[In the following excerpt, Baldeshweiler analyzes the so-called “lyrical” short story as represented by the short fiction of Turgenev and Chekhov.]

When the history of the modern short story is written, it will have to take into account two related developments, tracing the course of the larger mass of narratives that, for purposes of clarification we could term “epical,” and the smaller group which, to accentuate differences, we might call “lyrical.” The larger group of narratives is marked by external action developed “syllogistically” through characters fabricated mainly to forward plot, culminating in a decisive ending that sometimes affords a universal insight, and expressed in the serviceably inconspicuous language of prose realism. The other segment of stories concentrates on internal changes, moods, and feelings, utilizing a variety of structural patterns depending on the shape of the emotion itself, relies for the most part on the open ending, and is expressed in the condensed, evocative, often figured language of the poem. In present day literary theory, the term “lyric” refers of course not so much to structure as to subject and tone, and it is mainly to these aspects of the brief narrative that the adjective is meant to call attention in the phrase “lyrical” story. Obviously, the distinction between prose narrative and verse remains absolute: the “lyrical,” story like any other, includes the essentials of storytelling—persons with some degree of verisimilitude engaged in a unified action in time—and the medium remains prose. Looking at the “lyrical” narrative historically, one sees that some writers, a minority, devoted themselves exclusively to this form, while others were able to utilize the “epical” mode as well. Still, there exists a definite line of development within the “lyrical” vein, explicitly so titled as early as 1921 by Conrad Aiken, in a review of Bliss and Other Stories. The purpose of the present essay is to sketch the outline of this history by indicating briefly the writers that we need to examine and by suggesting something of their special contributions.

It seems clear that it is in the loosely structured, yet unified, sketches of Turgenev's A Sportsman's Notebook, with their subtle discrimination of shades of emotion, their famous “shimmering” tone and lovingly detached attention to the physical details of natural objects and scenes that the lyrical story first emerges as a distinctive form. Episodic in construction, few of the pieces revolve around a conventional plot; rather, more often than not, the author gently leads us through an interlude of time depicted by means of minute, impressionistic touches—not without occasional motifs or semi-symbolic figures—in such a way that the senses are alerted and the feelings softened and made reflective. At first glance, one thinks of Turgenev as working on a canvas crowded with characters, yet the more insistent impression is of a few distinct personages, each of whom is complete within his own aura, his own emotional tone and setting. Through the tactful managing of aesthetic distance and the use of a narrator-observer perfectly attuned to the nuances of nature and human feeling, Turgenev carefully controls and subtly shades tone. Although he works within the limits of naturalism, Turgenev exhibits a supreme power of cloaking all in a dream-like incandescence, of casting the gently melancholy light of his own vision uniformly over natural objects and human events.

Despite his respect and admiration for Turgenev, Chekhov, the next practitioner of the lyric story, works in a different vein, devoting almost his entire attention to reporting small, emotionally laden situations from the point of view of two or three characters. Forsaking the trappings of conventional plot as did Turgenev, Chekhov concentrates his attention on severely limited occasions, diffusing over them a humorous or melancholy light and reporting them with the absolute fidelity of naturalistic art. At times, however, these self-imposed limitations are transcended and Chekhov's story achieves a larger, freer, more musical dimension. Representative of the pieces that rise to the level of truly poetic utterance are “The Schoolmistress,” “Easter Eve,” “The Bishop,” “Gusev,” and “The Lady with the Dog,” although these are foreshadowed by such earlier sketches as “The Student” and “The Pipe.”

The “musicality” of Chekhov's major stories is exactly described by D. S. Mirsky's comment that while the author's prose is not “melodious,” the architectonics of his stories is akin to that of a musical composition. “At once fluid and precise,” the narratives are built on “very complicated curves … calculated with the utmost precision.” The structure of a Chekhov story, then, is “a series of points marking out with precision the lines discerned by him in the tangled web of consciousness.” According to Mirsky, Chekhov

excels in the art of tracing the first stages of an emotional process, in indicating those first symptoms of a deviation when to the general eye, and to the conscious eye of the subject in question, the nascent curve still seems to coincide with a straight line. An infinitesimal touch, which at first hardly arrests the reader's attention, gives a hint at the direction the story is going to take. It is then repeated as a leit-motif, and at each repetition the true equation of the curve becomes more important, and it ends by shooting away in a direction very different from that of the original straight line.

Thus in “The Lady with the Dog” the straight line is the hero's attitude towards his vacation affair with the young wife, an intrigue that he regards as passing and even trivial, while the “curve” is created in the growth of his overwhelming and all-pervasive love for her. (Mirsky adds that in many of Chekhov's stories these lines are complicated by “a rich and mellow atmosphere” arising from the abundance of emotionally significant detail. The effect, then, is poetical, even lyrical, and, as in lyric, it is not plot development that arouses interest. On the contrary, the reader experiences “infection” by the poet's mood. To Mirsky, Chekhov's stories are, in short, “lyrical monoliths”: the episodes are themselves deeply conditioned by the whole and without significance apart from it.)

There is a sense in which all of Chekhov's work is symbolical, but in some stories symbols perform central structural functions. The symbols of “The Lady with the Dog” are perhaps least well defined, but certain large metaphors—mostly related to place—are important vehicles of extended meaning. Thus the sea, the hotel room, the provincial concert hall, the house behind the barbed fence, the Yalta resort, all signify states of mind (freedom, imprisonment, vulgarity, longing) and suggest meaning beyond mere physical fact. In “The Schoolmistress,” symbols are more precise and more limited in effect. Objects like the teacher's faded photograph of her mother, which has a direct relation to the girl's hallucinatory vision of the woman in the railway carriage, both unify the story and underline the tragic theme of contrast between what is and what might have been as they recapitulate the past and insert it violently into the present. The difficult, painful journey by cart to the town is itself conventionally symbolic of the entrance into one's tragic destiny, here elaborated by the romantic encounter at the crossroads, the accident at the pond, and the “descent into hell” at the village tavern.

It is traditional “natural” symbols that dominate “Easter Eve,” one of the most appealing of all Chekhov's narratives. Here, the symbolism of the Christian Resurrection surrounds Ieronim's account of the death of his fellow monk and the earthly end of a perfect love of charity. Ferrying his passengers across the river to the monastery for the Paschal service, Ieronim questions the meaning of suffering, loneliness, and pain even as he and his companion view with ecstasy the scene of the great Easter fire on the far side of the stream. Thus it is as much through the plethora of suggestion surrounding such traditional symbols as a river passage, the Resurrection, light and darkness, as by means of action or characterization that Chekhov dramatizes profound human emotions. In “Gusev,” possibly an atypical Chekhov work, the subject is the death at sea of a simple Russian soldier returning to his village after a campaign in the East. The story gains its flavor by certain devices used to characterize the soldier, for example, a foil in the person of the “intellectual” Pavel, and to suggest the quality of his inner life, particularly the delirious dreams of Gusev's return to the snowbound village, with its terrifying motif of the bull's head without eyes, and the account of the meaningless fight with Chinese men, counterpointed by the exquisite scene of the boatmen with the canaries. As the dying Pavel bitterly chattered, “Gusev was looking at the little window and was not listening. A boat was swaying on the transparent, soft, turquoise water all bathed in hot, dazzling sunshine. In it there were naked Chinamen holding up cages with canaries and calling out: ‘It sings, It sings!’” The rapid alternation of scenes in the sick bay with dream sequences and idyllic interludes such as the scenes glimpsed through the porthole, with accompanying shifts of tone, becomes a major structural device and creates an extremely vivid, surrealistic effect.

When Chekhov, like Turgenev, raises tone to the level of a major device, we see an important step away from the conventional tale of reported action (the “epical” story) toward a condition approaching that of the lyric poem. Besides freeing the short story from the limitations of conventional plot, Turgenev and Chekhov consciously exploited language itself to express more sharply states of feeling and subtle changes in emotion. With these authors, the locus of narrative art has moved from external action to internal states of mind, and the plot line will hereafter consist, in this mode, of tracing complex emotions to a closing cadence utterly unlike the reasoned resolution of the conventional cause-and-effect narrative. It is here that we observe the birth of the “open” story. Besides the use of the emotional curve, other new patterns of story organization are beginning to emerge, such as the alternation of scenes and moods for a “surrealistic” effect, the circling around a central dilemma or set of feelings, the record of a moment of intense feeling or perception which contains its own significant form.