SOURCE: Johnson, Ronald L. “The Master, 1895-1903.” In Anton Chekhov: A Study of the Short Fiction, pp. 76-103. New York: Twayne, 1993.

[In the following essay, Johnson contends that a shift in Chekhov's narrative perspective during the late period of his career added greater depth and complexity to his short stories.]

Raymond Carver believed an agreement might be reached among “thoughtful” readers that Chekhov was the greatest short story writer who ever lived, not only because of the “immense number” of stories he wrote, but the “awesome frequency” with which he produced masterpieces.¹ That frequency is most apparent in this last period, from 1895 through 1903, when Chekhov treated the same subjects, but with a shift in point of view technique to include a narrating author persona in many stories. In general, this persona is disembodied, commenting on the characters and action as do the narrators in Henry James and George Eliot. A. P. Chudakov remarks that his characteristic manner of “depicting the world through a concrete, perceiving consciousness” has not been replaced. Rather the “old manner remains and a new one is added to it” (99-100).

Chekhov's contemporaries noticed this shift in point of view. One critic commented in 1898 that Chekhov was no longer the “objective artist” he had been earlier; that same year, another critic perceived that Chekhov's “added subjectivity” would deepen the content of his creative work (Chudakov, 73). The modern critic Nicholas Moravcevich traces the evolution of Chekhov's earlier artistic creed of strict objectivity to the new “persuasiveness” of his “artistic aims,” a transformation that gradually occurred over a five-year span from 1887 to 1892; Moravcevich believes this different approach marked the end of Chekhov's formative period and the beginning of his “transcendence of the aesthetic dictates of naturalism” (225).

STORIES OF LOVE AND THE AUTHENTIC LIFE

“A Lady with a Dog” (Hingley) beautifully illustrates Chekhov's use of a shift in point of view, for in addition to the perceiving consciousness of the protagonist, comment is presented directly to the reader through Chekhov's disembodied narrating persona. Like many of Chekhov's middle-class protagonists, the bank employee Gurov does not have a satisfactory relationship with his wife. He fears her because she is outspoken and intellectual. Any happiness he finds with women occurs in a series of affairs, and while on vacation in Yalta, he engages in what appears to be another such affair. The woman, the “lady with the dog,” is named Anne, and on an outing to a church at Oreanda, the couple sit on a bench, entranced by the view. Shifting beyond Gurov's conscious mind, Chekhov adopts a narrating persona who relates that “borne up from below, the sea's monotonous, muffled boom spoke of peace, of the everlasting sleep awaiting us” (IX, 132). This passage has a mystical dimension that recalls the last section of “Gusev,” also narrated beyond the conscious mind of the protagonist. The comment becomes more lyrical as it develops in a passage on eternity and the indifference of the universe, which measures not only Gurov but the reader against its endless vastness. It concludes with an optimistic comment on the eternal nature of life—not on the individual, who is mortal, but on life itself which is immortal and constantly progressing, a recurring motif in Chekhov's stories from this period.

The paragraph closes with a return to Gurov's mind as he reflects that “everything on earth is beautiful, really, when you consider it—everything but what we think and do ourselves when we forget the lofty goals of being and our human dignity” (IX, 132). This thought, mirroring Chekhov's own sensibilities, makes Gurov a more sympathetic character. Although he lives an inauthentic life—in which he speaks disparagingly of women, calling them the “inferior species”—he is capable of this insightful observation when sitting beside Anne. The couple takes a number of excursions which invariably leave an impression of “majesty and beauty,” while a subtle transformation begins to occur in each of them. Anne articulates her desire for that transformation when she voices her yearning for a different life—in Chekhov, such a desire is usually the telltale sign of a character's living an inauthentic life. Like Gurov, she does not love her spouse, but her adulterous relationship with Gurov disturbs her because she wants to live a “decent, moral life.”

Gurov on the other hand easily dismisses the affair until he returns to his inauthentic life in Moscow. There he resumes his boring life of “futile activities,” realizing such meaningless activities “engross most of your time, your best efforts, and you end up with a sort of botched, pedestrian life: a form of imbecility from which there's no way out, no escape” (IX, 135). Gurov's thought recalls the final comments of Nikitin on his domestic life in “The Russian Master”: “You might as well be in jail or in a madhouse” (IX, 135). Gurov feels the same desperation Anne felt before her vacation in Yalta, a desperation marked by the feeling she could not control herself. He now flees Moscow to seek out Anne, because their affair has become the most important aspect of his life. This transformation in Gurov's attitude constitutes the dramatic climax of the plot.

After Gurov finds Anne, their situation develops into a prolonged affair, and Gurov begins to live two lives. One is the false life he has been living, full of “stereotyped truths and stereotyped untruth,” identical to the life of his friends and acquaintances. He despises this inauthentic life, and feels that “everything vital, interesting and crucial to him, everything which called his sincerity and integrity into play, everything which made up the core of his life” (IX, 139) occurs in his other, secret life with Anne. In contrast to those protagonists from earlier stories such as “Lights” and “The Duel” who undergo a transformation and throw off their inauthentic lives, Gurov retains his old life in the form of a facade that satisfies the decorum of the age. This compromise makes him a more complex character, a typical modern hero unable to integrate his multiple lives into one.

As the story closes, both Anne and he feel their love has “transformed” them, but the most difficult part of their lives is “only just beginning” (IX, 141). Chekhov's method of ending a story with the suggestion that the lives of his characters will go on developing becomes one of his most effective closures during this period. This conclusion reinforces the theme that through love—one of Chekhov's favorite topics—the characters have been transformed, making them better people.

Chekhov approaches the power of love with a different tone, achieved partially through a shift in point of view, in “Angel” (Hingley). Chekhov has a tongue-in-cheek attitude toward the protagonist, Olga, who is “always in love with someone—couldn't help it” (IX, 82). She is a “quiet, good-hearted, sentimental, very healthy young lady with a tender, melting expression” (IX, 82) to whom men are attracted and to whom women respond openly and kindly. At first Chekhov conveys his criticism through light satire as Olga marries a theater manager and adopts his opinions in all matters, especially on the importance of the theater. When the theater manager dies a few years later, she marries a lumberyard manager and in turn adopts his opinions in all matters, including the idea that the theater is a “trifle.” Olga is not consciously insincere, merely naive and shallow.

When the lumberyard manager dies after six years—during which the couple prayed for children but had none—Olga falls in love with an army veterinarian who is estranged from his wife, and, in turn, takes up his opinions. But when he is transferred, Olga goes through a crisis because “she no longer had views on anything”—she cannot form her own opinions. She feels she needs a love “to possess her whole being, all her mind and soul: a love to equip her with ideas, with a sense of purpose, a love to warm her ageing blood” (IX, 88). This function of love is the object of Chekhov's satire. Although Chekhov presents some of Olga's experiences from her perspective, he also addresses much of the action directly to the reader. In earlier works, “Ward Number Six” and “Three Years,” for example, the passages outside the consciousness of the characters are almost always pure exposition, unmediated by the assertive voice of a separate, vital narrating persona.

To this point in the action, “Angel” satirizes Olga's sensibility in an amusing series of events without a focused form, reading more like a character sketch than a story. What makes the work a masterpiece is the last episode, in which the tone shifts to one of compassion for the protagonist, much as it does for Jacob in “Rothschild's Fiddle.” With this shift, the character is redeemed in the reader's eye, becoming worthy of respect and sympathy. After a half-dozen years, the veterinarian returns as a civilian with his wife and son, and Olga emotionally adopts the child, a nine-year-old boy named Sasha. Olga cares for all his needs as her love for him becomes boundless, eclipsing her earlier loves. Olga's desire to love, which Chekhov has been satirizing, now becomes meaningful by its very compassion: “For this boy—no relative at all—for his dimpled cheeks, for his cap she would give her whole life, give it gladly, with tears of ecstasy. Why? Who knows?” The satire is absent from this statement, which is as straightforward as the closing passage of “A Lady with a Dog.” The question “Why? Who knows?”—Chekhov directly addressing the reader—deftly deepens the reader's involvement in the action.

“Angel” has generated a number of widely different critical interpretations. One of the more insightful comes from an anonymous reviewer in 1916 who notes Chekhov possessed the “subtlest sympathy,” which enables him to “understand and reveal” his characters; this critic maintains that the effect of reading Chekhov's tales is to be “washed free of petty impatience and acerbity of judgement.”²

In “Ariadne” (Hingley), the character of Olga in “The Butterfly” is recast into a colder, more calculating young woman, and in place of the virtuous Dr. Dymov is a sensitive, idealistic young landowner, Shamokhin, who must resolve his feelings for the woman who makes him a victim of his love. Dr. Dymov escapes his situation with Olga through death, but in this later story, Chekhov develops the situation to its more complex, more logical, and more realistic conclusion.

Shamokhin narrates his story to a first-person character. As in the earlier stories, “Easter Eve” and “Uprooted,” this first-person character is a writer. The difference between this character and the persona identified in “A Lady with a Dog” and “Angel” is that in “Ariadne” the narrator is an actual character who interacts with another character, Shamokhin, not simply a narrating voice. The setting of the frame of “Ariadne” provides a backdrop for the telling of Shamokhin's story: the two men are on the passenger deck of a Black Sea steamer when Shamokhin makes some general comments on the nature of women and love, comments that recall the initial attitude of Gurov in “A Lady with a Dog”: because of disappointing love affairs, he looks upon women as “mean, restless, lying, unfair, primitive, cruel creatures” (VIII, 74). Shamokhin then relates his specific story to illustrate this opinion.

A few years previously, in his mid twenties, Shamokhin fell very much in love with a neighbor's sister, Ariadne, a beautiful woman whose selfish demands for luxurious items were bringing her brother's estate to ruin. Like many of Chekhov's landowners, Shamokhin is an idealist who “romanticizes” love, but he is wise enough to realize Ariadne is so self-centered, so taken with her own beauty and charm, that she is incapable of really loving another person. However, Shamokhin cannot resist her, so he follows her to Europe and eventually becomes her lover. There they live at resorts with the money Shamokhin obtains from his father, who must mortgage their estate to pay for the extravagance. Like Olga in “The Butterfly,” Ariadne begins painting, but her real interest is “to attract”: she must “bewitch, captivate, drive people out of their minds” (VIII, 90). Although Ariadne is without much taste, she is “diabolically sharp and cunning, and in company she had the knack of passing as educated and progressive” (VIII, 91). She is one of Chekhov's least likeable characters, a hypocrite whose behavior causes some critics to condemn her, and others to find in her an attack upon the marriage customs and lack of opportunities for women of the day.

After a short while, Shamokhin falls out of love and yearns to return to Russia, “to work and earn my bread by the sweat of my brow and make good my mistakes” (VIII, 92). This desire is a common goal for Chekhov's idealistic heroes—the same salvation through work the engineer espouses in “Lights” and Vanya clings to in the play Uncle Vanya. The story closes with a return to the frame, where the author character argues against Shamokhin's attitude toward women, maintaining one cannot generalize from Ariadne on the nature of women, but Shamokhin remains unconvinced. In contrast to Olga and Dymov in “The Butterfly,” the relationship between Shamokhin and Ariadne is portrayed over the entire course of its development and decline in a remarkable illustration of Chekhov's mastery of point-of-view technique.

The situation of a person trapped in a frustrating, harmful relationship is also the subject of “The Order of St. Anne” (Hingley). The narrative is often at a considerable distance from the heroine, but at times, shifts into her mind. In contrast to Ariadne, the young woman is a sympathetic character, and her husband takes advantage of her. Chekhov begins the story outside the consciousness of the heroine, commenting on people's response to a government official of fifty-two marrying an eighteen-year-old girl. Anne, the daughter of a recent widower, marries the wealthy official for independence and security, hoping to help her family, but in Chekhov, marrying for such reasons is inviting trouble.

Once married, Anne realizes she doesn't even like Modeste, her husband, and soon discovers she now has less money than before since Modeste will give her nothing. But, afraid to protest, she forces herself “to smile and pretend to be pleased when defiled by clumsy caresses and embraces that sickened her” (VIII, 36). Anne's position suddenly changes, however, when Modeste has her attend a ball to impress his supervisor and colleagues, where she dazzles the dignitaries in Cinderella-like fashion. The next day, after Modeste's supervisor visits the house to thank her for her attendance, Modeste appears before her with the “crawling, sugary, slavish, deferential look” (VIII, 41) he keeps for powerful people. With her newly won power, Anne now gains the upper hand, and begins spending his money freely, cavorting with other men in an ironic reversal of her situation: she is now the one who orders Modeste about. However, Modeste is not dissatisfied, for he receives a medal—the Order of St. Anne, Second Class—from his supervisor. Ronald Hingley observes that this story is one of the many by Chekhov that are only a “mere dozen pages” but seem to have the content of full-length novels because of Chekhov's ability to “conjure up a whole milieu by suggestion without needing to fill in every detail” (VIII, 7). The government official's desiring the medal, his fawning before a superior, and the ironic reversal recall Chekhov's early humorous period.

In contrast to the coarse, philistine Modeste is the idealistic, sensitive artist in “The Artist's Story” (Hingley). A landscape painter, his idealism resembles that of Shamokhin in “Ariadne.” In commenting on first-person stories from this period, A. P. Chudakov notes a shift in narrative technique away from the “individualized features” of the protagonist's speech toward a conventional literary narrator, similar to the use of the persona in such third-person stories as “A Lady with a Dog,” “Angel,” and “The Order of St. Anne.” (69). In both instances, strict objectivity is replaced by the author's presence. Because the pretext in “Ariadne” is that the author himself is a character, the conventional literary narration is justified; but in “An Artist's Story,” the narrative suggests a written manuscript although the story mentions none. Like Shamokhin, the narrator—he remains unnamed in the story—falls in love with a young woman from a neighboring estate, but unlike Ariadne, this girl, Zhenya, is sensitive and caring. Only seventeen or eighteen, Zhenya is five years younger than her sister, Lydia, who dominates the family, even their mother.

Lydia is an idealist, like the narrator, but her ideals have led her in a different, more practical direction: she builds schools and hospitals for the local peasants and teaches them herself. The artist, on the other hand, believes such efforts actually are keeping the peasants in poverty. He maintains a radical transformation of society is required for any real change. In one of the arguments between the narrator and Lydia, he declares that the peasants must be freed from their manual labor so that they can develop meaningful, spiritual lives. Otherwise, he believes work has no meaning, and thus refuses to do any. Lydia rejects his position, accusing him of simply saying “charming things” to excuse his laziness, for she believes “rejecting hospitals and schools is easier than healing or teaching” (VIII, 108). She believes such work is more valuable than “all the landscapes ever painted” (VIII, 109). This exchange of ideas is effective as fiction because Chekhov is portraying characters whose ideas are an integral part of their individuality.

But the artist finally is no match for Lydia with her practical sense. Lydia forbids Zhenya to ever see the narrator again, ordering Zhenya and her mother to leave the district. The story closes as the narrator relates that several years after his departure from the district he learned that Lydia continues to teach, struggling to improve the life of the peasants, and Zhenya no longer lives in the district. Now when he paints, he recalls their love, and it seems to him as if soon they shall meet again. Chekhov poignantly evokes a sense of expectation in the character that the reader is aware can never be realized.

The complexity of the story evolves from the ambiguity of the characters' situations. The narrator and Zhenya are both sensitive and sympathetic, and their love is obviously a beautiful, desirable emotion. The hard-working idealist Lydia, although a valuable member of her community, is the very person who makes the further development of that love impossible. Once again, Chekhov presents no solutions to his characters' problems in life.

Love is the subject of another landowner's story in “Concerning Love” (Hingley), which shares characters and a narrative approach with “A Hard Case” and “Gooseberries.” Because of these similarities, critics refer to these stories as the “Little Trilogy.” One function of the frame setting for the story—the opening and closing sections are in the third person—is to set the atmosphere for the landowner's inner story. Two sportsmen—Ivan Ivanovich, a veterinarian, and Burkin, a teacher—have been caught in a rainstorm while out hunting, so they must spend the night at the estate of Alyokhin, a landowner. The next day at lunch, Alyokhin comments on the general “mystery” of love in a metaphor that is not only particularly appropriate for Chekhov as a doctor, but can be applied to his poetics in short fiction: “What seems to fit one instance doesn't fit a dozen others. It's best to interpret each instance separately in my view, without trying to generalize. We must isolate each individual case, as doctors say” (IX, 41). The comparison to a case history is an apt one for many of Chekhov's stories, and Alyokhin's further comment on a lack of a solution in love suggests Chekhov's own position.

In Alyokhin's particular case, he took up farming his estate—“not without a certain repugnance”—to pay off the mortgage, and over the course of several years, he and a married woman who lived in town fell in love. However, because of her family duties, and because of Alyokhin's sense of responsibility to her household, they did not declare their love to each other. She eventually became depressed, feeling that her life was unfulfilled and wasted. When her husband secures a judgeship in a different province, the family moves away. As they part for the last time, Alyokhin realizes how inessential, how trivial, and how deceptive and unnecessary everything that frustrated their love was. As the story closes, the narrating persona returns to comment on how the two listeners—Ivan and Burkin—feel compassion for Alyokhin, and regret he has nothing to make his life more pleasant. This sense of regret, of love unfulfilled, of wasted opportunities and unlived lives, is the essence of the popular Chekhovian mood.

STORIES OF THE AUTHENTIC LIFE

These aspects of the Chekhovian mood also are present in another story published in 1898, “All Friends Together” (Hingley). The structure does not resemble “Concerning Love” as much as a more complex “Verotchka,” published eleven years earlier in 1887. As in “Verotchka,” a professional man from the city travels to the provinces where he has the opportunity for a life of love, but like the protagonist in “Verotchka,” he rejects that opportunity. The story is filtered through the consciousness of Podgorin, a successful lawyer who visits the estate of some old friends, where he had served as a tutor when a poor student. Both the types of characters and the estate's atmosphere resemble the characters and setting of Chekhov's later plays: because of mismanagement, the estate is to be sold, as in The Cherry Orchard; and the three women and Sergy are similar in many ways to the family in The Three Sisters. The story should not be confused with the earlier prose plays where the structure is composed of dialogue, for the interior, psychological action in Podgorin's consciousness is the structural center of this story.

The dramatic line of development involves Podgorin's relationship with Nadya. Ten years before, Podgorin had tutored her, and later, fallen in love with her. Now Nadya, an attractive, twenty-three-year-old, desires to marry, and the plot revolves around whether Podgorin will propose. One moonlit summer night, when Podgorin is sitting out on the grounds, Nadya appears. She senses his presence, but since she cannot see him in the shadows, she asks if someone is there. Podgorin knows that now is the time to speak, if he wishes to propose, but like the protagonist in “Verotchka,” he feels strangely indifferent. His emotions remain disengaged from this “poetic vision” of the woman in the moonlight. Podgorin remains silent, and Nadya turns away with the comment, “There's no one there” (IX, 242). On one level, her “no one” suggests Podgorin's lack of substance as a human being, for he has rejected the opportunity to become part of this “poetic vision,” the chance for a life of love. In his action, Podgorin on a deeper level rejects himself: “this Podgorin with his apathy, his boredom, his perpetual bad temper, his inability to adapt to real life” (IX, 241). Shortly afterward, Podgorin leaves for Moscow, feeling “indifferent,” not sad.

In “Verotchka,” the protagonist's rejection is a clear-cut turning away from a vital, life experience, but Podgorin's choice is more ambiguous. He does not wish to become entangled in the web of problems in Nadya's family, and more importantly, he yearns for a “new, lofty, rational mode of existence” (IX, 241), which he senses this marriage could not provide. The desire to change one's life is a common trait of the Chekhov protagonist who senses he is living an inauthentic life.

A story published later in 1898, “Dr. Startsev” (Hingley), is similar to “All Friends Together” in subject, but where “All Friends Together” has the tight dramatic focus of a play, “Dr. Startsev” suggests a novel that has been marvelously telescoped into a short story. Instead of the highly focused time span of one day, which leads itself to remaining exclusively in the consciousness of the protagonist, the time in “Dr. Startsev” spans several years, during which the protagonist ages considerably and his position in society changes. The story provides a good example of Chekhov's narrating persona, with several shifts into the consciousness of the protagonist during key dramatic moments.

In the opening, the narrator provides a general introduction to a provincial town and to the Turkins, the town's most cultivated and accomplished family. Dr. Startsev, a young doctor recently appointed to the area, falls in love with an aspiring pianist named Catherine Turkin, but when he proposes, Catherine rejects him. Although she believes he is kind and intelligent, she is determined to escape the provincial town with its “empty, futile existence” (IX, 60). In the four years that pass after Catherine leaves for Moscow, Startsev settles into a middle-class existence: he grows to resent the limited views of the provincial townspeople, gains a great amount of weight, and becomes a nightly bridge player. When Catherine returns after her discovery that she will never become a great pianist, she desires Startsev's company, but he rejects her request to call upon her.

The story closes after a few more years in which Startsev has built a vast practice, and has gained even more weight. Now a dedicated materialist primarily interested in acquiring property, he lives a dreary life without other interests. Like Podgorin, he has rejected the opportunity for a different life, and the narrator describes him as a rather pathetic figure. In commenting on the artistic merit of the story, Ronald Hingley observes that although “Dr. Startsev” has been comparatively neglected by the critics, the story holds its own with any rival (IX, 1).

Life in the provinces takes a different turn in “The Savage” (Hingley), in which the protagonist is not Chekhov's typical middle-class hero but an elderly, retired Cossack officer who invites a lawyer to his farm. At the farmhouse, the lawyer discovers the Cossack's wife is still young and pretty, although the couple has two full-grown sons. But the Cossack treats her with indifference: “She wasn't a wife, she wasn't the mistress of the house or even a servant, she was more of a dependent—an unwanted poor relation, a nobody” (VIII, 232). This deplorable condition is dramatized not only by the manner in which the Cossack orders his wife about, but when the Cossack says that “women aren't really human to my way of thinking” (VIII, 231).

The Cossack's treatment of his wife is but one form of his behavior that the lawyer finds objectionable, and Chekhov's achievement in the story is in portraying this very unsympathetic character in human terms. Because of a recent stroke, the Cossack is searching for “something to hold on to in his old age,” some belief so he will not be afraid of dying. For all his callous behavior, the old Cossack knows that for the “good of his soul” he should shake off “the laziness” that causes “day after day and year after year to be engulfed unnoticed, leaving no trace” (VIII, 232). Despite his cultural difference, the Cossack displays the same search for individual meaning exhibited by Chekhov's common middle-class protagonists.

Another character like Dr. Startsev who becomes confined to a life in the provinces is the heroine of “Home” (Hingley). Vera, a sensitive, educated, young woman, returns to her grandfather's farm after ten years in Moscow. At first, she is excited about her life in the country, although the wide-open landscape with its “boundless plain” is “so monotonous, so empty” it frightens her, and although she has reservations about her grandfather, who before emancipation had his peasants flogged and who still terrorizes his servants. But as Vera discovers the limited nature of the provincial society—she had never met people so “casual and indifferent”—her feelings about her life and future begin to change to uncertainty, and like so many Chekhov characters, she yearns for something to give her life meaning, a situation which will enable her to “love and have a family of her own” (VIII, 244).

Vera's aunt suggests that Vera marry Dr. Neshchapov, who is attracted to Vera. In his materialism, this doctor shares characteristics with Dr. Startsev: the director of a factory, he considers his medical practice his secondary profession. Vera is not attracted to him, but her other possibilities seem even more limiting, for the “vast expanses, the long winters, the monotony and tedium make you feel so helpless” (VIII, 246). She fears that disabling boredom so many Chekhov protagonists experience, but “there seemed to be no way out. Why do anything when nothing does any good?” (VIII, 246). One day Vera vents her frustration on her servant. Realizing the inappropriateness of her action—she detests such behavior in her grandfather—she agrees to marry Dr. Neshchapov, and thus resigns herself to her own “perpetual discontent with herself and others” (VIII, 247), the same discontent that Podgorin displays. Defeated, she accepts that “happiness and truth have nothing to do with ordinary life” (VIII, 247). In surrendering her aspirations and dreams for a better life, Vera knows she will now “expect nothing better.” The provincial social reality will overcome her desire for a better, richer life.

Chekhov had a special place in his heart for schoolteachers, and it shows in “In the Cart” (Hingley), published five weeks after “Home” in 1897. The events are structured around the journey of a rural schoolmistress. As in “All Friends Together” and “Home,” the story is centered in the consciousness of the protagonist, Marya, who has taught at the same school for thirteen years, although to her, the constant hardship makes it seem a “hundred years or more.” During Marya's journey, a local landowner, an alcoholic about her age, passes Marya's cart in his carriage. She feels attracted to him, but knows to fall in love would be a “disaster.” Although she desires a husband and wants “love and happiness,” she feels her job has made her unattractive, and so her love would not be returned.

Through her thoughts, Chekhov details the hardships of her position. All winter she must endure the cold schoolhouse, and she must struggle constantly against the attitudes of the janitor and the school manager. She realizes that no one finds her attractive, for the job is wearing her out, making her a drudge ashamed of her timid behavior. Her salary is low, and she is so worried about finances that she misses the satisfaction of serving an ideal in her work.

As Marya enters her home village, she sees a woman on a train who resembles her dead mother, reminding Marya of her life before teaching. This experience gives her a sudden surge of happiness and joy, a form of rapture. When the landowner again appears, she imagines “such happiness as has never been on earth” (VIII, 258). She feels the sky and trees and building windows are “aglow with her triumphant happiness” (VIII, 258). This mystical experience, which resembles the happiness of Gusev, is the climax of the story.

But this wonderful experience vanishes as Marya's cart continues into the village, leaving her “shivering, numb with cold.” She realizes she will continue her joyless life as before. She is trapped as firmly in her barren, provincial environment as Vera or Dr. Startsev. In commenting on her character, however, Kenneth Lantz notes that she is not “fixed, limited, easily defined,” but a character in flux: he compares her to Nadya Shimin in “A Marriageable Girl,” contending that characters such as these are “alive”—they are “unpredictable, and they can develop.”³

In many ways “A Marriageable Girl” (Hingley), the last short story Chekhov wrote, stands in opposition to such stories as “Dr. Startsev, “Home,” and “In the Cart.” Unlike Vera, who decides that marriage is the only available option, or Marya, who desires the opportunity for a suitor, the protagonist Nadya escapes her inauthentic life by a brave decision. When the story opens, Nadya has a fiancé whom she will marry in a few weeks, but she becomes depressed. Nadya attempts to tell her mother about this depression, but her widowed mother does not understand. A friend of the family, Sasha, encourages Nadya to flee the engagement and her home. He is one of those revolutionary students in Chekhov who advocates radical change—Trofimov in The Cherry Orchard, written immediately after “A Marriageable Girl,” is another example. Sasha accuses the whole family, including Nadya, of being “sordid and immoral” in their idleness. Although Nadya agrees with Sasha's criticism, she feels trapped in her situation and unable to change it.

A critical point comes a few weeks before the marriage, when her fiancé takes her to inspect their luxurious future house. Nadya hates it. She realizes she also hates her fiancé's “sheer complacency,” and “sheer stupid, mindless, intolerable smugness” (IX, 214-15). Afterwards Nadya explains to her mother that she cannot marry the man, and declares that their lives are “petty and degrading” and that she despises herself and “this idle, pointless existence” (IX, 217). In contrast to Vera in “Home,” Nadya does not submit to the objective, social reality of her circumstances, but begins a transformation of her life that affirms her subjective view of the world. The next day she runs away to St. Petersburg to go to school, “on her way to freedom.” Ronald Hingley notes that in the story's own time, Nadya would have been readily identified as a revolutionary figure (IX, 10); she feels a “new life opening before her, with its broad horizons” (IX, 223). In contrast to Vera in “Home,” Nadya does not settle for a life she knows will eventually defeat her. The last of Chekhov's great fiction protagonists, Nadya is a heroine in a most positive manner, a final tribute to Chekhov's ability to view each story as a fresh effort in his search for artistic integrity.

If the character of Nadya represents a challenge to the restrictions imposed by society, then Belikov, the protagonist of “A Hard Case” (Hingley), represents the other extreme. Belikov demands that everyone rigidly conform to the restrictions and rules of the objective, social reality. Like the others in the informal trilogy, “Concerning Love” and “Gooseberries,” there is a story within a story. Burkin, a schoolteacher, relates the inner story of Belikov to Ivan, the veterinarian surgeon, in a village barn after a day of hunting. Belikov, who died a few months before, was a classics teacher who had taught at the local school for fifteen years. He had terrorized not only other schoolteachers and students, but the whole town with his strict adherence to the rules. Out of fear of Belikov's disapproval, the townspeople gave up their amateur theatricals, and the clergy would not eat meat or play cards in his presence. Instead of directly bullying the townspeople like Sergeant Prishibeyev, Belikov, also one of Chekhov's more famous characters, intimidates them with the authority of his position.

Chekhov's portrayal of Belikov's personal life gives the character credibility. Belikov was afraid of life: he feared “repercussions” in his job, feared his throat would be cut by his servant, feared burglars; and the crowded school itself “terrified him, revolted his whole being” (IX, 18). Belikov's undoing begins when a Ukrainian woman moves to town, and the townspeople decide the two of them should marry. When Belikov sees the Ukrainian woman riding a bicycle, he goes to her brother to protest what he feels is a lack of decorum. But the brother—a robust, new teacher—tosses Belikov out of his lodgings, and he falls down the stairs. Although he is unhurt, the Ukrainian woman and some other ladies laugh at his ludicrous expression. Greatly upset, Belikov returns home where he goes to bed for a month, until he dies. Burkin remembers that after the funeral everyone enjoyed an hour or two of “absolute freedom,” but within a week, life was back to its “old rut. It was just as austere, wearisome, and pointless as before” (IX, 25).

Burkin closes his inner story with the comment that Belikov left behind a lot of other men in “shells” who will continue to be a force in the future. In contrast to Nadya from “A Marriageable Girl,” such men have a fixed response to life, and in their rigidity are living inauthentic lives, incapable of change or growth. Ivan believes everyone in the provincial town is living in a “shell,” like Belikov, and expresses the desire to tell an “extremely edifying” story himself, but since Burkin is tired and soon falls asleep, Ivan is left pondering the story he wanted to tell. On one level, this ending is an effective closure to the story, for Burkin's story strikes a moral chord in Ivan that makes him want to relate his own tale. On another level, it sets the stage for the next story in the trilogy.

Ivan relates his “edifying” story, “Gooseberries” (Hingley), on another hunting trip. Again Chekhov uses his narrator persona to establish the frame setting for Ivan's story: it begins raining, so the two men seek shelter on the estate of Alyokhin, who later will narrate “Concerning Love,” the last story in the trilogy. Over tea, Ivan begins his tale of his brother Nicholas, who spent much of his life saving for a small estate like the one on which the brothers spent their childhood. The dramatic section of Ivan's inner story occurs a year before his present narration, when he first visited Nicholas' estate. Nicholas, like Dr. Startsev, had gained weight; in describing him, his dog, and his cook, Ivan employs imagery that recalls pigs, so that Nicholas himself seems “all set to grunt.” Nicholas has undergone a great change, and behaves like “a real squire, a man of property.” Ivan believes he has become blatantly arrogant, with a typical landowner's attitude toward his peasants; he believes education is not right for “the lower orders,” and corporal punishment is “in certain cases useful and indispensible” (IX, 34).

The important change in the story, however, occurs in Ivan himself, which is appropriate since he is the point-of-view character. During the long years of saving, Nicholas dreamed of eating gooseberries from his estate, and his first action as owner was to order twenty bushes and plant them himself. A few hours after Ivan's arrival, when Nicholas picks his first gooseberries and, in silence and tears, eats them, Ivan realizes Nicholas is a happy man. But that realization plunges Ivan into a “despondency akin to despair.” Later that night Ivan realizes what a crushing force the happy people of the world are, for among the “grotesque poverty everywhere, the overcrowding, degeneracy, drunkenness and hypocrisy” (IX, 35), there is the impudence and idleness of the strong. Ivan believes happy people have “no eyes or ears” for those who suffer, and the “silent happiness” of a community is a collective hypnosis that allows such suffering to continue simply as “mute statistics” (IX, 35-36). Because of this system, Ivan believes at the door of every contented man should be someone standing with a little hammer, someone to keep “dinning into his head” that unhappy people do exist, and that, happy though he may be, life “will round on him sooner or later” (IX, 36).

In presenting this idea, Ivan becomes a voice advocating a moral position that underlies much of Chekhov's work in the last decade of his life, from the character of the earlier Ivan in “Ward Number Six” in 1892 to the revolutionary Sasha in “A Marriageable Girl” in 1903. In “Gooseberries,” Ivan relates this realization has worked a change in him, a kind of moral conversion, so now he finds the peace and quiet of town life unbearable, and no spectacle more depressing than a happy family having tea around a table. Ivan's search for meaning and authenticity in life becomes the focus for the larger moral content of the story.

When the story returns to the frame setting, the dissatisfaction of the listeners with Ivan's story is portrayed with Chekhov's tongue-in-cheek tone as they wish for a different kind of story, one about elegant persons that does not bore them. With this comment, Chekhov makes a light, ironic statement about the stereotypical concept of the function of fiction. To add to the irony, the listeners watch a pretty young maid clearing the table of their teacups, and believe watching her is “better than any story” (IX, 37).

In commenting on this masterpiece, Thomas Gullason states that nothing is solved, but the story is like “a delayed fuse” that depends on “after-effects on the reader via the poetic technique of suggestion and implication.”⁴ In Chekhov's own comments on “Thieves,” he maintained he would allow “the jury” to decide the “guilt” of the characters and would avoid “sermonizing” (Yarmolinsky, 133), but in “Gooseberries,” the character of Ivan seems to occupy the role of the prosecuting attorney. The idea that Chekhov could use the character of Ivan in this manner, and yet avoid didacticism, is implied in Gullason's further comment that the story seems “as artless, as unplanned, as unmechanical as any story can be; it seems to be going nowhere, but it is going everywhere” (27). Chekhov achieves the effect of the master artist in creating the illusion that the story is artless, as episodic as life itself, while presenting a moral content as well-defined and as detailed as in any story he wrote.

That search for meaning in life is the subject of Chekhov's most complex and accomplished novella written in the first person: “My Life—A Provincial's Story” (Hingley). The narrating protagonist Misail Poloznev, one of Chekhov's most compelling characters, embodies that search for the authentic life with his honesty and his integrity. As the subtitle suggests, the story is a portrayal of provincial life, Chekhov's most extensive effort in prose in that direction, and the limiting nature of that life is explored in depth. One situation involves the tension that family relationships generate. The twenty-five-year old son of the town architect, Misail is considered a failure because he cannot retain a clerk's position, although it requires no “mental effort, talent, special ability or creative drive” (VIII, 118). Since he despises the work, he has been fired nine times. Chekhov's characters frequently turn to work in their search for an authentic life, but that work must be meaningful labor. After his last dismissal, Misail wishes to find such meaning through manual labor, but his typically middle-class father is ashamed that Misail would do such work, believing it is the “hallmark of slaves and barbarians” (VIII, 116). In the ensuing argument, the father beats Misail with an umbrella, causing a permanent break between them. The tension involves more than manual labor, for Misail believes his father is an incompetent architect because his imagination is “muddled, chaotic, stunted”—another example of the limiting nature of provincial life. Not only does Misail rebel, but when his sister Cleopatra discovers her provincial, middle-class life to be inauthentic, she does also.

Misail finds manual labor as a house painter, working for a Dickens-like character named Radish. Chekhov's portrayal of the laboring men and their attitudes toward life, each other, and the townspeople illustrates a broad knowledge of life. Misail's ideas on the meaning of life are articulated in a dialogue with another of Chekhov's doctor figures, Dr. Blagovo, whom Misail believes to be the “best and most cultivated” man in town. Like the dialogues in “In Exile” and “Ward Number Six,” the philosophic positions of both characters are dramatized in lengthy conversations. Where Blagovo believes the “gray and commonplace” concerns of present life are not worth one's effort, Misail is committed to improving society. He is afraid “the art of enslavement” is gradually being perfected in the modern world, and believes although serfdom has been abolished, capitalism is spreading, so that “the majority still feeds, clothes and protects the minority, while remaining hungry, unclothed and unprotected itself” (VIII, 139). Misail also believes every man should do manual work, a belief similar to the artist's in “An Artist's Story,” published earlier in the same year of 1896. Like in “An Artist's Story,” Chekhov's artistic achievement in “My Life” lies not in articulating such ideas, but in creating emotionally complex characters capable of thinking deeply and passionately about the nature of man and society.

One aspect of the search for an authentic life in “My Life” involves love. Masha Dolzhikov, the daughter of a wealthy railway builder, falls in love with and marries Misail. Masha, who in contrast to the other provincials has lived in St. Petersburg, is an idealist who shares Misail's belief that rich and educated people should work like everyone else. She and Misail occupy one of her father's estates, where she attempts to live a meaningful life by farming. Misail knows Masha is not committed to a laboring life, for she has other choices with her wealth, but against his better judgment, he falls unequivocally in love with her. Chekhov's portrayal of the suffering this love causes Misail is one of the great accomplishments of the novella. The love between Misail and Masha is complemented by the love between Cleopatra and Dr. Blagovo, who has left his estranged wife and children in St. Petersburg. Cleopatra's love for the doctor incites her to seek an authentic life. In typical Chekhovian fashion, neither of these love relationships endure.

The relationship between Misail and Masha becomes dependent on her success with the estate. In contrast to Lydia in “An Artist's Story,” Masha becomes disillusioned in attempting to build a school for the peasants. Chekhov's portrayal of her efforts and the peasants' response illustrate the immense difficulty of effecting change in society; one of Chekhov's many achievements in this novella is presenting that complex relationship between landowner and peasant. The peasant is presented sympathetically through the attitudes of Misail, for through plowing, harrowing, and sowing, he develops some sense of the “barbarous, brute force” that both confronts the peasant and is a part of him. Misail, drawn to the peasants, concludes they are a “highly strung, irritable people” who have had a raw deal and whose imaginations have been “crushed” (VIII, 170). For all the limitations of the peasants, Misail sees something vital and significant in them, something that is “lacking in Masha and the doctor for instance” (VIII, 170). That element is the belief in the truth, and the power of the truth to save not only the peasant himself, but all mankind. Misail believes the peasant “loves justice more than anything else in the world” (VIII, 170), a belief that connects Misail directly to Leo Tolstoy. As Ronald Hingley notes, no contemporary Russian reader would have missed the connection (VIII, 5).

As the love relationship between Misail and Masha dissolves, she leaves for St. Petersburg, and then, before leaving for America, she requests a divorce. The other love relationship ends as Cleopatra dies shortly after giving birth to the doctor's child out of wedlock. In their last days, the suffering that Cleopatra and Misail endure in their poverty recalls the novels of Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Like characters in those novels tried by circumstances, Misail experiences a mental breakdown from the emotional strain, and wanders the streets out of his mind.

After his recovery, in the final, expository chapter, Misail continues to work as a painter in town as he cares for his sister's child, like the narrator in “An Anonymous Story.” In Misail's final comments, he declares the townspeople have been “reading and hearing about truth, mercy and freedom for generations” but “their entire progress from cradle to grave is one long lie”; they torment each other, “fearing and hating freedom as if it were their worst enemy” (VIII, 181). Chekhov thus links the relationship between the lie and freedom in this masterpiece. In commenting on “My Life,” D. S. Mirsky states only one other story by Chekhov, entitled “In the Hollow,” can rival it in terms of “poetical grasp” and significance (363).

The search for meaning in life in the provinces is also the subject of “On Official Business” (Hingley). The protagonist is a young coroner Lyzhin, who accompanies a doctor to a small village to investigate a suicide, the “official business” of the title. Once again, the limitations of provincial life are a theme. Because of a blizzard, Lyzhin must remain with the body for a number of hours in a hut, where he visits with the local constable, an old peasant who tells him about the dead man. After the peasant retires to another room, Lyzhin considers his life in this provincial outpost, contrasting it with the excitement of Moscow where he lived as a student, and decides “here you want nothing, you easily come to terms with your own insignificance, and you expect only one thing in life: just let it hurry up and go away” (IX, 117). If he could escape to Moscow in five or ten years, it still would not be too late to have a “whole life” ahead of him. To this point in the action, the events seem typical of many of Chekhov's stories about the limitations of provincial life, but events take a different direction when the doctor returns and invites Lyzhin to a local estate.

Lyzhin contrasts the gay happenings on the estate with the dismal peasant hut, feeling the difference between them is “magical.” That night he dreams of the suicide and the old peasant marching together through the freezing cold and the deep snow, singing, “We know no peace, no joy. We bear all the burdens of this life, our own and yours” (IX, 122). When Lyzhin wakes, he realizes “some link—invisible, but significant and essential” (IX, 122) exists not only between the suicide and the old peasant, but between all men. Such a thought recalls “The Student,” another story deceptively simple in its events, but in “On Official Business,” the moral context of the idea is based in a secular humanism, without a Christian holiday as backdrop for the vision. Even in this remote backwater, Lyzhin realizes nothing is arbitrary, for “everything is imbued with a single common idea, everything has one spirit, one purpose” (IX, 122). This mystical thought occurs to an ordinary coroner, an undistinguished protagonist, and it suggests even ordinary man is capable of profound experiences. Lyzhin realizes reasoning is not enough to furnish these insights, but the gift of penetrating “life's essence” is required, and that gift is available to him who “sees and understands his own life as part of the common whole” (IX, 122). This vision of the individual's relationship to mankind serves as Chekhov's own moral position. The idea that the sense of man's responsibility to his fellow man could occur to such an ordinary man in such a remote backwater does not refute the limitations of provincial life, but illustrates the possibility that even here, man can exercise his human responsibility.

Chekhov's vision of mankind has a sociological dimension in “A Case History” (Hingley) written shortly before “On Official Business.” The events are narrated through the consciousness of Dr. Korolyov, an assistant to a professor of medicine in Moscow, one of Chekhov's scientist doctors with a well-developed moral vision of the relationship between the individual and society. Society is represented by the setting of a factory town, similar to that in “A Woman's Kingdom,” written four years previously; the stories share other similarities as well, one being the burden of social responsibility felt by the future heiress.

When Korolyov is summoned from Moscow to treat the owner's daughter, he ascertains her primary problem is not physiological but “nerves.” Her symptoms are an indication of her inauthentic life, for like Anne in “A Woman's Kingdom,” this young woman will inherit the vast mill with all its responsibility and she is “worried and scared” without understanding the reason. Her problem is she does not believe she has “the right” to be a mill owner and rich heiress, and Korolyov tells her that her insomnia is a good sign because it shows concern about right and wrong. Korolyov has a moral vision of the age: the previous generation was not bothered by such moral questions, and future generations will have solved them. In his belief in the future—“Life will be good in fifty years' time” (IX,77)—he resembles other optimistic doctors in Chekhov's work.

Korolyov's most profound thoughts on the nature of man and society develop as he strolls around the mill that evening. He had never visited a factory before, and previously had compared improvements in the workers' lives to the treatment of incurable diseases. The situation is so hopeless for the worker and/or the patient that he can only be made as comfortable as possible and never really healthy or cured. But now Korolyov realizes not only the workers, but the supervisors and the “bosses” are all involved in a labor in which the “principal, the main beneficiary, is the devil” (IX, 75).

Korolyov actually does not believe in the devil, but the image comes to mind because of the appearance of the mill fires at night. He imagines in the chaos of everyday life, some malevolent, mysterious force has forged the relationship between weak and strong so that both are “equal victims.” Like the mutually harmful relationship between master and slave, the strong as well as the weak are victims of the “primitive mindless force” (IX, 75) that rules mankind.

With this vision, Korolyov functions as a metaphor for a spiritual doctor, “accustomed to forming accurate diagnoses of incurable chronic ailments deriving from some unknown ultimate cause” (IX, 74), with society as the sick patient, suffering from the malevolent, mysterious force that creates the illness in man's relationship to his fellow man. On one level, “On Official Business” complements this earlier story, for the coroner's vision of the common bond among men with its “one spirit, one purpose” becomes an answer, a cure, to the metaphoric illness that Korolyov diagnoses.

STORIES OF THE PEASANT

During this last period Chekhov wrote two masterpieces with peasant village life as his primary subject, “Peasants” and “In the Hollow.” After appearing in 1897 in a literary journal, “Peasants” was printed as a separate volume with “My Life” and became very popular, with seven reprints in the following few years. Where the narrator in “My Life” is from the middle class and views the peasant in an objective, but sympathetic manner, in “Peasants” Chekhov mainly presents the peasants' experiences directly to the reader. The second masterpiece, “In the Hollow,” resembles “Peasants” in that the characters and events also are presented directly through Chekhov's narrator. “The New Villa” (Hingley) is an important, chronologically intermediate story that gives the landowner and the peasant equal weight. The landowners in this story are a railway engineer and his compassionate wife who have recently moved to the area and built a new villa. They attempt to forge a relationship of integrity with the peasants in a neighboring village, but some of the peasants constantly take advantage of the engineer. In disgust, the engineer leaves the villa with his family and sells the estate.

The events provide insight into the difficulties of communication between both individuals and social groups. The goodwill efforts of two sets of characters—the engineer and his family, and a peasant blacksmith and his family—are defeated by the attitudes and actions of other hostile peasants. A new owner of the villa behaves much worse toward the peasants than the original compassionate owners, but the peasants get along with him much better. In one scene, the peasants pass the villa and wonder why they get along so well with the new owner, but knowing no answer, they “trudge on silently, heads bowed” (IX, 107). This image, when well-meaning people are defeated by some powerful force that operates against the betterment of human relations, is a powerful comment on the mysteriousness of human affairs.

If the portrait of peasant conditions that emerges from “The New Villa” is not encouraging, then the portrait in “Peasants” (Hingley) is a downright bleak naturalistic picture of unrelenting poverty that grinds down the human spirit. The portrayal is so unrelenting that Leo Tolstoy is reported to have termed it “a sin against the common people,”⁵ but in Russia during Chekhov's own lifetime, “Peasants” was the most famous of all his stories. Ronald Hingley believes the story clearly is “a great work of art,” and “a work of genius” (VIII, 3).

Brutal violence and indignities characterize life in a small peasant village of some forty huts. The narrative is a succession of hardship scenes with only an occasional experience to relieve the bleakness. A terminally ill waiter, Nicholas, returns from Moscow with his wife Olga and their ten-year-old daughter to live with his parents and his brother's families, all in one hut. When they arrive, Nicholas “actually took fright” as he sees how dark, cramped and dirty the hut is, recognizing the “real poverty and no mistake” (VIII, 196).

Later that first day, Nicholas and Olga have the opportunity to enjoy the beauty in the natural surroundings, but then Nicholas' drunk brother Kiryak comes to the hut and punches his wife Marya in the face. Pleased at the fear he causes, Kiryak drags Marya out of the hut “bellowing like a wild animal to make himself more frightening still” (VIII, 198). As usual in cases of domestic violence, Kiryak's beatings increase in intensity, and later are so severe that Marya has to be doused with water to bring her back to consciousness. Another instance of violence occurs as Kiryak himself is taken off to be flogged by the authorities.

The characters experience other disheartening indignities. Fyokla, another sister-in-law whose husband is away in the army, also lives in the hut with her children. One night she is stripped naked by the neighboring estate's servants, with many of whom she has been having sexual relations, and is left to wander home alone. When she returns, she weeps for her debasement. Another moving scene occurs when Nicholas' mother, Gran, who works hard to provide for the family, verbally abuses Nicholas. The samovar, their pot for heating tea water and symbol of the household, has been taken to pay taxes. Although she loves Nicholas, she feels so degraded and insulted when this happens she unfairly blames his family's presence for the misfortune. Since the members of the family have no one to turn to for help, they are completely vulnerable to these sufferings and hardships.

Although the events of the novella are narrated primarily through Chekhov's persona, certain passages are presented through the sensibility of Nicholas' wife Olga. As a newcomer, she notices behavior and detail that would not consciously register with the other characters. After a few months, Olga realizes life in the village is such a struggle that little time or effort is allowed for people to behave with anything but “mutual disrespect, fear and suspicion.” But for all the hardship, Olga learns these people have a sense of community. When Kiryak is taken off to be flogged, Olga remembers “how pitiful and crushed the old people had looked” (VIII, 221).

During the middle of winter, Nicholas dies, and that spring Olga decides to return to Moscow, to secure a position as housemaid. As the novella closes, she and her daughter are walking to Moscow, begging for alms. Chekhov employs his objective technique in this scene so that the effect paradoxically provides the reader with a sense of intimacy with these destitute characters.

The sociological information contained in “Peasants” created a political uproar among parts of society, generating the kind of public response that recalled the appearance of a new novel by Ivan Turgenev or Fyodor Dostoevksy in previous times (Simmons, 393). The artistic value of the novella, however, derives from the validity of the characters and from the experience of village life that Chekhov depicts. Chekhov's portrayal of Fyokla's sensibility and motivation is superb, and there are a number of powerful, lyrical descriptions. One is a fire scene when one of the village huts burns; another is the peasants' response to the visit of a traveling religious procession and another is the simple experience of attempting to sleep in the crowded hut. Since there is no sharp dramatic conflict, the narrative becomes a succession of mosaics that remains etched in the reader's mind.

Since the characters of “In the Hollow” (Hingley) are engaged in a dramatic conflict, the form is more traditional. In contrast to the beautiful natural surroundings in “Peasants,” the setting for this village is, as the title suggests, in the bottom of a ravine. Chekhov's environmental concerns are evident here where the village water is polluted by a tannery factory and the air always smells of factory waste, as if it were “clogged by a dense miasma of sin” (IX, 155). Unlike “Peasants,” which focuses on a poor family, the subject for “In the Hollow” is the members of the family that operate the village store, the Tsybukins, the wealthiest family in the village. The head of the family is a clever old man who has built up his business by constantly cheating his peasant customers. In addition to illegal vodka, Tsybukin sells putrid salt beef before feast days, “stuff with so vile a stench you could hardly go near the barrel” (IX, 155). But Tsybukin does love his family, especially his eldest son Anisim, now a police detective in Moscow, and his daughter-in-law Aksinya, a “beautiful, well-built” peasant married to his younger son, a mentally impaired deaf man. The basic family situation in this novella recalls “Peasant Women,” and in many ways “In the Hollow” develops from where the earlier story ends: the tensions in the family relationships, unresolved in “Peasant Women,” are worked dramatically through in “In the Hollow” until the dissatisfied daughter-in-law controls the family.

Aksinya is one of Chekhov's most sinister characters, an ambitious woman with an unusual head for business. She operates the store as effectively and dishonestly as her father-in-law. Chekhov often uses the image of the snake in describing her; like a viper, she is physically dangerous, eventually killing her sister-in-law's baby in a fit of rage. In contrast to her dishonesty is the goodness of Barbara, Tsybukin's second wife; cheerful and lighthearted, she freely gives alms to beggars and various pilgrims who stop at the store. Another sister-in-law, Lipa, is a poor, self-effacing, but physically attractive peasant girl whom the eldest son Anisim marries on a return trip to the village. While the guests at this major event are feasting at table, a crowd of poor peasants gathers in the store yard. Occasionally when the band is not playing, one village woman's cry carries clearly to the table: “Rotten swine, grinding the faces of the poor. May you rot in hell!” (IX, 163). This cry of protest recalls Misail's comment in “My Life” on the desire of the peasant for justice. By the end of the novella, Lipa emerges as a symbol of the peasant. Both a victim and an endurer of wrongdoing, she joins that mosaic of suffering depicted in “Peasants.”

The novella's key dramatic event occurs several months after Anisim is arrested for counterfeiting money. Ironically, Anisim's dishonest behavior was learned from his father. When Tsybukin returns from the sentencing of his son to Siberia, he wills some land to his grandson, the baby of Lipa and Anisim, but Aksinya is operating a brick factory on this land, and flies into a rage. In one of the most memorable scenes in Chekhov's work, she scalds the baby with boiling wash water. Once again, Chekhov uses irony: the action taken to help the baby instead destroys it. As Lipa attempts to come to terms with her grief, she wanders the countryside with the dead baby in her arms and questions the meaning of suffering in her simple, eloquent language.

In the final section, which occurs three years later, Lipa's character is once again juxtaposed against the members of the family. Aksinya has become the head of the house since Tsybukin is becoming feebleminded, in part from grief. Aksinya is now a force in the community because of her brick factory; her power attracts the ardor of a local landowner. As Lipa passes through the village with a group of peasants who work in Aksinya's brickyard, she gives Tsybukin something to eat. This act, symbolic of her human compassion, is juxtaposed against the thriving dishonesty of the very family that threw her out, and is Chekhov's final use of irony in the novella. In commenting on the complexity and power of “In the Hollow,” V. S. Pritchett pairs it with “The Bishop” as one of Chekhov's two “surpassing masterpieces” (178).

STORIES OF RELIGION

During this period Chekhov wrote two stories about characters committed to a religious life, stories in many ways diametrically opposed and indicative of Chekhov's great range as a writer. The characters in “Murder” (Hingley), Chekhov's most sensational story, are members of a fundamentalist religion who, in a frenzy of rage generated by frustration, beat a member of their household to death. The narrative begins in the consciousness of the victim, Matthew Terekhov, a laborer whose primary pleasures are attending church and singing in the choir. The element that makes his character so appropriate for the events that befall him is Matthew himself is a former religious fanatic, reared in a fundamentalist family like his cousin Jacob. After Matthew left home as a youth, he became increasingly devoted until he crossed over into fanaticism, doing penance such as going barefoot in the snow, wearing irons, and dragging around heavy stones. He established his own church where members went into “crazy fits” of shouting and dancing until they dropped. In one such service, Matthew committed fornication and when he requested forgiveness from his landlord, the man admonished Matthew to be an “ordinary man,” for “overdoing things is devil's work” (VIII, 52). Matthew eventually responded to that guidance, and now does everything—“eat, drink and worship”—like everyone else.

Because of this experience, Matthew criticizes his cousin Jacob's religious practices. Jacob believes the churches are observing the rites incorrectly, and spends his time in special fasts and prayer sessions. In describing Jacob, Chekhov employs one key detail that resembles his later description of Belikov in “A Hard Case”: both men wear galoshes all the time. Like Belikov, Jacob desperately clings to the “rules” because of his fear of life. Jacob's devotion is not to receive benefits from God, but for “form's sake”—upholding decorum, the same motivation of Belikov. During Easter week, when Jacob feels his faith leaving him and cannot worship as before, the stage is set for confrontation. Matthew implores Jacob to reform and accuses him of evil because he maintains a tavern at the inn where they live.

The murder is related with clever use of detail, revealing that Chekhov could be a superb writer of physical action, a fact often overlooked because so many of his stories are concerned with psychological action. One reason the scene is so effective is the unpremeditated manner in which the event unfolds. Like so much domestic violence, an argument simply gets out of hand. Jacob's sister engages Matthew in an argument about the use of oil on his food, forbidden during Lent, and Jacob joins the argument. Ironically, this day of religious observance becomes the scene for a deadly disagreement. Growing increasingly angry, Jacob grabs Matthew to drag him from the table, and in the confusion, the sister believes Matthew is attacking Jacob; she slams the bottle of oil down on Matthew's head, rendering him semiconscious. Jacob, who is “very worked up,” props Matthew up and, pointing to the flat iron beside the table, directs his sister to hit him again. In their fury, they beat Matthew to death, not realizing what is happening until it is too late.

A year later, after the trial, Jacob is disgusted at his former religion—“it seemed irrational and primitive” (VIII, 67). But in a situation that recalls the events in “God Sees the Truth, But Waits” (1872) by Leo Tolstoy, Jacob, while in prison, eventually turns to God and the “true faith” once again. Like many of Chekhov's characters, Jacob now wants “to live.” His heart aches with longing for his home, and he wants to return to tell people about his new faith.⁶ Ivan Bunin, a short story writer especially sensitive to technique, thought this story the best of Chekhov's later work because the “objective narrator lets the shocking conduct make a great impact upon the reader” (Meister, 117).

Another masterpiece involving a character's commitment to religion is “The Bishop” (Hingley). Part of the power of the narrative derives from the subtle portrayal of an intelligent man's perceptions, his mind and emotions. In contrast to the characters in “Murder,” the bishop is a reasonable and learned man with a good grasp of humankind who becomes annoyed during service by “the occasional shrieks of some religious maniac in the gallery” (IX, 191). Born into relative poverty, the bishop worked his way up to a position of power and influence and is now a distinguished figure, one of Chekhov's most elevated characters. The events are structured around his final struggle and test, typhoid fever. Appropriately enough, given the spiritual nature of the protagonist, the time is Easter week: the passions of the traditional religious ceremony are an effective backdrop for the protagonist's own emotional experiences. This story and “Easter Eve” are the crowning achievements of the Easter stories Chekhov had written since early in his career.

The focus is the bishop's evaluation of his life, a process initiated by the visit of his mother when she appears unexpectedly on the eve of Palm Sunday during his service. That evening his mind is filled with delight in recalling his poor native village and happy childhood, memories that his mother's appearance has triggered. The sheer delight with which the details are remembered—“the wheels creaking, sheep bleating, church bells pealing on bright summer mornings” (IX, 193)—recalls the thoughts of the character Gusev in his feverish state. The bishop is unknowingly developing typhoid fever, and like “Gusev” (1890), where the mind of the ill character is filled with memories before he eventually dies, the bishop's mind increasingly alters with his feverish state. The impressionistic prose is a development from those earlier depictions of altered states of consciousness in “Typhus” and “Sleepy.”

During the next few days, as the bishop performs his administrative duties, he reflects on the “pettiness and pointlessness” of his tasks. The church ladies seem “tiresomely stupid,” the peasants rough, the theological students ill-educated, and the paperwork overwhelming. The bishop is experiencing that particularly modern day Chekhovian test: instead of fire or sword, he must fight the trifles of everyday life, the “sheer weight” of which is dragging him down.

During the week, the bishop's illness progresses until he experiences the desire to escape and become a simple priest or ordinary monk, for his position seems to “crush” him. After he suffers an intestinal hemorrhage, he is diagnosed with typhoid fever, and in his weakness, he feels his past has escaped from him “to some infinitely remote place beyond all chance of repetition or continuation” (IX, 203). A sense of past provides a sense of identity, and so as the bishop desires, his identity is now dissolving. At this moment, his mother kisses him like a “dearly beloved child,” and with her soothing presence, he feels like an “ordinary simple man walking quickly and cheerfully through a field,” as “free as a bird” so he can go where he likes (IX, 203-204). Released at last from his worldly responsibilities, the bishop dies, symbolically just before dawn on Holy Saturday. The lyrical description of that joyful Easter Sunday captures the traditional rising of the spirit in Christian ritual as the continuity of the life process is thus assured. Chekhov relates in the closing paragraph no one remembered the bishop anymore except his mother, who lives in a remote province. His desire to become “ordinary” is fulfilled.

The subject of this masterpiece seems particularly appropriate for Chekhov at this stage in his life, when he himself was dying and confined to Yalta. That he should convert such personal materials into this work of art when writing itself was becoming an increasingly physically demanding task marks his great dedication as an artist.

Notes

1. Quoted in the Ecco Press fall catalog for 1990, 13.

2. Times Literary Supplement, 9 November 1916, 537a, quoted in Charles W. Meister, Chekhov Criticism: 1880 Through 1986 (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 1988), 143; hereafter cited in text.

3. “Chekhov's Cast of Characters,” in A Chekhov Companion, ed. Toby W. Clyman (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985), 83.

4. “The Short Story,” Short Story Theories, ed. Charles May (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1976), 27. Hereafter references will be cited with “Gullason” and page number.

5. Quoted in Meister, 123. Gleb Struve notes this opinion is not, however, documented in Tolstoy's own writing. Chekhov: Seven Short Novels, trans. Barbara Makanowitzky; introduction and prefaces by Gleb Struve (New York: Norton, 1971), 365-6. Hingley uses the quote in his introduction (VIII, 5), with the source from N. I. Gitovich, Letopis zhizni i tvorchestva A. P. Chekhov [Chronicle of the Life and Literary Activity of A. P. Chekhov] (Moscow, 1955), 821. In 1962, Ernest Simmons termed this Gitovich book “the most indispensible reference work for all aspects of Chekhov's life and writings” (642), but unfortunately, the book remains untranslated.

6. The closing events of “Murder” contain Chekhov's most realized portrait of Sakhalin Island in fiction. Some of Chekhov's prose non-fiction narratives such as “Yegor's Story,” in The Island: A Journey to Sakhalin, trans. Luba and Michael Terpak; introduction by Robert Payne (New York: Washington Square Press, 1967), suggest the origins for characters such as Anisim from “In the Hollow,” Yergunov in “Thieves” and Jacob Terekhov in “Murder.” In his introduction to this translation, Robert Payne terms The Island “a strange work, brilliant and wayward, scrupulously honest and unpretentious, lit by a flame of quiet indignation and furious sorrow” (xxxvi).

Selected Bibliography

Primary Works

Translations of Short Fiction

Note: I have listed the translations cited in this book. For a more complete list of translations, with 36 entries by 26 translators noted in chronological order, see Constance Garnett's Tales of Chekhov, vol. 13, 339-341.

Chertok, I. C., and Jean Gardner, trans. Late-Blooming Flowers and Other Stories. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1964.

Dunnigan, Ann, trans. Selected Stories. New York: New American Library, 1960.

FitzLyon, April, and Kyril Zinovieff, trans. The Woman in the Case and Other Stories. London: Spearman and Calder, 1953.

Garnett, Constance, trans. The Tales of Chekhov. 13 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1917-23; rpt. New York: Ecco Press, 1984-87. Vol. 13 includes a title index.

Hinchcliffe, Arnold, trans. The Sinner from Toledo and Other Stories. Rutherford, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1972.

Hingley, Ronald, trans. and ed. The Oxford Chekhov. Vol. 4-9. London: Oxford University Press, 1965-1980.

Jones. St. Peter's Day and Other Tales. Translated by Frances H. Jones. New York: Capricorn Books (Copyright: G. P. Putnam's Sons), 1959.

Miles. Chekhov: The Early Stories, 1883-1888. Translated by Patrick Miles and Harvey Pitcher. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1982.

Miller. Anton Chekhov: Collected Works in Five Volumes: Volume One: Stories 1880-1885. Translated by Alex Miller and Ivy Litvinov (other translators listed at the end of some stories). Edited by Raissa Bobrova. Moscow: Raduga Publishers, 1967.

Payne. The Image of Chekhov: Forty Stories by Anton Chekhov in the Order in Which They Were Written. Translated by Robert Payne. New York: Vintage, 1966. Reprinted by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf; copyright 1963 by Alfred A. Knopf.

Smith. The Thief and Other Tales. Translated by Ursula Smith. New York: The Vantage Press, 1964.

Yarmolinsky 1947. The Portable Chekhov. (Stories used in this text translated by Yarmolinsky.) Edited by Avrahm Yarmolinsky. New York: The Viking Press, 1947. (Note: reference to Chekhov's letters are not from this source, but from Letters of Anton Chekhov, ed. Avrahm Yarmolinsky. See Bibliography, “Letters” below.)

Yarmolinsky 1954. The Unknown Chekhov: Stories and Other Writings hitherto Untranslated. Translated with an Introduction by Avrahm Yarmolinsky. New York: The Noonday Press, 1954. (Note: references to Chekhov's letters are not from this source, but from Letters of Anton Chekhov, ed. Avrahm Yarmolinsky. See Bibliography, “Letters” below.)

Collected Works in Russian

Belchikov, N. F., et al, eds. Polnoye sobraniye sochineny i pisem v tridsati tomakh. 30 vols. Moscow, 1974-83.

Balukhaty, S. D., et al, eds. Polnoye sobraniye sochineny i pisem v dvenadtsati tomakh. 20 vols. Moscow, 1944-51.

Letters

Anton Chekhov's Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary. Translated by Michael Heim with Simon Karlinsky; selection, commentary and introduction by Simon Karlinsky. Originally published as Letters of Anton Chekhov. New York: Harper and Row, 1973. Rpt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975.

Letters of Anton Chekhov. Selected and edited by Avrahm Yarmolinsky. New York: Viking Press, 1973.

Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends with Biographical Sketch. Trans. Constance Garnett. New York: Macmillan, 1920.

Letters on the Short Story, the Drama, and Other Literary Topics. Selected and ed. Louis S. Friedland, with a Preface by Ernest Simmons. New York: Minto Beach, 1924; rpt. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1964.

The Life and Letters of Anton Tchekhov. Trans. and ed. S. S. Koteliansky and Philip Tomlinson. Cassell & Co. Ltd., London, 1925; rpt: New York: Benjamin Blom, 1965.

The Selected Letters of Anton Chekhov. Translated by Sidonie K. Lederer; edited with an Introduction by Lillian Hellman. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc., 1984.

Plays

The Oxford Chekhov. Vol. 1-3. Edited and translated by Ronald Hingley. London: Oxford University Press, 1964-1967. Vol. 1: Short Plays. Vol. 2: Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard, and The Wood-Demon. Vol. 3: Platonov, Ivanov, and The Seagull.

Nonfiction

The Island: A Journey to Sakhalin. Translated by Luba and Michael Terpak. Introduction by Robert Payne. New York: Washington Square Press, 1967.

Secondary Works

Buford, Walter H. Chekhov and His Russia: A Sociological Study. 2d. ed., London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1948; rpt. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1971.

Chudakov, A. P. Chekhov's Poetics. Translated by Edwina Cruise and Donald Dragt. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1983.

Clyman, Toby W., ed. A Chekhov Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985.

Eekman, Thomas, ed. Anton Cechov 1860-1960: Some Essays. Leiden: Brill, 1960.

Eekman, Thomas, ed. Critical Essays on Anton Chekhov. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989.

Halunciski, Leo and David Savignac, trans. and eds. Anton Chekhov as a Master of Story-Writing: Essays in Modern Soviet Literary Criticism. The Hague: Mouton, 1976.

Hahn, Beverly. Chekhov: A Study of the Major Stories and Plays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.

Hingley, Ronald. A New Life of Anton Chekhov. New York: Knopf, 1976.

Jackson, Robert Louis, ed. Chekhov: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1967.

Kirk, Irina. Anton Chekhov. Boston: Twayne, 1981.

Kramer, Karl. The Chameleon and the Dream: The Image of Reality in Cexov's Stories. The Hague: Mouton, 1970.

Meister, Charles W. Chekhov Criticism: 1880 Through 1986. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Company, Inc., 1988.

McConkey, James, ed. Chekhov and Our Age. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University, n.d.

Rayfield, Donald. Chekhov: The Evolution of His Art. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1975.

Simmons, Ernest J. Chekhov: A Biography. Boston: Little Brown, 1962.

Stowell, H. Peter. Literary Impressionism, James and Chekhov. Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1980.

Tulloch, John. Chekhov: A Structuralist Study. New York: Harper & Row, 1980.

Welleck, Rene and Nonna D. Welleck, eds. Chekhov: New Perspectives. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1984.

Williames, Lee J. Anton Chekhov: The Iconoclast. Scranton, Pa.: University of Scranton Press, 1989.

Winner, Thomas. Chekhov and His Prose. New York: Holt, Rhinehart and Winston, 1966.

Yermilov, Vladimir. Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, 1860-1904. Trans. Ivy Litvinov.

Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, n.d.[1956]. (Russian original: Moscow, 1953.)

Bibliographies

“Bibliographical Index to the Complete Works of Anton Chekhov.” In David Magarshack, Chekhov: A Life. New York: Grove Press, 1953; rpt. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1970. 393-423.

“Chekhov's Stories: A Chronology.” Tales of Chekhov, vol. 13, 345-350.

Leighton, Lauren. “Chekhov's Works in English: Selective Collections and Editions.” In A Chekhov Companion, edited by Toby W. Clyman. 306-309.

Lantz, Kennth. Anton Chekhov: A Reference Guide to Literature. Boston: Mass.: G. K. Hall, 1985.

Heifitz, Anna. Chekhov in English: A List of Works By and About Him. Ed. with a foreword by Avrahm Yarmolinsky. New York: New York Public Library, 1948.

Yachnin, Rissa. Chekhov in English: A Selective List of Works By and About Him 1949-1960. New York: New York Public Library, 1960.