SOURCE: Grossman, Leonid. “The Naturalism of Chekhov.” In Chekhov, A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Robert Louis Jackson, pp. 32–48. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1967.

“In Goethe the naturalist got along wonderfully with the poet,” Chekhov wrote in one of his letters. And did he not in this brief sentence express with his usual compactness his view of the perfect artist while at the same time he neatly characterized his own art?

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In Chekhov, as in Goethe, the poet wonderfully harmonized with the naturalist. His medical training and practice unquestionably played a decisive role in his creative work. They laid guidelines for his artistic method, introduced to him extraordinarily rich, living material for literary processing, structured his world view, deepened and to a great extent clarified his philosophy of life. It is no wonder that he took such pride in his medical profession, repeatedly called medicine his legal wife, and often turned from literature to the practical work of the physician. …

The impact of medical school appears first of all in his working methods. We are not surprised that he speaks with such reverence of those to whom God gave the rare gift of thinking scientifically. In his letters he expresses delight over a literary article because it is written in the matter-of-fact style of a report, because it interprets elementary things coldly and simply and, like a good textbook, tries to be precise. As a diligent intern would, he likes to individualize each separate case in every description, carefully to examine all its little details and bring to light all its particularities and peculiarities. … Scientific precision in poetic creation was for him an indispensable element. Goethe was not the only person in whom he discovered his favorite type of poet-naturalist. He praises Paul Bourget—perhaps excessively—because he was so thoroughly familiar with the methods of the natural sciences; and he castigates Edouard Rod for renouncing naturalism. He repeatedly comments in his own work upon the advantage of medical school training.

“As a doctor I feel that I correctly diagnosed the psychic ailment according to all the rules of the science of psychiatry,” he writes in connection with “An Attack of Nerves” (1888). An exacting artist, positively obsessed by a mania for the concise, he decides to insert like a wedge a special scientific conversation into the story in order to give it greater verisimilitude. “I am a physician,” he writes in answer to reproaches, “and for this reason—if I am not to be shamed—I must provide motivation for incidents related to medicine in my stories.” Chekhov takes it as the highest praise when women confirm the correctness of his description of childbirth in “The Nameday Party” (1888). “You know, it's not so bad to be a physician and to understand what it is you are writing about.” And even in letters to young writers, as he indulgently and gently examines their purely artistic shortcomings, Chekhov mercilessly chides them for the slightest defect in medical matters in their stories. “Leave it to us, the doctors, the physicians, to depict cripples and black monks,” he writes in one letter. “You have not seen corpses,” he notes with reproach in another.

Chekhov makes the same demands upon his great teacher, Tolstoy. He is “full of admiration for ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’ from an artistic point of view.” But as for the medical side of the story, he indicts the author as an “ignorant man who has not troubled in the course of his long life to read two or three books written by specialists.” He is carried away by War and Peace, but he does not let pass the opportunity to note here, too, the possibility of the same type of defect. At the first occasion the physician awakes in the delighted reader, and with his skepticism spoils all aesthetic pleasure. “It is strange to read that the wound of the prince, a rich man who spent days and nights with a doctor and enjoyed the care of Natasha and Sonya, gave off a smell of putrefaction. If I had been around Prince Andrei, I would have cured him,” the medical expert calmly concludes in the wake of the aesthetic response of the literary critic.

The school of Darwin and Claude Bernard planted strictly materialistic principles in the methodology of Chekhov's literary work.¹ He carries them over even into his mystical searches with amazing consistency. He demands of the enemies of positivism that they point out to him in the heavens an incorporeal God that he can see, and in the middle of the 1890s he predicts with joyous hope that Russian society will once again take up the natural sciences. Like a faithful pupil of Bazarov in Fathers and Sons, he calls the 1860s a sacred time, and affirms that thinking people can find truth only where microscopes, probes, and scalpels are useful. …

Medical practice brought home to Chekhov with remarkable fullness the horror of life, the cruelty of nature, and the impotence of man. Incidents from his medical practice found in his stories and letters create such a painful picture of life's absurdity that they are enough in themselves to make a pessimist of the observer. … Chekhov saw man first of all as a sick animal, and from then on, he looked at the world with a deep and at times even scornful sadness; from then on, despair shrouded all his dreams of a future golden age. Here and there in his letters you find the Shakespearean image of the wounded deer that suffers so horribly:

The wretched animal heav'd forth such groans
That their discharge did stretch his leathern coat
Almost to bursting, and the big round tears
Cours'd one another down his innocent nose
In piteous chase …

(As You Like It)

This image of a hunted animal merges in Chekhov's consciousness with the spectacle of a half-crushed human being to which he is so accustomed. It is worth rereading in his letters the story of the spring migration in Melikhovo when Isaac Levitan shot down a young woodcock, and Chekhov had to finish him off with a rifle butt; Chekhov's usual identification of man with a wounded animal is strikingly evident here. In this slight tale of a beautiful and enchanting bird, senselessly crushed by indifferent murderers—by a famous painter and a famous writer—the author of The Seagull makes his usual reflection on blind cruelty in the fate of all living creatures. The wounded woodcock with its bloodied wing and madly astonished eyes rose before him as an eternally sad symbol of human fate. The heroes of his stories unambiguously draw these philosophical parallels. “When I lie in the grass,” one of them says, “and spend a long time watching an insect that was born just yesterday and understands nothing, it seems to me that its life consists of nothing but horror, and I see myself in it.”

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One of Chekhov's heroes (in “An Attack of Nerves”), who like the author has a delicate sensitivity to the pain of others, lands in a place where there is the most intense suffering, shame, and humiliation of the free human personality. But he does not pity either the tortured prostitutes or the musicians or the lackeys. “All of them resemble animals more than they do people,” concludes this fanatical lover of humanity. And while a complex protest wells up in him, he continues to distinguish in every woman the insolent, obtuse, or abased animal.

It is not only prostitutes who are seen in this light. Among the sensitive idealists of Chekhov's world who speak glowingly about women, one meets cold philosophers who frankly declare that in our times the urban woman of the intelligentsia is returning to her primitive condition and has already been half transformed into an animal. “Little by little woman is disappearing and her place is being taken by the female,” says Shamokhin (“Ariadne,” 1895). And even Gurov (“The Lady with the Pet Dog,” 1899), capable of generous and deep feeling, recalls with hate those beautiful frigid women with rapacious, venal expressions passing across their faces. “And the lace on their lingerie seemed to him to resemble scales.”

These women-sirens are not only to be found in urban situations. Chekhov notes the very same serpentine attributes in the village beauty, Aksinya (“In the Ravine,” 1900). Like a reptile emerging from fresh rye she looks at those about her and, at the right moment, strikes at them like a snake with her poisonous fangs.

At the very best, woman resembles a wounded bird gazing with silent amazement at the cruel tortures of life. Nina Zarechnaya (The Seagull, 1896) is a wounded seagull; Maria Dolzhikova (“My Life,” 1896) a lonely, homeless wanderer, a green parrot who has flown out of the cage and now flutters about lazily from garden to garden; Anna Sergeevna (“The Lady with the Pet Dog”) a charming bird that has been snared, a female separated from its mate. Even the best human features—suffering, anguish, hopelessness—evoke first of all in this keen poet of spiritual misfortune the usual zoological parallels of the naturalist. Even the meek and enraptured girl reverently following the work of a man she loves, the charming and clever Vera Lyadovskaya, recalls to Chekhov a sick animal warming itself in the sun.

Nothing much can be said of the men here, of course. A nice worldly man produces the unpleasant impression of some kind of crab; an unhappy schoolboy just before committing suicide is represented as a pitiful and disgusting duckling; a lonely, embittered old man, a huge toad.

The heroes see themselves as worn-out beasts. “They caress me in this house the way one would a sick, unhappy dog who has been driven away by his master,” reflects Poloznev (“My Life”). And to Yakov Ivanovich (“The Murder,” 1895) life seems terrible, insane, and as cheerless as it seems to a dog. When he wanders about at night in the snow, lashed by a cruel wind, it seems to him that it is not he, but some kind of beast that is walking, “a huge, fearful beast and that, if he should cry out, his voice would sound with a roar across the fields and forests and frighten everybody.”

“In what way are they better than animals?” the hero of “My Life” asks about his fellow citizens. And all his reflections on people are haunted by recollections of tortured dogs who have been driven mad, of live sparrows plucked bare by little boys and then tossed into the water.

“Man is still the most predatory and most unclean animal,” remarks even his beloved artist in “The House with a Mezzanine” (1896), summing up in this brief remark all of Chekhov's tremendous work:

The cold observations of the mind
The bitter insights of the heart.(2)

Of course, a man needed great strength of creative love not to despair in this huge menagerie of reality and to maintain inviolable in it all the liberating dreams of snowy white cherry orchards.

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The range of Chekhov's reading was unusually extensive: novels and dramas side by side with reference books and medical almanacs, ancient literature with modern, foreign writers with Russian. But in this broad literary school the French moderns play almost the dominating role. It is significant, therefore, that Chekhov's old professor has a special liking for French books whose authors invariably have a strong feeling for personal freedom.

According to Ivan Bunin, Chekhov took particular pleasure in Maupassant, Flaubert, and Tolstoy. These three writers, along with Zola, must be recognized as his principal teachers. Chekhov was a convinced adherent of modern French naturalism. His first teacher, Darwin, had prepared him for the literary theories of Zola.

Darwin without doubt played a major role in the education of Chekhov's talent by helping him work out precise literary methods and a strict materialistic world view; he developed in Chekhov the ability to distinguish the animal element in man. The teacher of Chekhov the doctor must to a certain extent be considered also the educator of Chekhov the writer. Chekhov's early letters give evidence of a strong interest in Darwin. “I'm frightfully fond of his methods,” he writes to his brother. “I am reading Darwin,” he notes three years later, “what a wealth of material! I am terribly fond of him.” And in some of his later letters he defends the English naturalist from attacks in the press. … Darwin … introduced one of the main planks into Chekhov's joyless philosophy with his basic theory of the animal origins of man. Chekhov's constant habit of seeing maimed birds or wounded animals in his heroes may be explained in part by a Darwinian element in his world view. …

It is interesting to note that just at the time of Chekhov's literary debut, the journal Vestnik Evropy was publishing Zola's articles on the experimental novel. These manifestos of naturalism led to the broad dissemination in Russian society—a society always inclined toward a positivistic world view—of ideas about a scientific literature, about writer-physiologists, about the death of metaphysical man and the triumphant dominion of observation and experiment in art. The name of Zola gained a popularity among us that continued to grow until his very death.

Zola, too, occupies a prominent place in the literary schooling of Chekhov. His correspondence indicates that he never ceased to follow Zola's new work. He considers Le Docteur Pascal a very good novel and devotes whole pages to an analysis of it in his letters. He regards Thérèse Raquin as a fairly good play and even recommends to Suvorin that Zola be produced in his theater. Lourdes is mentioned in his letters and Nana several times.

Chekhov's strong attraction to Zola is understandable. A naturalist by education, a poet by temperament, a novelist by profession, Zola is a remarkable unity of those spiritual elements which, in Chekhov's view, go to make up the perfect writer. The demand that scientific method be applied to literature, the systematic introduction of physiology into the novel, the whole complex of precise methods of observation, of detailed reports about life, of abundant gathering of the infinitesimal facts of reality—the experimental method was just as congenial to Chekhov the writer as was the whole humanitarian utopianism of Zola: his dreams of how in the future happiness would replace the cheerless present for mankind.

We may exclude from the field of our comparison those differences of artistic temperament which determine the special character of literary form: Zola's need for grandiose frescoes and Chekhov's eternal craving for the miniature as an art form. Despite these differences, we find in these writers extraordinarily kindred natures. Both of them recognized that the writer must approach his literary material like a scholar; he must deal with human passions and the everyday phenomena of life the way a chemist does with inorganic bodies or a physiologist with living things.

“The writer,” Chekhov writes in a letter, as though continuing to develop Zola's theory, “is not a pastry cook, a beautician, or an entertainer. However unpleasant it may be to him, he must conquer his squeamishness, must soil his imagination with the grime of life. He is the same as an ordinary reporter. For chemists there is nothing unclean on the earth. The writer also must be objective, like the chemist; he must renounce everyday subjectivity and know that dungheaps in a landscape play a very respectable role and evil passions are just as much part of life as good ones.”

These lines seem to echo the epigraph to Thérèse Raquin: “Virtue and vice are just as much products as sugar and sulfuric acid.”

But when the object under observation has been studied in all its tiny facets and the schema of investigation is precisely sketched … the physician and naturalist give way to the poet … and the calm anatomist drops all his precise tools in order to speak of the horror, the beauty, or the eternal enigma of life. … Zola and Chekhov seem to have shared this method of creation and to have been completely conscious of it.

Their differences, at first glance, may be seen in the artistic development of their themes. Zola strikes us usually as consciously crude, as if he cynically depicted the vilenesses of everyday life as a matter of principle. And in this respect, of course, he cannot be juxtaposed with the chastely restrained Chekhov. But this difference appears significant only at first glance. There are far too many poetically tender, sometimes even idyllic scenes in Zola's work to allow him to be regarded as the antipode of Chekhov. Even in the most crude, sodden, and cumbersome novels of Zola, scenes of unbridled passion will alternate with the most lyrically dreamlike pages, and stormy descriptions of modern crowds and machines with twilight pastels. Whole pages in Zola's cycle of experimental novels are imbued with this typically Chekhovian mood. It is no wonder that in the preface to Une page d'amour he defines this novel as an intimate creation written in half tones.

But Zola's influence on Chekhov is felt chiefly in his philosophy of man. It seems as though nobody in world literature can compare with the author of Bête humaine in the unremitting, stubborn way he exposes human animality. At root, the chronicle Rougon-Macquart is a document most humiliating to man. Out of the multivolume history of wild, unbridled passions, savage struggles for booty, mad thirst for pleasures, and endless search for them in women, money, power, alcohol, crimes, and incest—out of this emerges in all its cynical ugliness the beast in man which civilization cannot eradicate. …

To reveal this man-animal most clearly, Zola turned to the milieu in which culture has the least softening and moderating influence. He exposed in the peasant world such unrestrained explosiveness of passion, monstrous greed, savage cruelty, and rapaciousness that all the refined crimes of the worldly Rougon-Macquarts pale before these primitive forces.

Perhaps it was Zola's direct example that made Chekhov turn to the peasant world to develop more fully that theme of the human menagerie which always intrigued him. There is no doubt, however, that the picture of savage avarice, cruelty, and uncontrolled passion in “The Peasants” (1897) and “In the Ravine” were not created independently of Zola's painful peasant epic.

It is interesting here to compare the manners and morals of Kholuevka or Ukleevo with the everyday order of life of the French Beauce. Greed and self-seeking, the struggle for money, land, or women, the readiness to commit any crime in order to get at the booty, cruelty to the sick and infirm, to everyone who has lost the capacity to work, who has ceased to be a “plunderer” (to use a term of Chekhov's peasants), unbridled sensuality, the eternal narcotic of vice, the eternal power of darkness—this is the peasant world as we find it in Zola and in Chekhov. The story “In the Ravine” appears to repeat on a small scale Zola's La Terre. The elements of description here are identical; the representation of day-to-day existence basically the same. …

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But first of all among Chekhov's teachers is the powerful representative of French naturalism, Guy de Maupassant. … The titles of the major works of Maupassant turn up throughout his correspondence. He mentions Bel-Ami and considers Mont-Oriol to be an excellent novel. In conversations with young writers he recognizes Maupassant as the head of a new school in European literature. “Maupassant, as a literary artist, made such tremendous demands, that it became impossible to write in the old fashion any longer,” he says to Bunin and to Kuprin.

To begin with, Maupassant's realistic style had a very great impact on Chekhov. It is this special method of depicting life in all its colorlessness, formlessness, and disorder which was equally typical of two other literary models of Chekhov—Tolstoy and Flaubert. But in these writers the art of putting down on paper authentic, everyday life was usually conditioned by the broad dimensions of their works. … Rapidly and deftly manipulating his small mirror fragments, Maupassant was able in each of them clearly to reflect a new side of life; he was able to reveal behind the torn lines of the tiny design the broad spaces of receding horizons. …

So Maupassant first of all responded to a basic need of Chekhov's temperament as a writer—his love for the miniature. We shall return to Maupassant's role in the creation of the external form of Chekhov's short story. But his role in forming Chekhov's world view was far more significant and important. On this point, the creative works of the two writers are firmly linked. Maupassant suggested to Chekhov, or rather reinforced his convictions about the colorlessness of life, the horror of death, the animal nature of man. Life in its basic nature is much simpler, shallower, and more insignificant than we are accustomed to think it—here is the hard core of Maupassant's work. Our existence is so plain and ordinary that we unquestionably do great honor to that miserable story called life when we expect from it some kind of dazzling joy or quail before its difficult dramas. The first never comes, the second are almost always lived through. Unrealized desires humble themselves before necessity, heavy blows are forgotten with the passing of pain, and the deepest wounds are healed by time. The real horror of life is its colorlessness and insignificance, the dullness of its most festive sensations, the drabness of its most vivid colors, the poverty of its most fanciful forms. “Life is never so frightful, never so beautiful as it seems to us,” one of Maupassant's heroines says—and these words might herald all of Chekhov's work. …

“I should like to describe everyday love and family life,” Chekhov observes in one of his letters, “without villains and angels, without lawyers and female devils; I should take as a subject life as it is in fact—even, smooth, ordinary.” Chekhov unquestionably gives expression here to a method which is that of Maupassant. … It is as if both of them wanted to show that the design of ordinary human existence, no matter how fanciful, elegant, and brilliant it appears from a distance, always on closer inspection turns out to be infinitely simple, flat, without luster or color.

The story “Three Years” (1895) strikingly illustrates this method. According to Chekhov's original idea it was supposed to develop into a major novel. Chekhov clearly wanted to give a comprehensive account of a woman with all her maiden hopes, marital disillusionments, and maternal joys. In other words, Chekhov took up the theme of Maupassant's Une Vie. The basic threads of this novel are to be found also in Chekhov's story. A hasty and unnecessary marriage without understanding, bitter disillusionment in marriage, the consolation of motherhood, acute sufferings over the loss of children, followed by inevitable resignation in the fact of the most terrible misfortunes—here you have three years in the life of Chekhov's Yulia, repeating on a smaller scale the story of the life of Maupassant's Jeanne. … The quiet, toneless moan of Chebutykin: “It's all the same; it's all the same!” (The Three Sisters, 1901) echoes through the Chekhovian world like a heavy, tired, hopeless sigh.

But however colorless and senseless life may be, nonbeing is still more terrible. The sharp terror of death which grips the last works of Maupassant, who is slowly losing his sanity, is felt distinctly also in the later works of the tubercular Chekhov.

The famous old poet Norbert de Varin senses the approaching end. The slow process of physical disintegration of the body deprives him of all the attributes of his former youthful vigor—lithe muscles, firm skin, hair, teeth, eyesight, excellence of memory, and keenness of thought; all he has left for the time that remains is a soul shaken with despair.

The famous old professor Nikolai Stepanovich (“A Boring Story,” 1889) knows his days are numbered. During his last days he assiduously makes notes on the signs of his approaching end. His hands tremble with feebleness, his mouth is twisted, his face is creased with the wrinkles of death; his memory and his talent as a spellbinder begin to fade, and he observes with horror that he is no longer able to finish the most ordinary lecture.

In this condition all the foundations of life crumble and in the place of his former inspiration, of intellectual engagement, of creative excitement, of intense curiosity, there is only one devastating feeling of despair. Maupassant's old poet senses the imminence of death so strongly that sometimes he wants to scream with his hands outstretched so as to repel this enemy who is creeping up on him. … The indifference of the world around to his tragic end strikes him as a monstrous cruelty, and with a scream he is ready to curse even the silence of the walls.

“I want to cry out in a loud voice,” says Chekhov's professor, “that I, a famous man, have been condemned to death by fate. I want to cry out that I am poisoned; new thoughts, that I did not know before, have poisoned my last days and continue to stab at my brain like mosquitoes. Then my position seems so dreadful that I would like my whole audience to be filled with horror, to leap from their seats in terrified panic, and rush to the exits with cries of despair.” …

The half-mad author of Le Horla communicated to his Russian disciple all this cheerless philosophy about life and death, about the world and people. Possibly, of course, he was only reinforcing in Chekhov a world view which had already taken root in him independently. Medical school, a mass of personal experience, the development of a mortal illness—all these circumstances of his own life directly instilled in Chekhov those views of the world and people which he had already found brilliantly developed in the work of his literary mentor. …

Flaubert's name crops up both in Chekhov's letters and in his conversations with young writers. There can be no doubt that Flaubert was his teacher in the creation of the faultless literary form of his short story.

The influence of this first naturalist mingled with those cheerless impressions of humanity which Chekhov drew from the books of Maupassant and Zola. Flaubert's hatred for the eternal philistine and his unconquerable contempt for the female laid the groundwork for nascent naturalism's epic of the man-animal, and was distantly reflected in the world view of Chekhov.

One might imagine that the talent of the author of The Three Sisters had been created by nature itself to give ideal creative embodiment to the eternal-feminine element. The capacity for spirituality and love, the quiet and sad melodiousness of woman's spirit pining with anguish and love, the lofty embraciveness of the Desdemonas of all times; finally, a keen understanding of all the oppressive pains of the troubled and melancholy masculine spirit—all this could scarcely have been conveyed with a softer and more delicate brush than that of Chekhov's art.

And yet, in the gallery of his radiant female figures, of these sad dreamers and pensive mourners, there appear some other un-Chekhovian images of predatory females. These exceptions in the Chekhovian world of maimed seagulls serve us as one further reminder of that school of French naturalism through which Chekhov passed. His Ariadne, his Susanna, his Anna Petrovna (“Anna on the Neck,” 1895) or Natasha Prozorova (The Three Sisters) unquestionably are closely related to Emma Bovary. …

“She imagined herself in the future in no other state than that of a very rich and distinguished person,” Chekhov writes in description of the typical “Bovarysme” of one of his heroines, “she dreamed of balls, races, servants, an elegant drawing room, her own salon, and a whole train of counts, princes, ambassadors, famous writers and artists, all of whom danced attendance on her and were thrilled by her beauty and her finery. She dreamed about a title, about glory.”

Two very opposite qualities develop simultaneously in a woman of this type. On the one hand, a refined sensuality cultivates in her a delicate aesthetic taste and creates an invincible need for elegance and glamour in everything around her—in her surroundings and finery, in sights and conversation. But on the other hand, the thirst for pleasures which dominates everything seriously lowers the level of her spiritual life, endows her inevitably with cynicism, brutality, and heartlessness. With amazing insight Flaubert united in his immortal heroine these diverse elements when he endowed her with all the charms of an aristocratic attraction to the beautiful as well as the typical attributes of the female odalisque. Emma Bovary's refined aestheticism does not save her from crude sensuality, restrained ferocity, cruelty to people around her, and even cutting indifference to her own child.

Chekhov combines in his heroines the same contrasting qualities. His charming Ariadne “was perfectly capable, even in a moment of good spirits, of offending a servant, squashing an insect. She loved bullfights, liked to read about murders, and would get angry when the defendants were acquitted.”

One device in the characterization of these Chekhovian heroines is typical of Flaubert and Maupassant. The central fissure in their psychology, the decisive moment when their fundamental nature is disclosed, often turns out to be a chance visit to some place of unusual elegance and splendor. Some elegant ball or festive occasion once and for all poisons their existence, reveals to them in all its fullness the philistinism of their daily life, the poverty of their circumstances, the humdrum character of the people around them, the unattractiveness of their husbands.

Chekhov used this typical theme of Flaubert and Maupassant for one of his stories (“Anna on the Neck”). A product of poverty and squalor, oppressed by a despotic husband, the humble and almost crushed Anna on landing at a brilliant ball instantly is transformed. The slumbering woman in her awakens through the combined action of all the currents of the electric atmosphere of the ball—the thunderous music, the bright lights, the ecstatic faces of the crowd, and the tantalizing proximity of the dancers. Unexpectedly and in a flash she realizes that she has been created just for this tumultuous, brilliant, gay life with its music, dances, admirers, and flattery. As she first becomes conscious of the great power in her feminine charm, a profound contempt awakens in her for everyday life, for her husband and her domestic surroundings. The once miserable sufferer returns from the ball with the awakened instincts of a spendthrift and adulterer. …

The usual references to the transition period of the 1880s are not enough to explain the sources of Chekhov's pessimism. Among the personal, social, and literary factors which go to make up his cheerless world view, the influence of French naturalism must be taken into account. Its final conclusions never ceased to act upon Chekhov; their inner meaning frightened him, aroused him to unrelenting protest, but compelled him despotically all the same to acknowledge their terrible truth. …

Reading Flaubert and his disciple Maupassant slowly cultivated in Chekhov those rules of strict literary work which the author of Salammbô never ceased to expound in his letters and conversations. Flaubert's famous objectivity is of first importance here. His insistence that the author be completely absent from his creations, the campaign against lyricism in artistic prose, were fixed canons of Flaubert's art. Chekhov, for his part, gives expression to these same principles from the very beginning of his literary career; undoubtedly many of them were wholly his own and only subsequently found support in the high authority of Flaubert. “In everything cast yourself overboard; don't thrust yourself upon the heroes of your novel; renounce yourself for at least a half hour”—such are the literary principles of the young Chekhov. “Subjectivity is a terrible thing,” he writes in one of his early letters.

He formulates in his correspondence a literary code and advances as one of its first points the demand for a complete objectivity which will always remain his guiding principle. “The more objective, the stronger the impression will be,” he writes even in 1892. And a principle he formulates in a letter to Suvorin is purely Flaubertian: “The artist must not be a judge of his characters, but only a dispassionate witness.”

This demand for strict objectivity consciously banishes from literature the whole element of lyrical sensibility. Flaubert considered a certain measure of coldness to be the highest quality of a writer's temperament. In his letters to young authors Chekhov never ceases to repeat these same precepts. He constantly warns them against the sentimental or maudlin. “When you depict some poor luckless wretch and you want to move the reader to pity, try to remain quite cold—this will provide a kind of background, against which the stranger's misery will stand out in bold relief. Otherwise your heroes will be crying and you will be sighing. Yes, be cold.” Such is the purely Flaubertian principle with which Chekhov ends one of his letters on the technique of writing.

Finally, Chekhov fully accepted Flaubert's principle of intense fidelity to life in descriptions. Flaubert's famous precept—when you describe a sunset, the page must seem ensanguined; when you depict a meadow, green—always seems to have remained a guiding principle for Chekhov. When he writes “The Steppe” (1888), he wants the story to smell of hay; when he finishes the story he reports with satisfaction that his pages have an aroma of the summer and the steppe. “I have given such an account of the climate that you will feel cold when you read about it,” he observes of his Island of Sakhalin.

His advice to other writers is similar. “Women must be described in such a way that the reader feels that your jacket is unbuttoned and your tie is off,” he advises one of his literary correspondents. In his letters he praises Sienkiewicz and Zola for being able to give such vivid descriptions that the reader wants to have lunch in Ploshovo, marry Anielka, or embrace Klotylda.

But Maupassant always remained Chekhov's direct and principal teacher of literary form. Maupassant seemed to Chekhov an incomparable artist in his love of brevity and his passion for the short story. He set before Chekhov perfect examples of vivid literary landscapes in three lines and finished human characterizations in several strokes. He convinced Chekhov that brevity is the sister of talent, and taught him to compress his images and thought to the utmost degree of concentration. He revealed to Chekhov the artistic secret of those short stories that are without entanglement or denouement, without introduction or conclusion, that have a trifling title and are almost without plot, stories which strike one as a simple vignette of passing reality but are the final attainment of an extraordinarily complex and refined art.

In the realm of literary form Maupassant disclosed to Chekhov the first devices of transition from the realism of everyday life to symbolic realism. Chekhov's subtle distillation of a symbol from the simple elements of life—a feature that marks the last period of his creative work—is already distinctly visible in Maupassant. …

The symbolism of ordinary life is found in all Maupassant's major creations, where events are mysteriously caught in the strands woven by fate, and external happenings herald future tragedies. Olivier Berton, crushed by a bus, seems to be himself the emblem of his dying love for the countess. Scorched letters stained with floods of melting sealing wax are a mournful symbol of the end of a sad story. Christiane in Mont-Oriol (a novel which Chekhov is enthusiastic about in his letters), even before the onset of her unhappy love, in the first days of her arrival at the health resort, witnesses the frightful death of a small black dog. As she leaves the public ceremony she accidentally comes upon a piece of bloody flesh, covered with black hair, without recognizing in this tiny fact the terrible epigraph which reality itself is writing for her future fate.

These devices of Maupassant represent the first sources of Chekhovian symbolism. Nothing passes without leaving some trace, say the heroes of Chekhov's stories and dramas; everything is pregnant with some universal thought; our every step has significance for present and future life; all of us are part of one miraculous and rational organism, and human suffering of the distant past stirs us mysteriously down through the millennia.

The final scene of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard is regarded as the high point of Chekhovian symbolism. The feeble Firs, forgotten in the boarded-up house by the owners who have departed, and quietly dying to the vigorous thud of axes, synthesizes the usual thoughts of Chekhov on the mystery of life and death, on their secret meaning, on the significance of everything transitory. “There is a far-off sound that seems to come from out of the sky—the sound of a snapped string, sad and dying away. A stillness falls, and all you can hear is the thud of an ax on a tree far away in the orchard.” The Cherry Orchard ends with this philosophical observation.

The origin in Maupassant of Chekhovian symbolism is especially evident here. The death of Firs strongly recalls the end of Olivier Berton. When the wounded artist, pressing the hand of his lover, gives a deep sigh and expires, something ominous sweeps through his room. The fire goes out in the fireplace under the black ashes of burned letters; two candles unexpectedly go out; a sinister crack sounds from some piece of furniture; and a moment later the agitated countess senses through cold stiffening fingers that her friend already has found comfort from all woes in a great forgetting.

Chekhovian realism was much refined by the example of modern French literature. Flaubert and Maupassant did much to clarify and strengthen Chekhov's style as a writer and unquestionably play a significant role in the creation of his clean-cut, steady, lucid, and precise form. They introduced him to a whole series of new stylistic devices; they awakened him to the basic rule of all French literature—that one should see to it that every line be vital, engaging, and full of literary import.

The fundamental postulates of naturalism had a most decisive influence on Chekhov. Man's age-old incapacity to structure his life intelligently, his inability to bridle the predatory beast in himself, the complete powerlessness of his spirit before the mighty elements of instinct, the triumph of cruelty, stupidity, vice—this somber content of the human comedy was already revealed by the great precursor of naturalism, Balzac, and reiterated, after a careful review of his conclusions, by such knowledgeable masters of life as Flaubert, Zola, and Maupassant.

These authors wrote the crowning works of French literature of the past century. They could not but make a profound impression upon Chekhov—one that was wholly confirmed by his own observations and reflections. Everything that his heroes briefly sum up in the words, “Everything is vile; there is no reason for living,” all his impressions about harrowing poverty, hunger, ignorance, anguish, the feeling of anger and humiliation, animality, and rapacity, all those Arakcheev thoughts³ of Chekhov's heroes completely accord with the basic conclusions of French naturalism.

But Chekhov did not want to—or perhaps could not—reconcile himself with them. … And in the mood of hopelessness evoked by the personal experience of a physician and his study of the experimental novel, he turned to those hopes of salvation to which he was led by his Slavic nature and the enduring traditions of his native literature. In the sick animal, overdriven or embittered, rapacious or meek, he began with anguish and hope to seek out glimmerings of the divine element. The notion of humanity as an attribute of the highest spirituality became the hallmark of his creative work and the symbol of his faith. The question of whether the preachment of human charity in literature was in consonance with art or appropriate to the times did not exist for him. This preachment was his only means of salvation from final despair. …

Chekhov, in one of his last stories, acknowledges as the only meaning of life and the highest law of existence man's great capacity for active good. And as he moved toward this outlook, Chekhov introduced into Russian literature a new crowd of insulted and injured, quite different from the malicious, hysterically excited, or meekly vile outcasts of Dostoevsky. The feeling of profound injury, of undeserved affliction, of unbearable pain only heightens in Chekhovian heroes their primordial need for active love. All these martyrs and victims of life reveal in their quiet humility such a lofty spirituality that man's violent, predatory nature is redeemed in advance by this capacity for heroic renunciation.

In his revelation of these evangelical elements the atheist Chekhov is unquestionably one of the most Christian poets of world literature. The final lines of his story “In the Ravine”—the depiction of Lipa in the field at night, submissively carrying her dead child with great maternal anguish but without the slightest feeling of enmity toward her murderer—is, of course, one of the greatest pages in the ancient legend about human meekness. Only a great force of love in the artist could create this new perfect image of the sorrowing mother.

Chekhov's chief strength lies in a love for man which overcame all revulsion. At root, he did not bring to his creations any new philosophy. An artist of extraordinary gifts, a lyrist of boundless spirituality, Chekhov was not a thinker of genius. He did not leave humanity revelations which strike one by their newness, boldness, or depth, revelations which immediately turn the broad current of human thought into a new channel. Even in the sphere of abstract wisdom, as in his purely artistic pages, he spoke the most simple words devoid of any philosophical profundity. Everything that is said in his works about the fate of the world and of people is in essence so simple that it might enter the head of any ordinary person. … But Chekhov expressed this simple wisdom in words so magically beautiful and, in their beauty, so comforting, that everyone was left with the impression that somehow he had been reassured about something, that he had been reconciled with something, that something had been set right. For all these sufferers of life the creations of Chekhov acted as a sudden revivifying flood of tears which are evoked by deep suffering, but which, after flowing, relieve the soul, lighten sorrow, and reconcile one with the most inconsolable misery.

Not only a poet lived in this naturalist, but also a rare genius of creative gentleness. One might say that nobody had ever probed with such precision the morbid fabric of life in all its tiny cellular structure and responded with such deep compassion for all its agonizing imperfections. This searching Darwinist with the love of Francis of Assisi for every living creature seems to confirm with all his creative work the remarkable words of Beethoven—that the only heroism in the world is to see the world as it is, and still to love it.

Notes

1. For a discussion of the impact upon Chekhov's artistic method of the work of the French physiologist Claude Bernard (1813–1878)—particularly his Introduction à l'étude de la médicine expérimentale—see A. Roskin's “Notes on Chekhov's Realism” (in Russian) in Literaturnyj kritik (1939), No. 7, pp. 58–77—[Ed.]

2. The lines are from the dedication of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin: “Uma kholodnykh nabljudenij / I serdtse gorestnykh zamet.” [Ed.]

3. The allusion here is to Count Aleksey A. Arakcheev (1769–1834), a war minister in the reign of Alexander I. Because of his internal policies, his name became a symbol in Russia of reaction and despotism. [Ed.]

“The Naturalism of Chekhov” by Leonid Grossman. From Vestnik Evropy (1914), No. 7, 218–247, in abridged form. Translated from the Russian by Robert Louis Jackson.