incidents which had been handed down; the writer's achievement depends on what he sees in the basic framework and is able to express.

One does not ordinarily seek or find analogues for the stories of Maupassant, Čexov, or Joyce. The short story writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have not as a rule taken their basic plot structures, or series of related events, from previously existing models. Ordinarily, as Šklovskij points out, the modern short story writer takes his basic material, including situation, from observed experience. This marks an extremely important break between Boccaccio and Cervantes and the modern period. The break is so basic that in effect the later writers are beginning all over again. The short story as we know it today goes back no further than the early nineteenth century. When one attempts to relate earlier work in short narrative prose to the short story of the past century and a half, he finds that the essential nature of the mode eludes him.

If one seeks the derivation of the genre, he may find considerably more fruitful connections between the lyric poem and the short story. Both the short story and the novel are products of extremely recent times. It has often been suggested that elements of the epic poem and of tragedy have found their way into the modern novel; by the same token, it might well be suggested that elements of the lyric poem have found their way into the short story. Irene Hendry, discussing specifically James Joyce's Dubliners, has noted that “… in poetry the isolated moment of revelation dates at least from Wordsworth's experiences in the presence of mountains, leech-gatherers, and the lights about Westminster Bridge”.² Although the mode of operation in the two forms is vastly different, they arrive at much the same goal. The lyric poem proceeds by way of manipulation of words, largely through images, but its shortness dictates that what it is centrally concerned with is delineating the revelations of an isolated moment in time. The short story proceeds primarily through situation and incident towards the same goal—a state of temporal stasis, in which a thing or person is defined and revealed. This similarity can be seen also through contrast: the epic poem, the tragic drama, and the novel deal with continuity, change, development, movement; the lyric poem and the short story deal with a separate moment, the revelation of a state of being; death often figures importantly in these two modes because it represents a standstill, a final halt to all movement. The longer forms can deal with past, present, and future; the shorter forms are limited to past and present, usually one or the other, and almost never deal with the future. In this connection it is interesting how often Čexov's short stories are written entirely in the present tense, as if he wished to freeze all action, to separate it from time, movement, and change; “A Dreary Story” (Skučnaja istorija) is the most obvious example.

Searching for the first appearance of something which can be identified as short story, one finds recognizable shapes at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. Some remarks by Northrup Frye, addressed primarily to the novel and the romance, are helpful in defining connections between this early work and the modern short story:

The essential difference between novel and romance lies in the conception of characterization. The romance does not attempt to create “real people” so much as stylized figures which expand into psychological archetypes. It is in the romance that we find Jung's libido, anima, and shadow reflected in the hero, heroine, and villain respectively. That is why the romance so often radiates a glow of subjective intensity that the novel lacks, and why a suggestion of allegory is constantly creeping in around its fringes. Certain elements of character are released in the romance which make it naturally a more revolutionary form than the novel. The novelist deals with personality, with character wearing the personae or social masks. He needs the framework of a stable society, and many of our best novelists have been conventional to the verge of fussiness. The romancer deals with individuality, with characters in vacuo idealized by revery, and, however conservative he may be, something nihilistic and untamable is likely to keep breaking out of his pages.³

Frye's distinctions between novel and romance are well founded; but rather curiously they resemble Frank O'Connor's attempt to distinguish between novel and short story. He claims that “the novel is bound to be a process of identification between the reader and the character. … One character at least in any novel must represent the reader in some aspect of his own conception of himself … and this process of identification invariably leads to some concept of normality and to some relationship—hostile or friendly—with society as a whole.” But in the short story, he continues, “there is this sense of outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of society, superimposed sometimes on symbolic figures whom they caricature and echo—Christ, Socrates, Moses. … As a result there is in the short story at its most characteristic something we do not often find in the novel—an intense awareness of human loneliness.”⁴ O'Connor's idea of ‘loneliness’ and Frye's of ‘individuality’ and ‘characters in vacuo idealized by revery’ very nearly coincide. In short, Frye's distinction between novel and romance seems much to the point in discussing novel versus short story. However, when he goes on to apply his own generic distinctions to the latter, he confuses essential characteristics with historical accident:

The prose romance, then, is an independent form of fiction to be distinguished from the novel and extracted from the miscellaneous heap of prose works now covered by that term. Even in the other heap known as short stories one can isolate the tale form used by Poe, which bears the same relation to the full romance that the stories of Chekhov or Katherine Mansfield do to the novel. “Pure” examples of either form are never found; there is hardly any modern romance that could not be made out to be a novel, and vice versa. The forms of prose fiction are mixed, like racial strains in human beings, not separable like the sexes.⁵

His choice of illustration for tale and short story is revealing: there is not only an obvious difference in theme, treatment, and approach in the ‘tales’ of Poe and the ‘short stories’ of Čexov and Katherine Mansfield; there is also an important time lag. It is my contention that more lines of connection between Poe and Katherine Mansfield can be established than differences. When we speak of short prose narratives, the forms are not only ‘mixed’; they indicate a steady pattern of evolution within the form.

Even the development of the terms ‘tale’ and ‘short story’ can be traced to historical usage. Throughout the nineteenth century the short story in England and America was referred to as tale. Poe's collection was called Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque; Hawthorne entitled one of his books Twice-Told Tales; there is Irving's Tales of a Traveller, Melville's The Piazza Tales, and Ambrose Bierce's Tales of Soldiers and Civilians. These writers intended no distinction between ‘tale’ and ‘short story’: the first use of the expression ‘short story’ is recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary as dating from 1898. Modern editors usually refer to the short stories of Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, rather than to their tales. Apparently the basic distinction between the two labels is simply a matter of historical usage. To associate the tale with romance and the short story with realism is an historical rather than generic division.

Much the same situation has existed in the Russian language. In Russian there are two terms which refer to short narrative prose fictions: povest' and rasskaz (roughly, ‘tale’ and ‘short story’). Today the word povest' is reserved for works somewhat longer than the rasskaz. Thus, in modern usage “The Death of Ivan Il'ič” or “Notes from Underground” would be referred to as povesti, while the term rasskaz would be reserved for such shorter works as Čexov's “Lady with the Dog” (Dama s sobačkoj) and “The Darling” (Dušečka). During the first half of the nineteenth century, however, only the term povest' was in current usage to refer to a short prose narrative. Thus, Puškin and Gogol' called their stories povesti regardless of length: Gogol's “Tale (Povest') of How Ivan Ivanovič Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovič” is considerably shorter than many pieces which Čexov wrote and called rasskazy. Puškin entitled his collection Tales (Povesti) of Ivan Belkin, though by modern standards—that is, the test of length—the Belkin series consists of rasskazy. According to Dal's Dictionary of the Russian Language, as late as 1882 the term rasskaz was not in general use to refer to a short narrative fiction.

Čexov's own attitude toward these two terms is revealing; he appears in Russian literary history during the transitional period when rasskaz was first being used to refer to a legitimate literary genre. He associates povest' not only with greater length, but also with greater formal complexity; the two qualities no doubt should go hand in hand, but unfortunately they do not always. Here is an interesting example of an historical distinction: the editor of the Soviet edition of Čexov's Complete Collected Works and Letters invariably refers to “The Duel” (Duèl') as a povest', apparently because of its length. However, Čexov calls it both povest' and rasskaz on different occasions. How does he decide which to use? It may be simply that he considered the terms interchangeable, but at least one reference to “The Duel” as rasskaz seems to indicate a real distinction: “At last I have finished my long, wearisome rasskaz …”.⁶ If it were a povest' it would be long but ‘wearisome’ would not be an adjunct to length. The length, then, does not by itself make “The Duel” a povest'; it is too long for a rasskaz, but because its length does not result in greater formal or thematic complexity it remains a rasskaz by default.

Excluding some very early pieces, the first relatively long work produced by Čexov was “The Steppe” (Step'). This was to be his debut in the thick journals of the day, an important literary event for him. Describing “The Steppe” to Korolenko, he wrote: “On your friendly advice I have begun a little povestuška …” (XIV, 11). This diminutive, derived from povest', could signify either affection or contempt. It is safe to say that the word indicates at least great modesty in regard to his undertaking, and perhaps that he expects at best barely to achieve the large form, for he goes on in the same letter to complain that he is writing so compactly that every page turns out like a little ‘rasskaz’. One suspects that Čexov tended to associate rasskaz with the kind of work he produced for the newspaper press and povest' with work of the quality demanded by the thick journals.

Ralph Matlaw maintains that Čexov “distinguished the rasskaz from the povest' according to the point of view taken in the work, subtitling first person narrations rasskazy regardless of their length (‘My Life’, ‘House with Mezzanine’)”.⁷ This is not entirely accurate, for he also referred to third person narratives as rasskazy, particularly “Three Years” (Tri goda), one of his very longest pieces from the same general period as “My Life” and “a House with The Mezzanine”. Of the stories written after 1890, he consistently called only two povesti—“Ward No. 6” (Palata No. 6) and “In the Ravine” (V ovrage). Concerning the former, he wrote: “It has plot, complication, and resolution (fabula, zavjazka i razvjazka)” (XV, 358). This would once again seem to indicate that length alone is not sufficient, that the narrative complexity associated with length is his basis for the distinction.⁸

At any rate, historically the term povest' bears the same relation to the term rasskaz as the English word ‘tale’ bears to ‘short story’. Both rasskaz and ‘short story’ acquired specifically literary meanings very late in the nineteenth century. That which had been written earlier was called tale or povest' by default, as it were, simply because no other terms were available. We shall assume that the word ‘tale’ refers to short prose narratives written during the nineteenth century—that it is to be distinguished from the short story only in this one respect.

What is more important here is to indicate the lines of connection between the nineteenth-century tale and the twentieth-century short story. The first notable practitioners of the genre belonged to the Romantic Movement or were highly indebted to its literary emphases. It is important in the history of the short story that it was achieving its first major successes during a period when the Romantic Movement held sway throughout Europe. E. T. A. Hoffmann in Germany, Poe and Hawthorne in America and Puškin and Gogol' in Russia were to varying degrees under the influence of Romanticism. Many of the characteristic features of their stories were derived from it. Perhaps the most essential of these is the dominant role of mood, atmosphere, and tone. Though part of this influence was certainly the Gothic revival, another more important aspect was the example offered by the Romantic poets. On the one hand, the mysterious, otherworldly atmospheric effects of a poet like Coleridge, and on the other, the close identification of setting with theme, as in Wordsworth's poetry, may well have led the way for the early short-story writers. It is almost always tone that holds their work together and the discovery of this ordering principle appears to have been made by the Romantics. The first analysis of the short story as a literary mode is usually attributed to Poe, whose often quoted phrase, ‘the single effect’, certainly seems relevant to the problem of tone. The principle thus discovered has endured long after the Romantic Movement ceased to dominate the literary scene. Tone is just as basic to the short story of Čexov and Katherine Mansfield as it was in the early nineteenth century, although the range of effects which can be achieved has been considerably increased.

One element of the early short story which has not persisted is the emphasis on elaborate plot construction. If one thinks of Poe and James Joyce together the differences seem far greater than the similarities. But it may well be that the plots of Poe and Hoffmann are simply part of the historical trappings which have lost their effectiveness; Poe employed suspense, the unexpected, and the violent turn of events as a means of achieving tone—a single effect in his terms. The romantic predilection for the exotic, the fantastic, and the mysterious found an outlet in these relatively elaborate plots. A mystery ordinarily involves a complex series of related events and a concept of change and development which are alien to the short story. However, the chain of events in such stories as Poe's “Fall of the House of Usher” or Puškin's “Queen of Spades” subordinates movement and change to the one dominant note, strangeness or fantasy. If one takes a sufficiently unusual chain of events, what is apt to lay hold of the reader is not so much the impression of movement and change as the note of unity emerging from the very singularity of the events. Plot in “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Queen of Spades” becomes as important a device for achieving tone as setting or character.

With the steady growth of realism as a trend in European literature writers became less interested in the mysterious and exotic. Because the elaborate suspense plot was no help at all in depicting the day-to-day existence of ordinary people, it had outworn its usefulness in the short story. The particular tone or atmosphere which the Romantics sought was no longer in vogue. As a consequence, elaborate plots were rejected in favor of the ever more bare narrative constructions of Maupassant, Čexov, Joyce, and Katherine Mansfield. Today the only types of short story in which elaborate plot still prevails are the ghost story, the tale of terror, the detective story, and science fiction, where the unusual and the mysterious are the chief attractions.

If the Romantic Movement had an impact on the evolution of the short story, it also can account for some of the differences between story and novel. Historically, the great difference between the two is the fact that the novel largely escaped the influences of the Romantic Movement. It had already established itself prior to the Romantic age, as the short story had not. Thus Lionel Trilling could say, “The novel, then, is a perpetual quest for reality, the field of its research being always the social world, the material of its analysis being always manners as the indication of the direction of man's soul.”⁹ Mr. Trilling was able to qualify his statement by adding: “… the novel as I have described it has never really established itself in America.”¹⁰ Perhaps it is possible to generalize about the function of the novel, and at the same time to ignore its development in America. However, the development of the short story in America has been so central in the mainstream of the whole genre that it is impossible to ignore it here. Trilling's generalization might well apply to the short stories of Maupassant and Čexov, but it will hold true neither for the short story in America, nor for the developments in the genre throughout Europe under the influence of Romanticism.

Thus, the short story was necessarily influenced by the historical situation at the time of its emergence on the literary scene. There remain, still, basic characteristics of the genre which lie outside the historical context. Commentators and anthologists often discuss the short story when they really wish to talk about the novel. Space limitations in anthologies make it easier to print short stories, and the commentator directs his attention to the common characteristics of both modes. To be sure, the two share many characteristics. Character, situation, plot, point of view, the discovery-complication-resolution-peripety formula, and symbolism are all exploited in the short story as well as in the novel. However, the relative importance of some of these devices varies enormously from one mode to the other: character is a much more central concern of the novelist, while tonal unity can be considerably more crucial in the short story. Nevertheless, there is no denying that this body of fictional techniques is common to both literary modes. The great insurmountable gap between them is length, and though there are many similarities between the long and short forms, the question here is how does one distinguish the short story from the novel? What are the implications of the former's shortness as to theme, structure, technique?

One implication is that technique itself assumes a more crucial role in the short story. By the sheer bulk of the novel the writer can afford passages which bear only a tenuous connection with his central themes, while each part of the short story seems magnified by the very littleness of its totality. At least two contemporary short story writers have attested to the relatively greater technical demands of their genre.¹¹ Though it does not always hold true, there have been cases of novelists who were unable to write short stories and short story writers who tried but failed to produce novels. Undeniably a great novelist, Dickens, like his English contemporaries, apparently had very little inclination towards the short story. The fact that Dickens is noted for studies of character and that Thackeray seems to have been at his best when dealing with panoramic scenes may well be signs of an anti-short-story bias in these writers: detailed characterization and panoramic description, while often major virtues in the novel, are largely superfluous in the short story. Čexov was the opposite type of writer; he often confessed to an inclination—a compulsion even—to cut off his stories at the point where development enters. Ray West, Jr. has noted that the short story “… does demand a certain conscious awareness. In any case, we can point to the fact that those authors who have excelled in the short story have all indicated a deliberate awareness of the problems of their craft: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner; those who have not had this awareness—Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, and Thomas Wolfe—are best known for their longer fiction.”¹² One might easily draw up a similar list for any other national literature. This relative lack of awareness may account for the small number of good short stories in nineteenth-century English literature. In Russia, on the other hand, nearly every major novelist can lay claim to a solid group of works in the genre, and many Russian poets, who never tried their hand at a novel, have written first-rate short stories.

Another result derived from the difference in length is that the short-story writer simply has no room for any kind of development.¹³ How, then, can he elude or exploit the restrictions imposed on him? One method has been the devices of allegory and parable, whereby the writer can telescope a great deal of human experience into an ideal situation in which the reader is more than usually willing to sacrifice his credulity for the sake of the device's charm. The short story writer has always sought means of telescoping; it is therefore not surprising that one often finds parable and allegory scattered through the works of many short-story writers; they feel a kind of kindred spirit in these devices. Čexov occasionally resorted to them, notably in “The Bet” (Pari). In his shortest pieces Tolstoj too often resorted to parable. In the main, however, allegory and parable have not proven entirely successful techniques in the short story. Particularly as realism came to dominate the literary scene in the second half of the nineteenth century, the demand for verisimilitude seemed to deny their validity.

A more fruitful solution has been the writer's ready admission and acceptance of the limitations imposed by the short story. He has tried to turn them into virtues by ignoring time or freezing it into a sudden moment of revelation in which the mode of existence of a thing or being is illuminated. Mark Schorer calls attention to a difference in kind between the short story and the novel when he observes: “If we can pin down the difference between the short story and the novellette and novel at all, it would seem to be in this distinction, that the short story is an art of moral revelation, the novel an art of moral evolution.”¹⁴ Boris Èjxenbaum calls attention to much the same distinction when he writes that the short story saves its punch until the final moment, while the end of a novel is a point of relaxation where the accumulated tensions are dispersed: “The short story is like a riddle; the novel something like a charade or rebus, in which the delight is in the doing rather than the solution of the puzzle.”¹⁵ The short story writer has very frequently seized upon the suddenness and shock effect inherent in a momentary realization of a thing's ‘whatness’, to use Joyce's term, and has made a dramatic virtue of the swiftness of the discovery. A classic instance of this is Henry James' somewhat belabored treatment of John Marcher's discovery of his fate in “The Beast in the Jungle”. Unfortunately, it loses much of its dramatic punch because James insists on extracting the last ounce of irony from the discovery. Later writers have further refined the device by underplaying their hand, as it were.

The conception of moral revelation affects the relative importance of plot, character, and setting in novel and story. For one thing, suspense plays a far more crucial role in the shorter form. One reads on to find out what will finally happen, what the actual state of affairs is, or what kind of person the central character really is. “What is going to happen?” is ordinarily a fundamental question in the novel, though not necessarily a crucial one; our interest focuses primarily on: “how or why does it happen?” Wellek and Warren have in mind this distinctive interest of the novel when they write: “To tell a story, one has to be concerned about the happening, not merely the outcome. There is or was a kind of reader who must look ahead to see how a story ‘comes out’; but one who reads only the ‘concluding chapter’ of a nineteenth-century novel would be somebody incapable of interest in story, which is process—even though process toward an end.”¹⁶ Thus, to read The Brothers Karamazov as a detective novel—simply to find out who was physically responsible for the murder—would be a bore; nine-tenths of the book would then become superfluous.

If the short story, lacking this fundamental interest in process, lays greater stress on suspense, on the ultimate revelation, then its balance of interest between plot and character also shifts. Henry James in “The Art of Fiction” addresses himself to the art of the novel when he stresses the primacy of character over plot or incident: “What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?”¹⁷ The rhetorical form of the questions seems to indicate their mutual dependence, though actually both formulations imply a subservience of plot to character. If we are speaking of the novel, this dominant interest in character is accurate, but the short story is never so consistently interested in it. At least one gifted writer in the genre, Sean O'Faolain, has pointed to the back-seat role which character must assume in the short story:

… in short story writing there can be no development of character. The most that can be done is to peel off an outer skin or mask, by means of an incident or two, in order to reveal that which is—as each writer sees this “is.” The character will not change his spots; there is no time; if he seems likely to do so in the future, the story can but glance at that future; if he seems likely to change at once, like Kolpakov in “The Chorus Girl,” we will have small reason to believe the change permanent.¹⁸

With its greater emphasis on development and change the novel is ideally suited to focus on character. The short story must reduce character to type for the most part; first, simply because there is no time for development; secondly, because its central concern with suspense dictates an interest in incident rather than character. Marvin Mudrick has produced a formulation directly opposed to James' in regard to character and incident, and he states the case for the short story better than James can when he writes: “… the shorter the work of fiction, the more likely are its characters to be simply functions and typical manifestations of a precise and inevitable sequence of events.”¹⁹ This is easy enough to see in a work like Robert Louis Stevenson's “Sire de Malétroit's Door” where our interest focuses on a series of mysteries: will Denis escape his pursuers? What is the secret of the house into which he stumbles? And finally, how will he escape from Sire de Malétroit's clutches? The answer to the final mystery hinges on the conception of character in the story. The hero, Denis, is a proud, handsome, gallant, young officer. The heroine is well-mannered, beautiful, and modest. Character is reduced completely to type, and therefore incident is not dependent on it in any meaningful sense. Our expectation is that the hero will somehow escape through his wit and valor; but the actual outcome simply substitutes another possible solution based on the types: the handsome young man marries the beautiful young lady. Stevenson employs a standard technique in the manipulation of suspense: the creation of an illusory pattern which the reader follows, thus overlooking the possibility of another equally valid resolution.

In this kind of story everything depends on the final event. In a rather more sophisticated type the interest focuses on the implications of an event—its meaning—rather than on the event itself. In Hemingway's “The Killers” we are intrigued first by the mystery: who are the killers and what do they want? However, these questions have been resolved prior to the end of the story. It is only after the mystery has been cleared up that we see the real point: a world has been revealed in which men must lie on their beds awaiting an unavoidable but arbitrary death. Once again, however, the story never focuses on the characters, Oley Anderson or Nick Adams, but rather on the nature of the world in which they play a part. The story in which loss of innocence is the main theme usually follows this pattern. Even in stories where the revelation concerns the nature of the hero the writer is restricted to the discovery of a single deviation from the pattern-type, or the discovery that there can be no deviation, as in Čexov's “The Man in a Case” (Čelovek v futljare), where the suspense hangs on the question, will Belikov marry? The resolution simply denies the question: such a type can never marry. Thus, the short story frequently places a burden on incident to the neglect of character just because it is an art of revelation and depends on the manipulation of suspense.

If we refer back to “Sire de Malétroit's Door” the importance of suspense is obvious enough, but what then are we to say of “The Killers”, which seemingly dissipates all its mysteries before the end? “The Killers” is a typical modern short story in this regard. The story which depends on revelation of event for its suspense is a limited form, but given the reader's expectation of this form, the writer is free to manipulate expectation. Upon finishing a typical modern short story one senses that he has missed the point somewhere. The end was not only unexpected, but somehow irrelevant to the questions apparently raised by the story. When this happens the writer has usually forced the reader to focus his interest on the wrong questions. This is the way Hemingway works in “The Killers”. It is only after one realizes that a shift of focus has occurred that the story can release its full impact, and the reader's own sense of discovery magnifies that impact. Another common variation on this pattern occurs in James Joyce's “Araby”. Together with the narrator the reader expects to comprehend the mystery and romance of Araby. The revelation is simply a denial of the mystery—a revelation which insinuates itself through a snatch of trivial, flirtatious conversation overheard by the narrator. Here the expectation is so nearly dissipated that the revelation may be missed completely. It is this kind of manipulation of suspense which characterizes the modern short story, and easily identifies Čexov as one of the moderns, though one suspects his manipulations are born primarily of an effort to restore a more direct connection between literature and life: the traditional story—“Sire de Malétroit's Door”, for instance—spells literary artificiality for Čexov.

An adjunct to these implications regarding the relative importance of plot and character in the short story concerns the role which time plays. Because change and growth are essentially foreign to this genre, the conception of time passing is itself largely irrelevant. As I have said previously, the short story writer can ignore the concept of time; he does this in exchange for a revelation which makes a virtue of temporal stasis. In view of these distinctions, I would like to look in some detail at one of Čexov's longer pieces “Ionyč”. This is something of a test case since although the story covers a time span of at least eight years in a man's life, it is essentially a short story because its method is revelation rather than evolution. Although externally a period of eight years is covered, it might be said that time is irrelevant to the internal life of the character depicted. “Ionyč” is divided into five sections, each presenting a variation on a single revelation: that the hero has stepped into a living death when he sets up medical practice in a provincial town. The hero, Starcev, does not actually change during the course of these eight years; rather, he becomes more completely that which he was from the very first page. Thus, the story presents the revelation of a single state.

The first section introduces the reader to a provincial town in which the chief characteristic is the absolute monotony of life. Čexov refers frequently to this one characteristic; I would suggest that there is only one state which is perfectly monotonous—death. The most interesting family in this town and the most complete personification of its flavor is the Turkins. There are suggestions everywhere in this first section that they are in fact spiritually dead. Either their actions are utterly divorced from life, or else these actions are symbolic of death; both characteristics obviously point in the same direction. Mrs. Turkin, Vera Iosifovna, writes novels which she reads to her guests at parties. On the occasion of Starcev's first visit to the Turkins she reads her latest effort: “She read of that which never happens in life …” (IX, 288). The implication is that her own experience never impinges on actuality; she is in fact outside of life. Mr. Turkin has taught one of the servants, Pava, to perform a scene which is symptomatic of the state of mind not only of the Turkins, but the entire town. “Pava took a pose, raised his hands upward and uttered in a tragic tone: ‘Die, unhappy woman!’” (IX, 290). This action is repeated again at another of Turkin's parties later in the story, and one realizes that its performance is one of Mr. Turkin's favorite amusements.

The business of the first section of the story is to show Starcev falling under the spell of the Turkins and their way of life. The revelation of Starcev's living death is summed up in fragments from two songs: as he goes to their house for the first time, he sings: “‘When I had not yet drunk the tears from the cup of life …’” (IX, 287); on his way home later that evening he hums: “‘Your voice for me so tender, so languorous …’” (IX, 290). He is innocent before he meets the Turkins, but by the end of the evening he has fallen under their deadly spell. It might be said that the rest of the story simply completes this revelation of Starcev's new identity. But the essence of the revelation is contained in the first section.

Section two is mainly concerned with Starcev's partial awareness of what has happened to him in this town. A year has passed and he has called upon the Turkins for a second time. He is attracted by their daughter, Ekaterina Ivanovna, and arranges a midnight meeting with her in the cemetery. She does not come to the meeting, and the scene in the cemetery shows the reader that Starcev realizes what he is becoming. The setting, the cemetery, is of course an obvious symbol. As he enters it, he reads a sign: “‘The hour cometh …’” (IX, 293). Alone in the cemetery, “… he imagined himself dead, buried there forever, he felt as though someone were looking at him, and for a moment he thought it was not peace and tranquility, but stifled despair, the dumb dreariness of non-existence …” (IX, 293). In desperation at the thought of all those around him who were once alive, “… he felt like shouting that he wanted, that he was waiting for, love at whatever price” (IX, 294). But he does not shout, and this is as close as he will come to resisting the kind of death which has overtaken him.

In the third section Ekaterina Ivanovna becomes aware of the revelation—she senses that Starcev has become like everyone else in the town, while she still hopes to escape. He proposes to her, but she refuses: “‘Dmitrij Ionyč, I am very grateful for the honor, I respect you, but … but I am sorry, I cannot be your wife. Let's speak seriously. Dmitrij Ionyč, you know I love art more than anything in life, I love, I worship music terribly, I have dedicated my life to it. I want to be an artist, I want honor, success, freedom, but you want me to go on living in this town, to go on with this empty, useless life that has become unendurable for me’” (IX, 296). Thus she realizes that she would condemn herself to the same life if she married him.

In the fourth section four years have passed, and Starcev sees Ekaterina again at a party given by the Turkins, at which Vera Iosifovna reads aloud from her latest novel and Pava gives the same performance described in section one. Ekaterina tells Starcev: “‘How much stouter you are! You look sunburnt and more manly, but on the whole you have changed very little’” (IX, 299). He has changed very little because, of course, the passage of time has only contributed to the process of perfecting what was almost evident from the very beginning. Starcev himself can no longer understand why he thought he loved this girl four years earlier. This is because his resistance to the revelation has completely disappeared.

Several more years have passed before the final section, which is really anticlimactic. Avram Derman has noted that Čexov indicates the passage of time and the rise in Starcev's fortunes through the laconic device of describing his changing means of transportation: in section one he has no horse; in section two he owns a pair; in the fourth he drives around in a troika with bells on it; and in the final section he has added a liveried servant.²⁰ But not only is this a cryptic means of expressing the passage of time, it also serves as a symbol of the entire theme with variations: the apparent changes are actually stages in the realization of a single state. Until the final section the reader sees the action from Starcev's point of view. But now the point of view has shifted to the outside; the reader sees the hero from the sidewalk as he passes down the street: “… one might think it was not a mortal, but some heathen deity in his chariot” (IX, 302). The explanation is obvious: the process has been completed, there is no longer a living being here; there is no longer a point of view from which to see the action. ‘Heathen deity’, with its suggestion of a being that never actually existed is an extremely apt image for Starcev at this point.

Thus, in each section of “Ionyč” the central revelation is acted out in an ever more fully realized form, and in spite of the story's lengthy time span, the notion of change and development is illusory. The story plays with suspense in two ways: the reader is first led to expect a romance between Starcev and Ekaterina, and then, as this line of development collapses, he resists the notion that Starcev cannot in any way escape his living death. The actual pattern is like that which a hammer makes while striking metal; it never changes pitch, but it may become louder and more overbearing. The ending seems irrelevant because the revelation has occurred previously, without the reader's full awareness of it. Čexov may not have been the first writer to use this device, but he is probably the first who is noted for it.

The short story writer, then, has evolved a variety of techniques for overcoming the limitations of his genre. But it is chiefly the attempt to reveal the inner essence of a thing or being, frozen, as it were, and divorced from time, change, and development, which has become the function of the short story at its most characteristic. The dramatic shock of sudden recognition has become the writer's central device for overcoming the lack of drama inherent in the genre, and the muffled ending has become a device for reinforcing its dramatic impact.

Notes

1. Viktor Šklovskij, Xudožestvennaja proza: Razmyšlenija i razbory (Moskva, 1959), p. 484.

2. Irene Hendry, “Joyce's Epiphanies”, in James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism, ed. Seon Givens (New York, 1948), p. 33.

3. Northrup Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, New Jersey, 1957), pp. 304–305.

4. Frank O'Connor, The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story (New York, 1962), pp. 17–19.

5. Northrup Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 305.

6. A. P. Čexov, Polnoe sobranie sočinenij i pisem (Moskva, 1944–51), XV, 233. All subsequent references to Čexov's work, unless otherwise indicated, will be cited by volume and page number within the text.

7. Ralph Matlaw, “Čechov and the Novel” in Anton Čechov, 1860–1960: Some Essays, ed. Thomas Eekman (Leiden, 1960), p. 149.

8. It is, of course, also entirely possible that when he uses the term povest' he has in mind simply the kind of traditional story which Puškin wrote.

9. Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (New York, 1950), p. 205.

10. Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, p. 206.

11. See Sean O'Faolain, The Short Story (New York, 1951) and Ray B. West, Jr., The Short Story in America (New York, 1952).

12. Ray B. West, Jr., The Short Story in America, p. 22.

13. It should be pointed out, of course, that length alone does not make a short story into a novel. In this sense Čexov was right in refusing to call many of his longer works anything but rasskazy. We see in the detective ‘novel’ how greater length does not in itself form a generic distinction. In spite of its greater length, it is a type which focuses on revelation rather than on an evolutionary process; the solution was there from the beginning had we only seen it.

14. The Story: A Critical Anthology, ed. Mark Schorer (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1950), p. 433.

15. B. M. Èjxenbaum, “O. Genri i teorija novelly”, Literatura: Teorija, kritika, polemika (Leningrad, 1927), p. 172.

16. René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (New York, 1956), p. 205.

17. Henry James, “The Art of Fiction”, The Future of the Novel, ed. Leon Edel (New York, 1956), pp. 15–16.

18. Sean O'Faolain, The Short Story, p. 191.

19. Marvin Mudrick, “Character and Event in Fiction”, The Yale Review, L (Winter 1961), 205.

20. Avram Derman, Tvorčeskij portret Čexova (Moskva, 1929), pp. 262–264.