Various Stories of Anton Chekhov

"One generation passes away, and another generation comes; But the earth abides forever." --Ecclesiastes 1:4

Vladimirka Road. Isaac Levitan (1892)

In September, 2011, my wife and favorite artist, Jeri Ross, learned that she had triple-negative breast cancer, a fast-growing, aggressive cancer with limited options for treatment. Fortunately, her annual mammogram had caught it in the earliest stages, so she opted for a lumpectomy. I took Volume One of Anton Chekhov: the Collected Stories with me to the waiting room at the surgical center. From that September though December, I worked through all four volumes in hospitals, chemotherapy sessions, radiation treatments, and while we sat together waiting for the post-treatment fatigues to pass. That winter I had the wherewithal to read, but not to compose any reflections.

While I enjoyed reading these stories back then, I could not truly appreciate them. I don’t remember much about them now except that I thought they each centered around an unremarkable person who either had an epiphany or missed the chance to have one. This theme, which I now see as only one of several in Chekhov’s stories, appealed to me greatly. As a lifelong reader of philosophy, I have always lived for those upending insights. So stories about such moments where the character has the insights (rather than the reader) connected nicely with my own experience.

Thanks to some help from other substackers, I put together a selection of eighteen short stories by Chekhov, published between 1887 and 1902. I loved all of them, but I’ll just offer some reactions to a few. The complete list appears at the end of this newsletter.

I’ll start with my favorite one, “The Steppe,” suggested by John the Lotus. Although the longest story of the set and plotless, it pulled me into its world more completely than any of the others. It describes a long, overland journey, but from a child’s perspective. I confess I love stories that meander, and what better way to meander than in a journey? Life on the Mississippi (Twain), Journal from the Sea of Cortez (Steinbeck), A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (Thoreau), and many others have always kept my interest from beginning to end. “The Steppe,” though much shorter than these others, fits right in there.

Yegorushka, his uncle Ivan Kuzmichov, and a Father Christopher Siriysky set out across the steppe to transport several tons of wool to a distant town in hopes of getting a better price for it than they could at home. They also plan to board Yegorushka with a relative so he can start school there. The boy accompanies them for a while, but when they come across a larger caravan of familiar people traveling in the same direction, they hand him off, knowing he will better enjoy the trip with that group. Indeed the caravan had much more to interest a young boy than the boring conversation of two grownups.

Although in each scene, I felt myself embedded in the dry grasses, grasshoppers springing out of the way, I could at times see the caravan as a tiny line of specks on an immense parchment. I think Chekhov’s attentive descriptions of how nature appears to travelers could fit right in with those of more recent nature writers.

On July evenings and nights quails and corncrakes no longer call, nightingales do not sing in weeded gullies, and there is no scent of flowers. But the steppe is still picturesque and full of life. Hardly has the sun gone down, hardly has darkness enfolded the earth when the day’s misery is forgotten, all is forgiven, and the prairies breathe a faint sigh from their broad bosom. In the grass—as if it can no longer tell how old it is in the dark—a merry, youthful trilling, unknown by day, arises. The chattering, the whistling, the scratching, the bass, tenor and treble voices of the steppe—all blend in a continuous monotonous boom, a fine background to memories and melancholy.

But nature can work herself into a fury as well, as the travelers learn when overtaken by a terrifying storm. In this and other stories, Chekhov shows us a world in which humans with all their little self-important troubles may flit briefly across a vast surface, but Earth abides. Nature spares no one, nor do time, death, or weather. In all his stories, Chekhov immerses the reader in a world of relentless cold and frequent illness. Furthermore, doctors can diagnose but they can’t cure. He describes the world of his experience so convincingly, I had to wrap myself in a blanket and take my temperature regularly.

I learned from Rayfield’s biography of Chekhov that he had a prodigious work ethic and a supererogatory dedication to relieving human suffering wherever he found it. He did not hesitate to go wherever a medical doctor could make some difference, volunteering his medical services during the many epidemics that swept Russia and treating any sick person, whether they could afford to pay or not.

Perhaps in his most most extravagant gesture of professionalism, Chekhov visited the prison colony on the island of Sakhalin in 1890, off the eastern coast of Siberia, just north of Japan. The overland journey across Siberia took more than two months. He spent three months there on Sakhalin, taking meticulous notes from interviews with inmates and wardens, and composing a report on the horrific conditions he found. Upon his return, when he got back to fiction again, he wrote the short story, “Gusev,” the most convincing account I’ve ever seen of Nature’s absolute indifference to human misery. I would say this little story hit me more powerfully than any other.

It starts off describing interactions between Gusev and Paul, two soldiers in an ocean transport vessel returning home, but it soon becomes clear that they and all the other passengers suffer from some ailment or other and probably won’t survive the trip. First Paul dies and his body gets removed. Then Gusev dies. His body, wrapped up with some iron bars in sailcloth, gets dumped in the ocean and sinks. Then, in a passage worthy of Cormac McCarthy, Chekhov describes how a shark noses around the sinking package.

[…] Ponderous, reluctant and apparently ignoring Gusev, it glides under him and he sinks on to its back. Then it turns belly upwards, basking in the warm translucent water, and languidly opening its jaw with the two rows of fangs. The pilot fish are delighted, waiting to see what will happen next. After playing with the body, the shark nonchalantly puts its jaws underneath, cautiously probing with its fangs, and the sailcloth tears along the body’s whole length from head to foot. One of the iron bars falls out, scares the pilot fish, hits the shark on the flank, and goes swiftly to the bottom.

Overhead, meanwhile, clouds are massing on the sunset side—one like a triumphal arch, another like a lion, a third like a pair of scissors.

From the clouds a broad, green shaft of light breaks through, spanning out to the sky’s very centre. A little later a violet ray settles alongside, then a gold one by that, and then a pink one.

The sky turns a delicate mauve. Gazing at this sky so glorious and magical, the ocean scowls at first, but soon it too takes on tender, joyous, ardent hues for which human speech hardly has a name.

With those lines the story ends.

Chekhov first mentioned in a letter at the age of twenty-eight that his persistent cough had turned bloody. He lived with his tuberculosis until he died from it at forty-four. Nevertheless, rather than coddle himself, he spent most of his adult life not only writing plays, novellas, and over five hundred stories but also treating people with typhoid, cholera, smallpox, and other diseases. He spent the whole of his writing career in the presence of death. This must surely have contributed to his detached, wry attitude toward life, and his eccentric notion of comedy.

Some of these stories point up the injustices of society. Almost everyone has heard of “A Lady with a Dog,” (or “The Lady with the Small Dog,” or some variation of that). It deals with a philandering man and a married woman and it showcases the hypocritical attitudes of society toward extramarital sex. Russian society expected men to engage in frequent dalliances as a matter of course. A decision to seduce someone entailed no more consequences for the man than choosing a pair of cufflinks. But the woman who gave in to a seducer risked losing everything. At the very end of the story, though, the man has succumbed to the worst possible fate: He has fallen in love.

Then they consulted at length about avoiding the need for concealment and deception, for living in different towns, for meeting only at rare intervals. How could they break these intolerable bonds? How, how, how?

He clutched his head and asked the question again and again.

Soon, it seemed, the solution would be found and a wonderful new life would begin. But both could see that they still had a long, long way to travel—and that the most complicated and difficult part was only just beginning.

Somehow, I can’t muster too much sympathy for the guy here, whom Chekhov surely modeled after himself. More Chekhovian humor methinks, only this time at his own expense.

In “The Student,” a young man from a theological college, walking home from hunting, stops to warm himself at a small house a few miles from his town. Two widows, a mother and daughter, live there, and they recognize him and let him sit by their fire. Reminded by the night’s bitter cold of the Twelve Gospel Readings at church the previous day, he retells the story of Peter’s betrayal of Jesus. When he finishes, he notices the little tale has affected his audience deeply.

Still smiling, Vasilisa suddenly sobbed and tears, large and profuse, flowed down her cheeks. She shielded her face from the fire with her sleeve as if ashamed of the tears, while Lukerya, staring at the student, blushed and her expression became distressed and tense as if she was holding back a terrible pain.

A short while later he left, and as he continued back home he realized that what had happened to Peter on that terrible night nineteen centuries before had a particular meaning for the two women at this moment.

“The past,” thought he, “is linked to the present by an unbroken chain of happenings, each flowing from the other.”

He felt as if he had just seen both ends of that chain. When he touched one end, the other vibrated.

…

A sensation of youth, health, strength—he was only twenty-two years old—together with an anticipation, ineffably sweet, of happiness, strange, mysterious happiness, gradually came over him. And life seemed enchanting, miraculous, imbued with exalted significance.

I don’t quite know what to make of this story. Religion played no role in Chekhov’s life as far as I know, yet it featured prominently in many of his stories. In this one, the student sees people connected across centuries, languages, and distances by “an unbroken chain of happenings.” What happenings, though? The repetition of stories? Since nature cares not for humanity, perhaps by sharing stories about the human condition, we can transcend time and space. Perhaps this way leads to meaning beyond death.

I think I least enjoyed the highly contrived story, “The Bet” (1889). It struck me as a fable with a moral lesson, and while I appreciated the lesson, the story had none of the realism I had come to expect from Chekhov. Did O. Henry sneak into Chekhov’s study and leave one of his own stories? A banker, once rich but now in reduced conditions, had once stupidly made a bet with someone that they couldn’t last for fifteen years in solitary confinement. He staked “two million” (Chekhov never mentions the monetary unit). At the time, that sum meant nothing to the fabulously wealthy banker, but now, with the sentence almost concluded, his fortunes have waned and he doesn’t have the two million. So he decides to solve his money problem with a murder, but when he sneaks into the cell, he finds the prisoner asleep and a note on his table renouncing the wager. It seems that in the last few years he has educated himself by reading a vast horde of literature, and in his note he declares he has seen through the absurdity of the banker’s money-based existence and rejects it. The banker reads the note and leaves without carrying out his plan. “At no other time—not even after losing heavily on the stock exchange—had he felt such contempt for himself.”

Although I liked this story the least, I still enjoyed it. All eighteen stories in this selection have their own unique features, and reading them again thirteen years later proved very satisfying.

And how did our own family drama turn out? Jeri first learned of her cancer just as she started back to school as a nontraditional student to earn a teaching certificate and begin a new career as an elementary art teacher. Palmer Hall, a colleague of mine at St. Mary’s University who had an inoperable brain tumor, told her she had a choice. She could feel terrible at home, miserable and self-pitying, or feel terrible at work. She chose to work, as Palmer had and as Chekhov had. The nine months of coursework and internship coincided almost exactly with the nine months of cancer treatments (surgery, chemo, and radiation). Now, after an eleven-year teaching career, she has retired, still cancer-free, and we celebrated our fortieth anniversary this year.

While that outcome makes us happy, I suspect that Nature cares not one jot or tittle.

Here follows the set of stories I read. Note that different translators have rendered some of the titles differently. “Angel,” for instance, often appears as “The Darling.”

• “The Kiss” (1887) – suggested by Peter Shull

• “The Steppe” (1888) – suggested by John the Lotus

• "The Bet" (1889)

• "A Dreary Story" (1889)

• “Gusev” (1890) – The first story Chekhov wrote after returning from Sakhalin

• "Ward Number Six" (1892)

• "The Student" (1894)

• "The Black Monk" (1894)

• "Rothschild’s Fiddle" (1894)

• “Murder” (1895) – mentioned by The New Yorker

• “Peasants” (1897) – suggested by John the Lotus

• “A Hard Case” (1898)

• "Gooseberries" (1898)

• "Concerning Love" (1898)

• "A Lady with a Dog" (1899)

• "Angel" (1899)

• "In the Hollow" (1900)

• “The Bishop” (1902) – suggested by John the Lotus

§ § §

I plan to offer some reflections on Volume Four of the Mahābhārata next week. The week after that, I’ll try to say something about East of Eden, by John Steinbeck. I’ve just finished reading a fantastic biography, Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck, by William Souder, so I want to plunge into Steinbeck’s magnum opus.

Thank you for reading my thoughts on these great works of literature. I appreciate your support and comments. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please do, so you’ll receive each reflection by email as it comes out. Also, if you want to feed my book-buying habit, consider upping your free subscription to a paid one. I won’t stop you. But also know that I get great satisfaction simply from knowing you enjoy these newsletters enough to devote the time and energy it takes to read them.

Works mentioned in this post

Anton Chekhov: The Collected Stories, translated by Ronald Hingley

Anton Chekhov: A Life, by Donald Rayfield

The Mahābhārata, translated by Bibek Debroy

East of Eden, by John Steinbeck

Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain

Log from the Sea of Cortez by John Steinbeck

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers by Henry David Thoreau