The Tales of Chekhov/Volume 1/Introduction
INTRODUCTION
A note on Chekhov's art
Chekhov's range of subject, scene, and situation is so varied that it will be convenient here to classify his Tales as follows:
(a) The short humorous sketches, of which the author wrote many hundreds, chiefly in early life.
(b) Stories of the life of the town "Intelligentsia"; family and domestic pieces, of which "The Duel" and "Three Years"—a study of Moscow atmosphere and environment—are the longest.
(c) Stories of provincial life, in which a great variety of types—landowners, officials, doctors, clergy, school-teachers, merchants, inn-keepers, etc.—appear.
(d) Stories of peasant life—settled types.
(e) Stories of unconventional and lawless types—roving characters.
(f) Psychological studies, such as "The Black Monk," "Ward No. 6."
One must recall here, also, Chekhov's plays, his short farces, and his descriptive account of Sahalin life.
By his supremacy as a writer of short stories, Chekhov has been termed the Russian Maupassant, and there are, indeed, several vital resemblances between the outlook of the French and of the Russian master. The art of both these unflinching realists, in its exploration of human motives, is imbued with a searching passion for truth and a poet's sensitiveness to beauty. But whereas Maupassant's mental atmosphere is clear, keen, and strong, with a touch of a hard, cold wind, Chekhov's is born of a softer, warmer, kindlier earth. Had Maupassant written "The Darling," he would have been less patient with Olenka's lack of brains, more cynical over her forgetfulness of her first and second husband. And a French Olenka would, in fact, have been less naive than the Russian woman, and in that respect more open to criticism.
The temperamental difference between the Norman and the Russian, in fact, reflects the differences between their traditions and the spiritual valuations of their national cultures. As an illustration we may cite Chekhov's handling of those odious women, Ariadne and the rapacious wife in "The Helpmate."
It is characteristic that Chekhov shows them to us through the eyes of a kindly, good-natured type of man whose judgment, however exasperated, does not crystallise into hardness or bitterness. Chekhov, though often melancholy, is rarely cynical; he looks at human nature with the charitable eye of the wise doctor who has learnt from experience that people cannot be other than what they are. It is his profundity of acceptation that blends with quiet humour and tenderness to make his mental atmosphere one of subtle emotional receptivity. In his art there is always this tinge of cool, scientific passivity blending with the sensitiveness of a sweet, responsive nature. Remark that Chekhov, unlike Dostoevsky, rarely Identifies himself with his sinners and sufferers, but he stands close to all his characters, watching them quietly and registering their circumstances and feelings with such finality that to pass judgment on them appears supererogatory. Thus, In "The Two Volodyas," when the neurotic Sofya Lvovna abandons herself to the dissipated Vladimir Mlhalovltch we realise that she Is preparing for herself fresh wretchedness, and whatever she may do, she Is bound to go on paying the price for her folly in marrying Colonel Yagitch, the elderly handsome lady-killer. It Is equally useless to pass judgment on the two Volodyas, who, between them, having helped to ruin Sofya Lvovna's life, will go on shrugging their shoulders at her, and following their life of bored, worldly pleasure. This Is life, and it Is the woman who pays.
Readers have complained of Chekhov's "greyness," but such a story as "The Two Volodyas" can with no more justice be called grey than can an etching by a master, whose range of the subtlest gradations of tone. In the chiaroscuro, stands In place of a fine colour scheme. Just as the colour of a flower is not a solid pigment, but is the result of the play of light on the broken surface of its innumerable cells, so Chekhov's art, however tragic or melancholy may be the life of his characters, produces the effect of living colour by the shifting play of human feelings. Note, for example, how the "depressing," squalid atmosphere of "Anyuta" is broken up by the artist's rapid inflections of feeling. Again, "A Trousseau" and "Talent" offer us fine examples of Chekhov's skill in conveying the essence of a situation, and of people's outlooks, by striking a few notes in the scale of their varying moods. Further, remark how from the disharmony between people's moods and circumstances springs the peculiar, subtle sense Chekhov conveys of life's ironic pattern of time and chance playing cat and mouse with people's happiness. Compare the opening pages, in "Three Years," of Laptev's passion for Yulia with the closing scene where she is waiting to tell him how dear he is to her, while he himself finds no response in his heart, and "cautiously removes her hand from his neck." But Chekhov is too subtle, too delicate an artist to emphasise this note in his impressionistic picture of life's teeming freshness and fulness; so he then touches in life's elusiveness and promise in the description of how "Yartsev kept smiling at Yulia and her beautiful neck with a sort of joyous shyness." Here is love's new birth indicated with exquisite delicacy. And here, as in the little scene preceding, where Laptev stands in the moonlit yard, a mysterious sense of the intricacy of the mesh of our lives steals over us. It is the poet's special sense for catching an atmosphere and in his plays, for instance, "The Cherry Orchard," we find the same delicate responsiveness to the spectacle of life's ceaseless intricacy. We get this again in the relations of the dying woman Nina Fyodorovna with her husband, the incorrigible Panaurov, and in Pollna Nikolaevna's inscrutable changes of feeling towards Laptev. With what beautiful slight, firm strokes these last two characters are touched in. If we stress here this side of Chekhov's talent—how a feeling of the inevitableness of things seems to float in the atmosphere of his finest sketches and stories—it is to point out how his flexible and transparent method reproduces the pulse and beat of life, Its pressure, Its fluidity, Its momentum. Its rhythm and change, with astonishing sureness and ease. But any appreciation of Chekhov's talent is Inevitably partial, since Its leading characteristic is Its surpassing variety. This, the first volume of a new translation of his Tales, presents a few aspects of Chekhov's incomparable gift. All who want to know modern Russian, especially the life of the educated class, must read Chekhov.