the story will be completely understandable. And in general, you shouldn't have anything that is superfluous. You have to discard mercilessly everything that is not directly related to the story. If, in the first chapter, you say that a rifle is hanging on the wall, then it absolutely must be fired in the second or third chapter. If it is not going to be fired, then it ought not to be hanging there.”³

Instructions of this sort are rarely absent in letters to authors who had sent him their works. He was no less merciless in his own personal creative practice, and his severity steadily increased as time went by. If in Čexov's earlier works one could still find ‘beginnings’ in the spirit of traditional poetics, with some specific traces of an ‘introduction’—they later disappear without a trace, and Čexov begins the story either with one (literally!) sentence introducing the very essence of the narration, or else he manages even without this. As an example of the first sort, we shall refer to “Ariadna”.

On the deck of a steamer travelling from Odessa to Sevastopol a rather handsome gentleman with a little round beard came up to me to ask for a light, and he said …

This is a bit more than the whole introduction: the note about the gentleman's appearance, strictly speaking, already belongs to the corpus of the narrative because this gentleman, being the narrator, is, at the same time, an important protagonist. Everything further is already the corpus of the work, the narrative itself. Too, it is impossible to remain silent about yet another fact. Evidently sensing some sort of unnaturalness in such a ‘beginning’ where a man goes up to someone he does not know to ask for a light and without any apparent reason relates to him a long, complicated and intimate story, Čexov took care to render this device harmless. Having allowed the narrator to speak a bit at first not on the main theme but on a closely related subject, the author observes: “It … was clear that he was somewhat upset and that he would rather talk about himself than about women, and that I would not escape without hearing some long story in the nature of a confession” (IX, 63).

Such a story, of course, follows later. There is, however, a second shock-absorber against artificiality: once he has begun the story, the narrator, that is, the gentleman with the little round beard, soon turns to the listener-author: “I'm sorry, but I must ask you again: is this boring you?”

“I told him that it was not at all boring, and he continued”, this time, we might add, uninterrupted by the author to the very end of the story.

As has already been mentioned, Čexov did not remain at this level in his battle with ‘introductions’, but began to get along entirely without them. Take, for example, the beginning of his long story, “My Life”.

The manager said to me: “I am keeping you on only out of respect for your esteemed father; otherwise you would have been fired long ago”.

(IX, 104)

Here there is absolutely nothing of the traditional ‘beginning’, ‘introduction’, etc. It is a characteristic segment of the life of the main hero, the first of a great many similar elements from which the life of the hero as a whole is formed and whose story is therefore called “My Life”.

In all probability, the dominant characteristic of his early work—always short stories—was the cause of the author's persistent concentration for many years on the improvement of literary devices directed towards condensing the ‘beginning of the plot’ as much as possible, because there was simply no room for it in the outlets in which he was published—newspapers and humor magazines. Having mastered the art of a short introduction, Čexov valued this achievement, became its principal supporter, and remained faithful to it even after every limitation on his work had been lifted.

2

Apropos of the second structural element, that is, the development of the theme, it must be said that here Čexov's persistent demand for compactness stands out very sharply, as is quite understandable: at this stage the author must most often be on guard against the dangers of extending the description and making it too detailed, and of allowing repetitions and superfluous comments. It is quite natural that it was to this stage that Čexov's inventiveness in the art of condensing the narration was directed. It would not be out of place to illustrate the laconism of his compositional devices here. The peculiarities of these devices are most spectacular in those instances where the author confronted the problem of chronologically depicting a process extending over a period of years. For the sake of illustration let us take an example:

It is necessary that the life of Starcev, the hero of the story “Ionyč”, pass before the reader. At first he is presented as a young country doctor—a fresh, naive, trusting person with a romantic personality. Then he slowly begins to lose his color; he turns grey and sinks into the mire of a dull Philistine life. The spirit of greedy and senseless money-grubbing seizes him; he finally loses the image and likeness of a human being and even is given a specifically Philistine nickname: “Ionyč”. This entire slow lifelong dying of a man's humanity had to be shown on the background of a colorless, dull, pitiful, Philistine environment which drags everyone imperiously into its own morass.

This entire extended multiphased process which by its own nature would seem to demand a great accumulation of large and small characteristics is realized in a few short pages with a truly commanding persuasiveness!

One can say that the main literary device which Čexov uses here is the arrangement of signposts along the path of Doctor Starcev's life, between which the writer leaves a broad space which the reader may fill in as part of his creative cooperation in the work.

These signposts follow various lines which often intersect: signposts along the path of the doctor's career; signposts along the path of the evolution of his tastes; signposts along the development and fate of his romance; signposts along the path of the lives of those individuals who form his milieu, etc.

Here are the signposts which signify the success of Starcev's career:

(1) Starcev went to town to enjoy himself a bit and to make some purchases. He walked at a leisurely pace (he did not yet own any horses) and all the while he sang:

“When I had yet to drink

Tears from the cup of life”.

(IX, 287)⁴

A little more than a year passes. How the hero spent this time is not mentioned, but it is stated almost in passing that:

(2) He already owned a pair of horses and had a coachman named Pantelejmon in a velvet waistcoat.

(293)

Another four years pass, and there is a new, third signpost along the path of Starcev's career.

(3) Starcev already had a large practice in the city. Every morning he hurriedly received his patients at Dyalizh, and then he left to make house calls in the city. Now he drove not with a pair of horses, but with a troika with bells …

(297)

A few years later we see the final phase of Starcev's transformation marked by the last signpost:

(4) Starcev has grown even stouter, he breathes heavily and now walks with his head thrown back. When he rides in the troika with bells, fat and red in the face, and Pantelejmon, also fat and red in the face with his thick beefy neck, sits on the box, extending his arms stiffly in front of himself as if they were made of wood, and shouts to those he meets “Keep to the r-r-right!” It is an impressive picture, and it seems that it is not a mortal being driven, but a pagan god.

(IX, 302)

In this way the detailed depiction of the growth of Dr. Starcev's material success and the simultaneous destruction of his moral and spiritual being was replaced by Čexov with a step by step view of his ‘mode of transportation’. One could not, however, complain of an insufficient expressivity in the sum total of the portrait of Dr. Starcev as received by the reader.

But in other instances Čexov found it possible to manage even without such signposts! Take for example the description in “Ariadna” of Šamoxin's love for the heroine after he gained her affections and when, as he put it, his love “entered into its final phase, its waning phase”.

I became her lover (says Šamoxin). At least for about a month I was crazy, feeling only delight. To embrace her young, beautiful body, to take one's pleasure of it, to feel each time upon waking her warmth and to remember that she is here, she, my Ariadna—oh, one cannot get used to this very easily!

(IX, 79)

It would seem that all of this was intentionally thought up to prepare the reader for a vivid story of the flowering of this passionate, intoxicated love, with the various shades of its further development.

No, the reader does not get a single line of this story! The words “one cannot get used to this very easily!” are followed immediately by “but nevertheless I did get used to it and gradually began to relate sensibly to my new situation” (IX, 79).

3

Of the three classical elements of structure—the beginning of the plot, the development of the plot, and the finale—it seems that Čexov was most concerned with the finale. Evidently the popular saying “The end crowns the matter”⁵ was for him a living experience in the process of his work. It is not without good reason that in his statements on matters of structure, considerations about the finale occupy the foremost place. The sharp changes in Čexov's poetics over the course of years are observable best of all in his finales: both the theory and practice of the writer's early years not only differ from those of his later period, but they are often in direct contrast.

Čexov's statements regarding his work on finales are characterized by their complete decisiveness. One of them which became quite popular, thanks to its unique aphoretical expressiveness, is particularly valuable in that it refers to the structure of both his short stories and his plays. When he finished working on Ivanov, Čexov wrote the following in a letter to his brother Aleksandr:

I was writing a play for the first time, ergo, mistakes are unavoidable. The sujet is complicated and not at all foolish. I end every act as I do short stories: I carry each act calmly and quietly, but in the end I give the playgoer a slap in the face.

(XIII, 372)

Čexov did not attempt to explain further what he had in mind with such an energetic formula, so it follows that he was certain that the addressee would not err on that account. And so it was: in 1887, when Čexov wrote that letter, the characteristic feature of the finales of his short stories was tangibly clear: it was the surprise effect.

Here there is a situation deserving attention, but one which, however, is not immediately evident. We will recall that a surprise effect in a finale is strongly associated in our mind with the humorous stories of Čexov's early period as, for example, “The Orator”, who makes the mistake of extolling in his panegyric not the deceased, but rather a living person who happens to be present at the funeral; “A Horse Name” which turns out to be only indirectly related to horses; “Failure” where the groom, taken by surprise, is blessed with a portrait of Lažečnikov [I. I. Lažečnikov (1792–1869)—a writer known for his historical novels] instead of an icon; “The Drama” where the writer uses a heavy paper weight to kill the lady driving him insane with a reading of her drama, and so on ad infinitum.

What emerges from Čexov's letter is that he deliberately applies this same literary device of an ending in his sombre drama! Moreover, in the letter, where he gives his brother only the most schematic idea of a literary genre which was new to him, he attempts to emphasize that fact: it turns out that he uses the same device for a dramatic work as for a humorous work.

It is certainly wrong to be surprised by this. In fact our erroneous impression can be explained by the fact that in Čexov's early work there is a predominance of humor which is strengthened further in our mind in that we remember this sort of thing better. The effective surprise endings of the non-humorous genres do not play a lesser role in Čexov's early works than they do in his humorous works. We recall such stories as “In Court” with its sudden assault on the reader's nerves in the finale where it comes to light that the defendant accused of murdering his wife is escorted by his son. Or the short story “The Beggar” in which he depicts the self-satisfied Pharisee of a lawyer, who believes that his own cliche admonitions have brought about the reeducation of Luškov, a drunkard and beggar, but who discovers that it was not his own doing but that of Ol'ga, the cook, who railed at him but in her heart wept over him and in his stead did the work which Skvorcev had given him to do as a repayment. We might also recall two other early short stories by Čexov: “Without Title” and “The Bet” which stand apart in his literary legacy by their philosophical character, which is reflected both in style and theme. In the former story we hear of the abbot of a monastery which was isolated from the sinful world. One day, having visited the city, he related to the brethren how the life of the city dweller passes in the depths of sin and temptation, and how great the power of the devil is there. And then comes the ending: “When he left his cell next morning, not a single monk remained in the monastery. They had all rushed to the city” (VII, 11).

In the second story, a young lawyer bets a banker two million rubles that he will voluntarily remain in prison fifteen years; but then, having won the bet for all intents and purposes, he loses it deliberately by escaping from prison, and leaves a note which ends with the following remarks: “To show you my contempt for what you live by, I am abandoning the two million which I once dreamt of as paradise, but which I now scorn. To deprive myself of any claim to this money, I am leaving this place five hours before the agreed-upon time and thereby shall lose the bet …” (VII, 209).

It is clear that in both of these two philosophical stories the entire structure is bound up in its ‘surprise’ ending. In particular, regarding “Without Title” (which in its first version was called “An Eastern Tale”), Polonskij [Y. P. Polonskij (1819–1898), Russian poet and editor] wrote to Čexov immediately after reading the story: “The ending is not merely unexpected, but it is also significant”. He was correct in this. In the more dramatic and perfect stories of the early Čexov, we do not notice, however, that the denouement contains an element of surprise. The reason for this is that we usually associate surprise with amusing, funny, humorous stories; and when there is no laughter, we get the impression that there is no surprise. But, isn't the denouement of “Van'ka”—the naive address on his letter to his grandfather—a typical final surprise? And isn't the denouement of “To Sleep, Sleep … !” also a surprise? And don't we feel something of sudden tragic enlightenment when, in “Anguish”, the cabman Iona turns with his tale of deep sorrow to his horse, the only, patient listener? And isn't the same thing true both in the author's intention and in our understanding: “I give the reader a slap in the face”?

It is necessary to take all of this into very careful consideration in order to evaluate correctly the abruptness of the change which later took place both in Čexov's opinions about finales and in his creative practice. Only two years pass after he utters the aphorism regarding the ending of Ivanov, and he writes the following to Pleščeev in a letter about “A Dreary Story”:

A narrative story, like the stage, has its own characteristics. Thus, my feeling tells me that in the ending of a short novel of a story I ought to deliberately concentrate in the reader the feeling of the entire story, and to do this I must mention briefly in passing those people about whom I spoke earlier.

(XIV, 407)

Three years later, Čexov writes the following in a letter to Suvorin:

I have an interesting sujet for a comedy, but still lack an ending. Whoever discovers new endings for plays will open up a new era. These damn endings do not come easy to me! Either the hero gets married or shoots himself—there is no other way out of it.

(XV, 388)

An exceptionally interesting situation! Čexov already recognizes the necessity for a departure from the traditional ‘denouement’, from the surprise effect (“he shoots himself”), that is, from the notorious “in the face”, but in practice he still uses that very sort of denouement. However, he finally comes out the victor in this battle with tradition: even for a work of drama, where “he gets married or shoots himself” seemed somehow unavoidable to him, he creates a finale without either one: we are thinking about The Cherry Orchard. In his short novels as well as his stories, Čexov succeeds not only in creating and elaborating, but also in strengthening the poetics of an ending without a ‘denouement’. Was it conceivable before Čexov that a story in which the ‘heroine’ had gone through several love affairs would end as in “The Darling”?

She lies down and thinks about Saša, who is sleeping soundly in the next room. From time to time he mutters in his sleep: “I'll show you. Get out of here! Don't fight!”

(IX, 327)

In the very nature of the finale there is a threatening danger for a writer, a danger which in spite of its relative variety—elevated and rhetorical, a bit sugary, spectacular, etc.—finally amounts to one thing: the danger of unoriginal ‘rounding’. Čexov used his own characteristic devices to do battle with this danger. One such device comes forward with special clarity in “A Case from a Doctor's Practice”. A doctor comes to a sick woman who owns a factory, and is seized by an oppressive mood replete with strong social feeling. He leaves early in the morning.

The singing of skylarks and the ringing of church bells was in the air. The windows in the factory buildings gleamed happily and on his way out of the yard and then down the road to the station, Korolev no longer thought about the workers, the pile dwellings, or the devil; rather he thought about the time, perhaps even in the near future, when life would be as bright and joyful as this quiet Sunday morning.

(IX, 314)

It would seem that as far as logic, psychology, and even rhythm are concerned, one might put a period here: everything is said and a typical ‘ending’ is made. But here the whole point is that the ending is ‘typical’, is reminiscent of a curtain falling, is rounded in an elevated style, and using a semicolon instead of a period, Čexov adds, clearly adds two unpretentious ‘lowering’ lines: “and he thought of how pleasant this was to ride on a spring morning in a fine troika and how pleasant it was to warm oneself in the sunshine”.

4

We have a classic example of a Čexovian finale characteristic of the highest level of his creativity in “The Lady with the Little Dog”—one of Čexov's masterpieces.

We have before our eyes a description of the story's two protagonists in one of the stolen moments of bitter ‘happiness’ which seldom fell to their lot.

He went up to her and took her by the shoulders to caress her and say something cheerful, and at that moment he caught sight of himself in the mirror.

His hair was already beginning to turn grey … The shoulders on which his hands lay were warm and trembling. He felt compassion for this life which was still warm and beautiful, but probably already near the time when it would begin to fade and wither, like his own life had … And only now, when his head became grey, did he come to love well, in a genuine way—for the first time in his life.

Anna Sergeevna and he loved each other like people very close, and akin, like man and wife, like tender friends; it seemed to them that fate itself had destined them for each other, and they could not understand why each was married to someone else. They were like two birds of passage, male and female, snared and forced to live in separate cages. They had forgiven each other for everything that they were ashamed of in the past, they forgave everything in the present and felt that their love had changed them both.

Formerly in moments of depression he comforted himself with any argument that came to his mind, but now he did not care any more for arguments, but rather felt profound compassion, he wanted to be sincere and tender …

“Don't cry any more, my darling”, he was saying. “You have cried enough, it is over now … Let's have a talk, we will come up with something.”

Then they talked for a long time consulting each other and spoke of how they might free themselves of the necessity for hiding, deceiving, and living in different cities while not seeing each other for long periods. How to free themselves from such unbearable fetters?

“How? How?” he asked, clutching his head. “How?”

And it seemed that in just a short while the solution would be found, and then a new, wonderful life would begin; and it was clear to both of them that the end was still far off and that the most complicated and difficult part was only just beginning.

(IX, 370–71)

This ending deserves very close attention. Here, with direct, exact words, the very thing which is the real essence of Čexov's finales in almost all the works of his mature stage of creativity, is distinctly pronounced ‘aloud’ the thing which he expressed elsewhere not so openly, sometimes only in an allusion.

Even if it is accidental, with no deliberate intention on the part of the author, that the quoted ‘end’ of “The Lady with the Little Dog” ends with the word ‘beginning’, it does not keep us from seeing that the same word could have been used in the finales of “The Duel”, “The House with the Mezzanine”, “The Betrothed”, “My Life”, “An Unknown Man's Story”, and many other stories, which are still read with deep interest in spite of the fact that ‘the particular situations’ from which they were created have almost completely disappeared into the past. These endings of Čexov's stories announce that in the life process depicted by the author a certain stage was completed—and only that. The process continues, a new phase begins which is more important than the one depicted, but it is the reader himself who must create it: Čexov places his courageous hopes on the creative cooperation of the reader, for whom he nonetheless has created all the necessary prerequisites for successful understanding.

In his excellent article “Čexovian Finales”, the late A. G. Gornfel'd,⁶ the well known scholar-critic whom Gor'kij held in high esteem, turned his attention to a peculiar feature of the finale in many Čexov stories: the author breaks with his hero at the moment when the hero falls to thinking, becomes absorbed in thought after experiencing the events described. This, of course, is not a chance repetition of a device. The thoughts and reflections of the hero are a projection of the presumed thoughts of the reader. They are the sort of thing which comprise the goal of the author's efforts. It is natural that the most intensive work in the reader's mind be directed towards the crowning of the work, toward the completion of the work when all the images and events before the reader's eyes which constitute the segment of life portrayed have passed. Hence the attention Čexov gave specifically to the finale. But if in his early years he concentrated in the latter all his resources to get an effect, in the most part for the emotional saturation of the reader's reaction, then in later years, while not ignoring this aspect of the matter, he nevertheless shifted the center of gravity towards arousing in the reader the deepest possible mental activity.

And so, turning attention to Čexov's prose beginning with 1894, that is, in the last decade of his life, we find the following in the finales:

In “Woman's World”:

She (Anna Akimovna, the heroine) now was thinking that were it possible to draw a picture of the long day which she had just lived through, then everything that was bad and vulgar … would have been true, while her dreams … would have stood out from the whole … like something false or exaggerated.

(VIII, 333)

In “Rothschild's Violin” Bronza, the principal hero, reflects bitterly and resentfully just before his death:

Why is it that in this world there is such a strange order of things that life, which is given to man only once, passes without profit?

(VIII, 343)

A student (in the story of the same name)

was thinking that truth and beauty … evidently always constituted the most important things in human life.

(VIII, 348)

In “A Case from a Doctor's Practice” Doctor Korolev, returning to the city early in the morning from a call to a patient

thought about the time, perhaps even in the near future, when life would be as bright and joyful as this quiet Sunday morning.

(IX, 314)

In “The New Dacha” the peasants think about their absurd relationship with the owners of the dacha:

What kind of fog is it which shrouded their eyes from what mattered most?

(IX, 341)

This enumeration of Čexov's works where the principal hero falls to thinking in the finale, trying to comprehend all that he has undergone, could be continued up to the very end of Čexov's writings, including his swan song, “The Betrothed”, at the end of which we read:

She went into Saša's room and stood there for a moment. “Farewell, dear Saša!” she thought, and her new life, broad and spacious, was pictured before her, and this life, still obscure, full of mystery, attracted her and beckoned to her.

(IX, 450)

Out of all of these leitmotifs of finales, we will distinguish only one which is particularly remarkable. In the short story “On Official Duty”, Inspector Lyžin, under the influence of what he has undergone, surrenders to his customary thoughts about the connection of his personal life with the general order of things. Significant is the ‘addition’ to these customary thoughts, engendered by the picture of harsh social contradictions raised before the eyes of Lyžin, who started to feel his responsibility—keenly—to the victims of this general process.

He felt that this suicide and the peasant's misery lay on his conscience too; to tolerate the idea that these people, resigned to their lot, take upon themselves the heaviest and darkest burden in life—how terrible this was! To tolerate this, and to wish for oneself a bright, active life among happy, satisfied people and to dream constantly of such a life—would mean to dream of new suicides of people crushed by work and weariness. …

(IX, 355)

Regarding the sharpness and revelatory character of the given train of thought, the author interrupts at that moment:

Such were Lyžin's thoughts, and such thoughts had long existed hidden within him, and only now were they displayed so broadly and clearly in his consciousness.

(IX, 354)

It is in these words that we find the key to Čexov's finales as extremely important structural elements! He does not attempt to startle his reader or uncover before him some exotic, unusual area of life. Just the opposite: he attempts to take out of the shadows and put into light ‘old’ but ‘hidden’ thought, to direct it towards what is most familiar and constantly before the reader's eyes, to open his eyes even wider, to compel him to look more deeply into the depths of life, to help him to perceive this life which is taken for granted “broadly and clearly”, to begin to think.

Notes

1. [From: A. Derman, O Masterstve Čexova (Moskva, Sovetskij pisatel', 1959). Chapter IV, pp. 74–88.]

2. [Zavjazka—that point in the sujet where the plot actually begins to unfold; sometimes called the ‘complication’.]

3. S. Ščukin, “Iz vospominanij ob A. P. Čexove”, Russkaja mysl' (1911), 10, p. 44.

4. [Numerals in parentheses in this essay refer to the volume and page number in Čexov's Polnoe sobranie sočinenij i pisem (Moskva, Goslitizdat, 1944–1951).]

5. [Equivalent to the Latin finis coronat opus, not ‘the end justifies the means’.]

6. Krasnaja nov' (1939), 8–9.