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The Pause in Chekhov’s Plots

Ilya Gutner

As the artillery regiment leaves town at the end of The Three

Sisters the schoolteacher Kulygin promises his wife Masha that when

the soldiers are gone again the two of them will begin their old

life all anew, as if nothing had happened. Вот и Оля

свидетельница…, says Kulygin: Начнем жить опять по-старому, и я

тебе ни одного слова, ни намека…1 But what is Olga the witness

of: the husband’s promise that they will begin to live anew, or

the wife’s last last date with lieutenant-corporal Vershinin?

Vershinin has walked away and Kulygin come back to replace

him, consoling his wife for the very tears which prove to him

more clearly than a child born of the affair could have done,

since with a child there is always mystery of origins but with

the tears there is no question why Masha is crying as Vershinin

walks rapidly from out of sight. that there was indeed an affair

between her and the division commander. But where his wife’s mind

is one whirling mess of pain (but a mess of pain unified in its

1 And here is Olga for a witness… We will begin our lives again like before, and I will not tell you a single word, a single hint... Three Sisters, in the 12-volume 1960-1964 Soviet critical edition of Chekhov’s Collected Works: Sobranie Sochinenii (Moscow:1963), volume 9, p.598. All translations mine.

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whirl into one single concept: a learned cat on a gold chain),

Kulygin’s is a mixed emotion: on the one hand he sees proof

absolute of that his wife has been unfaithful, but on the other

hand he is happy to have her back. Both the proof absolute and

the happiness to have his Masha back come to the Latin teacher in

course of the natural development of one same action: the

soldiers are leaving.

Chekhov’s way in dealing with complicated questions is to

double the proposition. Kulygin’s tongue plays not one double-

entendre against him here, but two. What Olga is witness to is

one thing; but for the cheated husband to say that he will not

make a single hint at what has happened right after the lover

walks away is already the first hint in their new life after the

regiment’s departure. If Kulygin does not mean it this way, yet

Masha cannot help but take it this way, because to her

overstrained nerves everything must now be a hint at her own

guilty conscience; in which indeed she is different from Natasha,

the other wife unfaithful in plain view, for whom there is no

internal contradiction in being married to one man and also being

the mistress of another.

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Here I must ask my reader to entertain an unlikely

proposition: Masha’s logic in this final Act is the logic of the

stage. Moreover, the three sisters all come together in their

final monologue in three parts because the inherent logic of

connection of each woman has put itself out into the logic of the

final Act, determining in equal measure that the Baron die in an

unnecessary duel because Irina does not love him, as that the

sisters do not go to Moscow, after all.. Put differently, the

events on this stage have the regiment’s departure only for their

external motivation, but what caused the regiment to leave town

in the first place is the strong moral sense in Masha Kulygina,

the most foolish and the most direct of the three Prozorov

sisters, for whom the very affair with Vershinin implied, not so

much in her thoughts as in her good taste which is her defining

trait all throughout the play, a life after the affair to be her

punishment for this brief and stolen happiness. Kulygin may be an

intelligent man, more intelligent than most in grasping the ut

consecutivum rule in Latin grammar, but he is not above the common

error, as he also does not know himself in the moment of his

change. It is the old Kulygin, kindest of men if not the

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smartest, who tries to console Masha in her heartbreak, but the

new Kulygin now, neither the kindest nor the smartest, who gives

his words their form to make the unkind jokes at his and at his

wife’s expense. What makes Kulygin change is the strong moral

sense in Masha, expressed as a sense of taste which lays its mark

upon the actions of all those around her, so that after her

intelligent lover walks away, her husband comes out looking twice

the fool for having said that he is smarter than many, many

people; if only because these words repeat Soleny’s foolish

language in the Second Act that he, Soleny, is more honest than

many, many people in the world, and can prove it too. The

standard of moral measurement in these plays is the desire of

cultivated people to receive punishment when they have done ill;

the fact they do - Chekhov’s badge of faith in moral progress.

Through the naturally painful consequences of their actions, and

more properly through the naturally painful consequences of their

failures to act in a timely manner in order to get the selfish

good in life, Chekhov’s characters end up at the beginning of a

categorical change in their world-view, which Marxists could

describe as the beginning of consciousness, but I would rather

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call the voice of conscience coming awake to speak up in the

desert. Either way, we have the birth of individuals through

pain.

Now a change of mind is the subject of all of the mature

Chekhov’s plots. Even such seeming non-entities as Mister Thin

and his family in The Fat and the Thin, as revised by Chekhov in 1899

for his Collected Works, end their encounter with Mister Fat, the

old school friend and present-time superior authority, by being

all three of them pleasantly surprised: a change of mind from

what happens at the story’s start when “both were pleasantly

surprised”, that is both old schoolmates at their meeting2. I

call it “a change of mind” because Mister Thin’s family is

pleasantly surprised for a different reason than that which made

the two old schoolmates pleasantly surprised at their meeting,

2 Both these individuals are of a rather poetic turn of phrase, even as their chance meeting turns awry. “Friend” is a word which means more in Russian than what these twohave between them if they had lost sight of one another for so many years. The reason for this poetic turn of phrase in them, I hazard, is that they never were such friendsin their school days as they make themselves out to have been in one another’s eyes atpresent meeting, flattering the past. Could these two ever have been such good friendsas they make themselves out to be now, possessing so different a pair of temperaments as that young Master Fat used to make trouble and young Master Thin used to tell on trouble-makers? In this way also the two poetic individuals of The Seagull will make moreof their past love than there ever was to it at their last meeting because it is in the nature of people who see their lives behind them to flatter their past. Nina, it must be remembered, is on the verge of breaking for good with her past life. Mister Fat has no power to overcome Mister Thin’s sudden reverential pose because, even in despite of himself, he accepts it as his due; Treplev none to stay his Nina because inhis own imagination she is the one who always leaves him.

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and so what began as the triumph of friendship over material

distinction, Mister Thin expecting from the start that Mister Fat

with his very aura of fine lunch about him is higher than he is

on the social scale, ends in the triumph of the Table of Ranks

over all other considerations for both men, as Mister Fat does,

after all, accept the sudden adoration of his school fellow, much

as it disgusts him; and what is more, he accepts it in the rank

of Privy Councilor, whom he becomes once and for all only in

consequence of this chance meeting. Chekhov writes: Толстый хотел

было возразить что-то, но на лице у тонкого было написано столько

благоговения, сладости и почтительной кислоты, что тайного

советника стошнило3. Having begun the sentence Mister Fat, the

man goes through his moment of reflection in his school fellow’s

eyes to emerge from it as the Privy Councilor, in full capital

letters. After this the fat man gets to have only the pronoun

“he” to represent him, having become, by personal acceptance of

the sweet-and-sour flattery, a product of the thin one’s

overheated mind.

3 Mister Fat would have objected something, but on the face of Mister Thin there was written so much adoration, sweetness and reverential acid, that the Privy Councilor lost his lunch. Vol.2, p.74.

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Chekhov was a hard materialist: for him, as for Lucretius

long before him, all motions of the mind and heart, and

consequently also of the soul when we come from Rome to Russia,

had to have their origins as well as their consequences in

material reality to be admitted actually to exist. What does not

begin in nature cannot enter into nature, but there is much in

the world outside us and in the world within which beggars our

philosophy4. “Then it follows you do not exist”, the psychology 4 Indeed, even such a mystically minded individual as Gogol of the later period, revising his story of the Portrait, came to this conclusion: the devil is approaching tonature as the line separating the supernatural from the natural thins out in our modern world, but he can only be born unto the world in a natural way. The laws of ouruniverse must gradually change to resemble the laws of the supernatural world, and then the devil is among us. It is not enough, then, for the supernatural to break out only into the natural world, but the devils must infiltrate the laws of ordinary physics and play the devil with them. There is a good example of this devilry at work in the tale of The Lost Letter, from the Dikanka tales: Grandpa Cossack in his youth goes to hell to get his stolen letter back, and, sitting down with the devils to their feast, finds that he cannot even reach a piece of salt pork (forbidden during the fast, of course, and not a thought in his mind that maybe it is not pork, but human flesh or horse meat) into his own mouth, but instead keeps missing it somehow with thegiant fork, to hear the delicious crunching of a pair of jaws right by his ear. Gogol’s devils are such strange creatures that they will even keep a man from defilinghimself with forbidden foods during a fast, so long as they can play a joke at his expense. Here indeed we can say that the only law of physics toyed with is that of perspective, as the fork is said to be about the size of a pitchfork, an unwieldy enough instrument by which to reach food into one’s mouth, instead of into someone else’s right hard by; so it is the greater wonder that Grandpa Cossack does not realize, nor yet the author knows a way to tell, each in his befuddlement, what actually happened: he keeps missing his own mouth with the giant fork because, being longer than his hands, it cannot possibly reach into his mouth, not unless grabbed in a barbaric manner at the middle, not the end. During the card game that ensues the witches keep beating Grandpa Cossack with cards on the table other than the ones he plays, but when the man finally thinks to cross himself, the laws of nature are thus far restored that his own eyes do not deceive him, and he sees the cards actually there in his hands. The sign of the cross does not take the man from the presence of the devils because he does not want to be taken from their presence before he wins thegame, but it does make the game one grade of fairness less unfair. This story indeed ends on a note that Chekhov would later pick up on: Grandpa Cossack’s night with the witches did not pass without a trace, but once each year his wife would dance madly,

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student Andrei Kovrin asks his philosophically inclined

hallucination of the black monk, his mind’s single most brilliant

invention into maintaining whose reality all his effort is then

drained. The monk has just told Kovrin in so many words about the

legend Kovrin had, not noticing his own creative act, invented

earlier that day after falling asleep to a sung romance on a

kindred theme: Легенда, мираж и я - все это продукт твоего

возбужденного воображения. Я - призрак.5 The black monk then

explains, making a weak smile as if to show that such questions

of physical possibility are surely beneath the two of them,

superior beings purely of the mind, that he exists in Kovrin’s

imagination, which in turn is part of nature, and so consequently

the black monk as well exists in nature. Admitting thought also

to be a part of physical nature insofar as it proceeds from

physical nature and also has changes in the physical world for

its result when given full unfolding, the change in Mister Fat’s

identity from Misha Fat to His Excellency the Privy Councilor is

an objective change in nature, so long as there is even a single

unable to control herself. It is Chekhov’s Misail Poloznev who would eventually come to the conviction, based on the observations of his life, that nothing passes without a trace in the world.5 “The legend, the mirage and I - all this is the product of your excited imagination. I am a ghost.” Vol. 7., p. 304.

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human being who is adamantly convinced that the one is surely not

the other.

That said, Mister Fat and Mister Thin make surely an ideal

case in the full unfolding of a petty notion: is that how it

actually happens in life, or is that what we recognize, when it

does happen, as what should have happened, given what we had in

mind? Nor is that story the only case in Chekhov’s clinical

record of pained souls where what we get is the ideal development

of an extreme exception, given us in terms which make it seem the

norm6. The black monk is a continually created production of

6 I explain this normalizing trait of Chekhov’s style in his description of extreme events as an item of imitation: when painful, distressing, or otherwise extraordinary things overtake us, but provided that these are indeed such things as to strike us to the very core, by a certain defense mechanism of our minds we begin to perceive these as the norm. Indeed, the story of The Black Monk is about just such a defense mechanism turning into an illness: Kovrin’s problem is not his hallucinations, but his delusionsof grandeur, which are there equally in the hard time he gives his wife and father-in-law when convalescing and unable to see the black monk, as when he is dying and sees the black monk to console him that his miserable death is really the fruits of genius.But to this harsh world-view, the elder Chekhov answered that maybe it is indeed, because who knows if Kovrin’s spark of genius, which was enough only to produce his hallucination and his self-esteem, did not pass on into the world, to be the impetus of new creations? On the one hand Kovrin is guilty of having ruined the Pesotsky orchard, huge supplier of fruit and goods, but on the other hand maybe Chekhov was notin favor of large enterprises to begin with, and it was the very size of the orchard which tied it to the exploitation of the past, a home plantation. Tanya and her fatherdo, after all, discuss between them a rather nasty question of labor hire, Tanya pressing the capitalist’s view that if they do not work right now, then we should not pay them right now, either. Did Chekhov see the capitalist change as the way to the future? My understanding is that he considered factory-scale capitalism only a new refinement of the old means of exploitation, as the painter in The House with a Mezzanine implies, and as the provincial Misail Poloznev puts it in his argument with doctor Blagovo in My Life. Lopakhin may have the wrong idea in being too optimistic about people that they really will farm their vacation-plots instead of just sitting there on the porch and drinking tea, but Chekhov would not have had Petya Trofimov challengehim on that point, had he himself not hoped that something of the kind really might be

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Kovrin’s mechanism of thought, which we see in action before the

hallucination appears, but never get described, as Kovrin is not

willing to investigate his own basic premises for fear that it

will turn out his is only a mechanism of individual perception,

and not a brilliance which will transform the world. What is

more, the elusive nature of this author comes of the change not

only in the thoughts themselves, but also in the mechanism of

connection through which he sees his characters over the course

of any given story; or else finds it regrettable that these

people failed to change. Gromov the mad prophet of Ward no. 6 is

Ivan Gromov all throughout, but doctor Ragin changes not only his

thoughts about the nature of material reality, but also in the

mechanism of their connection: seeing the hospital from the

inside as an inmate of it he notices for the first time the

prison just outside its windows. This nearby prison, suggested in

the very first paragraph of the first paragraph of the story as a

true as human man, and especially the Russian intellectual, makes forward progress in the moral sphere as well as the technological so to transform the world. Fazile Iskander would put his logical hinges in the past which we have lost, but Chekhov’s hinges necessitate the notion of a forward progress, and those who choose to see no message of hope in his works also invariably isolate for analysis the notion of the impossibility of understanding between people, and consequently also the impossibilityof our perfect understanding of the plots. If to understand is to simplify, then the understanding of Chekhov’s works begins with the forward motion of his logic: if things are not getting better, then we are getting better ourselves if we see this fact.

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nearby metaphor for the feeling produced in the author by the

dreary wood fence with the nails on top for barbed wire which

surrounds the insane ward, replaces now, a real prison, really

and actually right outside the window, in doctor Ragin’s thoughts

the customary jump ahead to when all these things will no longer

matter because the world will be a cold, wild waste of nothing.

If Dostoevsky’s characters are embodied philosophical doctrines,

which stand or fall by their validity to prop up the human spirit

in the storms of life, then Chekhov’s characters are embodied

mechanisms of thought, or syllogisms of transformation. Chekhov

brought his characters into being endowed with a personal logic

for each single one, which tends always towards being shown in

action rather than to being described. Hence the famous inability

of Chekhov’s characters ever to flesh out their positions: their

actions end up finishing their words in concrete example. The

instrument by means of which these logical constructs come into

the action is the pause, as what happens after the pause is

determined wholly by the nature of the people to whom it happens.

When Mister Fat and Mister Thin first met at the train

station on October 1, 1883 in an issue of Leikin’s Fragments

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magazine, Mister Thin had run afoul of superior management,

having, as it then turned out, met not only his ancient school

fellow, but also his present boss. Employed formerly in a

different town in the Department of Forewords and Typos, Mister

Thin explains in his unhappy answer to Mister Fat’s excited

question what he does now for a living that he will now have to

work here, change of town but same Department in the state

bureaucracy. Здесь буду служить, says Mister thin: Начальник,

говорят, скотина, ну да черт с ним!.. Уживусь как-нибудь.

Однофамилец он твой. Ну, а ты как? Небось уж статский? А?7 (The

translation is mine.] To these words Mister Fat replies with the

exaggerated courtesy of a tomcat worrying a mouse before a meal:

Тэк-с... Так это вы, стало быть, милостивый государь, секретарем

ко мне назначены?8 Mister Fat, who has not only the same last

name as Mister Thin’s new boss but also the same body, and what

is more important the exact same job as Mister Thin’s new boss,

then goes on to reproach Mister Thin for coming late to his

assigned place of work, quite unconcerned with the little

7 Now I will work here. They say the boss is a swine but to hell with him!.. I will make do somehow. He has the same last name as you. Well, and you? You must be a State Councilor by now? Huh? Vol. 2, p.555.8 So-o… So you must be my new secretary, kind sir.

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bureaucrat’s excuse that his wife, this same Louisa, born a

Lutheran, whom he had been praising to him just before the

terrible discovery, had been ill, which fact had delayed him on

the road.

Revising the story in the last years of his life, Chekhov

had turned it into a little fable about the power of the things

themselves to effect in people a change of mind. Mister Thin in

1883 had made the fatal mistake of telling his own boss on the

very first day of their meeting that he is, first of all, a

swine, and second of all to hell with him. This paired insult was

then enough for the new boss to give his new underling a good

running-down, having the excuse to hand that Mister Thin came to

work late, not that Mister Fat worried so much about it as that

he could not have had a pleasant lunch. In the course of this

running-down Mister Thin together with his son and wife had

suffered the grotesque change of shape which in the story’s

revised form would become “the trait of his slave nature”, as the

commentators of the second volume of the 1960-64 Soviet Collected

Works ungenerously put it9, quite forgetting that Chekhov also

9 I.S. Ezhova and E.M. Shub, Vol. 2, p.554. The editors write: в журнальной редакции заискивающее поведение "тонкого" в основном вызывается начальственным окриком

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brings out the Privy Councilor nature of Mister Fat in the same

new sequence he wrote in, the one’s sycophancy worth the other’s

arrogance, making between them a smoothly functioning human

apparatus of exchange. But in 1883 these were still the changes

"толстого", а в тексте сборника пресмыкательство является чертой характера "тонкого", свойством его рабской натуры. Now leaving to the side the unhappy question in the making of all such accusations whether or not it takes one to know one, I would observe this only: what does “basically the result” mean, exactly? Mister Thin’s sycophancy in the original version is simply the result of the scary situation with Mister Fat. In the final version the situation gets to be looked into more closely, sothat it does not even take the disapproval of the civil-service General to scare Mister Thin. If what the editors mean here is that Mister Thin was to begin with boundto end up abasing himself before Mister Fat, and that accordingly this is the problem in the will to inequality in people which Chekhov chooses for the subject of his little plot, then this gives some kind of reason. But if we begin to say that every work of art has infinite reasons in it, not possible for any one interpreter to pin down, then we open ourselves to the generic fallacy: if not a single one of the reasons can be pinned down, how do we know that we have not pinned down all the reasons? What is more, if Chekhov be admitted a genuine artist in this story, then he must have upon him the demand to have solved his agenda one way or the other in striking upon a single principle of development to move the whole story, start to finish. “Basically because” will never give us a base to stand upon in order to speak about an author in well-balanced terms. Be all this as it may, the editors’ interpretation betrays a categorical bias against Mister Thin, derived from a traditional interpretation of the final version, which bias then infiltrates their reading of the original in the little formulation “basically the result”, where the word “basically” can only mean that, in their opinion, Mister Thin is already a slave nature even in 1883. For my part, that this should be so does not seem even possible, given the young Chekhov’s sympathy for the lower rungs; and, what is more, his empathywith those who do have to make fake smiles and make do just in order to survive amidstall these proud individuals with high notions of their human worth, which of course means only their own personal human worth, and all below them is mere scum to stand on. (Gaev in The Cherry Orchard may not be polite to Lopakhin, but at least he makes no show of honoring the hard-working peasant in the man, as do the younger Chekhov’s pseudo-liberal Свистуны, Либеральный душка, and a host of other hypocrites including even the famous Huntsman. My guess about Gaev is that Chekhov wanted finally to make astudy of this lazy and parasitical speech-maker type in a place where he has least to gain by making speeches, having already everything his heart could want except the liberty of making speeches, in order to see if he can find an individual cure to the social illness). Later in life Chekhov author would indeed conclude that, after all, to each his own, and that Mister Thin does accept his lowly place in society, and evenlikes it, just as Dunyasha in The Cherry Orchard even likes the fact that Yasha will leaveher and maybe write her a letter from Paris, but in 1883 the change in Chekhov’s attitude to Mister Thin is as much in the future as is Dunyasha herself; and to imply the later views in the younger artist is, finally, to make a chaos of chronology.

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of a moment, and even an admirable way of taking an unpleasant

situation in the Thins, testifying to this little family’s

strength in going on as the little cogs of a governing apparatus,

which must in their very function now and then get heavy jolts

from the parts to which they impart all their motion: this was a

healthy ending for the Thins. But by 1899 Chekhov himself had

changed his notions, and both Mister Fat and Mister Thin are

turned into persons whose lives have been devoured by that very

machine of government, living articles of proof for that the

times must change, one way or another. Both become the victims of

one prejudice, which Chekhov, in a more serious mood, would

explain as the mutual harm in the relations between the wealthy

and the poor.

What motivates the break in the early story is not the rank,

but an action: the new boss giving his new employee a runing-down

for coming late to work, motivated in turn by the employee’s

unintended action in calling his new boss bad names. In the

revised version it is the things themselves producing the desired

effect: not only is there a difference in exactly ten ranks

between the men, but that difference is externalized unwittingly

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by Mister Thin when he speaks about his cigar cases which he

makes on the side and gives a discount to anyone who buys ten or

more at a time. little Nate no longer stretches out

"automatically, as if by instinct". The boy simply stretches to

attention and buttons up all the little buttons of his student

uniform. The internal motivation is completely taken out, the

whole thing now rotating on an object hinge which we ourselves,

not Mister Fat and Mister Thin must, in order to give the story

meaning, supply with the grease of our own understanding why this

happens. In so doing the author opens up the minds of his

characters as psychological mechanisms for analysis and

investigation, so that even if the story has no answers, yet it

sets out the field of question: why is it that these things make

such a change in Russian people at the end of the 19th century as

that when a Privy Councilor meets a Collegiate Assessor, the two

of them make a caricature of one another’s lives?

This story, in its final version, hinges around two gaps of

time left empty for the personalities of the two civil servants

to fill it with themselves: right after Mister Fat names his true

rank and his two medals of decoration, Mister Thin immediately

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turns pale, turns to stone, but soon after he begins to smile in

all directions and shower the sparks of servile flattery from out

his eyes. What else can this space between “suddenly” and “soon

after” be, if not room for the otherwise unrepresentable human

character of this individual? This is not indeed to say that the

personality is a null for Chekhov. What is not otherwise

representable than as a space of time in which it makes its

function is not yet a void of space: Mister Thin’s personality

fills in those few seconds with itself, and it is only through

our cognizance of the kind of man he is that we come to make

either heads or tails of this story. Properly speaking, then, the

little pause between his growing pale and his beginning to smile

and shower sparks of light like an exploding star, is the space

which Mister Thin’s personality takes up to carry out its

function. We know the mechanism by the result. But when Mister

Fat, protesting his childhood friendship as surely more important

than their present difference in rank (which, as it happens, is

the prerogative of his superior rank: to think himself above the

rank system, in a certain sort of way), sees that his assurances

are all to no effect, he too is about to say something else but

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then he becomes sick at Mister Thin’s visage of respectful

adoration and speaks nothing, but only gives him his hand goodbye

while turning his face away in the opposite direction. Here, as

in Mister Thin’s change of face above, there is a little space of

time implied by the language for the Privy Councilor to see

plainly with his eyes that his old friend is indeed beneath him,

and so to become sick at the presence of such a one as that: the

right to feel nauseous at the sight of people acting in a way

which is beneath him is also the prerogative of the Privy

Councilor’s high rank.

Some ten years before this late revision of an early joke,

young Nikitin the provincial Teacher of Literature was brought by the

very progress of his married joys to see for himself that the

comfortable life is not enough for one who still has brains to

think with. Nikitin, who first cannot think of any greater joy

than being married to his young Manusya and then can find no more

unfitting situation for himself than to be her husband, accepts

after a year of those same married joys, the life that lacks in

comfort as the surer way not to end up lacking in purpose. That

the young teacher’s first purpose is to leave for Moscow sounds

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indeed like the three Prozorov sisters at the beginning of their

play, but Nikitin, does leave us with a pledge of action.

Nikitin’s last diary entry has the story’s first appearance of

that provincial insect, together with the bedbug most despised of

Chekhov: the cockroach.

Somehow these little denizens of his big stone home which

Nikitin takes together with his plump Manusya for her dowry had

escaped the young man’s notice before he started to make sense

of the unsorted details of his household bliss. Скучные,

ничтожные люди, writes the teacher of literature who has for the

first time in his life come face-to-face with the vulgarity of

daily living which Russians more, perhaps, than any other people

in the world go to their literature in order to escape, горшочки

со сметаной, кувшины с молоком, тараканы, глупые женщины... Нет

ничего страшнее, оскорбительнее, тоскливее пошлости. Бежать

отсюда, бежать сегодня же, иначе я сойду с ума!10 These, of

course, are the sanest words of our schoolteacher Nikitin, with

now the first mention of cockroaches, indeed of any insects, in

10 Boring, insignificant people, little pots with sour cream, jugs with milk, cockroaches, stupid women… There is nothing more frightening, more insulting, more boring than vulgarity. Escape from here, escape from here today or else I shall go mad! Vol. 7, p.403.

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his whole story, right here at the end, together with the company

of stupid women to be the concrete facts of life, paired in their

affinity as large and small creatures equally irritating to

Nikitin’s sense of taste, which his eyes have opened to in result

of his change of mind. Nikitin neither noticed the cockroaches,

nor the foolishness of his wife and sister-in-law before now, and

now he sees these things in bright relief against the background

of his own past folly. Having become thus disappointed in his

past life, Nikitin does not give up. Precisely his irritation,

and his rude unjust remarks about the women in his house, are

proof positive that he has not lost something of himself, and

rather gained something of true value by coming to see

imperfections in the comfortable life, which seemed to him only a

year before the very peak of human bliss and freedom but now

seems a prison for his young life, the young man has now the one

thing necessary in him to be a worthy young man indeed, capable

of working for the future good of mankind: the will to live

better than he does, committing himself to something more

exciting than potted milk and present happiness. Nikitin’s year

of marriage was, in brief, the crucible in which his spirit was

21

tested, whether it will be melted down into so much sour cream

for the pots, or whether it will turn to flame.

Those of Chekhov’s characters who start out happy and

satisfied are bound to see their happiness was not enough,

disappointed by their own passivity, as Nikitin does who spends a

year going with the pleasant flow of his new life in the

provinces. And at year’s end Nikitin sees that he has been

mellowly putting up with cockroaches, little pots of sour cream

in the company of stupid women for the topic and the partners of

his conversation and, what is worst of all, his own physical and

mental laziness, throwing away voluntarily the gift of youth: he

is irritated at the mention of his young age in the first

chapter, but it is this very understanding, that he is not taking

the risks and not exposing himself to the trials which his youth

is still ready to weather in the world of work and chance which

poisons his happiness in chapter two. Nikitin’s change begins

with the middle entry in his journal, in which he explains to

himself that he did not say a farewell address over the grave of

his former roommate the geography teacher Ippolit Ippolitych

Ryzhitsky because the teacher was, somehow even in despite his

22

always saying things which everyone has heard already a hundred

times before, on cross terms with the school director, and so our

satisfied young man kept his peace on that occasion; or, in

short, failed to pay his last dues out of petty fear to lose even

the smallest bit of his new comfort in having to submit himself

to the discomfort of falling into the school director’s ill

graces himself, from whose wrath of mercy he, however, married

into a wealthy family with an influential father-in-law, and not

a bachelor as Ryzhitsky, was wholly independent, had he been

clear enough of thought in order to see his real situation as

regards the school director. But Nikitin is blinded by his very

pleasures to the real power for doing good, even as far as this

small gesture, which he has, given his new place in society. This

middle diary entry is also the middle of the chapter, and all

that comes thereafter is Nikitin’s change towards clarity of

thought at the expense of fullness of enjoyment. Domestic bliss

can also cloud the mind.

The three sisters themselves continually delay the

realization of their dream to go to Moscow simply because they

are happy enough and satisfied enough with their present lives to

23

begin with. Not one of the three sisters gets what she thought

she wanted from life in the end, but all three end up with a

purpose: to make a better man of Bobik, and with him of his

generation, than their brother Andrei had turned out to be. The

mechanism which draws Chekhov’s characters to their new

conclusions is the onward march of time in a progress towards a

better future, which Chekhov understood as a future when the

ordinary Russian intellectual will be rid of his laziness and

loneliness, and become an active, happy man. The sisters are

better off working with their hearts broken in the provinces than

having gone away to be stylish educated ladies in Moscow, like

three whole Ranevskayas in Paris: here in the provincial town

they can be part of the cure, but there in Moscow only a part of

the social illness which has ruined their own lives. This illness

is the desire in a whole segment of the population to live only

for the sake of present happiness. Whether or not Tuzenbakh’s

death at an idiotic duel is symbolic of anything, it is in any

case appropriate in context, he the defender of the philosophy of

present happiness against Vershinin’s philosophy that present

happiness must not be had, only work. That it is Vershinin who

24

gets what he wants, and Tuzenbakh who dies unhappy, is the

embodied consequence of each man’s words.

I must assert now another point of interpretation which,

much as it cannot be proven, would leave my reasoning incomplete

if left out. Chekhov has, as any good materialist with a faith in

progress, a teleological bent to all his thought: people turn out

for the best even when they end up putting a bullet in their

brains, with all their life’s work come to nothing, because

nothing is lost in the world. On Affairs of Business is a story about

the consequences of The Seagull, told in a different key: the land

agent may have blown his brains out in the most impolite possible

way, making trouble for the peasants and calling for an autopsy

in the middle of a snowstorm, but the man’s life was not lost,

because in its very loss he has made a cardinal impression on the

young court prosecutor, who now no longer will believe that life

in the provinces is less important than life in Moscow or

Petersburg. The doctor is as dead of soul as the land agent of

body, but even the doctor’s harsh remarks about neurasthenia

contribute to the young prosecutor’s change of mind, from the

belief that all things happen at random (which ultimately means

25

that all things happen at random outside of the exciting cultural

centers where you can enjoy yourself if you have the money for

it), to the new and stronger faith that all things are connected.

In such a worldview, which becomes the materialist’s redemption

of metabolism from doctor Ragin’s doubts in Ward no. 6 of the

early 1890’s to a poetical view of the selfsame notion that our

afterlife is most certainly assured by the eternal exchange of

substances recognized by Gurov in Oreanda sitting over the sea

with his Anna Sergeevna in the story of The Lady with a Lapdog, death

is not a tragic action, because it is by definition the beginning

of new life. The Cherry Orchard ends with Firs’s death, represented

onstage by means of the breaking string which, unlike in Act Two

when it is simply Epikhodov’s latest misfortune11 unnoticed by

any of the people on the stage because they are bored with

11 Epikhodov has one direct and one indirect misfortune for each Act: he pushes over achair in Act One and waits for his proposal; in Act Three he breaks the billiards cue and gets Varya’s anger to break over him, which are properly her pent-up feelings against Lopakhin; in Act Four the squashed hat-box and the drink of cold water which has made him go hoarse. But in Act Two both his misfortunes are shown in such a way asto pass by unnoticed: the sly Yasha has made Dunyasha’s heart his own right under Epikhodov’s nose, so that the man never does know for sure what has passed between them - so much for the indirect misfortune. And the direct misfortune can only be that, while playing his sad song on his guitar, which is a banjo for a madman who is in love, he snaps a string. None of the gathered company want to think about some Epikhodov, and in this the snapped string is a thermometer-measure of the illness of this whole small social sphere: they are all of them thinking about far-off things, and not noticing what is most near at hand. In order for them all to snap out of it, the cherry orchard has to go.

26

present things such as this selfsame Epikhodov playing his

guitar, can indeed be nothing but the sound of a man-bucket

snapping off its rope in the distant mines, and so the herald of

an off-stage death in order to be the material symbol of the on-

stage transformation. The play itself is a comedy because death

had come to the house in the best possible way12.

The big Chekhov scholars of the last half-century, looking

to explain what it is which makes a comedy out of the comedy of

The Cherry Orchard end up invariably making a paradox of it: what

happens is a tragedy, how it happens is a comedy. This is the

brunt of Svetlana Evdokimova’s article on the part of infantile

behavior in making the persons represented on stage to be as

12 It will surely be objected here that Chekhov was an agnostic if he entertained any possibilities of life after death for the human individual. But a thoroughgoing materialist does not see in death a tragic action, because what a makes a man to be a thoroughgoing materialist in the first place is the internalized belief, based on extensive observation, that nothing disappears in human life, and the truth of what wewere will always out. If he now believed and now did not believe in an afterlife, as the writer Boris Zaitsev, paraphrasing Bunin, had once put it (Chekhov (Moscow: 2000), pp.202-3), then this was nonetheless a material afterlife, of the kind that the student revolutionary Petya Trofimov and the painter from the story of The House with a Mezzanine speak, and which the soldier Gusev gets to have in reward for not understanding anything correctly but daydreaming through all the days of his life, whosleeps even through his death: Gusev is put in a bag and dropped into the sea without it ever being said that he is dead, that this is a sea funeral and that a big shark eats him. To sleep and to see pleasant dreams about the physical surroundings of one’sbody is the beginning of this soldier’s afterlife. Even doctor Ragin’s dead body retains some shreds of perception after this man who did not want an afterlife is dead, enough for the three or four paragraphs that end the story, all of them following the movements of his corpse up until the burial attended only by the postmaster Mikhail Averyanych and by doctor Ragin’s cook Dariushka, plain assurance that the man will have no immortality in the minds of men, having spent his life in giving up on the good of being.

27

funny as a lot of big colorful babies who had all somehow

managed, the ancient Firs the oldest baby of them all, to have

lived their lives in the closed world of the old nursery. “And

indeed”, Evdokimova’s article begins, “although we cannot but

realize that losing one’s estate and chopping down the cherry

trees to clear space for vacationers’ houses, when staged

properly”13 the play has great comic potential. Magarshack has on

the one hand “the destruction of beauty by those who are utterly

blind to it” and “a warning against the Lopakhins of this world,

a warning that can be understood everywhere, since the menace of

the speculative builder has been felt not only in Russia”, and on

the other hand a “powerful position as the heir of all the

thousands of serfs whose sweat and toil went to the upkeep of the

old country mansion”14 to characterize Lopakhin, and also, just

as Evdokimova, puts the emphasis of the comedy on the how,

leaving the what to be a tragedy. The great Alexander Chudakov

himself, for all his protestations of an adogmatic world-view and

a lack of final message, has a strong conservationist bias,

13 Svetlana Evdokimova, “What’s So Funny About Losing One’s Estate, or Infantilism in The Cherry Orchard”, in SEEJ, Vol. 44, No.4 (2000), pp.623-648; p.623.14 David Magarshack, “The Cherry Orchard”, in Chekhov: New Perspectives, editors Rene Wellek and Nonna D. Wellek (New Haven:1984), pp.168-182; 170 and 172, respectively.

28

explaining the action of Uncle Vanya wholly by the danger of

deforestation according to the facts on Astrov’s map; and of a

man who cites UNESCO data on the rise in mental illnesses over

the preceding decades to connect this data to the question of

deforestation15, it can only be supposed that for him, only a

madman could cut down the cherry orchard, as it takes a madman to

destroy the great orchard of the Pesotsky’s in another story.

Against these interpretations I offer another view. It is

precisely the death of Firs, together with the destruction of the

old big orchard, which makes the play into a comedy for Chekhov,

and the how is there to justify the what. In order for all these

people to snap out of their old dreams about the possibilities of

a life that could have been if they were more developed

individuals, and to face life as it actually is, the orchard must

go, and old Firs must die. To begin growing as individuals, these

people must first accept a few hard facts, and, perhaps, in

seeing these few hard facts on stage, we too can be convinced to

see less of a tragedy in our own daily lives, whatever life does

give us, and so be more productive members of society, giving the

15 Chekhov’s Poetics, chapter 6, section 7 (pp.208-212).

29

best of what we have in the belief that nothing passes, but all

is finally redeemed in human life by the future when these losses

will make sense. A tragedy transformed into a comedy by its

didactic function, so to speak, which is to my mind not excluding

the fact that Gaev and Ranevskaya play out the personal tragedy

of their lives as a light comedy, which is to teach us in the

audience how to take a real misfortune when it comes upon us,

remembering that there is always something after our own lives,

and what happiness we lose our children, or our neighbors’

children, must acquire as the strength to approach life full of

hopes. Anya’s and Petya’s hopeful shouts off-stage balance out

the tears of Gaev and Ranevskaya with a left-over on the part of

the young people: there is still room left in their young hope

for the ancient Firs’s end. The sound of the breaking string does

not, after all, outlast the sound of the tree-chopping, and it is

that sound exactly which starts up earlier in the act in answer

to Petya Trofimov’s words that he will either find the way to the

future, or else show the way: this lonely axe is the way to the

future, as a surgeon’s scalpel on a gangrened limb is the way to

life. Chekhov was not a conservationist: he makes doctor Astrov

30

wish for factories, schools, highways and improvements in the

educational level of the people in exchange for the destroyed

forests, and to regret that the forests are destroyed for no good

reason. If the cherry orchard has to go for the moral progress of

the people able to survive its end to continue, then the cherry

orchard surely has to go. The comedy is in the free acceptance of

necessity, which is why Nietzsche gets to be quoted by Simeon-

Pishchik at the beginning of the Third and towards the resolution

of the final Acts.

Chekhov’s characters, then, live for the future, even when

they do not know it or do not understand what it is about them

that tends towards that bright future through the present mess

their author leaves them in. Conversely also these characters are

unable to act in their present day because their way is not the

way of the future, in spite of all appearances: faith in human

progress implies a teleology of human actions and of human

inability to act as well, a hand that pulls as well as one that

pushes away. Time will show the necessity of all that happens, as

well as all of what is prevented from happening, on this stage.

31

But Chekhov does show glimpses of this future already in the

present day. The action of The Three Sisters tends towards putting

Bobik on the stage in the final scene of the play. The stage

directions read:

Музыка играет все тише и тише; Кулыгин, веселый,

улыбающийся, несет шляпу и тальму, Андрей везет колясочку, в

которой сидит Бобик.16

Before Andrei strolled about with little Sophie, but now he is

here with Bobik. Is Andrei actually his father? This part does

not matter, because the boy will nonetheless have the influence

of both his father’s and also his mother’s side of the family.

Answering the question teleologically we have: what kept them

from Moscow? Bobik. The child was pulling them towards himself to

their staged end from the beginning, before even he was born17,

16 The music plays more and more softly; Kulygin, cheerful, smiling, carries the hat and lady’s-cloak [for Masha], Andrei drives the little stroller, in which sits Bobik. Vol. 9, p. 601.17 Is it from before he was conceived? One of Chekhov’s best and funniest misogynists had once complained of a woman very like this Natasha that she had cheated on him two days before their wedding. (“My Wives. A letter to the Editor from Raoul Blue Beard”, Мои жены. Письмо в редакцию Рауля Синей Бороды, in Vol. 3, pp. 125-132. The story was submitted to The Alarm-clock in 1885; as the greater part of the stories whose materials Chekhov had recycled for the later plays, this one too was written off by the master as not to enter his Collected Works). What exactly do we know about this Natasha, except that, coupled with Vershinin she is one of the two devils that Chebutykin answers the three sisters with at the very beginning of the play, not knowing that it is the three sisters he addresses: Черта с два! And Tuzenbakh concurs then, also not realizing it that he is giving the judgment to the sisters’ dream of going to Moscow: Конечно, вздор. Nonsense, naturally. Natasha is as heavily veiled in traits of the

32

because the three sisters are needed not in Moscow where they

might have been happy, and also quite insignificant among the

Moscow crowds, but here in the dull provincial town, where they

can be a good influence between the three of them on this one

given child. Protopopov and Natasha did their part in putting

Bobik on the stage together with the question of whose bed he

came from, but the three aunts will be there to be a good

influence in little Bobik’s life, carrying with them a question

as concerns his future: will he turn out better than his father,

or the same? Whether Andrei Prozorov or Ivan Potapych Protopopov

the Vulgar Holy Ghost is the father, by the end of the play there

is not much difference between them, save that the one is unhappy

walking the little baby strollers and signing documents for

Protopopov’s office, while the other is quite content with what

life gave him, sitting comfortably in the guest room of the old

Prozorov house and listening to Natasha play “The Maid’s Prayer” irrational as is Vershinin, a pair of situation-changing devils on the stage around whom nothing can make sense; as also Nina and Trigorin in The Seagull, Astrov and Yelena Andreevna in the next and Ranevskaya and Lopakhin in the final play. Why should Natasha not have already been with child when she blushing at the company breakfast and runs off embarrassed because they said she is in love? Chekhov’s women have alwaysbeen an enterprising sort. “Which of the Three?” is no new question for this author tohave asked by the time he got around to writing his play of The Three Sisters. All this I do not say as proof positive of anything about Natasha, but rather as all those thoughts which Andrei has clouded out of his mind when he tells her at the end of Act I: Trust me, trust… But why does he trust her? This the fiddler in love does not know,enchanted by his strange Natasha.

33

for him. Where Dostoevsky asked whether all of human happiness

can justify the tears of just one child, Chekhov set the question

thus, as whether the ruined lives of a whole generation in a

town’s intelligentsia can be justified by the superior upbringing

of just one child, so that maybe, just maybe, he will have to

shed no tears of repentance at the life which he has come to live

when he is grown into an adult. The great change of mind in this

play is from that the three sisters thought it better to go to

now that they see it best to stay.

Whether Chekhov’s characters gain something in their

understanding of the world around them or lose some part of

themselves which it was time to let go of, they must experience

the bare duration of time. The famous pauses in Chekhov’s plays

are only the stage form of a device already well-developed in his

prose. When Kiryak Chikildeev comes home drunk in the first

chapter of The Peasants, hits his wife flat in the face and then,

already dragging her away by the hair in order to beat her in the

street, notices his brother home from Moscow, this miserable

drunk becomes embarrassed, prays to the icon on the wall in a

muddy-eyed way, sits down on the bench and drinks some ten whole

34

cups of tea, slurping loudly amidst everybody’s perfect silence.

Then Kiryak falls down on the bench and starts snoring, and with

this last action of his they all begin to settle down for the

night in the Chikildeev hut. These ten cups of tea amount to a

lengthy pause in which Kiryak’s own sense of embarrassment turns

to mere exhaustion, and everybody else also has time to calm down

and accept that there really is no changing of their present

circumstances and so nothing for it but to go to sleep: after the

ten loudly slurped cups of tea in perfect silence what else is

there to say which has not been said already? Whenever a pause

comes across the stage, it leaves this question hanging in the

air: what else is there to say which has not been said already?

The pauses are simply the reluctance to go on of those who

make them in saying or in doing that exactly which comes after

the pause, all in consequence of a split between opposite things

which they desire and demonstrating that split in very action.

These people may not go to sleep in the hut, especially not after

the sight of Kiryak making his nightly change from terrifying

monster to pathetic thing, but at length they see that there is

nothing for it, given who they are and what life gave them. The

35

special trait of Chekhov’s art is in that this reluctance is not

an empty space, but takes up in at a go the whole thought

mechanism, by which I mean the personality together with the

situation, of those who make the pauses. Все хорошо, все от Бога,

says Olga Prozorova at the beginning of the play, но мне кажется,

если бы я вышла замуж и целый день сидела дома, то это было бы

лучше. Then there follows a pause, and after the pause she says:

Я бы любила мужа.18 All this is in the presence of Masha, sitting

there and reading her book, in as dark a mood as her own dress.

To the sisters, who share all their feelings even without words,

it is no secret that Masha does not love her husband as well as

she might. Had the pause come after and not before Olga’s words,

we could have called it an embarrassed silence. But the pause

comes before Olga’s words, and contains in it the whole reasoning

which connects the words “it would be better if I stayed at home”

to “I would have loved my husband” in Olga’s own mind. Masha is

literally sitting, while the other two sisters are standing as

they talk, and she is certainly not happy with the golden chain

18 All is well, all comes from God, but it seems to me, that if I got married and stayed at home all day long, then this would be better. [...] I would have loved my husband.Vol. 9, p.535.

36

on which she must live, an educated cat good only for being

petted by her husband: what else is there to do in this her

present life? Olga feels that her words will hurt her sister as

if a reproach, and at the same time she cannot refrain from

speaking them because this is genuinely what she thinks, caught

up in her own self-deluded daydream of the happy future for

herself and her two sisters in Moscow.

The flaw in Olga’s thinking comes out right in the course of

her conversation with Irina: their happy future will be so little

communal that even in the ideal case Masha will only come to

visit them in the summer. The sisters are drifting apart at the

beginning of the play, but are joined by their misfortune into a

single group, both physically and also in their words and

thoughts, at the play’s end. At the beginning of their play, the

sisters all live each for herself, but in the end they live for

others, and so also for each other. The justification of Olga’s

way of life is that old Anfisa gets to be happy with a room all

of her own in the directress’ apartment. This is more happiness

than if she had a husband, as Masha could well tell her, who as

well will have to find a better reason than the ones she knew

37

before to live. The very possibility of a productive search is

the most interesting part about these people, and as Chekhov ends

with their opening-up to the big world which was outside their

dreams all along, the message is surely not despair, but

triumph19.19 Three more examples. When Masha Kulygina, at the end of Act Three of her play, saysthat what offends her about Andrei’s behavior is not that he has sold the house but that he has acted unfairly, and it is the unfairness which hurts her, there is a pause. The pause ends, and this same woman tells her husband to go away, which soon comes out to mean to go away so as to give her time to confess her love for Vershinin to her sisters, and then to answer his summons with a Tra-ta-ta and go off to become his mistress. All this is unfair to Kulygin. The pause in Masha’s speech between her judgment of their brother’s unfairness and the beginning of her own unfairness towardsher husband gives us at a go the whole thought mechanism of this young woman, who is acting now even in despite her better reason. The final Act will straighten everythingout, as I have said above, in accordance with that very reason, which she has forgotten in herself for the sake of her lover. At the end of Act Two of Uncle Vanya, there is a pause right after Yelena Andreevna has told the nightwatchman not to ring his board because the professor is ill. Yelena Andreevna, of course, is waiting for Sonya to come back and tell her whether or not they will be allowed to play music thatnight to have an outlet for their pent-up feelings. Following the pause enters Sonya to say the one word which then ends the act: Нельзя! Or, in English, simply “No!” Yelena Andreevna knew all along that her husband would not let her play music when he is in a bad mood from his arthritis, but for a moment she gave herself up to the vain hope that he will let her enjoy herself that night. This moment of vain hope even in despite her stronger reason is the deciding trait of Yelena Andreevna’s character, which will both make and break her encounter with Astrov in the next Act: knowing whatshe wants, this woman also knows that she is not to have it.

The two pauses in The Bear, both of them opening up a set of brackets in which toexplain the inverse meaning of the little widow’s passionate demands, serve the running joke of the play that the man may be his own heart’s fool throughout, but the woman is clever in despite herself, and when the man speaks openly his motives as theycome to him, the woman does not admit the truth even to herself. The first pause comeswhen Popova orders the intruder to get out because she does not wish to speak to rude persons. But after the pause we get the translation of those words, but not in words and rather in the action. Popova’s logic: the intruder must get out exactly for the reason that she wants to speak to rude persons who will make her feel alive and pull her from her depression, which has lasted for almost a year when indeed her husband has been dead for only 7 months, and so of course is not about the husband’s death, but about the husband living who paid no attention to her feelings. How else indeed dowe explain the failed expulsion scene, when the widow is only a plump little widow with no one to defend her, but the bear a huge big man, albeit with nothing but his anger to defend his heart? The bear’s logic: he hates women because he likes them too much; and so the widow surely has him in her sway the moment that she sees him. But the question to be put to the realist author will be when exactly their affair begins,

38

Under Alexander Chudakov's principle of isomorphism there is

no explaining the pauses because they are palpably unlike

anything else in the plays. Unless of course we take the line of

interpretation that nothing really changes. Chudakov indeed is

pushed by his argument into asserting that at the end of Uncle

Vanya’s play we see the picture of Voinitsky’s office as it was

before all of the events20. But is that so? The merry mood which

must have pertained amongst the denizens of this room, who were

happy with this life, is now not there for the two most sensitive

among them, who, being the two most sensitive, were surely the

ones most shining with this busy merriness before. We have also

the simple physical change that Astrov’s map is no longer there,

and only its mate the map of Africa remains on the wall. The fact

is that we never get to see Voinitsky’s office as it was before

he became forever and always only Uncle Vanya. And so we could

before or after they stop speaking about money? The final pause that sums up the wholeaction of the play and all that the preceding events actually oblige Popova to doing is, nonetheless, a translation into straightforth Russian what her words about hating Smirnov and calling him to the dueling line right before the kiss actually meant. But the widow never actually speaks her heart. The pause takes the place of her confession. It is without a doubt that she will keep Smirnov around precisely for the reason that he can let her continue playing the part of a more complicated person thanshe is without him. The complexity of Popova’s character is only a role, but that rolebecomes her life with the bear caught safely in it.20 Chekhov’s Poetics, chapter 5, section 6 for the notion, pp.166-7 for the specific application.

39

make the following adjustment first to the principle of

isomorphism, and then the pause: the whole play is contained in a

forward progress through suffering from a situation which was

perfectly acceptable to all involved in the old way of living, to

a situation which is as yet a single net of heartbreak for all

those who take part in the new life. The nurse Marina,

Voinitsky’s old maman Maria Vasilievna and Waffles with his quiet

pride end up in their old places as where they have been before

the storm of feelings had broken out over the estate, but uncle

Vanya and Sonya stand at the beginning of something new, isolated

from the rest of the cast by the pause at the beginning of

Sonya’s last big speech. The pause, too, is a mechanism of

transformation from what has been in the past into what will be

in the future: thought in Chekhov’s works is categorically a good

thing for mankind, even when it is the ruin of individuals. Time

taken to think is by definition time used to make a change for

this author, and ergo there is a forward nature in the pause.

There are two moments of human life that Chekhov leaves in

the dark, replacing them with either a greater or a lesser space

of time: when everything is pre-determined for a change and when

40

nothing at all is predetermined, and yet the people choose to act

as if they had no choice. The pause before Konstantin Treplev’s

last words replaces his suicide speech in which he would have

given his reasons for the action. Instead, we have only the

change in the actor’s face and gestures which is to take place in

that pause, and with that the thought mechanism contained in that

pause in which the young man puts together what has happened into

the results, becoming mechanized to act his end. The pause that

follows on Nina’s and Trigorin’s introduction to each other by

Arkadina is when the spark of love slips in between these two

individuals. Shakespeare would have had them put hand to hand and

read a sonnet in joined lines, whereas what Chekhov has is some

words about the play, a pause, and some more words about fish,

which indeed surprises Nina, because how could fishing be as good

as writing?21 Now that Trigorin has spoken to Nina his favorite

21 This, incidentally, is also doctor Dorn’s idea: a writer has more joy of life than does a doctor, because a writer can fly away from the mortal coil which is all a doctor gets to deal with in his life. The doctor sees, in short, something of a bird in Treplev, to fly up to the ethereal heights, and his final medical verdict is in line with his very first words to the young man after the play: “A jar of ether cracked [under its own tension]”. (I add these words in compromise to give the meaningof the Russian лопнула склянка с эфиром, which does not actually mean “blew up”, but “broke open from internal tension”; the blowing up a mischaracterization of Treplev inEnglish, he for the English-speaking world something of an unstable manic-depressive type, and not the very reasonable individual who takes upon him more than he can bear,reaching for something better out of love. Take a hundred such Treplevs, and you have a real turn in literature towards something new, and something interesting). The only way I see of reconciling the great variety of individual details and manners of

41

pastime she will have fishing on her mind, thinking of the fish

in the lake and not of the birds above it as she used to do when

she was in love with Treplev; so when Konstantin Gavrilovich

brings her the murdered seagull, the young woman’s thoughts are

literally elsewhere - in the lake, and not above it.

Two years pass between the events of the third and the

fourth Acts of The Seagull: time necessary for all the human

processes that meet for mutual resolution in the fourth Act to

ripen until they come to have convincing probability as having

all had time to happen. Sorin had the time to die, Treplev to

shoot himself in his isolation, Trigorin to have played out his

romance and have even forgotten how it started, the good doctor

Dorn to have gone abroad with his two thousand in lifetime

savings while everybody else stayed in Russia, and Arkadina to

have acted a huge benefit night in Kharkov; all these things now

coming up for resolution all at once because they have all had

ample time by now to happen. That this is also how things happen expression with the unified set of metaphors between the birds of the air, the flowersof the land and the fish of the lake, is indeed by inventing some special principle for a logic of connection which would require differentiation to equate on the one hand, and real living individuals making these connections on the other. Whatever we believe, Chekhov must certainly have believed the people he writes about are real individuals, actually thinking with a logic of their own to make his plots. Put differently, this author’s is an artistic system erected wholly on respect for the individual perception.

42

in real life must, it seems to me, be admitted rather an act of

recognition in us when we see it happen so in the play than the

law absolute of human being. Chekhov expresses his view on the

relative importance of the suicide by subordinating all the other

events of the play to this final resolution.

A moral judgment which is expressed in showing that people

get the things they do in consequence of the part which they have

played in the lives of others is a moral judgment framed in

objective terms. To take the example from Chekhov’s letter about

the story of the Horse Thieves, Russian Воры, as cited by Chudakov

in evidence of Chekhov’s adogmatic view of the world22, Chekhov’s

complaint to his critics, who were unhappy that he did not write

in so many words that “stealing horses is bad”, how can it be

possible in a short story to show what stealing horses is like

and also to say that it is bad? And in any case, what is the use

of telling the world that stealing horses is bad, when this has

been known for hundreds of years anyway? But in the story Chekhov

does show that before the drunken medical assistant becomes

22 Chekhov’s Poetics, pp.50-51, and cited in Chapter 6 for Chekhov’s response to criticism of the story.

43

tempted by the life of the horse thieves, he must be a good-for-

nothing drunkard and braggart of a medical assistant. That

Chekhov has no dogma does not yet mean he has no morals.

What was necessary with the good-for-nothing medical

assistant was to get him to see things in such a way as that he

could not help but become a thief himself, pronouncing in his

heart’s approval of the double murder and arson at the roadside

inn the strictest verdict on himself: a finished good-for-

nothing. The subjective conclusions of his characters are written

into the objects which Chekhov notes about them. When old Sorin

makes his double exit at the beginning of The Seagull, under

pretense of fetching all the other spectators for Treplev’s play,

but more properly to leave the two young lovers alone, he says

about his song that one time a certain Assistant Prosecutor told

him he has a loud voice, but an obnoxious one: to Sorin’s mind,

he is both a loud and an obnoxious presence at his beloved

nephew’s date with the beautiful Nina Zarechnaya. Sorin gets up

in order to fetch the others, and he goes away in order to leave

the two lovers alone for a minute or two on their evening date.

The quick change of Sorin’s mind, quickened by his pleasure at

44

seeing Nina, with whom he himself is in love in a lazy old man’s

kindly way, and his happiness at seeing that his favorite nephew

Treplev is also in love with this young woman but in a way more

active than his own, is represented in the song and anecdote

connected with the song. Sorin sings coming away to get the

others, and tells the anecdote coming back to remark upon the

couple’s joy, which he would never do in direct form, being a

modest person. Chekhov represents the changes in people’s way of

thought together with the changes in their way of life: the

things speak for themselves, but they do say something.

Because of the romantic inversion of the notion of an

accident in both Treplev’s and Nina’s minds on the one hand, and

also because of the realist hyperextension of the notion of the

incidental to everything except what most immediately flatters

their bodies or their pride in Trigorin and Arkadina’s on the

other, that the events of The Seagull take place as they do,

hanging all throughout on incidents and accidents: they poeticize

their chances, as Arkadina and Trigorin trivialize whatever is

poetical and unique of what they come to deal with. As Treplev

pushed to the extreme of contemplation sees only the birds above

45

the lake, so also Trigorin allowed to relax completely sees only

the fish swimming in it; but neither of the men is balanced

enough to go for a simple swim, as the workmen do just before the

play in the First Act. As it is impossible for Treplev to fall in

love with the young woman right there at his side who pays all of

her attention to him, so it is impossible for Nina not to fall in

love with Trigorin, who pays her almost none at all23.

It is by chance that Trigorin and Arkadina laugh at Nina’s

words that she is a real actress now, their laughter right on cue

from the dining room off stage as if in answer to her words.

Precisely the lack of a provable connection between these two

events functions as the final proof that the one follows from the

other: this is the logic of Nina’s mind expanded out of her to be

the logic of the stage. Because Trigorin and Arkadina cannot

23 Put differently, chance is the form of the absolute in Chekhov’s works, and the particular detail the ideal generalization of a case. It is by chance that Trigorin comes back for his cane and meets Nina at the end of the Third Act, but this chance issimply unavoidable given what she is and what he is, too. Nina will always make the most of all her chances, both for pain and joy, and so it is inevitable that this young woman, who gets her way despite her obstacles, and indeed needs her obstacles tohave her way completely, would have met Trigorin at the last minute in Act Three exactly as she manages to get out of home at the last minute in Act One, when her father and stepmother decide suddenly to go out on a visit, and to leave with just time enough for Treplev to tear up his manuscripts and go away to the other room before he kills himself in Act Four, when her appearance is a surgical operation of a sort in letting the young man take leave of his inspiration before he dies. There is that in Nina, and in Treplev too, which turns everything around them to stand upon therazor’s edge of chance: youth and talent, I should like to say, but with the necessaryunderstanding that both youth and talent do not yet mean happiness and success.

46

possibly have overheard Nina saying that she is a real actress

now their laughter is in answer to her words once and for all.

Nina will remember this moment, and not another, as the emblem of

her relationship to Trigorin: she speaks with inspiration about

the theater, he laughs at her ideals, and she loves him all the

more for it, quite illogically, or rather quite according to a

logic all her own. Because this is not only and not so much a

play about Nina and Treplev and all the others, but Nina’s play

and Treplev’s play and so forth, the explanation of the chance

occurrence is in that it happened when it did.

But if it is Nina’s feeling of hurt love as representative

in one flash of her whole existence, we are left with a pretty

case in question. Is Nina’s crooked logic, then, the logic of the

stage? My understanding is that for the play’s conclusion to have

any rational basis in what came before, this scene between

Treplev and Nina, together with Treplev’s monologue over his

notebooks, must be the moment of the perfect truth, so far as

these two young people are concerned. From a certain point on,

the logic of events onstage follows the logic of their minds.

Once Treplev says to himself that the most important thing is

47

neither new forms nor old forms, but writing what you feel like,

letting what comes naturally come out on the page, he begins

doing for the first time in the play that exactly which he

actually wants to do: first he talks to Nina, who shows up

because he is ready to speak sincerely to her, then he tears up

his papers and shoots himself dead. Because Nina’s appearance

coincides with Treplev’s confession to himself of that he has not

been writing as he wants, the logic of events rests for its

validity on the unspoken, but not therefore unrepresented,

conclusion that he has not been living as he wants, either. This

much of the mystical Chekhov keeps in his stage chances that the

logically necessary conclusion of Treplev’s words is expressed in

the form of a chance meeting between him and Nina, in which the

extent of the young man’s change from the rash and proud man of

the first three acts is measured through his talking to Nina.

Even Thomas Winner, with all his contempt for the young man,

admits that “a part of the seagull symbol applies actually to

[Treplev]”24; which indeed were a strange thing to say, given

that the young man is the one who first says that the bird is the

24 Thomas Winner, “The Sea Gull and Hamlet”, in Chekhov: New Perspectives, eds. Rene and Nonna D. Wellek (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: 1984), pp.107-117; p.116.

48

symbol of his own near death in the play’s second Act, had not

Konstantin Gavrilovich himself apparently forgotten the meaning

of the bird, or else not thought it would have made a strong

impression on his Nina, and so explains to doctor Dorn that

Nina’s imagination must be unsettled because she keeps signing

her letters “Seagull”, which fact Treplev explains by analogy

with the miller in Pushkin’s tale, who comes under the delusion

of believing himself a raven. What Winner forgets to add is that

the gunshot exactly does not bring with a terrible shock to

Trigorin that a part of the seagull symbol applies actually to

his part in Treplev’s story, and will of course not fall upon his

knees in tears of penitence after the curtain falls: the

punishment of evil actions for the mature Chekhov is merely that

those who do them cease to feel that what they do is bad. Thus

also in the next play Astrov, after his moment’s fling with

Yelena Andreevna, will sit there whistling while his old friend

Uncle Vanya, whose heart he has just broken, sits and cries.25

The moral disorder of the universe becomes rectified in this form

25 Letter to Stanislavsky, as cited in the notes to the play, volume 9 of the 1961-64 Collected Works: Он же свистит... Дядя Ваня плачет, а Астров - свистит… (But he is whistling… Uncle Vanya is crying, but Astrov is - whistling…), p.693

49

of exposition by means of showing the emptiness in people in

place of what they have lost of their first goodness in result of

their unhappy way of life.

Chizhevsky in the chapter on Realism in his “Comparative

History of Slavic Literature” writes that the difference in

method between the realist and the romantic was the difference

between metonymy and metaphor, referring in turn to Roman

Jakobson, who was “first to point out the significance of

metonymic means in the poetics of realism. Whereas metaphoric

means,” Chizhevsky then explains, “relate and, even more

important, compare an object in various ways with objects of

other spheres of being, metonomy depicts what is to be precsented

in relation to its own environment”26. Where Gogol invents an egg

held in an estate manager’s hand up to the light in order to

explain what Chichikov sees in his fatal blonde when his carriage

rides into hers on the way back to town, Chekhov has Waffles and

Maria Vasilievna continue their boring old activities on the

stage in outward image of the parts played by Uncle Vanya and

Yelena Andreevna in their old affair at the end of the play’s

26 Dmitry Chizhevsky, Comparative History of Slavic Literatures, translators Richard Noel Porter and Martin P. Rice (Vanderbilt University Press: 1971), p. 153.

50

First Act. Yelena Andreevna with her philosophy is only another

Maria Vasilievna in youth, with her pamphlets on female

liberation, even as Uncle Vanya with his confessions of love is

not doing much besides playing the polka on an old guitar, as his

friend Waffles. We go from explicit comparison with people who

are not actually there to implied comparison with people who

actually are. So also here, the logic of the events is the

outward exposition of the logic of Nina’s mind, insofar as that

we get to see the kind of connections she will make in action.

Chekhov, of course, is a problem case, because he makes of Maria

Vasilievna and Waffles both the outward image and also the

shaping factors which cause Voinitsky and his lady to carry on

their endless dance of half-bored love.

Another way of expressing Chekhov’s double nature, which has

to it the advantage of avoiding any individual ideological

category such as have been pressed upon this author from the

start, is what I have come to call in the course of my research

the subjective object hinge. The subjective object hinge is a

special form of logic of connection which combines both metaphor

and metonymy. Insofar that it is a mechanism of comparison, this

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“hinge” lends itself more easily to imitation than description.

As Osip Mandelstam had insisted towards the end of his life, a

metaphor can only be described through other metaphors, it being

an absolute psychological fact that there is no way to convey the

idea of bridges in language without making in one way or another,

more or less clumsily, a bridge between the separate notions

which these words describe: a metaphor being in principle a

mechanism of comprehension part of which is in the reader who

will grasp it true, whether through hard work or inspiration,

there can be no way to speak about this mechanism without

bringing in words such as "mechanism" or "bridge", or else words

from other languages which, in those languages, still give us the

same problem of non-static language, a bridge between two

thoughts that must be crossed by anyone who wants to understand

us.

These object hinges make for the greatest complication in

speaking about Chekhov’s works. Because no object is ever given

by this author without the subjective meaning of that object for

the people (sometimes also the animals, and in The Steppe even a

lonely poplar tree and the dried-out grass) he describes, it is

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indeed a temptation to conclude that there is no final answer

about the meaning of any of these things. I disagree: the meaning

of the snow in the story of The Nervous Breakdown is the effect

which it had had on the student Vasiliev’s imagination, and this

is the final meaning of it, unless we go one step further to say

that Chekhov concludes prostitution exactly a necessary evil

insofar that a thorough investigation of the problem as one that

must be solved leads a man into a fit of madness, and would not

occur to anyone who was not prepared for such a fit. To fight

against prostitution given the present state of things in Russia

were as vain as to fight against the snow; which brings us back

again to that the snow is both the outward image and also the

necessary precondition as an irritating factor in bringing on the

student’s fit, both metaphor and metonymy at once.

With this law student Vasiliev we come to the question

whether any of Chekhov’s stories could have turned out any other

way than they do in fact. Could Vasiliev have gone on another day

and not have had his strange fit? I say he would not have gone on

any other day because then he would not have been the same law

student Vasiliev, who could only have gone to the prostitutes in

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the first motion of his nervous breakdown: if at first he refuses

for a long time, why does he suddenly decide to go? This succinct

statement, in the story’s first paragraph, is the first

irrational decision of the law student, and so the first step of

his fit. You will know them, to speak an old teleological

proposition, by their fruits. While asking us not to judge these

people, Chekhov never tells us not to know them, and through them

not to learn also about ourselves.

Cited

Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich. Sobranie Sochinenii v dvenadtsati tomakh (Moscow: 1960-1964)

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Chizhevskii, Dmitrii. Comparative History of Slavic Literatures, translators Richard Noel Porter and Martin P. Rice

(Vanderbilt University Press: 1971)Chudakov, Alexandr Pavlovich. Chekhov’s Poetics, translators Edwina Jannie Cruise and Donald Dragt

(Ann Arbor:1983) Evdokimova, Svetlana. “What’s So Funny About Losing One’s Estate, or Infantilism in The Cherry Orchard”,

in SEEJ, Vol. 44, No.4 (2000), pp.623-648Magarshack, David. “The Cherry Orchard”, in Chekhov: New Perspectives, editorsRene Wellek and Nonna D.

Wellek (New Haven:1984), pp.168-182Winner, Thomas. “The Sea Gull and Hamlet”, in Chekhov: New Perspectives, editors. Rene and Nonna D. Wellek

(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: 1984), pp.107-117Zaitsev, Boris. Chekhov (Moscow: 2000)