Breaking Free from Death: The Art of Being a Successful Russian Writer 9781644692653

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Breaking Free from Death The Art of Being a Successful Russian Writer

Breaking Free from Death The Art of Being a Successful Russian Writer GALINA RYLKOVA

Boston 2020

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Rylkova, Galina, author. Title: Breaking free from death: the art of being a successful Russian writer / Galina Rylkova. Description: Boston: Academic Studies Press, [2020] | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019043803 (print) | LCCN 2019043804 (ebook) | ISBN 9781644692646 (hardback) | ISBN 9781644692653 (adobe pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Tolstoy, Leo, graf, 1828-1910—Criticism and ­interpretation. | Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich, 1860-1904—Criticism and ­interpretation. | Death in literature. | Authors, Russian—19th century— Attitudes. | Death—Psychological aspects. Classification: LCC PG3415.D42 R95 2020 (print) | LCC PG3415.D42 (ebook) | DDC 891.709/003—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019043803 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019043804 Copyright © 2020 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved. ISBN 978-1-64469-264-6 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-64469-265-3 (adobe pdf) Book and cover design by Kryon Publishing Services. On the cover: William Blake, Dante running from the Three Beasts (1824-1827) illustration for The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (Inferno I, 1-90) pen and ink and watercolour over pencil and black chalk 37 .3 ´ 52.8 cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Felton Bequest, 1920 (988-3) Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Published by Academic Studies Press. 1577 Beacon Street Brookline, MA 02446, USA

In memory of my parents and their parents

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Prologue: Breaking Free from Death

vii x

Part One—Beginnings and Endings Chapter 1: Leo Tolstoy and the Privilege of Formidable Hypochondria

3

Chapter 2:  In Chertkov’s Grip 

21

Chapter 3:  Uncle Vanya: The Drama of Sustainability

54

Chapter 4:  “Homo Sachaliensis”: Chekhov’s “Character” as a Strategy

65

Chapter 5:  The Steppe as a Story of Humble and Spectacular Beginnings 84 Photographs

99

Part Two—Transcending Death Chapter 6:  Reading Chekhov through Meyerhold’s Eyes

109

Chapter 7: Living with Tolstoy and Dying with Chekhov: Ivan Bunin’s Liberation of Tolstoy (1937) and About Chekhov (1953) as Two Modes of Auto/Biographical Writing 

129

Chapter 8: “There is a way out”: The Cherry Orchard in the Twenty-First Century

149

Chapter 9: A Boring Story: Chekhov’s Trip to Germany in 1904

162

Epilogue: Oyster Fever: Chekhov and Turgenev

173

Index

181

Acknowledgments

I

n 1966 my father, Stanislav Petrovich Myasnikov, was sent to teach physics at a polytechnic college built by the Soviet Union in francophone Conakry, Guinea. The Moscow Bauman Higher Technical School (MVTU imeni Baumana) chose my physically unfit and myopic father because he was a born teacher who could explain the most complex issues in a way that even beginners could understand. He was also fluent in French. When he returned to Moscow in 1969, he wrote a book designed to prepare students for entrance exams in physics at MVTU. This book went through four editions during his lifetime and another (200,000 copies) after his death. My high school classmates used it to prepare for their entrance exams at various university-level technical schools without knowing that the author was my father. He died unexpectedly on December 24, 1980. His premature death has had a lasting effect on my life. It took me nearly ten years to complete this book, which is intended not only for students and academics but for others interested in the subject. I am grateful to the chairs of the Department of Literatures, Languages, and Cultures at UF (Ann Wehmeyer, Mary Watt, Ingrid Kleespies, and Akíntúndé Akínyẹmí) for supporting my research and for giving me invaluable opportunities to teach and travel, as well as to work on various other projects. My fellow Russianists have maintained an atmosphere of collegiality, fairness, and great interest in our students, which has sustained me. I sorely miss the discussions I had on every aspect of academic life and literature with my dear colleague, the late professor Land Barksdale. My aunt, Rufina Tikhonova, her daughter, Anna Dormady, Alla Sadikova, Irene Kacandes, Meredith Meadows, Olga Glagoleva, Vladimir Oslon, Vera Zubarev, Radislav Lapushin, Vladimir Rylkov, Robert Flottemesch, James (Frank) Goodwin, Irina Men’shova, Anna Krylova, Boris Akhremitchev, Alexandra Popoff, and Vladimir Kagansky have been my support group for many years. In 2016 my daughter Daria reminded me of the effort it takes to start everything anew.

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Acknowledgments

Anna Muza (whose last name happened to be somewhat prophetic) has been one of my most important interlocutors during all stages of my thinking and writing. My husband, Alexander Burak, knows more than anybody can imagine and cares to know about the process of my writing this book. He also devoted a lot of time to translating many of the Russian quotations used in the text and to reading the entire manuscript several times. Rufus-Barbosus, Shusher, and Elma have been our most enchanting, forgiving, and loving four-legged friends in Gainesville. With my first book (The Archaeology of Anxiety) I was extremely lucky to have Irene Kacandes urge me to complete it and send it to the publisher. In this instance, Katy Meigs carefully and lovingly provided a first edit of the entire manuscript and told me it was a book. She also suggested that I participate in the 13th International Sandor Ferenczi Conference in Florence, Italy, May 3–6, 2018. Afterward, I was able to complete my last unfinished chapter “In Chertkov’s Grip.” I am grateful to the University of Florida for granting me a semester off in fall 2016, which allowed me to make major progress on the manuscript. I thank the Center of European Studies for giving me a travel grant in the summer of 2018, so that I could participate in the Ferenczi Conference. I am also grateful to Slavic Seminars, Università degli Studi di Genova, Italy, Dipartimento di Lingue e Culture Moderne, for inviting me to present a lecture on the first chapter of the book, followed by an extended question and discussion period in May 2018. Three days in Genoa and inspiring talks with Sara Dickinson and Laura Salmon gave me an energy boost that lasted many months. The University of Florida’s Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere (Robert and Margaret Rothman Endowment for the Humanities) awarded me a generous subvention grant of $1,500 toward publication expenses. A shorter version of chapter 4 was published as “Homo Sachaliensis: Chekhov as a Family Man,” in Chekhov’s Letters: Biography. Context. Poetics, ed. Carol Apollonio and Radislav Lapushin (New York: Lexington Books, 2018). Chapter 6 was published as “Reading Chekhov through Meyerhold’s Eyes,” Chekhov for the 21st Century, ed. Carol Apollonio and Angela Brintlinger (Bloomington: Slavica Publishers, 2012). I am very appreciative to the editors of these collections for publishing my work and offering feedback on it. Vera Zubarev was instrumental in making me write down some of my initial impressions from reading “Kashtanka” and The Steppe and publish them in Russian.

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to Igor Nemirovsky for his consistent interest in my work and to the staff of Academic Studies Press (Ekaterina Yanduganova, Stuart Allen, and Kira Nemirovsky) for handling my manuscript with such professional care. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers of my manuscript for their time and considered suggestions.

ix

Prologue: Breaking Free from Death Two fateful forces control us our entire life. [ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .] They are death and how other people judge us.1 —Fyodor Tyutchev, 1869

“I

’m thinking of Lev Tolstoy now,” Yury Olesha (1899–1960) recorded in   his notes in December 1959. Tolstoy always loomed large for Olesha, who for years wanted to write a grand novel comparable to Anna Karenina. Olesha, who had cancer, had less than five months to live, and his interest in Tolstoy’s final moments was not purely academic: [Tolstoy] was constantly contemplating death. Let’s recall now what death meant to him. He fell ill with pneumonia and, when on the second or third day his condition deteriorated, he began to breathe noisily, frightfully so that his breathing could be heard all over the house. Today this is called Cheyne-Stokes respiration, which is a symptom of fastapproaching death due to paralysis of a person’s respiratory center. The name of the symptom is derived from the names of the two ­physicians— Cheyne and Stokes—who first described it. The same symptom was recorded in the medical certificate confirming Stalin’s death. Tolstoy also had the same symptom right before he died. Were these moments of Tolstoy’s meeting with his death brightly illuminated in his mind? 1 “Две силы есть—две роковые силы, / Всю жизнь свою у них мы под рукой, / От колыбельных дней и до могилы,—/ Одна есть смерть, другая—Суд людской.” Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from Russian are mine, in collaboration with Alexander Burak.

Prologue: Breaking Free from Death Did death manifest itself in the way Tolstoy envisaged it all his life? I don’t think so. He would have been devoid of any sensations; he simply would have been unaware of what was happening to him. But before these moments, he was still alive, reaching over for his medications. There was nothing in common between Tolstoy’s death and the death of Ivan Ilyich, with his saying “Let me pass” [propustite] rather than “Forgive me” [prostite]. There was nothing in common between Tolstoy’s own death and the mundane, healthy nonsense that he invented in the course of his constant envisioning of death as [accompanied by] some kind of light, forgetting that, in this context, “light” was a poetic notion and not a physical phenomenon accompanying death. Two physicians—Cheyne and Stokes— knew the exact, physiological manifestations of death. They knew, for example, that it was not [the arrival of] some kind of light but a cessation of the activities of the respiratory center, which, in all probability, the dying person would be unaware of.2

Was Tolstoy at the moment of his death truly unaware of any physical sensations as Olesha implies in his detached analysis? Does it matter? As Pascal wrote, “It is dangerous to make man too aware that he is on the same level as animals without demonstrating to him his greatness. It is also dangerous to make him too aware of his greatness without showing him his baseness. It is even more dangerous to leave him ignorant of either state, but very helpful to demonstrate both of them to him.”3 Pascal’s pensée reads as a prophetic summation of Tolstoy’s future gigantic accomplishments. If anything, Olesha’s analysis attests to Tolstoy’s boundless resourcefulness and imagination—qualities that for many years allowed him to transform death’s dreadful physicality into an enlightening spiritual experience. Montaigne and Pascal suggested early on that all human activity is driven by the need to divert human beings from thinking about their own finitude.4 Olesha’s scrutiny of Tolstoy’s masterpiece was likely fueled by a similar yearning (whether conscious or subconscious) for distraction. Olesha probably compared Tolstoy’s view of death to that of Cheyne and Stokes not for the sake of questioning Tolstoy’s acclaimed intuition but for the sake of keeping his own thoughts about his own death at bay. 2 Iurii Olesha, Kniga proshchaniia (Moscow: Vargius, 1999), 433. 3 Blaise Pascal, Pensees and Other Writings, trans. Honor Levi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 38. Tolstoy read and admired Pascal. 4 Pascal echoes Montaigne in the section entitled “Diversion,” 44.

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Ernest Becker writes, “The knowledge of death is restrictive and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over. But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one’s dreams and even the most sun-filled days—that’s something else.”5 Becker draws his conclusions not only from the works of great thinkers like Montaigne, Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger but also from the findings of psychoanalysts and psychologists, such as William James, Freud, Rank, Adler, and many others who have stood the test of time: Everything that man does in his symbolic world is an attempt to deny and overcome his grotesque fate. He literally drives himself into a blind obliviousness with social games, psychological tricks, personal preoccupations so far removed from the reality of his situation that they are forms of madness, disguised and dignified madness, shared madness, but madness all the same. “Character-traits,” said Sandor Ferenczi . . . “are secret psychoses.”6

In Breaking Free from Death, I analyze how creative people respond to the burden of living with a realization of their inevitable finitude. While there are many insightful books devoted to the nature of creativity, I approach the phenomenon of creativity from another angle. Instead of focusing on creativity as such, I look at the circumstances that make a creative process possible or impossible. What contributes to creative death are not just crippling diseases that make man defenseless in the face of death, not just the arguably universal fear of death, and not just everyday hardships and political persecution but, equally important, the various impositions on the part of outsiders or, conversely, their pliability and helpfulness for the creative process. As Becker points out, the omnipresence of death pushes human beings toward some form of adjustment. I submit that with artists this adjusting process takes different forms, depending on how they manage to negotiate the delicate balance between their own needs and expectations and the needs and expectations of their peers and society at large. The artist needs life to secure his afterlife. Equally, what this afterlife is going to look like depends on the choices he makes and on the ways those choices affect his contemporaries. 5 Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1997), 27. 6 Ibid.

Prologue: Breaking Free from Death

After his Dead Souls was hailed as an incisive critique of Tsar Nicholas’s Russia, Nikolai Gogol (1809–52), the beneficiary of Nicholas’s much-needed financial support, chose to live for the rest of his life in Dante’s shadow. Gogol would say that Dead Souls was only the first part of his grand trilogy, that it ought to be compared with Dante’s Inferno, and that his very own Purgatory and Paradise—full of positive personalities and life-affirming examples—would follow shortly. In hindsight, Gogol’s identification with Dante made him prisoner of that spur-of-the-moment decision and provided all those who wanted to influence and control his creativity with a lot of space for maneuvering. As Simon Karlinsky contends, “In a misguided effort to become the kind of realist writer his contemporaries took him to be, Gogol spent eleven years trying to make himself over into a second-rate Turgenev or Goncharov.”7 Karlinsky continues: While Gogol had no trouble imagining the grotesque and comical aspects of Russian provincial reality in the original Dead Souls, picturing the attractive and constructive sides of this reality was something else. . . . Gogol’s notebooks from that period teem with factual information: the administrative hierarchy, religious customs, forms of economic dealings between landowners and serfs, commerce, methods of jurisprudence, clothing, names of local fish and birds. It is as if Gogol had suddenly become a total stranger to the country he had described with so much assurance in the published portion of Dead Souls. In the introduction to the 1847 edition of the book, Gogol pleaded with his readers to send him corrections of any factual errors his book might contain and suggestions about what he had omitted, as well as descriptions of life in the upper social stratum. “I need to know this class, which is the flower of our people,” Gogol wrote. “I cannot publish the latest volumes of my book until I acquire some knowledge of all the aspects of Russian life, at least to the extent I need to know it for my work in progress.”8

Gogol’s reaction to the outside suggestions, good wishes, and expectations was to seek refuge abroad (in Italy) for as long as possible. At the same time, he zealously immersed himself in religious preaching, which, as it turned out, did 7 Simon Karlinsky, The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 242. 8 Ibid., 240–41.

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not give Gogol the desired protection against his friends, admirers, and critics. His final act was to depart forever from all those who kept pestering him about a continuation of his novel. “For the rest of my life, I would keep thinking about this greatness-defeated man—a fate so common among Russians—only in his case the destruction came about with a resounding bang,” Dostoevsky wrote in 1877.9 Was Gogol’s identification with Dante doomed from the start? Or did it, in fact, secure him eleven more years of hopeful searching for new forms of literary expression? As I show in part two, Ivan Bunin’s identification with Tolstoy turned out to be highly beneficial for the former’s well-being and creativity. Russian writers often feature in narratives devoted to their heroic struggles in adverse political situations to the exclusion of anything else. I am predominantly interested in the variety of factors that constitute the elusive fabric of creativity and creativeness—such as a writer’s sources of inspiration, living arrangements, and daily routines, as well as their choice of friends, confidants, and even enemies. As I intend to show, many conflicts in the lives of my subjects arose not from their opposition to the existing political regimes but from their interactions with like-minded and supportive intellectuals, friends, and relatives. What often looks like a writer’s “unfortunate fate” was usually the result of his/her ingenuity and adaptability. Thus, Pushkin was quick to realize the benefits of exile and seclusion in order to become more productive. He was extremely productive during his exile to Crimea, the Caucasus, and his Mikhailovskoe estate. He reproduced these conditions, when he was no longer forced into isolation, during his magnificently prolific first Boldino period (1830) and second Boldino period (1832). Had his fateful duel turned out in his favor, it would have most likely have resulted in another exile as a form of punishment. Chekhov’s inexplicable (for the sick person that he was) trip to the island of Sakhalin in 1890 was, perhaps, a Gogolian attempt to free himself from his numerous self-appointed guardians and mentors. Once he became widely successful in the late 1880s, these people started to demand a grand novel from him, as it was seen as a more respectable genre than short stories or plays. In 1888–89, Chekhov kept promising a novel in his letters to his “well-meaning” advisers, but no matter how hard he tried, he could not reach his goal and felt increasingly uncomfortable at his inability to live up to his mentors’ expectations. In many ways, the premature and tragic death of his brother 9 F. M. Dostoevskii, “Podgotovitel´nye materialy k iiul´sko-avgustovskomu ‘Dnevniku’ 1877 goda,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 30 vols. (Leningrad: Nauka, 1983), 25:250.

Prologue: Breaking Free from Death

Nikolai in June 1889 was a fateful blessing in disguise, since it offered Chekhov a legitimate reason for discarding his work on the expected novel for the foreseeable future. Chekhov’s subsequent trip to Sakhalin (where Chekhov, like Gogol, immersed himself in ethnographic research) was a further step toward sheltering himself from external pressure. After his triumphant return from the island, no one felt that they were in a position to request a lengthy work of literature from him. He had accomplished enough for posterity. For Yury Olesha, Stalin’s oppressive regime provided a plausible and convenient excuse for his meager output during the thirty years following the publication of his highly successful Envy (1927). There is no evidence that he would have written much more had he had a chance to work in a different environment. It is an ironic coincidence that Olesha died in 1960, during Khrushchev’s Thaw, with its liberating atmosphere, new freedoms, and new publishing venues. As I have shown elsewhere, Anna Akhmatova ingeniously used her semi-voluntary cohabitation with many difficult lodgers in a large communal apartment as a major excuse for not writing in the 1920s and up until 1938.10 That she was astoundingly productive in the very same communal apartment in 1939 did not seem to puzzle her admirers. They saw it as a sign of her superhuman ability to overcome adversity. “What are you writing these days? What have you got in store for us?”— these are the questions that drive Chekhov’s fictional writer Boris Trigorin mad. Venedikt Erofeev (1938–90) chose to hide himself from his well-meaning “persecutors” by drinking heavily. This provided him with an excuse for losing his allegedly near-finished works on commuter trains and other means of transportation. In the 1970s before personal computers, such excuses seemed valid enough, while rumors about Erofeev feverishly working on another promising project abounded.11 For Erofeev’s peers, the stigma of being an alcoholic was less detrimental to his reputation than the stigma of his having a barren imagination. Somehow, the writer’s admirers were willing to accept his inability to look after his newly written manuscripts, while at the same time they were not prepared to give him sufficient time and space to nurture his creativity. Instead, they all cheerfully expected an immediate follow-up to his masterpiece Moscow-Petushki (1969). 10 Galina Rylkova, The Archaeology of Anxiety: The Russian Silver Age and Its Legacy (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), 66–107. 11 On Erofeev in the 1970s, see Elena Ignatova, Obernuvshis´ (“Venedikt”), http://www. antho.net/library/ignatova/obernuvshis/01.html.

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Erofeev’s predicament is a vivid illustration of how various mishaps enlace artists’ relationships with their aficionados. In Art and Artist, Otto Rank reveals that any creative personality must maintain an intricate balance between his personal ambitions and the demands of the society that he belongs to. While an artist may pursue his private agenda, believing that his primary responsibility is only to himself and his art, society may see the artist as a vehicle subordinated to its ideology and agendas, and as a means to collective immortality (i.e., the work of an artist should ultimately immortalize not an individual but his epoch and contemporaries).12 Consequently, the work of an artist cannot be a totally private matter, no matter how reclusive a life he/she leads. In his Powers of Two, author and essayist Joshua Shenk focuses on the dyad—the tiny and most viable unit of creativity. His goal is to prove that no one can create in a vacuum.13 The less obvious “other” in his chosen pairs is just as important as the celebrated creator, who usually gets all the credit. Here I pursue a broader scope. I look at writers’ inner circles, such as family, friends, and associates, as well as at their personal circumstances (e.g., their proximity to death and proclivity for thinking about it). What makes creative people different from anyone else is that an artist “has to earn his value as a person from his work, which means that his work has to carry the burden of justifying him” and ultimately of “qualifying [him] for immortality.”14 It is this value that an artist (together with his society) places on his/her work that makes his/her life both unbearable and worth fighting for. In his discussion of ethics, Giorgio Agamben argues that “there is no essence, no historical or spiritual vocation, no biological destiny that humans must enact or realize. This is the only reason why something like an ethics can exist, because it is clear that if humans were or had to be this or that substance, this or that destiny, no ethical experience would be possible—there would be only tasks to be done.”15 Man’s destiny is to be “one’s own possibility or potentiality, then and only for this reason . . . humans have and feel a debt. . . . The only evil consists instead in the decision to remain in a deficit of existence; or rather (and this is the destiny of morality) to regard potentiality itself, which is the most 12 Otto Rank, Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development [1932], trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989). 13 Joshua Shenk, Powers of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014). 14 Becker summarizes Rank’s ideas in Denial of Death, 109. 15 Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), xi.

Prologue: Breaking Free from Death

proper mode of human existence, as a fault that must always be repressed.”16 Following Agamben, I describe my subjects’ strategies to remain true to what they believed in as their potentialities. In Breaking Free from Death I examine the lives and choices that concrete individuals and—by extrapolation—their literary characters must face in order to preserve their singularity and integrity while attempting to achieve fame, greatness, and success. In the Divine Comedy, Dante famously wrote himself out of his spiritual and creative crisis. Likewise, I see my subjects’ literary works as manifestations of their authors’ unresolved or worked-through anxieties. To enlist Leon Edel’s depiction of literary biography, literary studies are “irrelevant if [they do not] discover the overlap between what the individual did and the life that made this possible.”17 Everything an artist does is somehow related to his creativity. Victor Shklovsky highlighted this aspect in his description of Tolstoy’s fatal departure from Yasnaya Polyana: He found himself on a new boundary of a new land which he saw but could not enter. Tolstoy’s departure from Yasnaya Polyana was not the flight of an old man into a strange, chilly, damp world. It was the resolution of an artist to cut himself away from the past, mastering the compassion he felt for his family.18

I admire my chosen writers for their creative approaches to their own lives and for their ability to overcome crucial obstacles standing in the way of their achieving greatness. The book consists of two parts. In part one, “Beginnings and Endings,” I concentrate on Chekhov’s and Tolstoy’s ways of getting out of the critical situations that threatened to end their respective careers at their zenith. Both writers were “perpetual beginners” and shared the same impulse for starting everything anew when faced with writing block or circumstances that were seemingly out of their control. In order to cope, they would rather embark on a new project, cultivate a new frame of mind, create new surroundings, and/or reform their own family. While this might have been natural for a short story 16 Ibid. 17 Leon Edel, “The Art of Biography No. 1,” interview by Jeanne McCulloch, Paris Review 98 (Winter 1985), https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2844/leon-edel-the-art-ofbiography-no-1-leon-edel. 18 Victor Shklovsky, Lev Tolstoy, trans. Olga Shartse (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978), 771.

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writer like Chekhov—after all, each story offered a new beginning—Tolstoy was destined to wear the mantle of a writer of great, long novels and center of Russia’s cultural universe. To maintain his pivotal position in Russian literature, Tolstoy had to reinvent himself by adopting new strategies and new sources of inspiration while maintaining his bonds with people who refused to acknowledge this inevitable stage in his evolution. In other words, he had to simultaneously epitomize development, change, and continuity. Each new beginning, however empowering, means that something else must suffer. Such a predicament does not fail to magnify and intensify beginners’ anxieties about both their mortality and permanence. Becker describes “the irony of man’s condition” as his “deepest need . . . to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.”19 I examine the writers’ attempts at making death a more manageable (in the case of Chekhov) or more palpable and prominent (in the case of Tolstoy) presence in their lives. The chapter on Uncle Vanya reveals various sources, and kinds, of sustainability that keep talented people afloat. I show what happens when such reservoirs remain unrecognized, untapped, or abused. In part two, “Transcending Death,” I discuss the role of Chekhov’s and Tolstoy’s texts in other people’s confrontations with death and posterity. The chapter on Vsevolod Meyerhold (the theater director and author) examines his ingenious misreading of Chekhov’s The Seagull. As a result, Meyerhold got out of the situation that threatened his life and career and went on to invent a new theater. The chapter on Bunin’s literary biographies of Tolstoy and Chekhov describes how Bunin used his subjects as vehicles for reducing his fears about his own finitude. The chapter on The Cherry Orchard offers a contemporary reading of Chekhov’s last work. The final chapter and the epilogue present a closer look at Chekhov’s last days and funeral. Cumulatively, I hope to show that a productive writer’s life (that is, a writer who succeeds in putting his/her thoughts about death and mortality in perspective) requires no less effort and creativity than a true masterpiece.

19 Becker, Denial of Death, 66.

CHAPTER 1

Leo Tolstoy and the Privilege of Formidable Hypochondria1 Many things that would be uncanny if they occurred in real life are not uncanny in literature, and . . . in literature there are many opportunities to achieve uncanny effects that are absent in real life. —Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny

“One sees Nothing but Death”

I

n January 1873, Tolstoy described the “absurdity” and indisputable   necessity of funeral rites in a letter to his close friend, the poet Afanasy Fet: I recently visited my brother; a child of his had died and was being buried. There were priests and a pink coffin, and everything there [as] ought to be. My brother and I took the same view about religious rites as you do, and when we were together we couldn’t help expressing to one another a feeling almost of revulsion at this ritualism. But then I began to think: well, what could my brother have done to carry the decomposing body of his child out of the house in the end? How should it have been carried out? By a coachman in a sack? And where should it be put, how should it be buried? What, generally speaking[,] is a fitting way to end things? Is there anything better than a requiem, incense, etc.? (I, at least, can’t think of anything.) And what about growing weak and dying?

1 My view of Tolstoy as a powerful “hypochondriac” was initially inspired by Brian Dillon’s The Hypochondriacs: Nine Tormented Lives (New York: Faber and Faber, 2009). Dillon does not discuss Tolstoy.

4

Part One    Beginnings and Endings Should one wet oneself, . . . and nothing more? That’s no good. . . . The remarkable thing about religion is that for so many centuries and for so many millions of people it has rendered a service, the very greatest service that any human thing can render on this occasion. With such a task, how can it be logical? It is an absurdity, but the one of many millions of absurdities, which is suitable for the occasion.2

Tolstoy’s remarkable ability of defamiliarizing the familiar and rationalizing it at the same time came to a halt a few years later. In 1875, he suddenly felt old and looked back on his previous life as devoid of meaning. He described his emotional state in a very long letter to his confidant, the philosopher Nikolai Strakhov: I am 47. Either because I have lived passionately or because this is the normal age for it, I feel that old age has begun for me. . . . And so I have reached old age, that inner spiritual condition in which nothing from the outer world [arouses] any interest, in which there are no desires and one sees nothing but death ahead of one. . . . As I said, the first feeling I experienced when I reached old age was bewilderment, then terror, a deep feeling of despair that the smart phrase of the poet is not just a phrase, but that life is a stupid and empty joke which someone had played on us. . . . And so I began to search for a view of life, which would do away with its apparent senselessness, being convinced that my despair did not come from an attribute of life itself, but from my view of it.3

Consequently, in Anna Karenina Tolstoy endowed his much younger character, successful landowner Konstantin Levin, with similar feelings, trying his best to resolve his protagonist’s crisis. The fear of death first engulfs Levin at the end of part 3 of Anna Karenina when he watches his terminally ill brother Nikolai toss and moan in his sleep: “Death, the inevitable end of everything, presented itself to him for the first time with irresistible force.”4 Levin feels defenseless: just as he has started to figure out how to live his life, he is shown that his life will Tolstoy’s Letters, sel., ed., and trans. R. F. Christian, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1978), 1:256. 3 Tolstoy’s Letters, 1:288–89. 4 Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Penguin, 2002), 348. Figures in parentheses correspond to page numbers in this edition. 2

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inevitably end someday. In James Massey’s summation of the early writings of Ludwig Feuerbach, “Only humans experience death before it takes place; the completion of my death and its outcome are experienced by other living people. Thus the major crisis in a human life is not the point of death itself but the realization by the living human that one will really die. The choice about what to do about death, then, is the choice about what life to live.”5 In his letter to Fet (April 1876), Tolstoy expresses a similar thought, which he illustrates with lines from a poem by Pierre-Jean de Beranger: Mourir vient de soi-même. N’en ayons point souci. Bien vivre est le problème Qu’il faut résoudre ici.6

Tolstoy tells Fet that the problem of how to live properly had been looming large for him lately and that he tried to resolve it in part 5, which describes Nikolai’s death and how it affects Levin and his wife.7 After a short remission, Levin’s anxieties come back with new intensity in the concluding portion of Anna Karenina. In part 8, we learn that Levin “suddenly felt himself in the position of a person who has traded his warm fur coat for muslin clothing and, caught in the cold for the first time, is convinced beyond question, not by reasoning but with his whole being, that he is as good as naked and must inevitably die a painful death” (786). “All that spring he was not himself and lived through terrible moments. ‘Without knowing what I am and why I am here, it is impossible for me to live. And I cannot know that, therefore I cannot live.’ . . . And, happy in his family life, a healthy man, Levin was several times so close to suicide that he hid a rope lest he hang himself with it, and was afraid to go about with a rifle lest he shoot himself ” (788–89). When Levin finally gives up on solving the riddle of life, the solution appears to him in all its beauty and simplicity—“To live not for one’s own needs but for God. . . . ‘Can this be faith?’ he wondered, afraid to believe his happiness. 5 Ludwig Feuerbach, Thoughts on Death and Immortality: From the Papers of a Thinker, along with an Appendix of Theological-Satirical Epigrams, Edited by One of His Friends, trans., with intro. and notes by James A. Massey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), xl. 6 “Death will come [of its own accord]. / This is not a problem we should think about. / To live well—that’s a task / Worth thinking about right now.” My literal, unrhymed translation—G. R. 7 Tolstoy’s Letters, 1:298.

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‘My God, thank you!’ he said, choking back the rising sobs and with both hands wiping away the tears that filled his eyes” (795, 800). The novel ends on the evening of the same day when Levin applies his crucial discovery to his daily life, full of trifles and inconsistencies: I’ll get angry in the same way with the coachman Ivan, argue in the same way, speak my mind inappropriately, there will be the same wall between my soul’s holy of holies and other people, even my wife, I’ll fail in the same way to understand with my reason why I pray, and yet I will pray—but my life now, my whole life, regardless of all that may happen to me, every minute of it, is not only not meaningless, as it was before, but has the unquestionable meaning of the good which it is in my power to put into it! (817)

By the time Tolstoy reluctantly finished Anna Karenina in 1877, he was utterly exhausted by his gigantic project. His intention to embark on another similarly titanic labor, the novel The Decembrists, was abandoned in 1879. In A Confession (written in 1879–82), Tolstoy reiterates and amplifies many of Levin’s thoughts, this time attributing them to his first-person narrator, who is barely distinguishable from his creator (or at least from the persona that Tolstoy created in the letter to Strakhov quoted above). As other scholars have pointed out, Tolstoy would always write himself out of any crisis, but in the 1870s his personal crisis was magnified by many deaths in his family and by his feeling that his own days were numbered. The letter to Strakhov was written three weeks after Tolstoy’s very “sick wife . . . gave birth to a stillborn child and [had] been at death’s door.”8 In a letter to Fet (November 1875), Tolstoy described that period through an uncanny succession of eleven nouns—“Fear, horror, death, the children’s merriment, meals, fussing around, physicians, falsity, death, horror”—that reads like one of Fet’s famous poems.9 On April 6, 1878, Tolstoy informed his relative Alexandrine Tolstoy about another disaster that had struck his family: “I’m in a depressed state, and 8 Tolstoy’s Letters, 1:282. 9 “Получил [ваше] письмо в страшно тяжелые минуты, жена была при смерти больна воспалением брюшины, родила преждевременно тотчас же умершего ребенка. Страх, ужас, смерть, веселье детей, еда, суета, доктора, фальшь, смерть, ужас. Ужасно тяжело было.” “I received your letter at a terribly traumatic time, my wife was on the brink of death, sick with peritonitis; she gave birth to a premature baby that died immediately afterward. Fear, horror, death, the children’s merriment, meals, fussing around, physicians, falsity, death, horror. Things were terribly traumatic.” Lev Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii, 22 vols. (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel´stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1984), 18:775. Alexander Burak’s translation.

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there are several reasons for this: the first and most important is that Sonya and the child are unwell and have been getting worse and worse for over a week now. The child is wasting away, Sonya torments herself and the child gets even worse.” Death seemed to be everywhere: Another reason is: our governor in Tula is a certain Ushakov, a frivolous but very kind man, and he has a wife, the mother of four children, a s­plendid woman who supports her husband and the whole family. I knew them slightly and had a high opinion of her. The day before yesterday I was in Tula with the children to have their portraits done and some clothes made. When leaving, I learned that a horse had badly hurt Ushakova and that she was seriously injured. Over dinner at home we learned that Ushakova had [died]. She is being buried today. No matter how long we’ve known this, i.e. that we are in the hands of God, it’s always new and amazing.10

On January 1, 1883, Tolstoy recorded in his diary: “Today Gudovich died. Died for good—and I and all of us died for a year, a day, or an hour. We live that means we die. To live well means to die well. A new year! I wish that I and everybody else may die well.”11 Tolstoy’s absence at the commemorative Pushkin festivities in Moscow in 1880 did not go unnoticed.12 At the end of May, the writer Dmitry Grigorovich informed Fyodor Dostoevsky that Tolstoy had gone mad. The rumor was immediately confirmed by another literary celebrity, the editor Mikhail Katkov. A certain Yuryev kept inviting Dostoevsky to visit Tolstoy in Yasnaya Polyana. Dostoevsky declined, although the idea was ­tempting.13 Tolstoy’s own wife had several young children to look after and had little time for thinking about death as intensely and philosophically as her husband invited her to do. Had Sophia Andreevna done so, she would have been utterly demoralized and wouldn’t have been able to perform her duties as a mother and the mistress of a big household. She repeatedly questioned the seriousness of Tolstoy’s new beliefs, was dumbfounded by his seemingly

10 Tolstoy’s Letters, 1:320. 11 Tolstoy’s Diaries, vol. 1, ed. and trans. R. F. Christian (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), 202. 12 Alexandra Popoff, Tolstoy’s False Disciple: The Untold Story of Leo Tolstoy and Vladimir Chertkov (New York: Pegasus Books, 2014), 23. 13 F. M. Dostoevskii and A. G. Dostoevskaiia, Perepiska (Leningrad: Nauka, 1976), 326–27.

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inexplicable and eccentric behavior, and at times also suspected him of losing his mind. In spring 1884, Tolstoy perused the professional periodical Archives of Psychiatry. He felt vulnerable and misunderstood and went to a great deal of trouble to record his critics’ behavior as being equally illogical and insane.14 On April 4, 1884, Tolstoy wrote in his diary: “I’ve been assigned the role of a querulous old man, and in their eyes I can’t escape from it: if I take part in their life I renounce the truth, and they would be the first to cast this renunciation in my teeth. If I look sadly, as now, at their madness—I’m a querulous old man, like all old men.”15 He continued the following day: [The painter, Ilya] Repin, said that even [another famous painter, Ivan] Kramskoy, called him mad. Read in [Archives of] Psychiatry about a landowner, Y, who lived with his servants. . . . Went for a walk. Dinner. Nothing all dinner time except shopping and dissatisfaction with those who serve us. Everything is more and more depressing. Their blindness is astonishing. . . . A conversation with Strakhov about it being impossible to follow rules—i.e. there aren’t any rules. A mad and senseless interruption [by Tolstoy’s wife] to the conversation, and it’s impossible even to expose this madness. If I expose it, there will be anger and accusations of personal malice. If I don’t—the assurance that all is well, and deeper and deeper degradation. I wait for a solution.16

It would seem that Tolstoy had no choice but to release his very personal anxieties into the public domain. This period of endless frustration and soul-­ searching culminated in the publication of The Death of Ivan Ilych in 1886.

The Mid-Life Crises In May 1882, Tolstoy bought a house in Moscow and took great care to remodel and furnish it, much to the surprise of his family. His daughter Tatiana 14 “Two things became clear to me yesterday: one unimportant, the other important. The unimportant one: I was afraid to say and think that all of 99 per cent of people are mad. But not only is there nothing to be afraid of, but one can’t help saying or thinking this. . . . And so you simply walk about among mad men, trying not to annoy them and to cure them if possible.” Tolstoy’s Diaries, 1:206. 15 Ibid., 1:208. 16 Ibid., 1:209.

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recorded in her diary how full of gratitude and amazement she was when she saw her new room, which by far exceeded her expectations: Everybody could see that Papa had thought about everything and tried to arrange everything in the best possible way. He has succeeded. I was very much moved by his taking such good care of us, which was especially nice of him as it was quite out of character. Our house is wonderful; there are no noticeable drawbacks in it. As for my own room and the garden, they are a delight!17

Tolstoy’s preoccupation with his Moscow residence is very similar to Ivan Ilych happily busying himself with decorating his new place, which causes his downfall. Students of Tolstoy readily recognize Levin as Tolstoy’s alter ego; however, nobody has so far identified Tolstoy with his dying character, Ivan Ilych. The differences between Levin and Ivan Ilych, nevertheless, are not as crucial as they may seem. When put in similar circumstances, Levin and Ivan Ilych act as exact doubles. Levin “lit the candle, got up carefully, went over to the mirror and began to examine his face and temples. He opened his mouth. The back teeth were beginning to go bad. He bared his muscular arms. Yes, good and strong. But Nikolenka, who was lying there breathing with the remains of his lungs, had also had a healthy body once” (348). From that night onward, Levin starts seeing “death or the approach of it everywhere” (348). Ivan Ilych is also shown studying his reflection in the mirror: “He bared his arms to the elbow, looked at them, drew the sleeves down again, sat down on an ottoman, and grew blacker than night.”18 The main difference lies in the dissimilar allowances that Tolstoy makes for his characters. Levin is granted a vital distraction in his agricultural projects: “He saw either death or the approach of it everywhere. But his undertaking now occupied him all the more. He had to live his life to the end, until death came. Darkness covered everything for him; but precisely because of this darkness he felt that his undertaking was the only guiding thread in this darkness, and he seized it and held on to it with all his remaining strength” (352). In other words, Tolstoy creates a buffer zone for Levin that allows him to go on living 17 Aleksei Zverev and Vladimir Tunimanov, Lev Tolstoi (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 2006), 383–84. Alexander Burak’s translation. 18 Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych, in Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maud (New York: HarperCollins Perennial Classics, 2004), 276. The figures in parentheses correspond to page numbers in this edition.

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and even start his family with Kitty, have a child, and be happy, until Tolstoy plunges him into another bout of depression and makes him rebuild and reinforce his defense mechanisms against death in the concluding section of the novel. Levin will suffer more bouts of depression, since as Tolstoy’s contemporary, William James, put it, death is “the worm at the core” of every possible attempt at happiness.19 What does it mean to live productively? What does it mean to be able to live at all? First and foremost, one has to pretend that the death-worm simply doesn’t exist. As the psychoanalyst Gregory Zilboorg explains: If this fear [of death] were constantly conscious, we would be unable to function normally. It must be properly repressed to keep us living with any modicum of comfort. We know very well that to repress means more than to put away and to forget that which was put away and the place where we put it. It means also to maintain a constant psychological effort to keep the lid on and inwardly never relax our watchfulness.20

Levin’s anxieties reach their peak in Moscow where he is overcome with restlessness while waiting for his wife to give birth to their first child. When the family returns to the country, Levin “returns to his usual occupations. Farming, relations with the muzhiks and his neighbors, running the household, his sister’s and brother’s affairs, which were in his hands, relations with his wife and family, cares about the baby, the new interest in bees he had aquired that last spring, took up all his time” (789). Levin’s existential crisis becomes manageable because he has other things to occupy his inquisitive mind. The first-person narrator of Tolstoy’s A Confession finds himself in a more perplexing situation: The truth was that life is meaningless. It was as if I had carried on living and walking until I reached a precipice from which I could see clearly that there was nothing ahead of me other than destruction. But it was i­mpossible to stop, and impossible to turn back or close my eyes in order not to see that there was nothing ahead other than deception of life and of happiness, and the reality of suffering and death: of complete annihilation.21 19 James is quoted in Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1997), 15 20 Zilboorg is quoted in Becker, Denial of Death, 17. 21 Leo Tolstoy, A Confession and Other Religious Writings, trans. Jane Kentish (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 30. Figures in parentheses correspond to page numbers in this edition.

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The narrator admits that he has encountered what he describes as the “standstill” situation before. He resolved it previously by getting married and by busying himself with the task “of achieving the best for [his] family and [himself].” And he did so for “another fifteen years.” After such a long time, however, his old system of distractions lost its power: “Those two drops of honey, which more than all else had diverted my eyes from the cruel truth, my love for my family and for my writing, which I called art—I no longer found sweet” (32): And then, what happens to everyone stricken with a fatal inner disease happened to me. At first the minor signs of indisposition appear, which the sick person ignores; then these symptoms appear more and more frequently, merging into one interrupted period of suffering. The suffering increases and before the sick man realizes what is happening he discovers that the thing he had taken for an indisposition is in fact the thing that is more important to him that anything in the world: it is death. (28–29)

Tolstoy brings down his narrator’s spiritual quest to the level of its physical manifestations, such as losing one’s mind, getting old, or developing a fatal inner disease. But this interpretive move brings little consolation, and the narrator’s mind and body continue to exist in their inexorable progression toward extinction until he finds solace in his adjusted version of Christianity. What is truly at the core of narrator’s bottomless depression and continuous self-deprecation? At some point the narrator describes the visibly upsetting process of getting old: “The time came when I stopped growing; I felt that I was no longer developing but was drying up, my muscles were growing weaker, my teeth falling out” (35). If we apply Arthur Kleinman’s theory of “somatization” and view the narrator’s exaggerated complaints as his only way of legitimizing something that is being repressed (either consciously or subconsciously),22 we may conclude that the narrator’s piercing sensations are the signs of a midlife crisis. Elliott Jaques describes a midlife crisis as a crucial period in human development, during which people learn to accept the fact that they are getting old and will eventually cease to exist.23 It is very similar to mourning, but 22 “Somatization is the communication of personal and interpersonal problems as a physical idiom of distress and a pattern of behavior that emphasizes the seeking of medical help.” Arthur Kleinman, The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing and the Human Condition (New York: Basic Books, 1989), 57. 23 Elliott Jaques, “Death and the Mid-Life Crisis,” in Death Interpretations, ed. Hendrik M. Ruitenbeek (New York: Delta, 1969), 140–65.

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the mourner in this situation preemptively mourns the loss of his own self and body. In A Confession and The Death of Ivan Ilych, Tolstoy skillfully turns this period of subdued resignation into an overwhelming life-and-death tragedy. Tolstoy’s celebrated predecessors and contemporaries also identified the fear of death as a decisive factor in human existence. But Tolstoy was the first to show its true magnitude and make subsequent thinkers reference The Death of Ivan Ilych as a spectacular record of man’s complete disintegration in the face of his extinction. Ivan Ilych’s collapse, however, is not as inevitable as Tolstoy wants us to believe.

The Failure of the Zaslon Mechanism To allow death to engulf Ivan Ilych’s life, Tolstoy sets out to demolish all those barriers that Ivan Ilych has successfully built around himself in order to function normally in real life. No matter how hard Ivan Ilych tries to keep his fears of his approaching death at bay, Tolstoy makes him fail: He would say to himself: “I would take up my duties again—after all, I used to live by them.” And banishing all doubts he would go to the law courts, enter into conversations with his colleagues, and sit carelessly as was his wont, scanning the crowd with a thoughtful look and leaning both his emaciated arms on the arms of his oak chair; bending over as usual to a colleague and drawing his papers nearer, he would interchange whispers with him, and then suddenly raising his eyes and sitting erect would ­pronounce certain words and open the proceedings. But suddenly in the midst of those proceedings the pain in his side, regardless of the stage the proceedings had reached, would begin its own gnawing work. Ivan Ilych would turn his attention to it and try to drive the thought of it away, but without success. It would come and stand before him and look at him, and he would be petrified and the light would die out of his eyes, and he would again begin asking himself whether It alone was true. And his colleagues and subordinates would see with surprise and distress that he, the brilliant and subtle judge, was becoming confused and making mistakes. (281)

Tolstoy informs us about Ivan Ilych’s brilliance only to confirm that it offered little solace in the face of his imminent doom. The major difference between Levin and the narrator in A Confession, on the one hand, and Ivan Ilych, on the other, does not lie in their outlooks or any singular achieve-

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ments or lack thereof, but in their actual proximity to death. William H. Young suggests: The significant differences between the living and the dying . . . are essentially two: (1) the knowledge of the imminence of death, and its likely cause; and (2) the altered and more specific concept of the temporal span between the present and the end of life. Thus, instead of the unknown, indeterminate, and therefore easily denied or evaded eventuality, death becomes a time-limited, causally determined reality, clearly an essential and dominant part of the process of life itself.24

What is left of Ivan Ilych’s life similarly unravels as a teleological progression toward its predetermined finale. Tolstoy systematically denies Ivan Ilych any access to his previously reliable sources of sustainability, thus making him supremely vulnerable. For a while his wife simply refuses to take his illness seriously, making Ivan Ilych feel like a stranger in his own house. “Those about him did not understand or would not understand [how he felt], but thought everything in the world was going on as usual. . . . Praskovya Fedorovna’s attitude to Ivan Ilych’s illness, as she expressed it both to others and to him, was that it was his own fault and was another of the annoyances he caused her” (274). In other words, his family treats Ivan Ilych as a hypochondriac, whose exaggerated complaints should be dismissed for his own good. Being left to his own devices, Ivan Ilych develops a meaningful relationship with his own body. He learns to cherish the moments of solitude when he could totally devote himself to thinking comforting thoughts about his body reaching the “desired improvement” (278). “Ivan Ilych walked away, went to his own room, lay down and began musing: ‘The kidney, a floating kidney’. . . . And by an effort of imagination he tried to catch that kidney and arrest it and support it. So little was needed for this, it seemed to him” (277). In his summation of the findings of T. S. Szasz, Becker ingeniously suggests that one’s ailing body and one’s own disease can become effective allies or useful enemies: The pains we feel, the illnesses that are real or imaginary give us something to relate to, keep us from slipping out of the worlds, from bogging down in the depression of complete loneliness and emptiness. In a word, 24 William H. Young, Jr., “Death of a Patient during Psychotherapy,” in Death Interpretations, 130.

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But Tolstoy does not allow Ivan Ilych a lasting respite from his pain and gloom. No sooner does Ivan Ilych “put out the light and turn on his side [musing,] ‘The appendix is getting better, absorption is occurring,’” he immediately feels “the old, familiar, dull, gnawing pain, stubborn and serious” (278). The six attributes to the word “pain” make it impossible to deny it. Finally, Tolstoy forces Ivan Ilych to question and subsequently unlearn his previous habits that he had acquired as a healthy and happy child, such as the habit of thinking that death was not his immediate concern. Ivan Ilych saw that he was dying, and he was in continual despair. In the depth of his heart he knew he was dying, but not only was he not accustomed to the thought, he simply did not and could not grasp it. The Syllogism he had learnt from Kiesewetter’s Logic: “Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal,” had always seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but certainly not as applied to himself. That Caius—man in the abstract—was mortal, was perfectly correct, but he was not Caius, not an abstract man, but a creature quite, quite separate from all others. He had been little Vanya, with a mamma and a papa, with Mitya and Volodya, with the toys, a coachman and a nurse, afterwards with Katenka and with all the joys, griefs, and delights of childhood, boyhood, and youth. What did Caius know of the smell of that striped leather ball Vanya had been so fond of? Had Caius kissed his mother’s hand like that, and did the silk of her dress rustle so for Caius? Had he rioted like that at school when the pastry was bad? Had Caius been in love like that? Could Caius preside at a session as he did? “Caius really was mortal, and it was right for him to die; but for me, little Vanya, Ivan Ilych, with all my thoughts and emotions, it’s altogether a different matter. It cannot be that I ought to die. That would be too terrible.” Such was his feeling. (280)

Although Tolstoy goes out of his way to show the complete falsity of such assumptions, such a falsification of reality is precisely what Ivan Ilych needs in 25 Becker, Denial of Death, 144.

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order to function adequately in the death-dominated world. As Becker points out, “each child grounds himself in some power that transcends him. Usually it is a combination of his parents, his social group, and the symbols of his society and nation. This is the unthinking web of support, which allows him to believe in himself, as he functions on the automatic security of delegated powers. He doesn’t of course admit to himself that he lives on borrowed powers, as that would lead him to question his own secure action, the very confidence that he needs.”26 Tolstoy ultimately makes it impossible for Ivan Ilych to shield himself with any screen or barrier (“заслон,” with its derivatives, and “ширма” in Russian): He tried to get back into the former current of thoughts that had once screened the thought of death from him. But strange to say, all that had formerly shut off, hidden, and destroyed his consciousness of death, no longer had that effect. Ivan Ilych now spent most of his time in attempting to re-establish that old current. . . . [He] looked for consolations—new screens—and new screens were found and for a while seemed to save him, but then they immediately fell to pieces or rather became transparent, as if It [death] penetrated them and nothing could veil it. (281–82)

Even a trivial and distracting argument with his wife ends with her awkward remark: “‘Let the servants do it. You will hurt yourself again.’ And suddenly It would flash through the screen and he would see it. . . . And nothing could be done with It except to look at it and shudder” (282). Ivan Ilych’s consistent failure to “replace” his uncomfortable thoughts with “a succession of others” (281) culminates in weeks of unbearable anguish and his anticipated death. In the face of death, Levin feels as if “he were caught up in the cold,” “wearing muslin clothes only” (281). With Ivan Ilych, Tolstoy decides to leave him completely naked. What is so special in Ivan Ilych’s death? Does he die because he was previously shown to be sick? In other words, does he perish in order to confirm that his fears of death have been founded all along? This is a hypochondriac’s dream come true. That is, Tolstoy did not have to die in order to prove that his inexplicable sensations did, indeed, have some physical cause—all he had to do was kill his fictional character. Was Tolstoy a hypochondriac? Even if he was not, he definitely succeeded in turning his very own fears and anxieties 26 Ibid., 89.

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into everyone’s indisputable and immediate concerns, making all those who failed to experience similar sensations simply not human. The solid façade that Tolstoy created for himself with his literary masterpieces proved a reliable shelter to nurse and conceal his exceptional hypochondria, which would have been inexcusable under normal circumstances. To aid his readers, Tolstoy skillfully transformed the syllogism that Ivan Ilych learned as a child (“Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal”) into its opposite: Ivan Ilych suffers tremendously, he is a man, therefore all men will suffer tremendously. One exceptional scenario takes precedence over all other possible scenarios. Tolstoy adopted a similar point of view in the concluding passage of The Devil (1889): “And indeed, if Eugene Irtenev was mentally deranged when he committed this crime, then everyone is similarly insane. The most mentally deranged people are certainly those who see in others indications of insanity they do not notice in themselves”27 It was this particular passage in The Devil that made Mark Aldanov (a prolific writer and an astute reader of Tolstoy) conclude that Tolstoy was, likely, the only truly sane person among his deranged contemporaries. Before Tolstoy was able to project his new view of life onto the lives of other people, he needed to establish through his literary characters the fact that no one was immune to the kind of feelings that Ivan Ilych experiences in the last year of his life. In A Confession, the narrator admits reproachfully that there was a time “when [he] had [his] own favorite ideals which justified [his] whims, and [he] endeavored to concoct a theory by which [he] could look upon [his] whims as laws governing mankind” (37). It would seem that Tolstoy had never given up that particular strategy. Tolstoy and his spiritual crisis of the 1880s feature prominently in William James’s best-known work, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1901–2). In the chapters with the joint title “The Sick Soul,” James describes A Confession as “a wonderful account of the attack of melancholy which led [Tolstoy] to his r­ eligious conclusions.”28 James was so captivated by Tolstoy’s genius that he s­tipulated that “Tolstoy’s preoccupations [i.e., obsessive and extraordinary behavior] were largely objective, for the purpose and meaning of life in general was what so troubled him.”29 Tolstoy’s counterpart is “poor” John Bunyan (1628–88), the author of The Pilgrim’s Progress. James quotes generously from A Confession and Bunyan’s 27 Leo Tolstoy, The Devil, in Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maud (New York: HarperCollins Perennial Classics, 2004), 351. 28 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: Random House, 1929), 147. 29 Ibid., 154.

Leo Tolstoy and the Privilege of Formidable Hypochondria     Chapter 1

Autobiography, concluding that Bunyan’s “troubles were over the condition of his own personal self.”30 Bunyan was “a typical case of the psychopathological temperament, sensitive of conscience to a diseased degree, beset by doubts, fears and insistent ideas, and a victim of verbal automatisms, both motor and sensory.” By contrast, Tolstoy’s “crisis was the getting of his soul in order, the discovery of its genuine habitat and vocation, the escape from falsehoods into what for him were ways of truth. It was a case of heterogeneous personality tardily and slowly finding its unity and level. And though not many of us can imitate Tolstoy, not having enough, perhaps, of the aboriginal human marrow in our bones, most of us may at least feel as if it might be better for us if we could.”31 Tolstoy’s case is truly exceptional, since hypochondriacs rarely receive the attention they crave. They learn to hide their true feelings for fear of becoming a laughing stock.32 Likewise, the narrator in A Confession suspects the mysterious “someone” of smiling at his genuine suffering: I could not help feeling that out there somewhere somebody was amusing himself by looking at me and the way I had lived for thirty or forty years, studying, developing, maturing in mind and body. And how now, with a fully matured intellect, having reached the precipice from which life reveals itself, I stood there like an utter fool, believing so firmly that there is nothing in life, that there never has been, nor ever will be. “And he laughs. . . . ” But whether or not this someone laughing at me really existed did not make my case easier for me. (31)33

In The Death of Ivan Ilych, Tolstoy firmly reclaims the place of that all-powerful somebody. By writing his novella Tolstoy effectively drew himself away from his spiritual and creative precipice, while leaving his readers to contemplate its gaping hollow forever.34 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., 183 32 See Dillon, Hypochondriacs. 33 Tolstoy admitted to having similar feelings in his private letter to the writer Ivan Turgenev (October 27, 1878): All is well here, thank God, but I haven’t written [anything] because lately I’ve been (to put [it] quite accurately) intellectually unwell [умственно нездоров]: I’ve been hunting and reading, but I’ve been literally incapable of any kind of original intellectual activity—even writing of a letter with any sense in it. . . . Please don’t think that I am [trying to impress you,] but, really and truly, even a cursory rereading or a mention of my writings produces an unpleasantly complex feeling in me, the greater part of which is shame and fear that people are laughing at me. . . . Much as I love you and believe that you are well-disposed towards me, it seems to me that you too are laughing at me. (Tolstoy’s Letters, 1:327)

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Salvation through Despair: The Case of Guy de Maupassant In 1894, Tolstoy invited the readers of Guy de Maupassant (1850–93) to view his death as his titanic (albeit failed) attempt at achieving spiritual and artistic rebirth. Tolstoy began reading Maupassant’s stories in 1881 at the suggestion of Ivan Turgenev. Maupassant’s stories, in Tolstoy’s words, either disgusted him or left him indifferent: “And I entirely forgot about Maupassant.”35 Years later, after Maupassant’s death, Tolstoy started to see his fellow writer’s life unraveling in accordance with his own previously established progression. In 1894, Tolstoy would have been aware of Maupassant’s lifelong obsession with suicide, his fear of death, and his attempt to cut his throat before he was put in a mental institution, where he spent the last eighteen months of his life. Tolstoy wanted to transform Maupassant’s finale into a tragedy worthy of his phenomenal talent: It would be nice, if it were possible to arrest life. But it goes on. What does it mean, life goes on? Life goes on, means the hair falls out and grows gray, the teeth decay, there appear wrinkles, and there is an odor in the mouth. Even before everything ends, everything becomes terrible and disgusting: you perceive the pasty paint and powder, the sweat, the stench, the homeliness. Where is that which I served? Where is beauty? And it is all. If it is not, there is nothing. There is no life. Not only is there no life in what seemed to have life, but you, too, begin to get away from it, to grow feeble, to look homely, to decay, while others before your very eyes seize from you those pleasures in which was the whole good of life. More than that: there begins to glint the possibility of another life, something else, some other 34 In his recollections of Tolstoy, the writer Maxim Gorky did not conceal the occasional frustration, almost “hatred,” that he experienced in Tolstoy’s presence. As becomes clear, Gorky was primarily disturbed by Tolstoy’s superhuman detachment in matters like life and death: In Leo Nikolaevich there is much which at times roused in me a feeling very like hatred, and this hatred fell upon my soul with crushing weight. His disproportionately overgrown individuality is a monstrous phenomenon, almost ugly. . . . I have often thought him to be a man who in the depths of his soul is stubbornly indifferent to people; he is so much above and beyond them that they seem to him like midgets and their activities ridiculous and miserable. He has gone too far away from them into some desert; and there, solitary, with the highest effort of all the force of his spirit, he closely examines into “the most essential,” into death. (Maxim Gorky, “Reminiscences of Leo Tolstoy,” in Reminiscences, trans. S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf [New York: Dover, 1946], 31)

35 Leo Tolstoy, “The Works of Guy de Maupassant,” trans. Leo Wiener, https://en.wikisource. org/wiki/The_Works_of_Guy_de_Maupassant.

Leo Tolstoy and the Privilege of Formidable Hypochondria     Chapter 1 union of men with the whole world, such as excludes all those deceptions, something else, something that cannot be impaired by anything, that is true and always beautiful. But that cannot be, it is only the provoking sight of an oasis, when we know that it is not there and that everything is sand. Maupassant lived down to that tragic moment of life when there began the struggle between the lie of the life which surrounded him, and the truth which he was beginning to see. He already had symptoms of spiritual birth. It is these labors of birth that are expressed in his best productions, especially in his short stories. If it had been his fate not to die in the labor of birth, but to be born, he would have given great, instructive productions, but even what he gave us during the process of his birth is much. Let us be grateful to this strong, truthful man for what he gave us.36

In his treatment of Maupassant (as in his earlier treatment of Ivan Ilych), Tolstoy relies heavily on the Augustinian tradition that was later reinforced in the writings of Luther and Kierkegaard. In William James’s words, “This is the salvation through self-despair, the dying to be truly born, of Lutheran theology, the passage into nothing. . . . To get to it, a critical point must usually be passed, a corner turned within one. Something must give way, a native hardness must break down and liquefy.”37 Or, as Kierkegaard put it in “The Concept of Dread” (1844), “the self must be broken in order to become a self.”38 In his “On the Importance of Illnesses” [Значение болезней], Gogol similarly praised his ailing body for granting him numerous opportunities to continue with his spiritual growth: Oh, how much we need ailments! Of the many benefits I have gained from them, I will name just one: Owing to my ailments these days, I’ve become a better person than I was before. Were I free of my ailments now, I would believe that I have already become the man I ought to be. To say nothing of the fact that good health, which constantly pushes a Russian person to perform some jumping around in order to show off their superior qualities in front of others, would have made me commit a thousand follies. As it is, in my moments of clarity that God’s grace grants me these days, even as I suffer, I sometimes conceive ideas that are immeasurably better than those I used to have before. I can see clearly now that everything that will 36 Ibid. 37 James is quoted in Becker, Denial of Death, 88. 38 Kierkegaard is quoted in ibid.

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In 1909, Tolstoy gave this particular passage an “A+” grade.40 Tolstoy arrests Ivan Ilych’s and Maupassant’s progress at a time when they both reach what psychiatrists and psychotherapists describe as an “impasse”: “The impasse is the position where environmental support or obsolete inner support is not forthcoming and authentic self-support has not yet been achieved.”41 The writing of The Death of Ivan Ilych coincided with Tolstoy’s relentless destruction of his old “self ” that allegedly relied on a number of “lies,” such as his growing family and his writing achievements. It arguably opened the door to creating a new “self ” that would rely on a different system of support, which I will discuss in the next chapter. In other words, the “old” Tolstoy did die with his character Ivan Ilych, while a “new” Tolstoy was strong enough to bid him farewell.

39 Nikolai Gogol´, Vybrannye mesta iz perepiski s druz´iami [1847], http://az.lib.ru/g/gogolx_n_w/text_0160.shtml. Alexander Burak’s translation. See Tolstoy’s letter to Strakhov (October 4, 1879): “I am worrying, fretting, spiritually enduring, and suffering, but I thank God for this state of mine. I consulted Zakhar´in about my body, and he recommended that I eat non-fasting food; he also gave me medicines. I will follow this recommendation. In the meantime, don’t take offense at me, don’t stop loving me and writing to me.” Alexander Burak’s translation. “Волнуюсь, метусь и борюсь духом и страдаю; но благодарю бога за это состояние. Советовался о теле своем с Захарьиным, он велел есть скоромное, дал лекарства. Я буду исполнять. Не пеняйте на меня, не переставайте любить и пишите.” Perepiska L. N. Tolstogo s N. N. Strakhovym, vol. 2, 1870–1894 (St. Petersburg: Izdanie Obshchestva Tolstovskogo muzeia, 1914), 234. 40 Lev Tolstoi, [“O Gogole,” 1909], in L. N. Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 90 vols. [ Jubilee edition, 1828–1928] (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel´stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1928–1964), 52–53. 41 Frederick S. Perls, Gestalt Therapy Verbatim (Gouldsboro: Gestalt Journal Press, 1992), 49.

CHAPTER 2

In Chertkov’s Grip I telegraphed you, my dear friend, knowing ahead of time that anything that you would suggest would be wonderful. Now that I have received [your redaction of my] article I can see that everything in it is not as I expected—it is better than I expected. S’il n’y avait pas Tchertkoff, il faudrait l’inventer. Pour mois du moins, pour mon bonheur—too much—pour mon plaisir—too little; anyhow, our unanimity of spirit is deeply gratifying for me. —Tolstoy, letter to Chertkov, June 9, 1908 This morning I was engrossed in thinking about you: I was reading your collection of my own thoughts. —Tolstoy, letter to Chertkov, n.d.

A Way Out

C

hapter 6 of A Confession shows the narrator reaching a point where he feels like Dante’s pilgrim at the start of his journey: In my search for answers to the questions of life I felt just like a man who is lost in a wood. I came to a clearing, climbed a tree and saw clearly into the never-ending distance. But there was no house there, nor could there be. I walked into the thicket, into the gloom and saw the darkness, but there was no house either. In the same way I wandered in the forest of human knowledge, both amidst the bright rays of mathematical knowledge and experimental knowledge, where wide horizons were opened up to me, but in a direction where I could find no house, and amidst the darkness of speculative knowledge where I was immersed in ever deeper gloom the further I progressed. And I became quite convinced that there was not, and could not be, a way out.1

1

Leo Tolstoy, A Confession and Other Religious Writings, trans. Jane Kentish (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 39. Figures in parentheses correspond to page numbers in this edition. The theme of being lost in a wood first appears at the end of chapter 4: “I was like a man in a

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Irina Paperno highlights the repetitive pattern of Tolstoy’s creative crises: In the course of his life, Tolstoy was to experience other critical periods in which he questioned the meaning and purpose of his life and work, and, as we shall see, his crises followed a similar pattern. Each time, Tolstoy experienced failures of literary form and style with the intensity of a moral feeling. Each time, he turned to religion. In each case, he attempted to abandon fiction as a mode of writing and literary authorship as a profession, but, in one form or another, he continued to write.2

I would add that each time Tolstoy looked for new sources of inspiration and sustenance. In 1881 Tolstoy went down to Moscow’s lower depths when he took part in the census and chose specifically to have his data taken in the rental block inhabited by alcoholics, old or sick prostitutes, and other underprivileged and impoverished people. The census was meant to become Tolstoy’s The House of the Dead, his Sakhalin, his Inferno. The actual experience brought little consolation. Tolstoy discovered that the people he was eager to save from destitution did not regard themselves as being destitute and, as it turned out, had developed their own support system. No one asked Tolstoy for help, and no one wanted him to record his/her story. Tolstoy described his wanderings in a treatise with the strident title, What Then Must We Do? [Так что же нам делать?], which he could not finish until 1886. In the Divine Comedy, when Beatrice learns about Dante’s misery, she sends him a helper and a guide, Dante’s beloved poet Virgil. I suggest that Vladimir Grigorievich Chertkov (1854–1936) happened to perform a similar function for Tolstoy by creating what we can call a Tolstoyan institution that suited Tolstoy’s specific needs over the period from 1884 to Tolstoy’s death in 1910. Alexandra Popoff, in her witty anti-biography of Chertkov, describes him as an unscrupulous leech and a megalomaniac who benefited greatly from his symbiotic relationship with Tolstoy.3 In her reading, Tolstoy simply went along with Chertkov’s selfish and ambitious projects, allowing his art to suffer tremendously, all because of his inexplicable attachment to a younger man. The wood who is lost, and terrified by this rushes around hoping to find his way out, knowing that with each step he is getting more lost, and yet unable to stop rushing about” (33). 2 Irina Paperno, “Who, what am I?”: Tolstoy Struggles to Narrate the Self (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014), 35. 3 Alexandra Popoff, Tolstoy’s False Disciple.

In Chertkov’s Grip    Chapter 2

philosopher Vasily Rozanov (1856–1919), the day before Tolstoy’s death, also intimated that Chertkov had a firm grip on Tolstoy. This narrow-minded, fanatical “fan” of Tolstoy clamped a permanent seal on Tolstoy’s ever turbulent, growing, and changing world of thoughts, feelings and moods. . . . Tolstoy practically “fell ill” as he watched Chertkov first bow all the way down to the ground, then straighten up, with his huge, heavy-set figure “hovering over Tolstoy,” and finally pronounce, in a deathly tone of voice: “Credo: From now on, not a single step forward or sideways.”4

But this “questionable” association lasted for a quarter of a century. It is time to examine the benefits it gave to Tolstoy. Chertkov had a unique way of catering to Tolstoy’s declared and unspoken wishes. I would argue that it was this collaboration that made it possible for Tolstoy to keep on being creative until his very last days. Boris Eikhenbaum observed that in the late 1850s and early 1860s, Tolstoy had transformed his family estate Yasnaya Polyana into a private literary paradise, whose main function was to protect him from the thriving literary periodicals with their motley personnel and contributors, whom Tolstoy found preposterous and even threatening to his well-being as a writer.5 By the mid-1880s, however, the pastoral lifestyle at Yasnaya Polyana, with its daily routines and responsibilities, started to impinge on Tolstoy’s need for independence and his personal and artistic growth. Eikhenbaum construed this new development as Tolstoy’s fateful separation from the historical process: “What began as a socio-historical pursuit evolved into a form of personal morality and mode of personal behavior. Tolstoy had no choice but to assume [пришлось занять] the risky and controversial role of a sage preacher saving mankind from ­perdition.”6 A few pages later Eikhenbaum amplifies the idea of external compulsion by stating clearly that this new line of development was somehow thrust upon Tolstoy: “It was no accident that, in the final years of his life, Tolstoy had no choice but to direct all his efforts [пришлось потратить] not so much toward fighting social evil as toward fighting his own family.”7 But what 4 Vasilii Rozanov, “Gde zhe ‘pokoi’ Tolstomu?,” Novoe Vremia, November 6, 1910. 5 B. M. Eikhenbaum, “Literaturnaia kar´era L. Tolstogo,” in Lev Tolstoi: Issledovaniia (St. Petersburg: Fakul´tet filologii i iskusstv SPbGU, 2009), 689. 6 B. M. Eikhenbaum, “O protivorechiiakh L´va Tolstogo,” in Lev Tolstoi: Issledovaniia, 724. 7 Ibid., 729.

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if the transmogrification of Tolstoy’s conflict with history into a family conflict (aided by Chertkov’s interventions) was, in fact, just what Tolstoy needed? Is this a case of giants turning into familiar windmills and not the other way around? In Tolstoy’s words (see my first epigraph to this chapter), if Chertkov hadn’t existed, he would have had to be invented. Chertkov’s role in Tolstoy’s creative development in the last three decades of his life was enormous.8 Suffice it to say that Chertkov satisfied Tolstoy’s craving to create a new relationship with his readership, as well as his need to address his audience directly and not only through his literary characters like Ivan Ilych. Under Chertkov’s supervision, Yasnaya Polyana was reinvented again, this time as the hub for Tolstoy’s interactions with his followers. Tolstoy’s new stage in life, which he envisioned as a profound change in his own views, mode of thinking, and writing style, required that the people closest to him make unconditional sacrifices and practice unprecedented self-­restrictions. But these people could not transform themselves at the rate and level of commitment that would satisfy Tolstoy. Chertkov did not ruin Tolstoy’s relationship with his wife directly (as Popoff insists); I would argue that he assisted Tolstoy in finding ways to make Tolstoy’s inconsistent and often “outrageous” behavior justifiable and explicable to Tolstoy’s readers and followers.

Confusion in Tolstoy’s House In fall 1874, when Tolstoy took a respite from writing Anna Karenina and “immersed himself in public education,” his wife Sophia felt “bewildered,” betrayed, and abused.9 Tolstoy’s creative process relied on his intricate and intimate relationship with his wife as his very first reader and scribe. She was the primary mediator between Tolstoy and his intended audience. Sophia famously shared Tolstoy’s progress and his plans for each of his characters in War and Peace in her correspondence with her acquaintances, who were waiting for new installments. The readers’ feedback was discussed and taken into consideration. The first impressions—and the legible transcripts that Sophia made of them, which also performed the function of the very first impressions—provided Tolstoy with an impetus for further changes and 8 See compilers’ extensive commentary on Tolstoy’s first letter to Chertkov (December 5, 1882) in Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 85:4–25. See also Pavel Basinskii, Lev Tolstoi: Begstvo iz raia (Moscow: AST, Astrel´, 2010). 9 Sophia’s letter to her brother Stepan is quoted in Alexandra Popoff, Sophia Tolstoy: A Biography (New York: Free Press, 2010), 80.

In Chertkov’s Grip    Chapter 2

c­ larifications. His famous thirteen versions of the same passages in War and Peace would not have come into existence had they not been copied diligently one after another by his wife. Sophia had never questioned her husband’s demands on her time before, because she felt she was contributing to the creation of his masterpieces. Their joint work and discussions gave them both a lot of pleasure and cemented their marriage. But when she was called on to copy page by page Tolstoy’s ABCs, she began to feel that she was wasting her time on something that could have been easily accomplished by someone with different qualifications. She described her feelings to her sister Tatiana: There isn’t much to tell about myself. I teach and nurse, like a machine, from morning till night. And I copied the ABCs; but when I felt that the end was not near, all these little words and phrases, “Masha ate her kasha,” etc., began to annoy me so much that I dropped it altogether; let a scribe do this work. My task was to copy out the immortal War and Peace and Anna [Karenina].10

A few years later she similarly resented her husband’s infatuation with religion: “Lyovochka is working, or so he says, but alas! He is writing religious tracts, reads and thinks until his head aches, and all this to prove how inconsistent the Church is with the teaching of the Gospels. There will be hardly ten people in Russia interested in this. But there is nothing to be done. I only wish . . . this passes as a malady.”11 Alexandra Popoff, in her compassionate biography of Tolstoy’s wife, uses these excerpts from Sophia’s letters to buttress her main thesis that Tolstoy was often unreasonable in his demands and that it took Sophia a great deal of love and patience to handle his swinging moods and her own disappointments. Implicitly reproaching the novelist, Popoff describes Sophia’s state of mind in 1879: “There was no sense of togetherness now that Tolstoy had left his literary vocation behind. His literature gave her purpose and joy; without it, there was a void.”12 It is hard to disagree with Popoff ’s conclusion, but Tolstoy was no ordinary husband, he was a literary giant at a turning point in his artistic development. Sophia passionately resisted this

10 Alexandra Popoff, Sophia Tolstoy: A Biography (New York: Free Press, 2010), 80. 11 Ibid., 95. 12 Ibid., 96.

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transformation and insisted on Tolstoy producing more of the same—that is, another War and Peace and another Anna Karenina. In 1885 Sophia began work on a new edition of her husband’s collected works. In trying to reach her husband, Sophia shared with him her impressions on rereading his first published work, Childhood (1852): I went through the chapters of Childhood and there arose in me that former girlish feeling that I first experienced when I was eleven, and again my eyes grew dim, and instead of quietly correcting the misprints, I took to weeping. But I know what I loved in you when I was thirteen to fourteen, and I love the same thing now; but that which has been added to it and hardened—that I do not love; that is an addition, an excrescence. Scrape it away, and what is left will be pure gold.13

“Always a bit of a romantic, poor Sonya wanted her girlhood hero to remain a girlhood hero and not a titan dedicated to founding the Kingdom of God on earth,” Ernest Simmons comments on this letter in his biography of Tolstoy.14 Poor Sophia Andreevna, indeed. Tolstoy’s new convictions called for changes in the family foundations that are usually least prone to change. The tug of war, now from the old toward the new, now from the new toward the old, was taking place in the very heart of domestic life. Tolstoy was dragging his family into the newness of his works in hopes of reaching an audience in its millions, while his wife was putting up a mighty resistance, all of which made his works increasingly focused on family issues (The Death of Ivan Ilych and The Kreutzer Sonata). It was a vicious circle. S. A. had this to say about the events in the fall of 1885: “He wanted to break humanity, but he was unable to break his own family.”15 In December 1885, Sophia explained her understanding of the conflict in a letter to her oldest daughter Tatiana: I know, Tania, that life is good and there’s nothing to shed tears about, but you’d better tell that to your dad, not me. He keeps moping and moaning and is thus destroying us. . . . At this point, I can say: Yes, I want him to come back to me as much as he wants me to follow him. What is mine 13 Quoted in Ernest J. Simmons, Leo Tolstoy, vol. 2, The Years of Maturity 1880—1910 (New York: Vintage, 1960), 85. 14 Ibid. 15 S. A. Tolstaia, Moia zhizn´ (Moscow: Gosudarstvennyi muzei L. N. Tolstogo, 2011), 1:500.

In Chertkov’s Grip    Chapter 2 is the old, happy existence that was certainly lived well, lightly, cheerfully, lovingly, and amicably. What is his is the new, the constant torture, and the constant tugging at the soul. . . . No, I won’t be lured into that horror. This new outlook that seemed to have saved him has, in fact, returned him to the old death wish that has tortured me to the point of hating him. Yes, I’m calling him back into the old, which was solid, and happiness will be reestablished only when we go back to our old life. I have never been more certain of this than now. It is also true that I’m very unhappy on account of our discord. But I’m not going to ruin our life because of this—I won’t, and I can’t.16

The unfolding family drama in Yasnaya Polyana started to resemble the familiar conflict between the artist’s creative freedom and the demands of the crowd/ society. In this case, the writer’s wife and other family and household members came to represent the proverbial crowd. According to Sophia, Tolstoy’s irrational unwillingness to comply with her very natural desires and expectations was at the root of their strained coexistence. But the problem went even deeper than that. By failing to meet her husband’s standards, Sophia also resigned herself to a secondary role during this new stage in Tolstoy’s artistic development. When in 1883–86 Vladimir Chertkov gradually evolved into becoming Tolstoy’s devoted disciple, closest friend, editor, publisher, and confidant, things got even more complicated. In fact, Chertkov only filled in the space that had been vacated by Sophia. Sophia and Chertkov were undoubtedly Tolstoy’s muses,17 a superannuated one and a newly embraced one, respectively. Otto Rank devotes substantial portions of his Art and Artist to what we might call the institution of muses and issues a warning to all those who want to turn their muses into domestic partners, wives, and mothers of their children: Not only has [the muse] to endure, even enjoy, the moods of the divinely inspired master, but she very often becomes for the artist a symbol of ideology that is no longer adequate, which she may have helped him to create, but which he has now to overcome and throw overboard. In that case we have that conflict in the artist, with which the psychoanalyst so 16 Sophia’s letter is quoted in L. N. Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 85:305; Sophia’s italics. 17 Basinskii notes that emotionally Chertkov was very similar to Tolstoy’s wife. Basinskii, Lev Tolstoi: Begstvo iz raia, 455.

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According to Rank, if an artist fails to break his relationship with the muse who is no longer essential to his artistic development and even impedes it, his ensuing work “will often enough be purely the expression of the conflict itself, whose solution has to be justified as much as the failure to reach a solution would have to be.”19 Tolstoy’s misogynistic masterpiece The Kreutzer Sonata (1889), written at the peak of his disagreements with his wife, might make more sense if seen through Rank’s eyes. Tolstoy’s vigorous attacks on the institution of marriage as well as his implicit justification of his character’s brutal murder of his wife are transparent manifestations of Tolstoy’s inner struggle for his artistic freedom and integrity. In the 1880s, Tolstoy was equally “unfair,” if more resolute, toward his friend Nikolai Strakhov, who undoubtedly functioned as a major source of inspiration for Tolstoy in the 1870s. Apart from being Tolstoy’s closest friend and his major intellectual interlocutor, Strakhov was a virtual midwife to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. He continuously encouraged Tolstoy to finish Anna Karenina when his work came to a standstill and was the first to offer his critical understanding of Tolstoy’s novel. In 1877, Strakhov devoted his summer to proofreading and editing the book version of Anna Karenina. It was his confessional letter to Strakhov (November 30, 1875) that Tolstoy incorporated four years later into his programmatic A Confession. This letter starts with the description of the effect that Strakhov’s own letter had on Tolstoy: “Your letter made such a strong impression on me, dear Nikolay Nikolayevich, that my nose twitched and tears came to my eyes.”20 Tolstoy could admit to Strakhov alone (and not to any other correspondents) that he felt creative amid the various disasters that befell his family in October and November 1875: “All this time—2 weeks—I’ve been looking after a sick wife who gave birth to a stillborn child and has been at death’s door. But it’s a 18 Otto Rank, Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development [1932], trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 380. 19 Ibid. 20 Tolstoy’s Letters, 1:283.

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strange thing—I’ve never thought with such vigor about the problems which interest me as at this time.”21 Although Tolstoy sent Strakhov some of the longest and most intimate letters in his epistolary output and called him his “dearest and only soul friend,” he was always somehow dissatisfied with Strakhov’s reciprocation and his performance in general. He repeatedly invited Strakhov to criticize his writings as honestly and as severely as he could, something which Strakhov was incapable of doing due to his veneration of Tolstoy’s literary genius and his adoration of Tolstoy and his family. In December 1876, Tolstoy was introduced to the composer Pyotr Ilych Tchaikovsky (1840– 1893). This promising relationship was terminated abruptly by Tchaikovsky after he received a long letter from Tolstoy with his naïve instructions on how to arrange music to Tolstoy’s collection of Russian folk songs.22 Tolstoy’s resolution to be completely honest with Tchaikovsky (“I haven’t looked through your pieces yet, but when I settle down to them, I will give you my opinion—whether you need it or not—and give it boldly, because I have grown to love your talent”23) testifies not so much to Tolstoy’s megalomania but to his need to have a talented interlocutor who would not be shy to point out Tolstoy’s own mistakes. In 1878–79 Tolstoy’s long-suppressed frustration with Strakhov erupted in some barely explicable attacks on Strakhov’s ways of thinking and living, thinly disguised as objective criticism. By the mid-1880s, Tolstoy was finding Strakhov as irritating and impossible to reason with as his own family members, and Sophia in particular. On April 5, 1884, Tolstoy recorded in his diary: “Strakhov came. He’s grown thin. Still the same narrowness and rigidity. He could have woken up by now.”24 Two days later: “A conversation with Strakhov about Darwinism. I was bored and ashamed.”25 On April 9, Tolstoy expressed his frustration with Strakhov’s new article in which he criticized Darwinism: “Read Strakhov’s article late at night. It’s useless, you can’t possibly demonstrate every single stupidity.”26

21 Ibid. 22 This relationship is discussed in P. I. Biriukov, Biografiia L. N. Tolstogo, vol. 2, http:// dugward.ru/library/birukov/birukov_biogr-2.html. 23 Tolstoy’s Letters, 1:302. 24 Tolstoy, Diaries, 1:208. 25 Ibid., 1:209. 26 Tolstoy’s Diaries, vol. 1, ed. and trans. R. F. Christian (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), 209.

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The same diary entry ends with Tolstoy’s reference to a letter from Chertkov: “A letter from Chertkov—splendid.”27 Irina Paperno offers an enlightening reading of the Tolstoy-Strakhov relationship, which she covers until 1879. The rest of the story is summarized aptly in the subtitle of one of her sections: “The Parting of Ways: Tolstoy Writes His Confession, and Strakhov Continues to Confess in his Letters to Tolstoy.”28 But Tolstoy’s confessional correspondence did not end with his disenchantment with Strakhov. Strakhov’s place was soon taken by Chertkov, in whom Tolstoy apparently found his ideal muse for the next twenty-six years. Unlike Chertkov, Strakhov was not only Tolstoy’s correspondent and his soul mate; he was also a friend of Sophia Andreevna, who always invited Strakhov to visit Yasnaya Polyana or to join them during their family vacations. When Tolstoy decided to liberate himself from his ties to his family, Strakhov, it seems probable, had to go as well. Tolstoy’s parting with Strakhov also coincided with his abandonment of his plans for writing another major novel, The Decembrists, the preparation for which occupied him in 1878–79. It is remarkable that Strakhov either did not notice or wisely pretended not to notice such abrupt changes in his profoundly intimate relationship with Tolstoy. Literary scholars tell readers of Anna Karenina to identify Tolstoy with his alter ego Levin, to associate Tolstoy’s behavior with the landowner’s longing to start a family in the 1870s, and with Levin’s sensitive and sensible ways of running his family estate. But if one looks at Tolstoy’s life after the completion of Anna Karenina, one sees that, strangely enough, it does not resemble Levin’s life trajectory but the trajectory of Anna’s long-suffering husband, Aleksei Karenin. In part 7, Karenin receives support and consolation from his friend, Princess Lidiya Ivanovna. Lidiya Ivanovna does not only adore Karenin, sharing his interests, but she also actively involves him in her spiritual divinations and informs him about the latest religious trends. We see one of the intimate gatherings at her place through the eyes of Stiva Oblonsky, Anna’s brother and Karenin’s longtime acquaintance. Oblonsky observes Lidiya Ivanovna’s interactions with her guest of honor, the French clairvoyant Jules Landau, who is there to determine whether Karenin should be magnanimous enough to grant his wife a divorce. Janet Malcolm sees the unfolding scene as highly comical and suggests that “in the novel’s moral hierarchy, Lidiya Ivanovna and Karenin occupy 27 Tolstoy, Diaries, 1: 209. 28 Paperno, “Who, what am I?”, 56–59.

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the lowest rung; they sin against the human spirit, while [Oblonsky] only sins against his wife and children and creditors.”29 Malcolm does not credit Lidiya Ivanovna with her initial friendliness toward Oblonsky and her inclusion of Oblonsky in the group of intimate friends, to whom she reads out loud an English treatise, Safe and Happy, which makes Oblonsky uncontrollably drowsy. The next day, Karenin sends Oblonsky his official refusal to grant his wife a divorce. Such a tragic, almost inexplicable, failure to reach a much-needed compromise will be projected onto Tolstoy’s later life. If in Anna Karenina the crux of the matter is the divorce procedure, in the TolstoySophia-Chertkov relationship, it is Tolstoy’s last testament and its provisions for the members of this triangle that will soon become the crux of the matter. During the soiree, Lidiya Ivanovna informs Oblonsky that over the last few months Karenin had undergone a spiritual transformation: “‘The change is not in his [outward appearance],’ Countess Lidiya Ivanovna said sternly, at the same time following [Karenin] with amorous eyes as he got up and went over to Landau. ‘His heart has changed, a new heart has been given him, and I’m afraid you haven’t quite perceived the change that has taken place in him.’”30 Oblonsky, indeed, shows little sign of having noticed the change. Tolstoy was most likely inclined to ridicule Lidiya Ivanovna’s obsession with spiritualism and Lord Radstock’s ideas and missionary accomplishments. He had just heard about Lord Radstock’s growing influence among the Russian aristocracy from his trusted and sophisticated relative, Countess Alexandrine Tolstoy,31 and had not missed his chance to mock this latest development (that he knew very little about) in his novel, which was devoted to contemporary Russia. As Tolstoy would learn later, Chertkov’s mother and Chertkov himself were also followers of Lord Radstock. Chertkov would change his mind, while his mother would remain Lord Radstock’s most ardent and faithful supporter. With the benefit of historical knowledge, we can say that the sad outcome of Lidiya Ivanovna’s awkward gathering was not caused by Karenin’s and Lidiya Ivanovna’s moral depravity, as Malcolm suggests, but rather by Oblonsky’s inability to understand the scale of Karenin’s transformation and its consequences. Oblonsky’s failure is no different from Sophia’s inability to appreciate the seriousness and resoluteness of Tolstoy’s decision to start a new life in the late 1870s to mid-1880s. 29 Janet Malcolm, “Dreams and Anna Karenina,” New York Review of Books, July 25, 2015, 10. 30 Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 733. 31 [Sviashchennik] Georgii Orekhanov, Zhestokii sud Rossii: V. G. Chertkov v zhizni L. N. Tolstogo (Moscow: Izdatel´stvo PSTGU, 2009), 21.

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Sophia Writes Back In 1892 Sophia challenged her husband’s ability to be the judge of human nature in her novella with the appropriate title, Who Is to Blame? In Response to “The Kreutzer Sonata” by Leo Tolstoy. In her Response, Sophia described her character Anna’s turbulent relationship with her husband by using Tolstoy’s own building blocks/themes/strategies and syntactic structures, which she borrowed freely from War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and The Kreutzer Sonata, texts she undoubtedly knew by heart. All she wanted to do was to tell her version of their courtship and their life together by ridiculing Tolstoy, thinly camouflaged as Anna’s unbending and obsessively jealous husband Prince Prozorsky. Under Sophia’s pen, Tolstoy’s subtle observations sound grotesquely erotic, cumbersome, and banal. This is how Sophia describes the very beginning of Prozorsky’s falling in love with Anna: “The prince flushed deeply at the sight of Anna’s impossibly graceful figure as it flitted in front of him, having floated off the balcony railing, a butterfly in her hand.”32 Prozorsky keeps thinking about Anna on his way home after the visit: And again, in his mind’s eye, he saw Anna, and he was now mentally undressing her, lusting, in his imagination, after her slender legs and her seductively lithe and vigorous virginal body. . . . “Yes, it was only recently that I was watching these little girls calmly and joyfully. . . . But now? I suddenly became aware that she was a young woman, that there was no one like her, and that I couldn’t help wanting to possess this child.” He felt a rush of blood to his head. He closed his eyes the better to visualize Anna. The carriage kept rolling along the country lane. The ride was rocking the prince to sleep, spreading a sense of languor all over his body and increasing the urge to have carnal fulfillment on this wondrous summer night. (160)

Prozorsky dabbled in philosophy and “imagined that he was a profound and original thinker” (165). In fact, the narrator hastens to explain, his articles were nothing but compilations and regurgitations of other people’s ideas: “He wrote 32 S. A. Tolstaia, Ch´ia vina? (po povodu “Kreitzerovoi sonaty” L´va Tolstogo), in Tolstoi Lev Nikolaevich, Kreitzerova sonata; Tolstaia Sof´ia Andreevna, Ch´ia vina? Pesnia bez slov; Tolstoi Lev L´vovich, Preliudiia Shopena (Moscow: Gosudarstvennyi muzei Tolstogo, 2010), 159. Figures in parentheses correspond to page numbers in this edition. Alexander Burak’s ­translation.

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articles, and some people thought that he indeed was very smart. But sensitive and educated people knew that his philosophy was, in fact, pitiful and ridiculous” (165). When the family moved to Moscow, Prozorsky occasionally would read his articles out loud and discuss them with his friends: “Anna knew all those tedious disquisitions by heart as she had to copy out the texts time and again. There were so many, unknown to her, scrupulously selected difficult scholarly words and expressions in them, abstruse verbiage! She didn’t attend the reading session this time round and spent the evening with her children” (197). As a husband, Prozorsky often acts like a sexual psychopath. Who Is to Blame? culminates with Prozorsky hitting Anna with his marble paper weight; she dies shortly afterward. Prozorsky plunges into unbearable despair and “feels like a child lost in the woods” (229). He immediately admits his guilt, but no one believes him; they all think that Anna’s death was an accident. His friends and relatives fear that he is losing his mind. Once Anna’s physical beauty can no longer cause Prozorsky jealous anguish, he begins to appreciate the beauty of her soul and grope for their spiritual reunion in Heaven. It is noteworthy that in her response to her husband’s Kreutzer Sonata, Sophia did not alter Tolstoy’s tragic finale. All she did was to underscore her suffering heroine’s purity, naiveté, and her supremely loving and forgiving personality. In many ways, Who Is to Blame? is not so much Sophia’s unfair and deprecating portrayal of her celebrated husband as her way of mourning the loss of her position of supreme importance in her husband’s life and creativity. In part 2, Sophia introduces a future rival of Prozorsky—his old friend Bakhmetiev. Through Bakhmetiev she offers a second opinion on Anna’s beauty, her perfection as a mother, a caring wife, and even a soul mate for an equally impeccable Bakhmetiev. The very last sentence informs us that Bakhmetiev outlived Anna by one month and died abroad. In 1897, Sophia immersed herself in reading a biography of Beethoven, which offered her another productive way of looking at her husband’s aloofness: I was then listening to a lot of music, and I first read Beethoven’s biography, which I found extremely interesting. Many things revealed themselves to me and got me thinking about different things. Apparently, all people of genius are unsatisfied with their everyday life and suffer a lot. Beethoven was unhappy, and even his music of genius didn’t console him. Lev Nikolayevich’s diary of that period [the 1880s] is filled with deep thoughts and insightful analysis of the motions of his soul. That soul of genius

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But in real life Sophia failed to stick to her new outlook for long: as much as she liked the idea of Tolstoy being an enigmatic genius, she could not reconcile herself with the escalating role of Chertkov in her husband’s literary endeavors and well-being. What was it that Chertkov could offer Tolstoy that no one else could offer between 1884 and 1910? The short answer is that Chertkov was instrumental in creating and maintaining a certain routine that allowed Tolstoy to write as little fiction as he wanted without feeling embarrassed by his meager output.

“I Feel Like an Apple Tree” Tolstoy was relatively open and consistent in outlining the conditions that he found conducive to feeling good about himself, which often stimulated his creative vitality. On July 5, 1865, he described his experience of being married for nearly three years in a letter to Alexandrine Tolstoy: It’s amazing how much married life changes you. I feel like an apple tree whose branches used to grow any which way from the ground up but which life has now pruned back, trimmed, tied, and propped up so that it won’t stunt the growth of others and will develop a strong root and one solid trunk. That’s the way I’m growing. I don’t know if I’ll bear good fruit or if I’ll wither and die. All I know is that I’m growing the right way.34

Four months later, he challenged Alexandrine to write more about her own life, saying that she “always seemed rather incomprehensible to [him]—a stranger. . . .” I think I have always been comprehensible, and even more so now that I’ve entered the rut of family life which leads along the beaten track of moderation, duty, and moral tranquility, in spite of all pride and need 33 S. A. Tolstaia, Moia zhizn´, 2:497; Sophia’s italics. 34 Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 61:93.

In Chertkov’s Grip    Chapter 2 for originality. And a good thing too! I have never been so keenly aware of myself and of my soul as now, when impulses and passions know their limit. . . . It is now late autumn; the hunting which takes up a lot of my time has finished, and I’m writing a lot and thinking over in advance many of my future works which will never come to be written, and I’m doing all this with faith in myself and the conviction that I’m doing a serious job of work. That’s the main thing.35

The idea that Tolstoy liked to regulate his life with different sets of rules, tasks, and daily regimens has been comprehensibly discussed by Tolstoy scholars. I can only add that Tolstoy seems to have been at his most productive and at peace with himself when those limits were not invented by him but rather imposed on him from the outside—like late autumn putting an end to the time-consuming hunting season; or life taking care of the proper growth of an apple tree. Tolstoy liked different seasons with their prescribed duties and occupations and, for example, did not expect to be productive as a writer in the summertime.36 Each period of intensive work or procrastination had its reasons that were not subjected to Tolstoy’s control. On October 26, 1875, Tolstoy described to his close friend, the poet Afanasy Fet, “the scaffolding” he needed in order to start writing: Our work is a terrible thing. Nobody knows this except us. In order to work it is necessary for scaffolding to be erected under your feet. And this scaffolding doesn’t depend on you. If you start working without a scaffolding, you will only waste material and make a mess of the walls and not be able to go on with them. You feel this particularly once the work has begun. You keep thinking—why not go on? And all of a sudden your arms fail and you sit and wait. This is what I’ve been doing. But now I think, the scaffolding has been erected and I’m rolling up my sleeves.37

In his letter to Strakhov (April 8, 1878), Tolstoy again underscores his unwilling­ness to force his creative flow: “If you strain yourself, you’ll stop being natural and truthful, and we cannot afford that.”38 35 Tolstoy’s Letters, 1:198. 36 To N. N. Strakhov, June 7–8, 1876, Yasnaya Polyana: “A beautiful summer has arrived, and I’m enjoying it, and I go out for walks, and I can’t understand how I could write in the winter.” Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 62:278. 37 Tolstoy’s Letters, 1:281. 38 Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 62:410.

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On April 6, 1878, Tolstoy begged Alexandrine to not regard him as being busy with his writings: Please, do not deprive me of the great pleasure of receiving your letters on the pretext that I’m very busy; firstly, I’m not busy with anything, and secondly, such cautious treatment terrifies me with the responsibilities it lays upon me and, above all, it puts the evil eye on me. I think in general that nothing will come of my undertakings. I lack the energy delusion gives, which is necessary for all worldly affairs, or else a jolt from the above.39

Tolstoy gave several reasons for being “in a depressed state”: “The first and most important is that Sonya and the child are unwell and have been getting worse and worse for over a week now. The child is wasting away, Sonya torments herself and the child gets even worse.”40 Even a cursory look at Tolstoy’s correspondence in the late 1870s to mid-1880s shows that many of his spells of illness coincided with his periods of not writing (and vice versa). I would argue that Tolstoy often welcomed periods of being sick or unwell as a convincing explanation for his being unable to write fiction. Another frequently used excuse was Tolstoy’s family. On November 6, 1877, he commiserated with Strakhov on the death of his friend: I can commiserate with you even more deeply but support you much less strongly because I myself have lately felt rather forlorn, sad, and spiritually depleted. I must say I have no idea why all this is happening; if I knew, I’d know how to deal with this state of mind. I have two main excuses for my sadness: one is my complete and shameful idleness, and the other—my wife’s condition: the morbid course of her pregnancy and her forthcoming delivery already in December. The less valid excuse is this tiresome war.41

Based on Tolstoy’s letters, one might go as far as to conclude that Tolstoy’s insatiable desire for procreation—his wife gave birth to thirteen children— may have been a conscious or unconscious strategy to maintain a situation of constant family problems connected with pregnancies, childbirth, children’s 39 Tolstoy’s Letters, 1:319–20. 40 Ibid., 1:320. 41 Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 62:347.

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illnesses, and so on. In turn, this was used, when needed, to make excuses about his not infrequent spells of writer’s block. In her diaries and in her autobiography, My Life, Sophia describes how Tolstoy felt during one of his dry spells, between his completion of War and Peace and the beginning of writing Anna Karenina. Tolstoy did not only suffer physically but he literally feared losing his mind and scared Sophia with his accounts of his torturous thoughts.42 By contrast, when writing was about to begin or was coming to him “effortlessly,” Tolstoy (like Pushkin in “Autumn”) would use explicit water imagery to underscore his potency as a writer. On October 2, 1870, he described the beginning of his writing spell to Fet as follows: “It’s been a long time since we last saw each other, and in my wintry mood, which is beginning to get me down, I’m especially happy to see you. I go hunting, but once the creative juices begin to flow, I catch them with my vessels. Whether good or bad, I let the juices flow on these long and wonderful autumn evenings.”43 Tolstoy was quick to share his feelings of exuberance and creative elation. On January 27, 1878, he joyfully informs Alexandrine about the end of one of his illnesses and his beginning to work on a new novel, The Decembrists: I am now entirely engrossed in reading from the period of the 20s, and I can’t express to you the delight I feel in imagining that time to myself. . . . I’m experiencing the feeling of a cook (a bad one) who has gone to a rich market, and after looking over all the vegetables, meat, and fish at his disposal, dreams of what a dinner he could make! And so I dream on, although I know how often I’ve had splendid dreams and then spoiled the dinner or done nothing. Once you have overcooked the grouse, you can’t do anything to remedy it. And cooking is difficult and frightening. . . . But washing and laying out the provisions is great fun!44

42 Discussed in Eikhenbaum, Lev Tolstoi: Issledovaniia, 692. Tolstoy’s son recalled: “When thinking about my father’s life during my childhood years, I can only remember him being cheerful, calm, and happy during the times he spent at Yasnaya Polyana. . . . His best moments came after spells of productive writing. When he was studious, that is, wrote well and a lot, he radiated cheerfulness, kindness, and happiness. When he failed to write productively, he was dull and dark as night.” L. L. Tolstoi, V Iasnoi Poliane: Pravda o moёm ottse (Prague: Plamia, 1923), 34. 43 Tolstoy’s letter to Fet is quoted in P. I. Biriukov, Biografiia L. N. Tolstogo, vol. 2, http:// dugward.ru/library/birukov/birukov_biogr-2.html. 44 Tolstoy’s Letters, 1:315.

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Tolstoy follows up with some chanting in order to reinforce his commitment to his new project: “I pray to God to allow me to do at least approximately what I want. This business is so important to me that however capable you may be of understanding everything, you can’t imagine how important this is. It’s as important to me as your faith is to you. And even more important, I am tempted to say.”45 In his letter to the slightly older Ivan Turgenev (October 27, 1878), Tolstoy rushes to reassure him that his inability to write is temporary and will pass under the right circumstances: All the same I can’t help wishing you what for me constitutes the greatest happiness in life—hard work—with the assurance of its importance and excellence. I don’t in the slightest believe you when you say that you’ve stopped writing, and I don’t want to believe you because I know that the best is still in you, as in a bottle, which people have tried to decant too abruptly. One only needs to find the position in which it will pour smoothly. I wish this both for you and myself.46

In 1877–79, Tolstoy tried hard to find such an agreeable position for himself.

The Decembrists For his new novel, The Decembrists, Tolstoy solicited help from various people, including Strakhov, Alexandrine, his elderly relatives, and numerous people who had something to do with the Decembrist movement and had access to private letters and memoirs related to the 1820s. Tolstoy’s vigorous correspondence in 1878–79, in which he painstakingly explained to his addressees the importance of this or that tiny detail for the ultimate “jolt” that would enable him to start writing, reminds one of Nikolai Gogol’s equally zealous attempts to collect various pieces of information in order to write an ethnographically sound sequel to his The Dead Souls.47 In December 1878, Tolstoy informed one of the surviving Decembrists, Petr Nikolaevich Svistunov, about his progress on the novel: “My work tires and torments me, gives me joy, sometimes puts me in a state of rapture, sometimes of doubt and despondency; but the

45 Ibid., 1:316. 46 Ibid., 327. 47 See the introduction to this book and Karlinsky, The Sexual Labyrinth.

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thought of it never leaves me for a moment, day or night, ill or well.”48 Tolstoy accepts Svistunov’s offer to answer some of Tolstoy’s questions, judicially choosing “only the most important” ones: What sort of man was Fyodor Alexandrovich Uvarov, who was married to Lunina? I know he was a brave officer, wounded in the head at the battle of Borodino. But what sort of man was he? When did he marry? What was his attitude to society? How did he disappear? What sort of woman was Katerina Sergeyevna? When did she die? Were there any children? In what duel—with whom and for what—was Mikhail Sergeyevich Lunin wounded in the groin?49

Tolstoy concludes his letter by assuring his esteemed correspondent that his novel “is nearly as important to [him] now as [his] own life.” He signs his letter and immediately adds a postscript: “Do you remember any Decembrists who escaped and disappeared?”50 Another typical inquiry was addressed to Alexandrine on January 25–28, 1879: I have a request to make to you: is there a biography, even a very short one, of Lev Alekseyevich Pesotsky? I need to know where he worked and where he lived from 1816 to 1833. Above all, I really need to know when, how and where he married Katerina Vasilievna Uvarova (the widow of Dmitry Petrovich Uvarov), née Princess Gorchakova. I know that she had a very bad life with him and died in 1833, but every detail of his marriage and relations with her would be valuable to me. . . . I’ve one more request. I’m told that the original Decembrist files with biographies and portraits of all Decembrists are in Petersburg. Only Bogdanovich, the historian, has been allowed access to these files. Is there any hope of my gaining access to them? If there is, whom should I apply to, and how? Well, come what may! I’ll be very lucky if you don’t say “Well, I have rarely met such an unscrupulous egoist as Lev Tolstoy!”51 48 Tolstoy’s Letters, 1:329. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid., 330–31.

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In January 1879, Tolstoy also sent a list of inquiries to the always obliging Strakhov. Fearing that Strakhov might not take his questions seriously enough, Tolstoy finished his letter with a passionate plea that was hard to ignore: You have probably noticed my capacity for being absorbed in ­reading and imagining that some piece of information I lack is particularly important to me, and then forgetting all about it. For goodness sake don’t think this is the case now. This information is exceptionally important to me. This person [a distant relative Gorchakov] is the key to the whole thing. . . . If anybody needs to be approached, or if it’s necessary to go to Petersburg, write and tell me. Please, please do this. I embrace you most cordially. Yours, L. Tolstoy.52

Despite the upbeat tone of his inquiries and a professed commitment to his work on The Decembrists, Tolstoy soon felt physically unwell and depressed. He described his emotional state in a letter to Fet in response to receiving one of Fet’s poems (February 1879): “I keep on feeling poorly, my dear Afanasy Afanasyevich. . . . I’m neither ill nor well, but the mental and spiritual alertness, which I need so badly, eludes me. Unlike you—I’m a withered tree. Do send along more verses. It is strange how inconclusive deep thinking can be.”53 In the late 1870s Tolstoy often felt like a withered tree and compared his situation with a lasting insomnia or a menopausal stage that was marking the end of his productive period. On November 26, 1877, he agreed with Strakhov’s suggestion to wait and allow time to take its toll: “I feel that I will soon get down to work—with ardor and self-abandonment. . . . You’re right: one has to wait. It’s like insomnia—one needs to wait for sleep to come, occupying oneself somehow during the unwelcome wakefulness.”54 On November 6–8, 1878, Tolstoy thanked Fet for his kind words and reassurances: “If only your words would come true: It would be good to be pregnant [with a new project], but it rather seems like the termination of the ability to give birth, which is also aggravated by disease. One way or another, I am spiritually deficient—I sleep, and the only reason I’m writing to you that all is well and good and that we all love you as always is because you asked me to do that.”55 52 Ibid., 330. 53 Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 62:473. 54 Tolstoy’s Letters, 1:308–9. 55 Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 62:451.

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Tolstoy was quick to discard his work on The Decembrists as soon as he learned from Alexandrine that he had been denied access to the archival materials that he needed to complete his research for the novel. He informed Fet about his decision in April 1879, giving the impression that political pressure and censorship had something to do with his abrupt change of plans: “God only knows where my Decembrists are, and I don’t think about them, but if I were to and to write about them, I’m vain enough to hope that the spirit of my writing would be insufferable to those who shoot at people for the benefit of humanity.”56

“You are Still Far too Young to Die” Tolstoy met Chertkov in fall 1883. The ensuing correspondence suggests an unprecedented degree of confidentiality and trust that Tolstoy was quick to develop in his much younger interlocutor. In the early 1880s, Tolstoy started to attract the attention of those who sought to change their lives and/or achieve spiritual transformation. In such interactions Tolstoy acted like an analyst, listening to an individual’s story and advising him on how to proceed with his desired transformation. Chertkov first approached Tolstoy as one such seeker. Their relationship did not remain static. Chertkov came to Tolstoy as his admirer and disciple, but by May 1884, Chertkov was already acting as Tolstoy’s fellow: “Talking about death, Lev Nikolayevich, you’re still far too young to die. Honestly, you always strike me not as an elderly man but as someone quite young; I often feel that you’re younger than I—you’re more vigorous, enterprising and stronger than I. I think of you as a person of my age. And this often amazes me.”57 Like Tolstoy, Chertkov (who prematurely lost a father and two brothers) was genuinely interested in the subject of death. On November 12, 1885, Chertkov confessed that he sees himself “as very, very little, lowly and cowardly. . . . A fly would frighten me. In such moments, the prospect of death is particularly comforting. . . . I am tired and I would rest in death, but if I’m still needed, I’m prepared to stay. Still, it would seem that this is the very moment when a fresh racehorse should replace me as I’m all bruised and beaten. But, apparently, a replacement horse is not available yet. Anyway, it is the Master Himself who knows best.”58 56 Ibid., 483. 57 Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 85:62. 58 Ibid., 282.

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Chertkov and Tolstoy developed the habit of exchanging what might be described as epistolary psychotherapy sessions with each other. One of Tolstoy’s letters to Chertkov, dated December 9, 1885, is a good illustration of that ­practice.59 “I’m living perhaps the final hours of my life. . . . I’m irritated and I want to die,” Tolstoy writes in the opening paragraph. He complains about Sophia and his children’s not understanding him and feels that other people around him treat him as “something unpleasant and deviant—the way bees deal with worms invading their beehives; being unable to kill the worms, the bees smear them with wax so as to stop them from being in the way.”60 In this lengthy letter, Tolstoy assumes the role of an analysand in need of the analyst’s guidance: “If it becomes absolutely clear to you what I should do, write to me. . . . I cry on my own all day long and cannot restrain myself from doing so.”61 In January 1886, his correspondence with Chertkov helped Tolstoy to reconcile himself with the death of his son, Alyosha. He wrote: “The death of our child, which at first seemed incomprehensible and cruel, now seems to me to be rational and beneficent. We became more loving and close-knit than before. Thank you for your letter. It was this letter that I needed most.”62 A few days later, in another letter to Chertkov, Tolstoy is already discussing their publication plans, complaining of his “throat disease,” is happy to accept his indisposition without irritation, and, as an afterthought, adds: “[Alyosha’s] death has left a mark on all of us, and I think it is a good mark.”63 S. A. and her feelings were not even mentioned. Despite the tragedy in Tolstoy’s family, Chertkov continued to dwell on his own problems and closeness to death: “I receive more letters than I can answer, and at times am at my wits’ end, but then I recall that we will all die soon, and the thought calms me down.”64 In response to Tolstoy’s invitation to tell each other only the truth and to avoid saying pleasing things (in the tradition of the first Christians), Chertkov described such an attitude as “too pedagogical,” suggesting instead a spontaneous exchange of thoughts— that is, saying exactly what comes to mind at any given moment, be it a compliment or criticism.65 59 Although it bears Sophia’s mark “unsent,” Tolstoy, in fact, showed this letter to Chertkov when they met in person. 60 Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 85:294. 61 Ibid., 296; Tolstoy’s italics 62 Ibid., 314–15. 63 Ibid., 317. 64 Ibid., 318. 65 Ibid., 321.

In Chertkov’s Grip    Chapter 2

Mutual Analysis Par Excellence Unlike Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), who resisted establishing mutually unrestricted relationships with his talented younger colleagues such as Sandor Ferenczi (1873–1933), Tolstoy and Chertkov did have an analytically free exchange like that described by Ferenczi in his Clinical Diary: Certain phases of mutual analysis represent [a] complete renunciation of all compulsion and of all authority on both sides: they give the impression of two equally terrified children who compare their experiences and, because of their common fate, understand each other completely and instinctively try to comfort each other. [An] awareness of this shared fate allows [one’s] partner to appear completely harmless, therefore as someone whom one can trust with confidence.66

In his last diary entry (October 2, 1932) Ferenczi postulates: “Mutuality—sine qua non.” He follows it with two questions: “Must every case be mutual?—And to what extent?” citing his own observations of three of his patients, which, in effect, make us question his initial postulate.67 Tolstoy’s correspondence with Chertkov, which lasted twenty-six years until Tolstoy’s death in 1910, might have offered Ferenczi bountiful material to elaborate on his favorite concept of the possibility of having a mutually beneficial analysis between the analyst and the analysand. His very first letter to Chertkov contained Tolstoy’s opinions of the books that Chertkov had sent him, asking Tolstoy for his guidance. In one of his subsequent letters, Chertkov admitted “to drinking alcohol and to having depraved thoughts.” Tolstoy responded by saying that Chertkov’s letter made him “frightened and alarmed, in case [Chertkov] should break his neck.” And not because I don’t trust your strength, or that I don’t value you highly; not because you have climbed up terribly high in my opinion (where you need to be), but because I think you are insecure there. I say this because I love you very much and because the work you are doing on this bell tower is very dear to me. I want to give advice, and I am frightened of interfering. One thing I can’t help saying in reply to your last letter but one. 66 Sandor Ferenczi, The Clinical Diary of Sandor Ferenczi, ed. Judith Dupont, trans. Michael Balint and Nicola Zarday Jackson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 56. 67 Ferenczi, Clinical Diary, 213–14.

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Part One    Beginnings and Endings You ought to get married—that is, I think you will be safer high up there if you tie this rope round you.68

Tolstoy presented himself as an experienced person who could analyze and give loving advice. Just three weeks later, however, Tolstoy offered Chertkov an account of his own weaknesses: “I shall write about myself: I would like to say that I’m happy and cheerful, but I can’t. I’m not unhappy—far from it—and I’ve not become feeble yet—still further from it. But I feel miserable. I have no work that can completely absorb me and make me work like a madman in the knowledge that it is my own concern, and so I am sensitive to the life around me and to my own life, and this life is repulsive.”69 Tolstoy never stopped analyzing himself and, when in doubt, he was always able to create literary characters that would suit this or that psychotherapeutic need. In other words, by showing what his characters supposedly went through he could justify and explain his own behavior. But his urge to be psychoanalyzed by his interlocutors was never satisfied until he met Chertkov, his ideal analysand-cum-analyst. “I’ll tell you something that happened to me and which I haven’t told anybody yet,” Tolstoy wrote to Chertkov on July 24, 1884: I fell into temptation of the flesh. I suffered terribly, struggled, and felt my own powerlessness. Finally, I performed a most loathsome act; I made an appointment with a woman and went to keep it. The same day I should have had a lesson with my 2nd son. I walked past his window into the garden, and suddenly—something that had never happened before—he hailed me and reminded me that it was his lesson that day. I came to my senses and didn’t keep the appointment. Clearly it can be said that God saved me. And He really did save me. But did the temptation pass after that? No, it remained, and I again felt that I would certainly fall. I then confessed [my misdeed] to [our children’s] teacher who was living with us and told him not to leave me at a certain time, and to help me. He was a good man. He understood me and looked after me like a child.70

As is apparent from his letter, Tolstoy had already confessed his sin to his children’s tutor; Chertkov, therefore, couldn’t have been the first person to learn 68 Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 85:32. 69 Tolstoy’s Letters, 2:369. 70 Tolstoy’s Letters, 2:373.

In Chertkov’s Grip    Chapter 2

about Tolstoy’s misdeed. But by recalling the episode that had taken place years before their first meeting, Tolstoy, in effect, invited Chertkov to play the role of a very good tutor who would never leave Tolstoy out of his sight. Tolstoy needed Chertkov in order to keep his own self-analysis, self-exploration, and self-justification going. As Judith Dupont observes in her introduction to Ferenczi’s Clinical Diary: It has often been said that the analyst throughout his life pursues his own analysis with the assistance of his patients. In general, this means the self-questioning induced by analytic sessions with patients obliges him to engage in permanent self-analysis. This, however, does not take into account the analyst’s blind spots and weaknesses, which he no more than other people can tackle alone. The technique of mutual analysis essentially rests on the idea that where the analyst is unable to offer his patients reliable support, he should at least provide them with guideposts, by acquainting them, as sincerely as he can with his own weaknesses and feelings.71

This observation is extremely relevant for the beginning of Tolstoy’s relationship with Chertkov. Chertkov became Tolstoy’s indispensable analysand and assistant by ensuring the permanency of change in Tolstoy’s approach to himself and his role in Russian cultural and literary life. Their intense letter writing created a space for a meaningful exchange and mutual psychoanalysis to take place. Willingness to experiment and to change that is so admirable in Ferenczi and his patient Elizabeth Severn (who encouraged Ferenczi to embark on mutual analysis) was fully embraced by Tolstoy and Chertkov. Tolstoy’s son recalled: “‘You know,’ [Tolstoy] said to me during one of our heart-to-heart nice conversations, ‘I treat Chertkov in this [extraordinary] way because, for my sake, he remade—not to say ruined—his whole life.’”72 Of course, the TolstoyChertkov relationship was never completely egalitarian. When they met, Tolstoy was already a preeminent Russian writer enjoying world recognition. Tolstoy was also considerably older. Both Tolstoy and Chertkov were striving (whether consciously or unconsciously) to reach a compromise. Chertkov

71 Judith Dupont, introduction to Clinical Diary of Sandor Ferenczi, xx. 72 L. L. Tolstoi, V Iasnoi Poliane: Pravda o moёm ottse, 59.

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by yearning to become Tolstoy’s collaborator, Tolstoy by making Chertkov interfere with his writing.

The Intermediary In 1884, Chertkov and his friend Pavel Biryukov (another Tolstoyan and Tolstoy’s future biographer) launched a new publishing venture called The Intermediary. The journal’s main purpose was to disseminate short literary works and polemical essays among ordinary and underprivileged people. Tolstoy became one of Chertkov’s main contributors. Tolstoy’s work for The Intermediary is often seen as a kind of “forced labor” that Tolstoy resented but complied with in order to produce “something worthwhile” for humanity.73 I would argue that Tolstoy’s writing on demand for The Intermediary became a much-desired and permissible respite from writing fiction.74 The following excerpt from Biryukov’s biography of Tolstoy encapsulated the advantages of such an arrangement: Despite being preoccupied with setting up a school for disadvantaged pupils, developing teaching methodologies, writing an ABC book, thinking about how to improve seminaries, and engaging in other pedagogical experiments in the 1870s, following his completion of War and Peace, Lev Nikolayevich would often get an urge to write literary prose proper. Lev Nikolayevich’s sense of moral obligation to help ordinary people realize their true potential dulled and deferred the gratification of his creative 73 Popoff, Tolstoy’s False Disciple. 74 As his letter of invitation to his fellow-writer Saltykov-Shchedrin to become a regular contributor to The Intermediary reveals, Tolstoy found this task intellectually exciting and challenging: Since you and I have been writing, the reading public has changed enormously, and views about the reading public have also changed. Previously it was just the journals which had the largest and most valuable public—about 20,000—and the greater part of them were honest and serious readers, but now the position is that the quality of the intelligent readers has declined very much—they read more to help their digestion— and a new and enormous circle of readers has arisen, which needs to be counted in hundreds of thousands, practically millions. The issues of The Intermediary, which Chertkov will show you, were sold out in six months, at a hundred thousand copies each, and the demand for them is still increasing. I would say about myself that when I correct the proofs of my writings for our circles I am relaxed and composed, but when I write something which will be read in a year’s time by millions of people, and read in the way they read, with the utmost attention to detail, I am overcome by doubt and faintheartedness. (Tolstoy’s Letters, 1:390)

In Chertkov’s Grip    Chapter 2 needs but could not prevent the buildup of his creative energy from making small breaches and seeping through his moral dam.75

Whether consciously or unconsciously, Chertkov took upon himself the function of the aforementioned moral dam that for years held back the flow of Tolstoy’s creativity. It also fell to Chertkov to make this dam porous enough for Tolstoy’s creative juices to seep through. Tolstoy’s elaborate discussion of the division of labor in human society in What Then Must We Do? (1886) finishes with a description of his newly adopted daily regimen that left him surprisingly little time for writing fiction. The case presented itself to me like this: our food divides our day into four “spells,” as the peasants term it: (1) till breakfast, (2) from breakfast till dinner, (3) from dinner till [the] evening meal, (4) and the evening. Man’s natural activity is also divided into four kinds: (1) muscular activity—work of hands, feet, shoulders, and back-heavy work which makes one sweat; (2) the activity of the fingers and wrists—that of craftsmanship; (3) [the] activity of the mind and imagination; (4) and the activity of social intercourse. . . . It seemed to me that only then would the false division of labor that exists in our society be abolished, and a just division established which would not infringe man’s happiness. I, for instance, have occupied myself all my life long with mental work. I said to myself that I have so divided labor that writing, that is, mental work, was my special occupation, and the other necessary occupations I allowed (or compelled) others to do for me. That arrangement, apparently the most advantageous for mental labor, to say nothing of its injustice, was after all disadvantageous for mental labor. All life long I had arranged my food, sleep, and amusements with regard to those hours of specialized work, and besides that work I had done nothing. . . . I sat down to write without any inner compulsion to write, and no one demanded of me writing for its own sake, that is to say for my thoughts, but only wanted my name for journalistic 75 Biriukov, Biografiia L. N. Tolstogo, vol. 2, http://dugward.ru/library/birukov/birukov_ biogr-2.html. Biriukov was undoubtedly influenced by Tolstoy’s own comments, such as those he made in the 1870s, describing his progress on Anna Karenina: “I’ve promised to publish my novel in The Russian Herald, but so far I’ve been unable to tear myself away from living people in order to devote myself to imaginary ones” (Tolstoy’s Letters, 1:173). But simply spending time in the company of Tolstoy and his influential friends, such as Chertkov, in the 1890s and 1900s, would also have influenced his observations.

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Part One    Beginnings and Endings purposes. I tried to squeeze what I could out of myself: sometimes nothing could be squeezed out, sometimes only something very poor, and I felt dissatisfied and dull. So that very often days and weeks passed when I ate and drank, slept and warmed myself, without doing anything, or doing only what nobody needed; that is to say, I committed an unquestionable and nasty crime of a kind hardly ever committed by a man of the laboring classes. But now after having recognized the necessity of physical work, both rough work and handicraft, something quite different happened: my time was occupied, however humbly, in a way that was certainly useful and joyous and instructive for me. And so I tore myself away from that unquestionably useful and joyous occupation to my specialty only when I felt an inner need and saw a demand directly addressed to me for my work as a writer. And just these demands conditioned the quality, and therefore the value and joyousness of my specialized work.76

Tolstoy tried to make his case matter-of-factly and applicable to everyone. He insisted that his urge to end people’s long-lasting inequality and injustice was the only reason behind his radical agenda. He went as far as to suggest that people who lost their jobs and were forced to drastically change their lives, in fact, benefited because their “special oppressive and difficult work has been changed for a joyous alteration of labor.”77 After years of coping with his writer’s block alone, Tolstoy himself was apparently eager to change his oppressive work for a joyous occupation and companionship. As I mentioned earlier, the initial impetus for What Then Must We Do? was Tolstoy’s attempt at jumpstarting his inspiration by meeting some of the most miserable people that he could find in Moscow at the time. Tolstoy did not write his own Les Miserables, but his rationalized daily routine was one personal answer to the overarching question of his title. Through his dialogue with Chertkov, Tolstoy finally succeeded in developing a theory that accounted for his inability to write continuously— something that had worried him ever since he had started to write.78 In his letter to Tolstoy of August 8–11, 1886, Chertkov was quick to equate Tolstoy’s contributions to The Intermediary to Tolstoy’s favorite form of menial labor, such as making high boots from scratch: 76 Leo Tolstoy, What Then Must We Do?, trans. Aylmer Maude, http://www.vidyaonline.net/ dl/whatthenmustwedo.pdf. 77 Leo Tolstoy, What Then Must We Do? 78 See Eikhenbaum’s discussion of how Tolstoy was making himself productive at the beginning of his literary career. Eikhenbaum, Lev Tolstoi: Issledovaniia, 716.

In Chertkov’s Grip    Chapter 2 While traveling, I have been rereading your old letters and again I found a lot of things that are edifying for me. You know, you should start keeping notes—a diary of your thoughts and feelings—on a permanent basis. You must have felt something along those lines when you entitled your works “The Notes of a Christian Man” and “The Notes of a Madman . . . ” I have noticed that your thoughts, your words have much greater penetrating power when they are uttered spontaneously, on the spur of the moment— in the present—when they have not been carefully crafted for an article. It seems to me that these days there is no need for articles. It is an outdated form. . . . There was a time when people would pick up a book and read, reread and study it. Nowadays people are keen on raw impressions, real deeds. . . . Your keeping daily notes would have the added value of capturing your thoughts the moment you felt like it . . . the practice would not be at odds with your craft of writing literary fiction for all the people and peoples for all time. . . . Your short stories, Lev Nikolayevich, are needed more than ever before. . . . Write little pieces for drawings, bigger pieces for books, write unprintable pieces. Only write. Your writings would be those high boots that all of us, all the people need. We are asking you for those boots because only you are capable of making them. “High boots” is a figure of speech; your writings are, in fact, our daily bread.79

Some analysts make their analysands draw or engage in other free association activities. In many ways, Chertkov’s attempts to make Tolstoy write short pieces with little or no embellishment are similar to these activities, as was Chertkov’s encouragement to write down everything that came into Tolstoy’s mind, insisting that it was of paramount importance to him personally and to the rest of the world. Chertkov consistently stymied all attempts by Tolstoy to write for his own circle. When Chertkov learned that Tolstoy was happily working on his article about life and death, he cautiously instructed the writer: Just think of the number of people who would feel relieved to realize that, in a certain sense, there is no death nor can there be any death; that death only exists for those people who equate their life with their organic casing, which is as absurd as equating one’s life with, for example, the waste matter excreted from one’s body. 79 Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 85:382.

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Part One    Beginnings and Endings I have only one little apprehension about all this. I am fearful that you might write about this [life and death] keeping in mind just the educated milieu. It would be a great pity if you did that, as is your wont, since in doing so you would be liable to say a lot of unnecessary things. Everything that people need to know can be expressed in a generally accessible form. I am absolutely confident of that. At the same time, this is an excellent gauge to ascertain what people really need or do not need. I am dying to read what you have written.80

On March 3, 1887, Chertkov shared his reservations about the painter Ilya Repin, accusing him of being indiscriminate with regard to the subjects for his paintings: one day it is Jesus Christ in the Gethsemane garden, another day it is a flirt seducing a Tatar in Crimea, then it is Pushkin’s Don Juan wearing a monk’s clothing for disguise.81 Chertkov’s opening line, “My socializing with the local painters and writers makes me think a lot about the meaning of art,”82 reads like an impetus for Tolstoy’s equally dyspeptic treatise What Is Art? (1897). The joint Tolstoy-Chertkov strategy of putting high literature in second place after “making high boots” seems to have alleviated Tolstoy’s anxiety about not writing, even if such blessed moments were rare. “How fulfilling and joyful life is even when I don’t have the energy to write properly, and now is just such a time,” Tolstoy wrote to Chertkov on April 17–18, 1886.83 On December 9–10, 1886, Tolstoy dutifully informed Chertkov about his progress: “I worked on the calendar and then on the drama. What I did with the drama may have been a sin as I edited it too meticulously. And this shouldn’t be done as it makes many things worse.”84 Chertkov implored Tolstoy to write very simply and even quickly to retain his popularity with the ordinary readers of The Intermediary. Any deviation from this pattern swiftly began to be seen by Chertkov and Tolstoy as a sinful activity on a par with lusting and fornicating. When Chertkov was exiled from Russia in February 1897 for his help in relocating the Doukhobors from Russia to Canada, Tolstoy swiftly embarked on writing his novella Hadji Murat (1912), defining its main theme as

80 Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 86:46. 81 Ibid., 40. 82 Ibid. 83 Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 85:345. 84 Ibid., 416.

In Chertkov’s Grip    Chapter 2

“betrayal of faith.”85 Although Tolstoy repeatedly expressed in his diaries and letters his urge to devote himself solely to the story of a Caucasian rebel, Hadji Murat, the only work that he did complete in 1897 was his virulent attack on high literature and the arts, What Is Art?, as if in Chertkov’s physical absence he needed to reinforce his adherence to their joint principles and even faith. Tolstoy continued to work on Hadji Murat for many more years to come, refusing to finish/publish it so as not to provoke any further complications in his relationship with Chertkov and Sophia Andreevna, who competed for the right to publish any new works by Tolstoy.86 “This despot has spiritually enslaved the old man, who cannot undertake anything without his permission,” Sophia (Tolstoy’s wife) wrote about Chertkov in 1910 to her daughter Tatiana.87 Tatiana’s husband, Mikhail Sukhotin, had to admit that “Chertkov also loved [Tolstoy] very much, not only strongly but also tyrannically. . . . I cannot blame a cuckoo bird for failing to sing like a nightingale. I’m far more surprised and saddened by the nightingale, who forgot his gorgeous singing out of love for a cuckoo bird and was trying not to sing.”88 To say that Tolstoy “forgot his gorgeous singing” in the period 1884– 1910, the years of his close friendship with Chertkov, is a huge exaggeration. Some of his best novellas and his novel Resurrection (1899) were written under Chertkov’s spell and supervision. It is tempting to assume that Chertkov developed and deepened his prescriptive strategies in response to Tolstoy’s secret and not-so-secret yearnings, such as those expressed by Tolstoy in his letter to Chertkov of June 1–2, 1885: “It is difficult writing in the country, though. I long to mow and chop wood, which I am in fact doing.”89 Apparently, at the time Tolstoy was working on his long article, any other work, besides writing, seemed more desirable. To feel inspiration, Tolstoy needed not only an ax and an adequate supply of firewood; he, most importantly, needed to turn what seemed like a chore into an object of desire. He had already developed a somewhat similar strategy toward his all-consuming fear of death. On May 7–8, 1884, Tolstoy explained to Chertkov why his longing for death was, in fact, beneficial for his well-being: “I can’t say that I’m in low spirits. I am calm,

85 A. P. Sergeenko, “Khadzhi Murat: Istoriia pisaniia,” in Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 35:589. 86 Sergeenko, “Khadzhi Murat: Istoriia pisaniia.” 87 Quoted in Popoff, Tolstoy’s False Disciple, 221. 88 Ibid., 232. 89 Tolstoy’s Letters, 2:383.

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not unhappy, as my thoughts of death increasingly present themselves to me as something very desirable, although forbidden, for the time being.” 90 It is not surprising that Tolstoy readily complied with Chertkov’s ideas that only his work for the poor and underprivileged was morally sound. With Chertkov’s assistance, Tolstoy developed a ruse, a psychological defense mechanism that consisted in equating fictional writing with lust that had to be resisted. Tolstoy, who was a great believer in contradiction as the prime mover of any development, could not fail to appreciate the advantages of interpreting the art of writing as an activity that was simultaneously attractive and shameful. In a letter to D. Khilkov (1899), written during his tranquil period of working on Resurrection, Tolstoy happily equated a sex urge with a creative urge: I think nature has endowed people with a sex instinct so that they can procreate in the same way as it has endowed some people with a seemingly senseless and irrepressible creativity instinct so that they can create works of art that other people would find pleasant and useful. As you can see, I am being very immodest, but this is the only explanation I can find for the strange phenomenon of a reasonably intelligent old man who at the age of seventy can fritter his time away on writing a novel.91

During his periods of temporary inability to write, Tolstoy (with Chertkov’s assistance) was arguably able to console himself with a sense of achievement on account of having overcome something as disgraceful as sex urges. Chertkov was extremely well-suited to support this illusion. Popoff writes: “In January 1890, replying to Chertkov’s questions about his writing plans, Tolstoy wrote he had ideas for different works: ‘There is a lot that I not only want to write now, but I am writing, and it’s all artistic. Please, don’t tell anybody,’ he added as if confessing a sin.”92 Popoff takes Tolstoy’s words as evidence of his perplexing submission to Chertkov. But Tolstoy’s diary entries and letters to different correspondents are full of self-denunciations and calls for self-regulation. Since his youth, Tolstoy had been devising plans for his own moral improvement, which he would consistently fail to accomplish. It seems that, emotionally and creatively, Tolstoy needed a Chertkov with his unfailing ability to curb what might, 90 Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 85:58. 91 Quoted in Eikhenbaum, Lev Tolstoi: Issledovaniia, 698. 92 Popoff, Tolstoy’s False Disciple, 89.

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at times, have felt like overwhelming artistic freedom. No doubt, he needed Sophia Andreevna as well. After Tolstoy left Yasnaya Polyana for good in October 1910, he tried to describe his new circumstances to his English translator and biographer, Aylmer Maude: “He began dictating a letter to me in English (though he usually wrote to me in Russian), but got no further than the words: ‘On my way to the place where I wished to be alone, I was.’”93 The letter that promised to convey the wisdom of the utmost liberation was never finished.

93 Aylmer Maude, The Life of Tolstoy, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 510.

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CHAPTER 3

Uncle Vanya: The Drama of Sustainability

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olstoy and Chertkov’s mutually beneficial relationship, lasting a quarter of a century, was truly exceptional. In Uncle Vanya (1897), Anton Chekhov provides a glimpse of a similar bond that went awry. In act 1, the play’s eponymous character, Vanya or Ivan Voinitsky, famously accuses his brother-in-law, Professor Serebryakov, of being a contemptible mediocrity. Serebryakov happens to be the owner of the estate that Vanya has been managing ever since Serebryakov’s marriage to Vanya’s sister twenty-five years ago: Oh, how I have been cheated! I idolized that professor, that pathetic martyr to gout. I worked for him like a beast of burden! Sonya and I squeezed every last drop out of this estate; like grasping peasants we drove a trade in vegetable oil, peas, cottage cheese, stinted ourselves on crumbs so we could scrape together the pennies and small change into thousands and send them to him. I was proud of him and his learning, he was my life, my sole source of air to breathe! Everything he wrote or uttered seemed to me to emanate from a genius.1

Voinitsky’s alternative to his prolonged self-abnegation takes the form of misguided heroism, which he practices by pestering Serebryakov’s wife Yelena and by humiliating his family members. By the end of act 4, he is completely exhausted and is ready to start “a new life,” which means going back to working on the very same estate. The circle is complete. By most critics’ accounts, Voinitsky is not a hero but a pitiable loser. However, the twenty-five years that Voinitsky has allegedly wasted by working on Serebryakov’s estate and his subsequent rebellion deserve a closer examination. 1 All quotations from Uncle Vanya are from Anton Chekhov, The Complete Plays, trans. Laurence Senelick (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 837. Figures in parentheses correspond to page numbers in this edition.

Uncle Vanya: The Drama of Sustainability    Chapter 3

Unlike a great many of Chekhov’s characters, Voinitsky has actually mastered what philosophers describe as “the art of being in the world.” Until we meet him in act 1, he has been the epitome of sustainability, a highly resourceful estate manager, almost a creative genius in matters related to village life and agriculture. I suggest that Uncle Vanya’s rebellion against Serebryakov is not some form of spiritual awakening but a rather misguided attempt at destroying precisely all those things that helped him go on living and even enjoy his life for nearly a quarter of a century. His tragedy is not in wasting twenty-five years of his life but in being unable to understand what made his life sustainable and trying to destroy the very system that kept him afloat. Uncle Vanya’s story might serve as an illustration to the forty-eighth hexagram in the Chinese Book of Changes (I Ching), “one of the first efforts of the human mind to place itself within the universe.”2 The forty-eighth hexagram is known as “The Well” and speaks to the necessity of keeping one’s source of water clean and readily available. To quote one of the twenty-first century translations-cum-interpretations: Such wellsprings are so important that we cannot live far from them. We may move our houses, even our cities, but we cannot eliminate our need for water. Therefore, we must safeguard wells and maintain them. . . . Instead of neglecting the reliable sources of our sustenance, whether they are water, shelter or relationships, we need to remember to maintain them before they are muddy or broken. . . . So often we do not notice what is most valuable to us until we lose it. Much of wisdom consists of being mindful of these basics—physical, economic, social, and psychic.3

Many Chekhov plays feature wellsprings of collective well-being, such as rivers, lakes, forests, or orchards, which provide settings and sites of contention. In Ivanov, the swindler Borkin conceives of building a dam that will threaten the stability of many groups of people and industrial centers situated down river and making them pay heavy ransoms to stop the impeding construction. In Uncle Vanya, the doctor Astrov is passionate about the preservation of the forests and endangered species. In The Seagull, all action takes place around 2 “[O]ne of the first efforts of the human mind to place itself within the universe” comes from the book’s description: https://www.amazon.com/Ching-Book-Changes-BollingenGeneral/dp/069109750X/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=Chinese+book+of+CHanges&qid= 1565023769&s=gateway&sr=8-2. 3 Margaret J. Pearson, The Original I Ching: An Authentic Translation of the Book of Changes (Singapore: Tuttle, 2011), 187–88.

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the “enchanted lake” that serves as a focal point for several estates scattered on its banks. In Uncle Vanya, such a focal point is reduced to a family samovar. Unlike modern electric kettles, old samovars required a lot of attention, and once the water reached the boiling point, everyone would gather around it for a comforting cup of tea. As we learn from the very beginning of the play, this commonsensical ritual has been turned upside down with the arrival of the Serebryakovs. The old nanny, Marina, comments with indignation: Such a confusion in the house! The Professor gets up at twelve, though the samovar’s been boiling from early morning, waiting on him. Before they came we used to have dinner at one o’clock, like everybody else, but now we have it at seven. At night the Professor reads and writes, and all of a sudden, round about two, the bell rings. . . . What’s the matter, goodness gracious? Tea! Wake folks up for him, set up the samovar. . . . No sense to it! (821)

Marina only amplifies what Uncle Vanya/Voinitsky stated earlier to her: “Ever since the Professor and his [wife] have been living here, our life’s been shunted to a siding . . . I sleep at odd hours, for lunch and dinner eat all kinds of spicy food, drink wine . . . unhealthy, that’s what I call it! Sonia and I used to work together and never had an idle moment, but now Sonia works alone and I only eat and drink and sleep. It’s not right! (821).” In his long utterances, Voinitsky gives plenty of information about his life in the past and how it changed dramatically just a few months ago. When his mother remarks that he used to be “a man of steadfast convictions, a shining light,” Voinitsky interrupts her impatiently: Oh, yes! I was a shining light but no one ever basked in my rays. . . . Now I am forty-seven. Before last year I was the same as you, deliberately trying to cloud my vision with this book learning of yours, to keep from seeing real life—and I thought I was doing the right thing. And now, if you had the least idea! I don’t sleep nights out of frustration, out of spite for having wasted my time so stupidly when I could have had everything that’s withheld from me now by old age! (826)

In act 3, Voinitsky describes how he slaved for Serebryakov for twenty-five years: For twenty-five years I and my mother here, like moles, sat between these four walls. . . . All our thoughts and feelings concerned no one but you.

Uncle Vanya: The Drama of Sustainability    Chapter 3 Days we talked about you, about your work, took pride in you, uttered your name with reverence; nights we wasted reading periodicals and books, which now I deeply despise! . . . To us you were a creature of a higher order, and we learned your articles by heart. . . . But now my eyes have been opened! I see it all! You write about art, but not one thing do you understand about art! All your work, which I loved, isn’t worth a tinker’s dam! You bamboozled us! . . . My life is wasted! I’m talented, intelligent, audacious. . . . If I had had [a] normal life, I might have evolved into a Schopenhauer, a Dostoevsky. (858–59)

From utterance to utterance, Voinitsky wants us to believe that his choice to work selflessly on Serebryakov’s estate was dictated by some purely ethical considerations, such as his devotion to his beloved sister and later his niece, and that it had little to do with his own likings or his own potentiality. But is this true? Of course, we can say that Voinitsky’s deep disenchantment with his brother-in-law came about as the result of his falling in love with Serebryakov’s second wife. We can even explain Voinitsky’s sudden passion for Yelena (after her nearly ten-year marriage to Serebryakov) in terms of Girard’s triangular desire theory.4 Serebryakov is, Girard would argue, the mediator of the desire, and Yelena is the object of the mediator’s desire. This makes her so much more desirable in the eyes of the subject of the desire, that is, Voinitsky. But Chekhov constructs this triangle in an even more intriguing way. What happens first is that Voinitsky becomes disillusioned with Serebryakov. This, in turn, creates a painful void in Voinitsky’s life. Voinitsky is anxious to fill this void with his newly discovered passion for Yelena. Given this sequence of developments, I would like to pose and answer the following questions: Why was Voinitsky attracted to Serebryakov in the first place? What happened to Voinitsky’s incredible adoration of Serebryakov that lasted twenty-five years?

The Truth about Serebryakov To begin with, the contentious estate is not a familial estate—it had been bought as part of a deal, in which Voinitsky had renounced his share of his inheritance in favor of his sister. In doing so, Voinitsky had irrevocably bound 4 See René Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 1–52.

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his personal destiny with Serebryakov. For Serebryakov, accepting the property was clearly a burden, as he himself never intended to become an estate owner. In one of his trademark monologues, Voinitsky describes Serebryakov as “the son of a humble sexton, a seminary student on a tuition scholarship, [who has] acquired academic degrees and chairs, the title ‘Your Excellency,’ married the daughter of a senator, and so on and so forth” (823). More so, Serebryakov compares his country manor to a mausoleum and his time there to forced exile: “To labor all one’s life in the cause of learning, to grow accustomed to one’s study, to the lecture hall, to esteemed colleagues—and suddenly, for no rhyme or reason, to find oneself in this mausoleum, to spend every day seeing stupid people, listening to trivial chitchat. . . . I want to live, I love success, I love celebrity, fame, and here—it’s like being in exile” (833). In act 3 he admits to a stranger: “I don’t like this house. Just like a labyrinth. Twenty-six enormous rooms, everyone scatters, and you can never find anyone” (854). Neither the twenty-six rooms of the manor nor Vanya’s own twenty-five years of service are of any obvious value to Serebryakov. Who has depended on whom? Voinitsky’s attachment to Serebryakov—“I idolized that professor. . . . I worked for him like a beast of burden! . . . I was proud of him and his learning, he was my life, my sole source of air to breathe! Everything he wrote or uttered seemed to me to emanate from a genius” (837)—is a clear example of transference. According to Otto Rank and Ernest Becker, every man wants to belong to a bigger group: Rank said: “For only by living in close union with a god-ideal that has been erected outside one’s own ego is one able to live at all.” . . . In other words, you need to find another human being, who on the one hand will embody everything you yearn for, and on the other hand, will be as fallible as everybody else. . . . [Transference] is the establishment of a locus from which our lives can draw the powers they need and want. . . . Projection is necessary and desirable for self-fulfillment. Otherwise man is overwhelmed by his loneliness and separation and negated by the very burden of his own life. As Rank so wisely saw, projection is a necessary unburdening of the individual; man cannot live closed upon himself and for himself. He must project the meaning of his life outward, the reason for it, even the blame for it.5 5 Becker, Denial of Death, 152, 155, 158.

Uncle Vanya: The Drama of Sustainability    Chapter 3

Rank’s and Becker’s insights are highly applicable to Voinitsky’s relationships with his sister, his niece, and, most important, to his bonding with Serebryakov. I suggest that Voinitsky decided to devote his life to Serebryakov not out of his sense of duty but for the following reasons: the association with his brother-in-law imparted meaningfulness to Voinitsky’s life, gave his life a practical application and rationale, and, last but not least, it gave him hope of immortality. It is their association with some creative geniuses (artists, scholars, scientists, philanthropists, to name but a few) and their significant projects that gives many ordinary people a sense of taking part in something truly crucial for humanity that will last forever. The public charges their creative geniuses to deliver them from oblivion, which puts a considerable burden on any artist’s shoulders. The most meaningful event, as is often the case in Chekhov’s mature plays, happens offstage: by this I mean Serebryakov’s retirement from academia after his twenty-five years of service. It is this watershed that prompts Vointisky to reassess Serebryakov’s legacy, arguably, something that he is not qualified to do adequately. This lack of expertise, however, does not stop Voinitsky from making his vindictive accusations. Why? We remember that Serebryakov is an art critic, basically a writer. Unlike sculptors, painters, and musicians—who usually have formal, specialist training, and always work with specialist apparatus—writers employ words as their tools, a media they share with everyone. This is both a blessing and a curse, because such sharing breeds familiarity and an ill-informed sense of camaraderie. Generally speaking, the conflict between the creative personality and “the crowd” in both The Seagull and Uncle Vanya (written concurrently) has been maximally minimized or minimally maximized whereby the crowd consists of people who are closest to an artist. In Uncle Vanya the crowd consists of the best representatives of the Russian intelligentsia, such as Doctor Astrov, who is also passionate about the preservation of Russian forests; an exemplary estate manager, Voinitsky; a celebrated professor, Serebryakov; Serebryakov’s wife Yelena, who studied music at a conservatory; and their compassionate relatives and friends (Sonya, Mariya Vasilyevna, Telegin, and Marina). In both plays “the genius” and his “worshippers” are gathered under the same roof—a proximity that tends to breed enmity and even hatred. In Voinitsky’s view, no one was reading Serebryakov’s articles or was interested in his opinions: “Now that he’s retired you can see what his whole life adds up to: when he goes not a single page of his work will endure, he is utterly unknown, he’s nothing! A soap bubble! And I’ve been cheated . . . I see it—stupidly cheated” (837). Consequently, no

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one would recognize the contribution that Voinitsky made to Serebryakov’s cause. In other words, Serebryakov did not live up to Voynitsky’s expectation to secure their joint immortality.

Food for Thought Serebryakov is fascinating until he becomes part of the routine. He is interesting while he can be imagined and fantasized about. His arrival and the necessity to live on the same premises with him destroy his aura, the sense that he is a celestial being in the literal sense of the phrase. A person who is sharing accommodations with you cannot be a celestial being by definition. No food can substitute for the nectar of the imagination. The play’s ending, where everyone agrees to go on living as before, signifies an attempt to return to a state of dynamic anticipation in contrast with the inert state of satiety, which, already in the first scene, is associated with the unpleasant changes in the content and ritual of meals that had been introduced by the Serebryakovs’ arrival. It is no surprise that Serebryakov is believed to be suffering not from rheumatism (as he claims to be) but from gout, which is usually caused by unhealthy eating and a self-indulgent way of life. When Voinitsky, in his own words, “stinted himself on crumbs,” he lived in harmony with himself. The meager and simple food, therefore, stands not only for simplicity and austerity as a life choice but also for the richness and stability of Voinitsky’s relationship with Serebryakov. When their friendship turns sour, he begins complaining about his excessive eating. For his part, Serebryakov uses a gastronomical metaphor to describe his inability to live in the country: “I cannot digest living in the country” [“не могу переварить строя деревенской жизни”] (98; my emphasis).6 In act 4, Marina happily dreams of things to do once the Serebryakovs leave for good: “Once again we’ll live as we used to, the old way. Tea in the morning between seven and eight, dinner between noon and one, sit down to supper in the evening, everything in its place, the way folks do it . . . like Christians. (With a sigh.) It’s a long time, bless my soul, since I’ve had noodles” (862). Although noodles (Russian lapsha) is a common dish, it also evokes an idiomatic expression—“veshat´ lapshu na ushi”—which means to deceive/delude or to be deceived/to be deluded. Going back to eating lapsha will probably help to sustain the illusion of a meaningful life. 6 A. P. Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v tridtsati tomakh (Moscow: Nauka, 1974– 83), part 1, Sochineniia, 13:98. Translated by Alexander Burak.

Uncle Vanya: The Drama of Sustainability    Chapter 3

What’s important is not the actual eating of noodles but thinking about it, what in Russian is called predvkushenie (literally, having a pleasant taste of something before eating it). In a letter to his older friend and publisher, Aleksei Suvorin (February 6, 1891), Chekhov demonstrates his mastery of this modus operandi: “By the time you arrive, I will have finished half of the story or maybe even more. I’ll give it to you and ask you to read it. Anticipate this pleasure the way I anticipate your criticism, which, by the way, I’m not afraid of, as you are a very kind person who knows his business extremely well, which is a rare combination.”7 A rare combination indeed. Chekhov promises Suvorin to finish the first draft of his long story, The Duel, by Suvorin’s next visit to Moscow. Suvorin’s anticipation of the pleasure he will get from reading Chekhov’s Duel will be matched only by Chekhov’s own anticipation of reading Suvorin’s reaction to his Duel, because, as Chekhov claims to know in advance, Suvorin’s reaction is going to be very favorable. Chekhov leaves no doubt that a delicate cordiality with Suvorin is a given; however, his need to describe it so elaborately makes one wonder about all the effort that friendship required. For the characters in Uncle Vanya, such a degree of admirable affability is attainable only when noodles reign supreme and the Serebryakovs move to Kharkov.

Realism/Idealism/Modernism Chekhov is usually seen as a unique link between the realist and modernist literary traditions, a transition from bold realist strokes to impressionistic blurriness and fleeting sensations. While this might be true for his stories, in his major plays (Uncle Vanya, The Seagull, and Three Sisters), he lays bare the conflict between aesthetic idealism and realism/modernism. In this I follow the lead of Toril Moi, who submits that “the true aesthetic antithesis of modernism is not realism, but idealism,” prosecuting her groundbreaking argument through an analysis of Henrik Ibsen’s plays.8 The idealistic aesthetic was based 7

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“К Вашему приезду будет готова половина, а может быть, и больше, дам Вам и попрошу прочесть. Предвкушайте это наслаждение, как я предвкушаю Вашу критику, которой, впрочем, не боюсь, так как Вы очень добрый человек и к тому же превосходно понимаете дело—редкое сочетание.” Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v tridtsati tomakh, part 2, Pis´ma, 4:174. All translations from Chekhov’s Pis´ma are by Alexander Burak unless otherwise noted. Toril Moi, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theory, Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 5.

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on the perfectibility of human nature, on the need for self-sacrifice either for a great cause or true love, and on seeing little difference between art and human behavior. Women were seen either as pure angels or as ruthless predators. Indeed, many characters in Chekhov’s plays embody such qualities. At the same time, Chekhov’s idealists (Ivanov, Leshy, Treplev, Nina, Voinitsky, Sonya, Vershinin, Irina, and Tuzenbach) are different from Ibsen’s implacable idealists, such as Brand, for example, in that they attempt to ground their ideals in down-to-earth activities, such as bookkeeping, planting trees, or working at a telegraph station. The alternative is to come to the brink of madness or suicide as happens with Ivanov, Treplev, and the very first version of Voinitsky from Chekhov’s earlier play, The Wood Goblin (1889). To quote Becker again: We do not want to admit that we are fundamentally dishonest about reality, that we do not really control our own lives. We don’t want to admit that we do not stand alone, that we always rely on something that transcends us, some system of ideas and powers in which we are embedded and which support us. This power is not always obvious. It need not be overtly a god or openly a stronger person, but it can be the power of an all-absorbing activity, a passion, a dedication to a game, a way of life, that like a comfortable web keeps a person buoyed up and ignorant of himself, of the fact that he does not rest on his own center. All of us are driven to be supported in a self-forgetful way, ignorant of what energies we really draw on, of the kind of lie we have fashioned in order to live securely and serenely.9

When Voinitsky says, “Before last year I was the same as you, deliberately trying to cloud my vision with this book learning of yours, to keep from seeing real life—and I thought I was doing the right thing,” he was describing his strategy for being alive. What he sets out to destroy is his own personality that he developed in order to stay focused and productive. As Becker demonstrates, there are things that people turn to in order to be able to function normally in everyday life. Some become revolutionaries, others translate the Divine Comedy, still others become reformers or start drinking heavily or try to conquer men, women, Mount Everest, and so on. One such focus is the family with all of its various derivatives. Becker believed 9 Becker, Denial of Death, 55.

Uncle Vanya: The Drama of Sustainability    Chapter 3

that Tolstoy was one of the very few who succeeded in freeing himself from illusions and was able to look death in the eye. As I discussed in previous chapters, this is not quite true. When Tolstoy wanted to leave his family in the 1880s–1900s, ostensibly to stop living a lie and prepare himself for death, he was, in fact, replacing a support system, at the center of which was (by then) his much criticized wife, with another life system built upon his younger collaborator, Vladimir Chertkov. In the final analysis, nothing had changed in his life. He continued to “deceive” himself by resolving to wait for death in a state of inner belief that it would never come. As Becker remarks: The defenses that form a person’s character support a grand illusion, and when we grasp this we can understand the full drivenness of man. He is driven away from himself, from self-knowledge, self-reflection. He is driven toward things that support the lie of his character, his automatic equanimity. But he is also drawn precisely toward those things that make him anxious, as a way of skirting them masterfully, testing himself against them, controlling them by defying them. . . . We enter symbiotic relationships in order to get the security we need, in order to get relief from our anxieties, our aloneness and helplessness; but these relationships also bind us, they enslave us even further because they support the lie we have fashioned. So we strain against them in order to be more free. The irony is that we do this straining uncritically, in a struggle within our own armor, as it were; and so we increase our drivenness, the second-hand quality of our struggle for freedom.10

It isn’t an exaggeration to say that Chekhov’s famous trip to Sakhalin Island, which I discuss in the following chapter, was, among other things, an attempt to get away from his family, that is to say, to get out of the system that provided him with authorial serenity. It took him little time to realize his dependency on that status quo. It is not surprising, therefore, that Voinitsky is rescued by no one but his niece. In act 3, an out-of-control Voinitsky tries to shoot Serebryakov but, luckily, misses. At the beginning of act 4, Vanya contemplates his own death and falls into a state of complete apathy, anticipating another thirteen years of more of the same routine. His niece Sonya describes the afterlife to him, taking him through the various stages beyond the grave and thus making the fear of total 10 Ibid., 56.

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oblivion less frightening. One cannot live without erecting some kind of barrier between oneself and death, and Sonya offers her uncle a religion, at the center of which is God who, above all, is filled with pity and compassion. In Sonya’s version of the afterlife, Voinitsky won’t face death alone; Sonya will be standing next to him; and, like heroes in novels with happy endings, they will die on the same day and meet God together: “When our time comes, we will die meekly and beyond the grave we will tell how we suffered, how we wept, how bitter we felt, and God will take pity on us, and you and I, Uncle Vanya, dear Uncle, shall see a life bright, beautiful, exquisite, we shall rejoice and look upon our present unhappiness with forbearance, with a smile—and we’ll be at peace” (872). What does this finale mean? The unusual, persistent symbiosis of Vanya and Serebryakov was caused by Vanya’s fear of life, which is synonymous with the fear of death. Sonya’s mournful promise of eventual rest and redemption, “Мы отдохнем” (“We will be at peace!” or “we shall rest!”), echoes and supplants her uncle’s previous statement of his complete identification with Serebryakov’s life and accomplishments. He says, “я дышал им” (“I breathed him”), which means that Serebryakov was literally the source of breathing air for Voinitsky. (The Russian “дох” and “дыш” are variations of the same root.) Sonya’s words have a magic effect on everyone. Her monologue is accompanied by Chekhov’s dispassionate summation: “The watchman taps. Telegin quietly goes on playing his guitar; Mariya Vasilyevna writes [something] in the margins of a pamphlet; Marina knits a stocking” (872). In other words, everyone is back to doing what they can do best and what keeps them from thinking bad thoughts. Immediately after Sonya’s repeated incantation, “We shall rest,” comes the stage direction, “The curtain begins its slow descent.” It is as if Sonya’s words had cast a spell against death and created a protective barrier. For how long? As far as the fictional world of Uncle Vanya is concerned—forever. In the chapters that follow, I move backward in time and look at the turning points in Chekhov’s writing career and at his very own dealings with his relatives, fellow writers, and friendly mentors.

CHAPTER 4

“Homo Sachaliensis”: Chekhov’s “Character” as a Strategy To become human or to learn what it means to be human does not come that easily. —Søren Aabye Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers

C

hekhov’s unusually close ties with his relatives, which only intensified with his growing fame and recognition, still puzzle his readers. I see Chekhov’s impulsive trip to Sakhalin Island in 1890 as a turning point in this relationship. From that point onward, Chekhov stopped considering this relationship as largely one-sided, as that of a breadwinner providing for his ineffectual dependents. During his trip he came to recognize the important role that his family played in preserving his equanimity and creative spirit. Chekhov’s intense correspondence with his relatives during his trip across Siberia created an ideal space for such a transformation to occur. There is a noticeable difference between Chekhov begrudgingly fulfilling his duties as the main provider and caregiver before the trip and his elation at seeing his relatives on his return from Sakhalin.

“A Lump in the Middle of My Forehead” In April 1888, in a letter responding to a fellow writer’s hints at the intricacies of his family arrangements, Chekhov gave a lengthy description of his own situation, which he compared to having “a benign tumor” or “a lump in the middle of [his] forehead”: I’m down to my last seventy-five rubles. . . . Where do I get the money to go to Sumy? If I don’t get an advance, I’ll shoot myself. I also have a “familial caboodle.” To make things easier, I always take it along with me on my travels, the way I travel with my baggage. I’m used to it the way you get used to a lump in the middle of your forehead.

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Part One    Beginnings and Endings It’s safer and cheaper to bring this caboodle along with you than to leave it behind at home. . . . To be fair, though, in comparison with an unnatural growth of tissue, my tumor is benign—not malignant. And my caboodle is very good at sewing shirts, cooking meals, and always being cheerful. In winter, the caboodle consists of eight persons and, in summer, of five (including two maids). In any case, I’m more often cheerful than sad, although, to come right down to it, I’m bound-up hand and foot. . . . You, my dear friend, have a compact little apartment, whereas I have a whole house, a lousy one, I admit, but still a house, complete with two stories . . . . You have just one wife who will forgive you your penury, whereas I have to maintain a whole commonwealth whose edifice will come crashing down on me, flattening me with its heavy masonry, should I fail to earn a certain number of rubles every single month.1

The unsteady construction collapsed on June 17, 1889, when Chekhov’s older brother Nikolai died of tuberculosis, the disease that would claim Chekhov’s life fifteen years later. When Nikolai was sick, Chekhov had no other choice but to act as his dying brother’s physician, a role he found particularly unbearable and started to resent, as his letters attest. Soon he left for Odessa (where according to his letters, he drank champagne with local actresses) and traveled on to Yalta. He admitted guiltily in a letter to Aleksei Pleshcheev: “There was no point in coming here, and there is no point in staying here either. I swim in the morning, die from heat in the afternoon, drink wine in the evening; and at night I sleep. . . . Every day I intend to leave, but somehow fail to do so.”2 His inexplicable procrastination in sunny sea resorts, while his family was in mourning, made Chekhov feel remorseful to the extent that he welcomed a dangerous swimming accident as some form of punishment for his hedonistic behavior and a symbolic turning point: I feel a little ashamed of leading a sybaritic life here when things at home are bad. I left behind dreary melancholy and fear. . . . I had a joyful moment today. While bathing in the sea, I was almost killed by a long, heavy pole wielded by some ogre. What saved me was just one centimeter that 1 Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v tridtsati tomakh, part 2, Pis´ma, 2:249. Chekhov’s italics. 2 Alexander Burak’s adjusted version of the translation from Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters, ed. Rosamund Barlett, trans. Rosamund Barlett and Anthony Phillips (London: Penguin, 2004), 189. Further references to this edition are given as B/P in the body of the text.

“Homo Sachaliensis”: Chekhov’s “Character” as a Strategy     Chapter 4 s­ eparated my head from the pole. This miraculous deliverance from death brought to mind various fitting-for-the-occasion thoughts.3

The trip across Siberia was in part conceived as atonement for Chekhov’s lethargic and evasive behavior in Crimea. In fall 1889, Chekhov suddenly began planning and preparing for a long and strenuous trip to Sakhalin, which lasted from April 21 to December 7, 1890. The trip’s objective was so incomprehensible to those around him that even Aleksei Suvorin (Chekhov’s staunchest supporter and admirer) questioned its validity for either science or literature. As Simon Karlinsky clarifies in his edition of Chekhov’s letters: As for the assertion that [Chekhov’s] journey was a subversive act or an act of political defiance, its proponents should be told that Sakhalin was not any kind of political prison to begin with. It was a recently acquired territory, bleak and inhospitable, which the Russian government was trying to colonize with convicted murderers, swindlers, thieves and embezzlers. It was a penal colony in the original sense of the term, the sort of colony that the British and the French governments maintained on the East Coast of North America in the eighteenth century and to which Abbe Prevost’s Manon Lescaut and Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders were sent, the kind of colony that was used to get Australia settled.4

In his long and elaborate letter to Suvorin (March 1890), Chekhov tried to reason, describing his need to discipline himself as a top priority, “I may not be able to write anything at all, but the journey still retains its charm to me. By reading, looking around and listening, I’ll discover and learn a great deal. . . . Besides, the journey as I see it means six months’ continuous physical and mental labor, something I absolutely need, because I’m a Southerner and have already begun to grow lazy. I’ve got to discipline myself ” (K/H 159). Chekhov’s insistence that an enlightened person needs discipline and should work continuously on improving his character is usually taken as something admirable but not particularly essential for well-being. Chekhov’s lengthy epistolary instructions to his relatives, female correspondents, and 3 Ibid. 4 Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary, trans. Michael Heim; sel., intro., and commentary by Simon Karlinsky (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999),153. Further references to this edition are given as K/H in the body of the text.

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even his fellow writers are usually seen as a sign of his almost impeccable grace and high aesthetic and moral standards. He almost always knew how to handle an awkward situation when others faltered and stumbled. In his frequently quoted letter to Suvorin, Chekhov hints that he might have reached this stage in January 1889 by “squeezing the slave out of himself drop by drop,” with “his veins no longer [carrying] the blood of a slave.”5 Examining the content and style of Chekhov’s letters, I would argue that the process of Chekhov’s character building continued for another three years (1889–91). By 1891, Chekhov’s character had solidified into a unique set of defense mechanisms. I base my argument on Ernest Becker’s thesis that a human being “fashion[s] his character for the precise purpose of putting it between himself and the facts of life; it is his special tour-de-force that allows him to ignore incongruities, to nourish himself on impossibilities, to thrive on blindness. He accomplishes thereby a peculiarly human victory: the ability to be smug about terror.”6 Indeed, Chekhov, who was sick with tuberculosis for the most part of his mature life and was particularly sensitive to outside pressures and criticism of his work, would have required a reliable set of tactics to distract himself from being constantly focused on his mortality. It is significant that he left a substantial record of his instructions to his relatives. Instead of asking what Chekhov’s brothers would have done without his thoughtful guidance, I suggest we pose different questions. Did Chekhov, in fact, resort to epistolary mentoring and close supervision of his family members as a means of skirting his own fallibility and mortality? What was the role of his relatives in Chekhov’s life? Could Chekhov have accomplished what he succeeded in carrying out without his “fallible” relatives? And what role did the trip to Sakhalin, and the letters he wrote from there, play in the process of creating these strategies? On closer examination, Chekhov’s letters written during his trip to Sakhalin reflect not only the political, social, and personal concerns that have been the focus of much critical discussion over the years but also a key dimension of his relationship with his family.

The Sakhalin Trip and Its Objectives The conventional wisdom that Chekhov went to Sakhalin to prove to other people that he was capable of serious academic and literary work is a 5 Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v tridtsati tomakh, part 2, Pis´ma, 3:133. My translation. 6 Becker, Denial of Death, 59.

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distortion of what he was seeking to achieve as a result of this trip. In the months that followed Nikolai’s death and preceded the trip to Sakhalin, Chekhov wrote his novella “A Boring Story” (“Skuchnaia istoriia,” 1889) and a play, The Wood Goblin (Leshii, 1889). Both works focus on a negative reassessment of the lives lived by their outstanding scholarly protagonists. “A Boring Story” starts with its protagonist being completely worn out from waiting for his death, which he thinks will come in six months. Nikolai Stepanovich is plagued with insomnia and is overwhelmed by some unfair and ungracious thoughts about his family members, friends, and colleagues. He plunges himself into further darkness, while his brilliant mind keeps informing him that he is surrounded only by callous and greedy people. Chekhov does not grant Nikolai Stepanovich his anticipated and much feared finale, and his desperate efforts to find some overarching idea that would validate his particular life of scholarly research fail completely. If Chekhov wanted to write himself out of a spiritual crisis that was caused by his brother’s death, he failed to do so, and, as an alternative, he plunged himself into the time-consuming preparations for the journey that required the skills of an ethnographer and anthropologist. Five weeks prior to his trip, Chekhov described Sakhalin as “a place of unbearable suffering”’ and suggested making “pilgrimages to places like Sakhalin the way the Turks go to Mecca” (K/H 159). Like his character Nikolai Stepanovich, Chekhov longed to impart meaning to his predictably short life. He confessed to Suvorin on December 9, 1890: “While I was actually living on Sakhalin, the only feeling I was aware of was a bilious discomfort in my gut as if I had eaten rancid butter, but now I am able to contemplate it in retrospect, Sakhalin appears to me like [total] hell” (B/P 252). A day later, Chekhov lightheartedly described his journey as a progression from Hell to Paradise: “I have been in Hell, represented by Sakhalin, and in heaven, that is to say on the island of Ceylon. Oh! the butterflies, the creepy-crawlies, the flies, the cockroaches!” (B/P 255). But Sakhalin was no ordinary Hell;7 it was Chekhov’s personal Inferno. Dante’s Inferno famously offered its author a unique opportunity to reinvent himself; it was totally a product of his imagination. Sakhalin Island was there for Chekhov to visit in order to compare his own anguish with that of the inhabitants of the penal colony. The conclusion he reached after the trip was: “God’s world is good. Only one thing 7 See Michael Finke’s treatment of the theme of descent in Chekhov’s works in “The Hero’s Descent to the Underworld in Chekhov’s Works,” Russian Review 53 ( January 1994): 67–80.

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in it is vile: ourselves” (B/P 253). Similarly, the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl invented his “logotheraphy” while being a prisoner in Nazi concentrations camps. He insisted that human beings are not only driven by their quest for pleasure and power but, primarily, by their quest for meaning. Frankl defined his “logotherapy” as healing through finding meaning in one’s existence, even under the most unbearable circumstances, such as life and death in Hitler’s concentration camps: “The Meaning of life always changes, but . . . it never ceases to be. According to logotherapy, we can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: (1) by creating a work or doing a deed; (2) by experiencing something or encountering someone; and (3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering.”8 The trip to Sakhalin, which, apart from numerous hardships, made room for its immediate description and appropriation in Chekhov’s letters and newspaper reports, encompasses all three ways of obtaining meaning in Frankl’s terms. In all likelihood, Frankl was familiar with Ludwig Feuerbach’s earlier statement that “the choice about what to do about death . . . is the choice about what life to live.”9 Chekhov’s decision to spend his “recuperation” period in a penal colony might have also had its roots in Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy, which Chekhov knew and admired. In his “On the Suffering of the World,” Schopenhauer invited his readers to recognize the fact that any life is futile because no matter what one does, he will end up dying and that, therefore, all mortals deserve our profound compassion. Achieving equanimity and mental stability would reward the bearer of such an outlook: As a reliable compass for orienting yourself in life nothing is more useful than to accustom yourself to regarding this world as a place of atonement, a sort of penal colony. When you have done this, you will order your expectations of life according to the nature of things and no longer regard the calamities, sufferings, torments and miseries of life as something irregular and not to be expected but will find them entirely in order, well knowing that each of us is here being punished for his existence and each in his particular way. This outlook will enable us to view the so-called imperfections of the majority of men, that is, their moral and intellectual shortcomings and the facial appearance resulting therefrom, without surprise and certainly without indignation: for we shall always bear in mind 8 Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Boston: Beacon, 2006), 111. 9 Feuerbach, Thoughts on Death and Immortality, xl.

“Homo Sachaliensis”: Chekhov’s “Character” as a Strategy     Chapter 4 where we are and consequently regard every man first and foremost as a being who exists only as a consequence of his culpability and whose life is an expiation of the crime of being born. . . . From this point of view, one might indeed consider that the appropriate form of address between man and man ought to be, not monsieur, sir, but fellow sufferer, compagnon de misères. However strange this may sound it corresponds to the nature of the case, makes us see other men in a true light and reminds us of what are the most necessary of all things: tolerance, patience, forbearance and charity, which each of us needs and which each of us therefore owes.10

As Schopenhauer might have envisaged, the Sakhalin trip, including Chekhov’s residence in a real penal colony, considerably improved the artist’s mood and overall physical condition. Karlinsky writes: “His swimming exploits in the Indian Ocean, his amorous exploits in Siberia and on Ceylon, his healthy and suntanned appearance upon his return and the energy with which he undertook the extended journey through Western Europe very soon thereafter all easily demolish the myth that the Sakhalin journey was detrimental to Chekhov’s health” (K/H 153). On his return to Moscow, Chekhov felt lighthearted while contemplating his future offspring and judges: “When I have children of my own, I shall be able to boast to them: ‘Well, you little sons of bitches, once upon a time I had intercourse with a black-eyed Hindu girl, and where do you think that was? In a coconut grove, by the light of the moon!’ ” (B/P 253). Among the many curious things that Chekhov brought back from his trip was a pair of mongooses, probably a subconscious way of showing his newly acquired omnipotence and joie de vivre. “If you only knew what sweet animals I’ve brought back from India with me!” Chekhov informed his correspondent. “Two mongooses, about the size of a young cat, most cheerful and lively beasts. Their qualities are: courage, curiosity and affection for human beings” (B/P 256).

Chekhov as a Family Man During his physically exhausting journey across Siberia, Chekhov started to write long, detailed, and frequent letters to his parents and brothers. While he scarcely wrote to his regular correspondents (such as Pleshcheev, 10 Arthur Schopenhauer, “On the Suffering of the World,” in Essays and Aphorisms, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1970), 49–50.

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Leont´ev-Shcheglov, Leikin, and even Suvorin), he spared no time in writing to his family. Chekhov signed his first letter “To the Chekhov family” on April 23, 1890, as “Your homesick Volga Boatman, Homo Sakhaliensis [skuchaiushchii vologzhanin, Homo Sachaliensis], A. Chekhov” (B/P 216). In his first letter from Siberia to Suvorin (May 20, 1890), Chekhov all of a sudden adopted the tone of his eponymous character Vanka (in his short story “Vanka,” 1886). Vanka Zhukov is a nine-year-old apprentice to a shoemaker in Moscow. On Christmas Eve he writes a soulful letter to his distant grandfather, begging him to take him “away from here or [he will] die.”11 And last week the mistress told me to clean a herring, and I started with the tail, so she took the herring and began shoving its head into my mug. . . . And there is nothing to eat. They give me bread in the morning, kasha for dinner, and bread again in the evening, and as for tea or cabbage soup, that the masters grab up for themselves.”12

In his letter to Suvorin, Chekhov appears to be just as hungry and miserable as his orphaned character. The smell of the fictional herring transforms into an equally disgusting smell and taste of the sausage that Chekhov tries to eat in Siberia: I’ve been as hungry as a horse all the way. I filled my belly with bread in order to stop thinking of turbot, asparagus and suchlike. I even dreamt of buckwheat kasha. I dreamt of it for hours on end. I bought some sausage for the journey in Tyumen, if you can call it a sausage! When you bit into it, the smell was just like going into a stable at the precise moment the coachmen are removing their foot bindings; when I started chewing it, my teeth felt as if they caught hold of a dog’s tail smeared in tar. Ugh! I made two attempts to eat it and then threw it away. (B/P 219)

In his letters to his relatives, Chekhov also complained about problems with getting warm, getting good food, and getting good sleep.

11 Anton Chekhov, “Vanka,” in Stories, trans. Richard Pevear and Larisa Volokhonsky (New York: Bantam, 2000), 47. 12 Ibid.

“Homo Sachaliensis”: Chekhov’s “Character” as a Strategy     Chapter 4 [To his mother:] I’m alive, in good health and all is well. I’ve learnt how to brew coffee, but I find I need two spoonfuls a cup, not one. . . . There is no greenery anywhere, everything is frozen. My feet are terribly cold. . . . There’s literally not a hint of greenery anywhere yet. (B/P 218) [To brother Alexander:] Siberia is a big, cold country. There seems no end to the journey. There is little of novelty or interest to be seen, but I am experiencing and feeling a lot. I’ve battled with rivers in flood, with cold, unbelievable quagmires, hunger and lack of sleep. . . . Experiences you couldn’t buy in Moscow for a million rubles. . . . The worst of it is that in these little provincial places there is never anything to eat, and when you’re on the road this becomes a matter of capital importance! You arrive in a town hungry enough to eat a mountain of food, and bang go your hopes; no sausage, no cheese, no meat, not so much as a herring, nothing but the sort of tasteless eggs and milk you find in the villages. (B/P 226) [To his parents:] Beyond Krasnoyarsk the heat and the dust began. The heat is terrible, and I have banished my coat and hat. The dust gets into your mouth, up your nose, down your neck—ugh! To get to Irkutsk you must cross the Angara on a flat-bottomed ferry; and just then, as if on purpose, a strong wind gets up. . . . I and the officers who are my traveling companions have spent the last ten days dreaming of a bath and a sleep in a proper bed, and we stand on the bank reluctantly getting used to the idea that we may have to spend the night in the village instead of in Irkutsk. . . . All my clothes are creased, dirty and torn. I look like a bandit! . . . When travelling you need to take at least two large pillows, and definitely dark pillowcases. . . . My big boots have stretched now and become more comfortable to wear: my heels aren’t sore anymore. I’ve ordered buckwheat kasha for tomorrow. I remembered about curd cheese while I was on the road, and have started eating it with milk whenever I get to a station. (B/P, 227–29)

As his letters show, the Sakhalin trip arguably allowed Chekhov for the first time to put himself in the position of a vulnerable person whose well-being could not be taken completely for granted. Chekhov was utterly denied this privilege in his teens, when his family moved to Moscow and left him behind in Taganrog to provide for himself and send money to his impoverished parents.

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Chekhov’s trip to Sakhalin was perhaps the only form of a lengthy separation acceptable to his relatives in 1890. The desired separation revealed the crucial role that Chekhov’s family played in his life. Chekhov continued to describe the hardships of his journey to his relatives However, the general tone of these letters reminds one of a Khlestakov-like exuberance and childish joy that everything is going so well. The above-quoted letter about Chekhov’s anguish while approaching Irkutsk develops into a jubilant account of his arrival and stay there: We wait an hour or two, and—oh, heavens!—with a supreme effort the ferry gets to the bank and ties up alongside. Bravo, we can have our bath, supper and sleep. How sweet it is to steam in the bath-house and then sleep! Irkutsk is a splendid town, and very civilized. It has a theatre, a museum, municipal gardens with music playing in them, good hotels. . . . I was bitterly disappointed not to find a letter from you. If you had written anything before 6 May I would have received it in Irkutsk. (B/P 227–28)

In June Chekhov gently inquired if his relatives had started getting used to his absence: “Be well and happy, and don’t get too used to my not being with you. But perhaps you already have? A deep bow and an affectionate kiss to you all” (B/P 242). Besides giving the impression that Chekhov’s family might have perished without his guidance and providing detailed reports about his progress, his letters are evidence that his family was, in fact, his major source of sustenance and endurance. Even in his letters to his “irresponsible” brother Alexander, Chekhov is unusually gentle and restrained in his habitual mentoring. The family reunion in December 1890 brought everyone a lot of joy: “My family is beaming with happiness” (B/P 256). On December 9, he described to Suvorin his elation of finally being home: “Hooray! Well, here I am at last, sitting at my desk, offering up prayers to my dilapidated penates and writing to you. I have such a wonderful feeling, as if I had never left home. I am very happy to the marrow of my bones” (B/P 252). One year later, Chekhov attributed the very same feelings to Kashtanka, his female dog character in the eponymous story. At the end of the story Kashtanka walks behind her old masters, “and it seemed to her that she had been following them all along, rejoicing that her life had not been interrupted for a single moment.”13 13 Anton Chekhov, “Kashtanka,” in Anton Chekhov’s Selected Stories, ed. Cathy Popkin, trans. Richard Pevear and Larisa Volokhonsky (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014), 147.

“Homo Sachaliensis”: Chekhov’s “Character” as a Strategy     Chapter 4

“Kashtanka” The first version of “Kashtanka” was written in 1887 and was so much liked by Suvorin’s younger children that they named all their pets after Chekhov’s main characters. In December 1891 (one year after his return from Sakhalin), Chekhov revised his story by dividing it into smaller segments and by adding a totally new segment, “A Troubled Night.” It features the tragic and upsetting death of the pet goose, Ivan Ivanych. In an earlier version the goose stayed unharmed. In the final version, Ivan Ivanych’s sudden death makes Kashtanka start thinking about her own vulnerability and mortality. As it memorably happens to Tolstoy’s human characters, she quickly realizes that she can also die right now, for no apparent reason. It seemed to [Kashtanka] that the same thing was going to happen to her—that she, too, for some unknown reason, would close her eyes, stretch out her paws, bare her teeth, and everybody would look at her with horror. Apparently, similar thoughts were wandering through Fyodor Timofeyich’s head. Never before had the old cat been so sullen and gloomy as now.14

The circus master also reacts to his pet’s death in a most disquieting way: he is overwhelmed with compassion; he cries and doesn’t know what to do in this situation. It takes him a while to realize what caused Ivan Ivanych’s death. “Ivan Ivanych!” the master called. The goose didn’t move. The master sat down on the floor in front of him, looked at him silently for a moment, and said, “Ivan Ivanych, what’s the matter? Are you dying or something? Ah, now I remember, I remember!” he cried, clutching his head. “I know what it is! It’s because that horse stepped on you today! My God! My God!” Auntie did not understand what her master was saying, but from the look on his face she saw that he, too, was expecting something terrible. She stretched her muzzle towards the dark window, through which it seemed to her some stranger was looking, and howled. “He’s dying, Auntie!” her master said, clasping his hands. “Yes, yes, dying! Death has come to our room! What are we to do?” 14 Ibid., 142.

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Part One    Beginnings and Endings Auntie walked around his feet, and not understanding what was causing him such anguish and where all this situation came from, but trying to understand, she watched his every movement. . . . And glittering drops, such one sees on window panes when it rains, crept down his cheeks. Not understanding what was wrong, Auntie and Fyodor Timofeyich huddled close to him, staring in horror at the goose.15

The animals in the story behave just like little children when they try to determine the possible outcome of a sudden or unfamiliar event from their parents’ body language and facial expressions. It is customary to believe that a healthy child should grow with no or few anxieties, because they are supposedly absent from the life of young children. Becker, on the contrary, claims that a happy childhood is the process by which each child “learns to act and to perceive his environment in such a way that he banishes anxiety from it.”16 In other words, each child is born with anxieties and fears that manifest themselves in bad dreams, fears of darkness, the howling wind, thunderstorms, and so forth. Therefore, the task of responsible parents (and any other guardians) is to teach their children to control their anxieties and to assist them in building a secure and safe environment for themselves. Becker explains, “It can’t be overstressed, one final time, that to see the world as it really is devastating and terrifying. It achieves the very result that the child has painfully built his character over the years in order to avoid: it makes routine, automatic, secure, self-confident activity impossible. . . . I mean that without character-traits there has to be full and open psychosis.”17 Chekhov wrote several stories about such character-­building efforts, most notably, “Grisha” (1886), The Steppe (1888), and “Kashtanka” (1887/1892). In all of these stories the primary caregivers are either conspicuously out of the picture or are missing, as is the case with Kashtanka. The main characters (a baby boy, a nine-year-old boy, and a young dog) are left to their own devices in potentially threatening situations. Kashtanka makes her sudden decision to leave her new master as a result of chance circumstances that make her act in such an abrupt and determined manner. It should be noted that with her new owner Kashtanka, which means “chestnut,” or “chestnut-colored,” acquires a new name, “Auntie.” At first it seems that her new master gives her this particular name because Kashtanka 15 Ibid., 141–42. 16 Becker, Denial of Death, 142. 17 Ibid., 60, 66.

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looks so hungry and reminds him of a Russian saying—“Hunger is no auntie and gives you no pies.” Subsequently, it transpires that the name was given primarily because of the role Kashtanka/Auntie was meant to play in her master’s new routine. As soon as Kashtanka gets used to her new name, the narrator starts calling her “Auntie.” This happens gradually in the next to last section “Talent! Talent.” In “A Troubled Night” she is continuously called Auntie, and in the very last section, “An Unsuccessful Debut,” she is given back her old name, Kashtanka: “Half an hour later, Kashtanka was walking down the street, following the people who smelled of glue and varnish.”18 This final segment begins with the following episode: One fine evening the master walked into the room with the dirty wall paper and rubbing his hands, said: “Well . . . ” He wanted to say something more, but did not say it and left. Auntie had made a close study of his face and voice during her lessons, and she could tell that he was nervous, worried, maybe even angry. A little later he came back and said: “Today I’ll take Auntie and Fyodor Timofeyich with me. In the Egyptian Pyramid, you, Auntie, will replace the late Ivan Ivanych today. Devil knows what will come out of it! Nothing’s ready, nothing’s been learned, we haven’t rehearsed enough! It’ll be a disgrace, a flop!”19

The circus master worries that Kashtanka needs more experience before her debut, but Becker’s child would think that she is facing the same fate as the goose. She is literally invited to take the place of the dead animal in the Egyptian Pyramid. Just prior to the performance, the circus master locks Kashtanka up in his little suitcase together with the cat: “Then it became dark . . . Auntie stepped over the cat, and clawed at the sides of the suitcase, and was so terrified that she could not utter a sound. The suitcase rocked and swayed as if it were floating on water.”20 How would a city dog know what it felt like to be rocking in the waves? Kashtanka’s predicament brings back to mind Chekhov’s story “Gusev,” in which the peasant soldier Gusev dies of consumption on board a ship and 18 Chekhov, “Kashtanka,” 146. 19 Ibid., 143. 20 Ibid., 145.

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is buried in the ocean. The last name Gusev literally means “of geese,” which might mean that he is somehow related to the dying goose in “Kashtanka.” Ivan Ivanych, the goose, does not die because of old age or because of some bird disease. He dies as the result of being crushed by one of the horses at the circus, an accident that his master is strangely oblivious of until the goose’s death. It is no coincidence that Kashtanka sees frightening monsters lurking everywhere in the circus, and she quickly identifies an elephant (although she doesn’t “know” that it is an elephant) as her major threat. The circus is a place where one can be literally hurt and killed. The word “talent” comes to her master’s lips shortly before the goose’s death. Kashtanka goes on stage because she needs to replace Ivan Ivanych in the Egyptian Pyramid number. Kashtanka not only loses one syllable in her name (Auntie as compared to Kashtanka), but her life suddenly starts to unravel in a predetermined progression. Before letting Auntie/Kashtanka and the cat Fyodor Timofeyich out of the suitcase, the circus master introduces them as his remaining relatives and an unwelcome responsibility. “Here I am!” the master shouted loudly. “Here I am!” After this shout, Auntie felt the suitcase hit against something solid and stop swaying. There was a loud deep roar. . . . “Ha!” [the master] yelled, trying to outshout the roar. “Most esteemed public! I’ve just come from the station! My granny dropped dead and left me an inheritance! The suitcase is very heavy—gold, obviously. . . . Ha-a! And suddenly we’ve got a million here! Let’s open it right now and have a look . . . ” The latch clicked. Bright light struck Auntie’s eyes. She jumped out of the suitcase and, deafened by the roar, ran around her master as fast as she could go, yelping all the while. “Ha!” shouted the master. “Uncle Fyodor Timofeyich! Dear Auntie! My nice relatives, devil take you all!!!”21

Kashtanka/Auntie’s future seems to be pretty clear—soon the devil will take her and the cat as he took the goose a few days prior to the night at the circus. But this sequence of events is interrupted by the sudden appearance of Kashtanka’s previous owners. They sit in the upper gallery and are overjoyed to see their dog. When she heard her name, “Kashtanka,” “Auntie was startled, 21 Ibid.

“Homo Sachaliensis”: Chekhov’s “Character” as a Strategy     Chapter 4

and looked in the direction of the voices. Two faces—one hairy, drunk, and grinning and the other chubby, pink-cheeked, and frightened—struck her eyes as the bright light had done before. . . . She remembered, fell off the chair, floundered in the sand, jumped up, and with a joyful yelp ran toward those faces.”22 Kashtanka’s first reaction (falling off the chair into the sand) looks like a mock suicide followed by a miraculous ascension to Paradise. (In Russian, the upper gallery is called “raёk,” which can be translated as “little paradise.”) Auntie jumped over the barrier, then over someone’s shoulder, and landed in a box seat. To get to the next tier, she had to leap a high wall [she is a dachshund]. She leaped, but not high enough, and slid back down the wall. Then she was picked up and passed from hand to hand, she licked hands and faces, she kept getting higher and higher, and at last she reached the top row. . . . Half an hour later, Kashtanka was walking down the street, following the people who smelled of glue and varnish. (146)

Thus in a few leaps and jumps Auntie gets transformed back into Kashtanka, and everything that was prepared for some Auntie is no longer relevant for Kashtanka. She literally jumps away from death. This explains the meaning of the penultimate sentence, which states that Kashtanka was “rejoicing that her life had not been interrupted for a single moment.”23 “Kashtanka” was one of Chekhov’s favorite stories. Even six years after its publication in 1892, Chekhov kept inviting Aleksandra Khotiaintseva, his female acquaintance and a painter, to go to the circus with him: “It’s so good in the circus! Lots of inspiration for cartoons, and most important, you can start making drafts for your future illustrations to ‘Kashtanka.’24 Although Chekhov joked that his story was written in hopes of making money and was meant for children and young adults, “Kashtanka” clearly created a fulcrum and a frame that allowed Chekhov to talk about universal and harrowing topics, which he normally avoided even in conversations with such interested people as Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy was a robust man, who could still enjoy a strenuous horse ride shortly before his death. Chekhov, on the contrary, for most of his mature life lived with the feeling that every day could be his very last. This might explain why Tolstoy chose to write about the death of a human being, Ivan Ilych 22 Ibid., 146. 23 Ibid., 147. 24 Chekhov, Sochineniia, 6:702.

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Golovin, and Chekhov chose to channel his very similar anxieties and fears through the death of a pet goose, Ivan Ivanych. It becomes very clear from the start that Kashtanka is an artist in a dog’s body. In fact, her artistic career starts early on, when she lives with the cabinetmaker and his son. The boy Fedyushka “would make her walk on her hind legs, turn her into a [church] bell by pulling her tail hard, until she squealed and barked, or give her tobacco to sniff. . . . Especially tormenting was the following trick: Fedyushka would tie a piece of meat to a string and give it to Kashtanka; then once she had swallowed it, with loud laughter he would pull it out of her stomach.”25 Kashtanka has astounding intuition. When she is about to overcome her fears during her first performance at the circus, she is quick to notice that her master’s “face, especially his mouth and teeth, were distorted [izurodovany] by a wide, fixed grin.”26 Kashtanka has a congenial phobia: the sound of music makes her lose her bearings. When she understands that she is lost, the narrator says, “If she had been a human being, she would probably have thought: ‘No, it’s impossible to live this way! I’ll shoot myself.’ ”27 Kashtanka fits the description of the neurotic personality that was introduced in the late nineteenth century in the works of Max Nordau and William James.28 People, whom Nordau identifies as neurotics, are primarily artists, philosophers, and writers (Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde, and Leo Tolstoy, for example). James similarly devotes many pages to Tolstoy and his characters. People with such levels of sensitivity were believed to be prone to megalomania, depression, and suicidal thoughts. The main problem with Kashtanka’s new owner (the circus master) was not that he was too sophisticated for Kashtanka, as some critics have suggested,29 but that he left too much room for her disquieting thoughts: Lessons and dinner made the days very interesting, but the evenings were rather boring. Usually, in the evening, the master went out somewhere and took the goose and the cat with him. Left alone, [Kashtanka] would lie down on her mattress, feeling sad. . . . Sadness crept up on her 25 Chekhov, “Kashtanka,” 134. 26 Ibid., 146. 27 Ibid., 133. 28 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902); Max Nordau, Entartung [Degeneration] (1892). 29 Janet Malcolm, Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey (New York: Random House, 2002), 199–202.

“Homo Sachaliensis”: Chekhov’s “Character” as a Strategy     Chapter 4 s­omehow imperceptibly and came over her gradually, as darkness falls upon the room. She would lose all desire to bark, to eat, to run through the rooms, or even to look.30

Kashtanka’s feelings of discomfort and boredom only intensify with Ivan Ivanych’s death: Kashtanka “went to the living room and looked behind the cupboard. The master had not eaten her chicken leg; it was still there, covered with dust and cobwebs. But [she] felt dull, sad, and wanted to cry. She didn’t even sniff the leg. She got under the sofa, lay down, and began to whine softly in a thin voice.”31 It is no wonder that, when given a chance, Kashtanka returns to the cabinetmaker’s room, cluttered up with pieces of wood and various tools. She returns to the place where she expected to be constantly busy with finding food and with trying to escape Fedyushka’s little games. Of course, she is going to die one day, but like Montaigne, she has almost no time to think about this harrowing experience, because almost every minute is taken up by some demanding chores.32

“My life wouldn’t be full, if . . .” It is possible to compare Kashtanka’s reaction to Ivan Ivanych’s death to Chekhov’s lasting inability to cope with his brother’s death. Nikolai’s death was the very first death in Chekhov’s family, and it caused a lot of pain, anxiety, and feelings of remorse. In a similar way, it is fair to assume that a seriously ill Chekhov might also have found comfort in being immersed in various problems that required his immediate attention. Chekhov’s unexpected trip to Sakhalin was undoubtedly provoked by his brother’s death and the writer’s desire to not just change the scenery but to also fill each hour with elemental efforts to sustain life. As his letters reveal, the horse-drawn carts on which he traveled predictably kept getting stuck in the mud and turning over; there was a constant risk of colliding with ongoing carts; even when sleeping, one had to brace oneself against road bumps and potholes, or, if at sea, the pitching and rolling of the vessel. It would seem that Chekhov’s relatives were just as capable of providing this sort of distraction 30 Chekhov, “Kashtanka,” 139. 31 Ibid., 143. 32 Michel de Montaigne, “That to Philosophize is to Learn to Die,” in The Complete Works, trans. Donald M. Frame (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 74.

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in abundance. It is very likely that by sharing living accommodations with his parents and relatives, while constantly taking care of his sister and brothers (the younger and the older ones), Chekhov was not just fulfilling his filial and brotherly obligations but was also creating the conditions for his own normal functioning as a very sick man. As many of his letters suggest, writing came most naturally to him while at home. In his little-known story “A Letter,” Chekhov lets his aspiring writer share his vision of what he truly needs in order to lead a productive life: Every day, I need to see, close to me, my sufferer-father. Every night, I need to hear him, in his sleeplessness, thinking out loud about my hard labor–convict brother. Once or twice every three months, I need my other mad-monk brother to visit our home just to hear him damn, with blazing eyes, modern civilization and see him go back to his monastery again. My life wouldn’t be full if, at least once a week, I didn’t see Travnikov. My love for him grows ever stronger even as he is being sucked, ever more deeply, into the quagmire of his avid, inexorable, torment-filled thoughts. . . . And what a darling our old deacon Pavel Denisovich is! Every single day, for the last two years, he has been dying but cannot ever die. He himself makes fun of his survivability, “I die and die and never ever die!” Life is great, Mariya Sergeyevna! True, it’s hard and fleeting but how rich, intelligent, and diverse it is! Life is wondrous! Travnikov poisons himself by pining for immortality and eternal bliss; I, for one, am not so avid and am entirely content with my own life, so brief and trivial though it may be. Life is beautiful!33

The draft of “A Letter” was found in 1907, several years after Chekhov’s death. Handwriting and paper experts conclude that it was written between 1888 and 1892.34 Thus we will never know if this so-called fragment (which actually reads as a finished humorous story) was written prior to or after his trip to Sakhalin. In any case, it offers an interesting, if ironic, commentary on writers’ sources of inspiration and sustainability. In some sense, Chekhov was a variant of his Darling, the character of “The Darling” (Dushechka, 1899), who pined away in the absence of someone to take care of. The Darling is at her most creative when she is in full care mode. 33 Chekhov, Sochineniia, 7:516. Alexander Burak’s translation. 34 Editors’ commentary in Chekhov, Sochineniia, 7:718–19. Alexander Burak’s translation.

“Homo Sachaliensis”: Chekhov’s “Character” as a Strategy     Chapter 4

Chekhov’s friend and fellow writer Ignaty Potapenko believed that the trip to Sakhalin ultimately had no impact on Chekhov’s creativity, since he had not written any fictional accounts of that trip and had rarely mentioned his journey in their frequent conversations.35 As our focus on the family issues contributing to the journey to Sakhalin reveals, this is not quite true. In his first post-­Sakhalin story, “Gusev” (December 1890), Chekhov makes his dying consumptive a great family man. Gusev is single, and for the last few years he has been an army recruit in the Russian Far East, but all he can think of are his relatives. Gusev worries that without his help his alcoholic brother will not be able to support his wife, children, and their old parents. Gusev’s situation mimics Chekhov’s own family drama, with his older brother Alexander being an alcoholic and an irresponsible father, husband, and son. Chekhov rewards Gusev’s devotion by giving him an opportunity to see his relatives in his dreams. He makes the signs of Gusev’s terminal illness less frightening by blending them with the joy of seeing his family: “But all the same he is glad to have seen his family. Joy takes his breath away, gives him gooseflesh all over, quivers in his fingers.”36 Even if Potapenko was right and Chekhov’s trip to Sakhalin did not result in his conquering of new dazzling literary summits, it played a pivotal role in Chekhov’s exploration of his inner space and its boundaries, in acquiring meaning in life that had his family as its hub. In the following chapter I examine Chekhov’s similarly significant “journey” through the steppe that allowed him to break into the literary pantheon.

35 I. N. Potapenko, “Neskol´ko let s A. P. Chekhovym,” in A. P. Chekhov v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel´stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1960), 338. 36 Anton Chekhov, “Gusev,” in Stories, trans. Richard Pevear and Larisa Volokhonsky (New York: Bantam, 2000), 110.

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CHAPTER 5

The Steppe as a Story of Humble and Spectacular Beginnings

O

n January 1, 1888, Chekhov informed his fellow writer Ivan Leont´ev-Shcheglov that he had begun writing “a steppe story.” “I’m writing but I can smell no hay,” he grumbled.1 The Steppe was Chekhov’s first lengthy work written purposely for a “thick” journal, the Northern Herald. Compared to his previous works, The Steppe turned out to be the most demanding in terms of creative effort: “I have expended so much vital force and energy on The Steppe that it will be a long time before I recover enough to start writing something serious again.”2 In his frank letters to writer friends in January and February 1888, Chekhov talks mostly about his fears, boredom, and apprehension that The Steppe would fail to be a success: [To Korolenko:] On your friendly advice I have begun a short novelette for the Northern Herald. By way of a beginning, I have undertaken to describe the steppe, the people of the steppe, and the things I experienced in the steppe. It’s a good theme, and I’m enjoying writing about it, but unfortunately, since I’m not used to writing anything long and am afraid of writing to excess, I’ve gone to another extreme: every page comes out as compact as a little story, and the scenes keep piling up, crowding each other, getting in each other’s way, and ruining the general impression. . . . A writer, you for instance, will understand me, but the reader will get bored and drop the whole thing.3 [To Grigorovich:] Since I am not used to writing anything long and am constantly, as is my wont, afraid of writing too much, I’ve gone to the 1 Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v tridtsati tomakh, part 2, Pis´ma, 2:166. 2 Ibid., 206. 3 Heim and Karlinsky, Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought, 89–90.

The Steppe as a Story of Humble and Spectacular Beginnings    Chapter 5 other extreme. . . . You will understand my steppe, I know, and you will pardon my unwitting sins for its sake. As it now turns out, the reason I have sinned unwittingly is that I do not yet know how to write long pieces. (K/H 91–92) [To Yakov Polonsky:] In a nutshell, I’m not satisfied with my little freak of a story. I find it cumbersome, boring, and overly specialized.4 [To Aleksei Pleshcheev:] I feel that some places in my little freak of a story will please you, my dear poet, but as to the whole thing, it will hardly be pleasing . . . I expect the story to be 4–5 printer’s sheets in length, including 2 sheets with descriptions of nature and localities. What can be more boring?!”5 You are expecting something especially nice from me, but you may be setting yourself up for a major disappointment. I’m losing courage and fear that my Steppe will turn out to be a paltry little product. I take my time writing—the way gourmets eat their great snipe—appreciatively, deliberately, and slowly. Frankly speaking, I squeeze it out of myself, huffing and puffing only to remain dissatisfied in the end. I must admit, though, that, in places, I do manage to produce little “verses in prose.”6 [To Ivan Leont´ev-Shcheglov:] I’m finishing a manuscript for the Northern Herald. How difficult it is!7 Don’t expect anything especially good or anything good for that matter. You will grow disappointed in Atoine because Antoine, as I have now become entirely convinced, is incapable of writing long works.8 [To Dmitry Grigorovich:] I know that, in his afterlife, Gogol won’t be mad at me. In our literature, he is the tsar of the Steppe. I trespassed into his territory with the best of intentions but made a pretty good mess of things. Three quarters of the novella didn’t turn out well. . . . I guide my nine-year-old 4 Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v tridtsati tomakh, part 2, Pis´ma, 2:178. 5 Ibid., 180. 6 Ibid., 182. 7 Ibid., 181. 8 Ibid., 189.

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Part One    Beginnings and Endings protagonist through the eight chapters of The Steppe, already knowing that, later in his life, the boy will find himself in St. Petersburg or Moscow where he will eventually come to a bad end. If The Steppe has a minimum of success, I will write a sequel. I purposely made the novella read like an incomplete literary work. You will see that it gives the impression of being the first part of a longer work.9

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Chekhov fans and scholars search for a continuation of The Steppe in Chekhov’s other writings;10 provide masterly analyses of the inexhaustible multidimensionality of The Steppe;11 and evaluate its protagonist’s potential for further narratives.12 The idea that The Steppe marked a new turn in Chekhov’s creative work has been expressed by several Chekhov scholars. In this chapter I go further than that and interpret The Steppe in terms of Edward Said’s “beginning intention” and its development into a work of literature.13 According to Said, in order to begin to write, the author must first sense an inner confidence that the beginning s/he chooses is indeed the beginning of the narrative s/he has in mind. The space between the beginning and the ending of a literary work exists somewhere on its own, as it were. All the author has to do is fill that empty space with content of his/her own: “What is really anterior to a search for a method, to a search for a temporal beginning, is not merely an initiative, but a necessary certainty, a genetic optimism, that continuity is possible as intended by the act of beginning. Stretching from start to finish is a fillable space, or time, pretty much there but, like a foundling, awaiting an author or a speaker to father it, to authorize its being.”14 In The Steppe, Said’s

9 Ibid., 190. 10 Marena Senderovich, “Chekhov’s Existential Trilogy,” in Anton Chekhov Rediscovered: A Collection of New Studies with a Comprehensive Bibliography, ed. Savely Senderovich and Munir Sendich, special issue of Russian Language Journal (1987): 77–91. 11 Michael Finke, Metapoesis: The Russian Tradition from Pushkin to Chekhov. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 134–66; Radislav Lapushin, Dew on the Grass: The Poetics of Inbetweenness in Chekhov (New York: Peter Lang, 2010). 12 Vera Zubareva, Chekhov v XXI veke: Pozitsionnyi stil´ i komediia novogo tipa (Idyllwild: Charles Schlacks, Jr., 2015). 13 “For the critic a novel begins, as it does for the novelist who wrote it, with the intention to write a novel and not a play or a poem,” Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), 13. 14 Ibid., 46–48; my emphasis.

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curious metaphor is fully realized. The novel ends with Nastasya Petrovna Toskunova gladly adopting her foundling, Egorushka: “Lord!’ she said, wringing her hands. “Olechka’s little son! What a joy! Just like his mother! Exactly!” . . . Nastasya Petrovna embraced Egorushka once more, called him a little angel, and tearfully began setting the table. In three minutes Egorushka was already sitting beside her, answering her endless questions, and eating rich, hot cabbage soup. . . . His bed was made up on a trunk, and he was informed that if he wanted to eat during the night, he should go out to the corridor and take some of the chicken that was there on the windowsill, covered with a plate.15

Chekhov, who at the age of sixteen was left behind alone in his native city of Taganrog to earn a living for himself and the rest of the family who were on the run from creditors, was fully aware of the advantages of Egorushka’s new life in the home of his mother’s best friend. As for the fact that Egorushka ended up in the household of Toskunova (a last name derived from the Russian words for “melancholy” or “depression” [toska]) and not with someone bearing the name Schastlivtseva (a last name derived from the Russian word for “happiness” [shchast´e]), it is most likely a reflection of Chekhov’s previously expressed intention to make the character of Egorushka “come to a bad end” and an indication of Chekhov’s own state of mind. At this point in his life, Chekhov was preoccupied with thoughts of abandoning the all-toofamiliar genre of short story and devoting himself to writing novels. From 1886 onward, Chekhov was under heavy pressure to switch over to novel writing from his mentors Grigorovich (1822–1900), Pleshcheev (1825–93), and Aleksei Suvorin (1834–1912), whose literary careers were made in the golden period of the Russian novel. Chekhov was so anxious to be done with The Steppe that in response to Pleshcheev’s question of when he was going to start work on a sequel he killed Father Khristofor (with a stroke of the pen) and made the foreseeable future of the other characters utterly uninteresting: “As for [The Steppe], I do intend to continue [it], but not just now. Silly old Father Khristofor has already passed away. Mme Branitskaya is living in terrible conditions. Varlamov is still whirling around.”16 15 Anton Chekhov, The Steppe, in Anton Chekhov: The Complete Short Novels, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 110–12. Further references to this edition are given as P/V in the body of the text. 16 Barlett and Phillips, Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters, 127.

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Thematically, The Steppe falls into the category of short stories about how grownups, children, and even animals cope with their fear and lack of confidence in the face of difficult, unfamiliar circumstances. Such circumstances may involve strange people, new surroundings, a new routine, or the necessity to sum things up in the face of imminent death. For example, the theme of coping with strange and life-threatening situations dominates such works as “Grisha” (1886), “Kashtanka” (1887/1891), and “A Boring Story” (1889). From this perspective, The Steppe is interesting in that the unfamiliar situation affects not only the nine-year-old Egorushka but also the author of the story, who is fearful and unsure of himself in the process of portraying his protagonist’s progress. In other words, The Steppe is not only about “some anxious moments” that Chekhov once had to live through on the steppe. It is also a reflection of the author’s anxieties in the process of writing his first novel. The author’s painful awareness of being alone and vulnerable in an unusually boundless narrative terrain is superimposed on the anxiousness of a nine-year-old boy who is unexpectedly separated from his mother and sent on his way to a city he does not know, and where he will soon start his studies at the local grammar school. A symbiosis of big and small is already set up in the title of the story—The Steppe (The Story of a Journey), where the main title signifies boundlessness and the subtitle offers a welcome clarification and a sense of a beginning and an ending. Even if we agree with Alexander Chudakov that the narrator is very different from Egorushka and can see things that Egorushka is incapable of seeing,17 it is still striking that, in this particular case, the narrator is oversensitive, easily frightened, and prone to see danger, often mortal, where there is none. All these characteristics are quite untypical of narrators in Chekov’s writings. In a famous letter of March 25, 1886, Grigorovich urged Chekhov to write “several excellent, genuine works of verbal art. You will commit a grievous moral sin if you don’t live up to such expectations.”18 A little earlier, Chekhov had received “an earnest letter from Suvorin” on the same subject. “I began making plans to write something worthwhile [Chekhov uses the word “putёvoe,” which literally means taking the right road], yet I still had no faith in my own literary worth [putёvost’]” (K/H 59), Chekhov writes back to Grigorovich. It is interesting that Chekhov’s first “worthwhile work of verbal art”—The Steppe— describes a journey (an experience of being on the road) and the stages of its progress: “I felt I’ve made a lot of headway and that there are passages that 17 A. P. Chudakov, Poetika Chekhova (Moscow: Nauka, 1971), 107–16. 18 Quoted in Letopis´ zhizni i tvorchestva A. P. Chekhova, vol. 1 (Moscow: Nasledie, 2000), 236.

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smell of hay, but on the whole, I’m ending up with something odd and much too original” (K/H 91). The symbolic nature of Egorushka’s struggle with evil and boredom is convincingly revealed in the works of other researchers.19 For my part, I would add here that the boredom and discomfort The Steppe’s characters keep talking about may well reflect Chekhov’s own state of mind in the course of writing the short novel. The burden fulfilling the enormous task of writing a short novel, imposed on him by other people, could not but weigh heavily on his mind. It is no accident that, in the first sentence of the story, the Gogolian britzka does not “rattle down” the road, as one would expect, but rolls down the road “with thunder,” an odd expression in Russian that many would consider irritating and bewildering “bad style:” “On an early July morning a battered, springless britzka . . . rolled out of the district town of N., in Z--------- province, and went thundering down the post road” (P/V 3). Egorushka “hates” the britzka (“The boy peered at the familiar places, and the hateful britzka raced past and left it all behind”), while finding the cemetery “cozy” (“cozy green cemetery,” “the white crosses . . . peeped merrily from behind the wall”) (P/V 4–5). Egorushka’s profound boredom is also the boredom of his creator, who was not accustomed to writing lengthy fiction prose. At the peak of his work on The Steppe, Chekhov confessed to Pleshcheev: “To write lengthy prose pieces is very boring and much more difficult than to write short pieces.”20 “The effort and strain of writing at such unfamiliar length has quite tired me out” (B/P, 124). This last is a quote from Chekhov’s letter to the same Pleshcheev on the day Chekhov finished The Steppe. These authorial sentiments find their way into the narrative and are felt throughout the story. At the beginning of the very first day, “it seemed [to Egorushka] that he had already been riding and bobbing about for a long time, that the sun had already been baking his back for a long time. They had not yet gone ten miles, but he was already thinking: ‘Time for a rest!’” (P/V 9). Chekhov creates a hero whose age makes it possible for the author to express his fears and anxieties in clear, straightforward terms. In response to Grigorovich’s observations on the increasing rate of suicide in Russia, Chekhov 19 Savely Senderovich, “Anton Chekhov and St. George the Dragonslayer (An Introduction to the Theme),” in Anton Chekhov Rediscovered: A Collection of New Studies with a Comprehensive Bibliography, ed. Savely Senderovich and Munir Sendich, special issue of Russian Language Journal (1987): 167–87; Zubareva, Chekhov v XXI veke.; M. Ch. Larionova, “V nashei literature on stepnoi tsar´: Step´ Gogolia i Chekhova” (2012), http://domgogolya.ru/science/ researches/1213. 20 Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v tridtsati tomakh, part 2, Pis´ma, 2:180.

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underscores the peculiarities of Russian life: “Russian life hits people very hard; it hits you like a ton of bricks. In western Europe, life cramps and suffocates people; in Russia, people die because there is too much space to live in. . . . The little persons die from their inability to get their bearings in all that space.”21 The Steppe depicts both the cramped suffocating life and the boundlessness of the steppe. What is most surprising in Egorushka is his ability to orient himself in unknown surroundings: some things help him recall other things, and some things have been seen before so that he knows how to control his emotions. His mind is flexible and ready for action. He is quick to associate Father Khristofor with Robinson Crusoe—the fictional character famous for surviving the test of limited space and infinite time. Chekhov subjects Egorushka to trial by steppe, which the boy passes successfully, despite his young age, complete dependence on the people around him, and the logistics of the journey. Finding himself on a wide steppe road, Egorushka is not scared; he begins to imagine Roman chariots and Russian fairy-tale warriors, thus quickly appropriating the unfamiliar space around him. And although Chekhov was preparing an inglorious ending for his hero,22 we do not become witness to it: his plans to write a sequel were never realized. Readers of The Steppe will remember the detailed description of the first two days of Egorushka’s journey, the slow unfolding of the plot in the other chapters, and the absence of any description of the day that precedes the evening thunderstorm in the penultimate chapter of the story. It is as if Chekhov and Egorushka were both getting into their respective roles of narrator and traveler by finding things to do in “real time” (for Chekhov) and in the created time inside the narrative (for Egorushka.) The frequent “lyrical digressions” in the Gogolian troika-bird tradition are striking not only because of their lyricism and beauty but also because they sound contrived, as if they have been written “to kill time,” as Egorushka himself puts it, wondering how to protect himself from the heat of another day on the steppe: “How to kill that long time and where to hide from the heat? A tricky problem” (P/V 15); and “The mournful song now died down, now drifted again through the stagnant, stifling air, the brook burbled monotonously, the horses munched, and time dragged on endlessly, as if it, too, had congealed and stopped. It seemed that a hundred years had passed since morning” (P/V 18). Egorushka’s wondering about how to fill the empty hours of the day brings to mind a writer facing a blank sheet of paper. 21 Ibid., 190. 22 Zubareva, Chekhov v XXI veke.

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Egorushka’s patience and ability to sit tight—at the beginning of the journey he finds it difficult to sit still next to Deniska—are well rewarded at the end of a very long first day of travel: You ride for an hour, two hours. . . . On the way you come upon a silent old barrow or a stone idol set up God knows when or by whom, a night bird noiselessly flies over the ground, and steppe legends gradually come to your mind, stories of passing strangers, tales of some old nanny of the steppe, and all that you yourself have managed to see and grasp with your soul. And then, in the chirring of the insects, in the suspicious figures and barrows, in the blue sky, in the moonlight, in the flight of a night bird, in everything you see and hear, you begin to perceive the triumph of beauty, youth, flourishing strength, and a passionate thirst for life. (P/V 42–43)

That the story has finally got underway becomes clear after the narrator gets to move not only the battered britzka but also the whole gigantic wagon train: For two minutes it was silent, as if the wagon train had fallen asleep, and you could hear only the clanking of the bucket tied to the rear of the britzka gradually dying away in the distance. But then at the head of the train someone shouted: “Gee-up, Kiriukha!” The wagon at the very front creaked, after it the second, the third. . . . Egorushka felt the wagon he was lying on sway and also creak. The train got moving. (P/V 44)

At the end of that never-ending day, Egorushka “laughed again with pleasure . . . and began to fall asleep the way he used to fall asleep at home in his bed” (P/V 44). It seems that the narrator is also beginning to feel as if he were at home: he can now see the story lines of written and yet-to-be-written literary works (The Cherry Orchard, “The Late Flowers,” “The Black Monk,” “The Sleepy,” The Seagull, “The Bride,” “The Bishop”) everywhere around him. On entering the coaching inn grounds, the travelers can see “a pathetic little cherry orchard” (P/V 30). In the next chapter, unpleasant odors are replaced with “a scent of hay, dried grass, and late flowers,” and “you see a silhouette like a monk’s standing just by the road. . . . The figure draws near, grows, now it comes even with the britzka, and you see that it is not a man but a solitary bush

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or a big stone” (P/V 42). “The suspicious monk-like figures seem blacker and look more sullen against the bright background of the night” (P/V 42). “Sleep, sleep, sleep” (P/V 44), Egorushka echoes Varka, the protagonist in the short story “Sleepy.” Konstantin, consumed and delirious with love for his wife of eighteen days—he also kills a bird (a bustard [дрофа]), which the wagon train drivers cannot eat—is a precursor of Konstantin Treplev, the love-stricken suicidal character in The Seagull. Varlamov is a close relative of Lopakhin from The Cherry Orchard. The eighth chapter introduces a sick bishop, a future character in one of Chekhov’s last stories (“The Bishop”): Father Khristofor intends “to go to see the bishop after the liturgy, but they say he’s sick” (P/V 103). The singing grass (“in its song, half dead, already perished, wordless, but plaintive and sincere . . . it insisted that it wanted passionately to live, that it was still young and would be beautiful if it were not for the heat and drought” [P/V 16]), will later reincarnate as a mother passionately wanting to live and Nadezhda herself (“The Bride,” 1903). A double of Toskunova, according to several researchers, appears in Chekhov’s much later story, “The Darling” (1899). I see the Darling, first of all, as a creative personality. She is not afraid to try herself in different roles, taking advantage of the unique opportunities to put her ideas into practice consistently and without external interference. She first selflessly tends to her father; she then takes equally selfless care of the theater producer, Kukin; the timber merchant, Pustovalov; a veterinarian; and finally the veterinarian’s son, Sasha. Pustovalov dies shortly after Kukin, thus clearing the way for the Darling to start a new undertaking with a clear conscience. The three men quickly drop out of the picture as unproductive ideas. They are needed as stopgaps until someone worth living for appears in the Darling’s life—little Sasha. (Here again we have the recurring theme of adopting a foundling.) One can only guess at the enormity of the effort that Chekhov expended, while resisting self-justifying distractions, in the process of taking The Steppe to its vaguely discernible ending. He writes to Grigorovich: “Your letter did not make me too ashamed, since it caught me at work on something for a thick journal. Here then is my response to the essential part of your letter: I have made a start on a substantial work. I have completed slightly more than thirty pages and anticipate adding to them another sixty or so. . . . I shall resume my unfinished novel in the summer” (B/P 118–19). One can sense in this progress report the joy of a person who begins to believe that now he will almost certainly complete the task that at first seemed almost impossible to carry out.

The Steppe as a Story of Humble and Spectacular Beginnings    Chapter 5

The self-deprecating tone of Chekhov’s letters is reflected in Egorushka’s dependent position. He is constantly being reminded of his duty to study and of his being indebted to his uncle and his mother. At the end of the story, Egorushka is suddenly given the ennobling surname Knyazev (“of princes” in Russian), which immediately conjures up in the reader’s mind the popular Russian saying that goes, literally, “from dirt to princedom”—an equivalent of the English “from rags to riches.” It is also a hint that it is not going to be easy for Egorushka to prove his worth in the new milieu he is about to enter. The family name of Egorushka’s chief enemy, Dymov, contains an anagram of Grigorovich’s first letters in his name and patronymic—Dmitry Vasilyevich (D. V.). Egorushka is scared and disgusted when he witnesses Dymov wantonly kill a baby grass snake (“uzh,” “uzhik” in Russian) or watches as the seemingly squeamish Vasya unexpectedly eats a little goby alive. Numerous words in the seventh chapter, marking a breakdown in the relationship between Egorushka and Dymov, contain the caution- or fear-inspiring sound clusters “uzh [уж],” “ush [уш],” “ushch [ущ],” and “yush/yushch” [юш/ющ]. It is as if the text itself were in awe of the scary, unpredictable reader: - Ты хуже всех! Я тебя терпеть не могу!23 “You are the worst of all!! I can’t stand you!” (P/V 87) Егорушка почувствовал, что дышать уже нечем. [83] Egorushka felt he had no air left to breathe. (P/V 88) Он ужасался и в отчаянии спрашивал себя, как это и зачем попал он в неизвестную землю, в компанию страшных мужиков? [83] He was terrified and asked himself in despair how and why he had ended up in an unknown land in the company of frightening muzhicks. (P/V 88) Ему становилось холодно и так жутко. [83] The thought that he was forgotten and abandoned to the mercy of fate made him feel cold and so eerie. (P/V 88) Должно быть, и подводчикам было жутко. После того, как Егорушка убежал от костра, они . . . заговорили о чем-то, что оно идет и 23 Chekhov, “Step´,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v tridtsati tomakh, part 1, Sochineniia, 7:82. Figures in brackets correspond to page numbers in this edition; my emphasis.

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Part One    Beginnings and Endings что поскорее нужно собираться и уходить от него. . . . Они скоро поужинали, потушили костер и молча стали запрягать. [83] The wagoners must also have felt eerie. After Egorushka ran away from the campfire, they . . . began saying in low and muted voices that something was coming and that they had to make ready quickly and get away from it. . . . They ate a quick supper, put out the fire, and silently began harnessing up. (P/V 88) не то плачущим, но то досадующим голосом. . . [84] in a half-plaintive, half-vexed voice. . . (P/V 89) Даль заметно почернела и уж чаще, чем каждую минуту, мигала бледным светом, как веками. [84] The distance had become noticeably more black and now blinked more than once a minute with a pale light, as if through eyelids. (P/V 89) - Скушно мне! — донесся с передних возов крик Дымова, и по голосу его можно было судить, что он уж опять начинал злиться. — Скушно! [84–85] “I am bored!” Dymov’s cry came from the front wagons, and one could tell by his voice that he was beginning to get angry again. “Bored!” (P/V 90)

In 1888–89 Chekhov had to bend over backward to explain to Grigorovich his refusal to write a continuation of The Steppe or any other lengthy work—the way a thrifty storekeeper only buys a new consignment of goods after making sure that there is demand for them: “If the Steppe has a minimum of success, I will write a sequel.”24 A few months later Chekhov further explicated his unwillingness to embark immediately on writing another novel: I want to write a novel, and I have a wonderful subject; there are times when I am gripped by a passionate desire to get down to it, but I evidently lack the necessary strength. I have begun work on it but am afraid to go on. . . . I am not rushing to stake everything on a decisive step at the moment. For if the novel were to turn out badly, I would have lost the game forever! . . . Until the time comes for me to concentrate on the novel I shall carry on writing what I love, that is short stories of one to one and a half 24 Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v tridtsati tomakh, part 2, Pis´ma, 2:190.

The Steppe as a Story of Humble and Spectacular Beginnings    Chapter 5 p­ rinter’s sheet or less. Inflating trivial subjects so as to fill up large canvases is tedious work, although it can be profitable. . . . I shall bide my time until it is more propitious. (B/P 154–55)

In his letter to Suvorin, Chekhov explained that he did not write lengthy works because of his difficult material situation and the expectations of the publishers of thick journals: I write the beginning calmly and don’t hold myself back, but by the middle I start feeling uneasy and apprehensive that the story will come out too long. I have to keep in mind that the Northern Herald is low in funds and that I am one of its more expensive contributors. That’s why my beginning always seems as promising as if I started a novel, the middle is crumpled together and timid, and the end is all fireworks, like the end of a brief sketch. (K/H 118)

That it was not only a matter of the deadline for submitting the story becomes clear from the same lengthy letter in which Chekhov declines Suvorin’s offer to provide Chekhov with material support for the duration of his writing another novel: Money won’t help me figure out what I should do. An extra thousand rubles won’t settle my problem, and a hundred thousand is a castle in the air. Besides, whenever I do have money (maybe because I’m so unused to it, I don’t know), I become extremely carefree and lazy; I feel as if I could wade across the seas. . . . I need privacy and time. (K/H 119)

After the usual pleasantries and his signature, as if succumbing to an irresistible desire to occupy himself with something easy and brief in time, Chekhov suddenly adds: “There is a mosquito flying around my room. Where did it come from?” (K/H 119). In March 1889, Chekhov described his future novel to the Northern Herald’s editor, Anna Evreinova, in a way that practically invited her to reject it at its very inception: There is nothing in the novel inciting anyone to revolution, but the censors will ruin it anyway. Half the characters say, “I don’t believe in God,” it has a father whose son has been sent to life-long labor for armed resistance, a police chief who is ashamed of his uniform, a marshal of the

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Part One    Beginnings and Endings n­ obility whom everybody hates, etc. There is a wealth of material for the red pencil. (K/H 132)

Earlier in 1888, Chekhov, elated by receiving the Pushkin Prize, wrote to Suvorin that he had not yet written his best works and that his worthwhile literary activity had not yet begun: To tell the whole truth, even though I did receive the prize, I still have not begun my literary career. The plots for five stories and two novels are languishing away in my head. One of the novels I conceived so long ago that some of the characters have grown out of date before my ever getting them down to paper. I have a whole army of people in my head begging to be let out and ordered what to do. Everything I’ve written to date is nonsense compared with what I would like to have written and would be overjoyed to be writing. (K/H 118)

In June 1842, Nikolai Gogol (1809–52) wrote to the celebrated poet Vasily Zhukovsky (1783–1852) a similar letter, which he enclosed in the parcel with what he then thought was the first volume of Dead Souls: There lives in my soul a deep irresistible faith that heavenly powers will help me ascend that ladder that I am destined to climb, although I still stand on its lowest bottom rungs. What hard work, earthly travel, and assiduous training of the soul still lie ahead of me! My soul must be purer than mountain snow and clearer than heavens. Only then will I gain enough strength to begin to do great deeds and embark on lofty pursuits. Only then will the mystery of my existence be resolved. . . . I am sending you my Dead Souls. It is the first volume. . . . I have amended it a great deal since I first read the initial chapters from it. However, I cannot help seeing its insignificance compared to the other parts of the novel that are to follow. In relation to the future volumes, the first part is like a front porch hastily tacked by a local architect on to the grand palace whose construction is yet to begin.25

25 N. V. Gogol´, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel´stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1952), http://predanie.ru/gogol-nikolay-vasilevich/book/69207-pisma1842-1845-gg/#toc3.

The Steppe as a Story of Humble and Spectacular Beginnings    Chapter 5

Due to a cruel quirk of fate, this letter marked not the beginning but the end of Gogol’s literary career. No matter how much time Gogol spent in Rome hiding from unwelcome advisers and fans, their well-intentioned urgings for him to produce a continuation of an already completed work turned a brilliant writer into a deeply unhappy ethnographer and anthropologist constantly doubting his talent and intuition and forced to gather minutiae and details supposedly necessary for the sequels.26 Although the trilogy weighed heavily on Gogol, interfering with both his writing and his happiness, he and his fans continued to hope for a miracle. It is hard to say who was guiltier in this situation—the readers, with their excessive expectations, or Gogol himself, with his belief in his limitless potential. As for Chekhov, in spring 1890, he had enough strength and willpower to evade Gogol’s fate by escaping not to Rome but to the barely accessible island of Sakhalin. In an amusing reversal of roles, in one of his letters to Suvorin in 1899, Chekhov put Suvorin in the position of an aspiring novelist and made him think about the meaning of life and the form of the novel: Chekhov writes today: “If I were you, I would write a novel. If you wanted to, you could now write an interesting novel—and a big novel, too. Especially since you’ve bought yourself an estate where you could seclude yourself and work.” If he were I, he would certainly write a novel. But being who I am, I won’t. Life is not clear to me. If I were writing a novel, I would have to give it a very special form—a form I have grown accustomed to and comfortable with. It would be a topical satire in which I could express my own thoughts the way Pushkin did in Eugene Onegin. To achieve that aim in a novel as a form of fiction prose, one would have to present one’s thoughts as if they belonged to the hero of the novel. And this mode of self-expression is alien to me. Under the influence of Chekhov’s words, I went so far as to open a notebook. I sat and thought, staring at the blank pages, and then put the notebook back in the desk drawer. No. It’s too late.27

To what degree could reading Chekhov or Tolstoy indeed influence one’s life? This is the question I address in part 2, “Transcending Death.” 26 See Karlinsky, The Sexual Labyrinth, 240–41. 27 A. S. Suvorin, Dnevnik, textual analysis and deciphering N. A. Roskina, ed. Donald Rayfield and O. E. Makarova (Moscow: Garnett Press/Nezavisimaia gazeta, 1999), 338.

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Photographs

Fig.1  Tolstoy and Chekhov in Gaspra,1901.

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Fig. 2  The Tolstoy family in Yasnaya Poliana, August 1887.

Fig. 3  Tolstoy and Chertkov working together in Yasnaya Poliana, March, 1909. The back side of this antique postcard says in Russian: “L.N. Tolstoy and his friend V. G. Chertkov.”

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Fig. 4  Tolstoy reading his [new] work to Chertkov, 1909.

Fig. 5  Uncle Vanya, Act 1, Moscow Art Theatre. Voinitsky says to Yelena: “Let me tell you about my love. Don’t chase me away. That alone will give me the greatest joy.”

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Fig. 6  Chekhov, his friends and family in 1890, before his trip to the Island of Sakhalin. From left to right upper row: Ivan Chekhov, Alexander Chekhov, Pavel Yegorovich Chekhov. Second row: M. Korneeva, Lika Mizinova, Maria Chekhova, Yevgeniia Yakovlevna Chekhova, Seryozha Kiselev. First row: Mikhail Chekhov, Anton Chekhov.

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Fig. 7  D. N. Kardovsky’s illustration of Chekhov’s “Kashtanka.”

Fig. 8  Chekhov and Moscow Art Theatre actors, May 1899; sitting Raevskaya, Artyom, Chekhov, Lilina, Tikhomirov, Meyerhold; standing Vishnevsky, Luzhsky, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, Olga Knipper, Stanislavsky, Roksanova, Nikolaeva, Andreev.

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Fig. 9  Chekhov reading The Seagull to the Moscow Art Theatre members, May 1899; sitting Raevskaya, Vishnevsky, Artyom, Olga Knipper, Stanislavsky, Chekhov, Lilina, Tikhomirov, Meyerhold; standing Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, Luzhsky, Andreev, Nikolaeva, Roksanova.

Fig. 10  Bunin in 1937.

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Fig. 11  A dust jacket for the 1933 Soviet edition of The Cherry Orchard. Courtesy of  The New York Public Library.

Fig. 12  Badenweiler at the turn of the century. Hotel Römerbad is at the forefront to the right [my private collection].

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Fig. 13  A portrait of Turgenev in 1881.

CHAPTER 6

Reading Chekhov through Meyerhold’s Eyes

W

hat should students of literature make of the books a performing artist reads and the roles he plays? How should one account for the intricate relationship between a character in a novel or play and the real person, the subject matter of one’s research? The great actor and director Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874–1940) presents an interesting case study. One could argue that the trajectory of his life was delineated by his role as Treplev in the Moscow Art Theatre production of The Seagull in 1898. Of course, when Chekhov was writing The Seagull in 1895–96, he was unaware of Meyerhold’s existence. He was using the play as a testing ground both for his ability to write drama and for staging his personal relationships. But once finished, the play seemed to take on a life of its own, making people involved in the play’s productions reproduce its intricate entanglements in their own lives. Nobody has been compared to Treplev as frequently and consistently as Meyerhold.1 Nearly every Meyerhold scholar has tried to establish a parallel between his tragic death and that of his character. And there are grounds for this because back in the late 1890s and early the 1900s, Meyerhold openly identified himself with Treplev and repeatedly talked about committing suicide, as can be seen, for example, from his letter to Chekhov.2 His friends feared that one day he would take his own life for real in 1

Nikolai Volkov was the first to highlight the significance of the role of Treplev in shaping Meyerhold’s life in Meierkhol´d, vol. 1 (Moscow: Akademiia, 1929). Later he reiterated this point in his Teatral´nye vechera (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1966), 281. In his 1952 recollections of his first encounter with Meyerhold in the early 1900s, Aleksei Remizov deliberately merges Meyerhold with Treplev: “Now Treplev will go to my room and will shoot himself.” Remizov, Iveren´, in Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 8 (Moscow: Russkaia kniga, 2000), 350. 2 [Moscow, April 18, 1901] “I didn’t write to you and so didn’t provide concrete proof of my constant thoughts about you for the sole reason that I’m acutely aware of my uselessness in life and of the fact that nobody is interested in my soul-searching. I’m irritable, carping, and distrustful, and everybody thinks I’m an unpleasant person. And I’m suffering and thinking of suicide. Let everybody despise me” (442–43). All quotes from Meyerhold’s letters to Chekhov are from “Pis´ma Meierkhol´da k Chekhovu,” prepared for publication by

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the concluding scene of The Seagull.3 According to Shcherbakov, “Meyerhold remained a Treplev for the rest of his life. No wonder Chekhov liked him so much in this particular role.”4 By 1905 Meyerhold was no longer playing the role of Treplev, but this clearly did not stop him from seeing life through the prism of a TreplevTrigorin relationship. Thus, in the 1930s, Meyerhold remarked to Alexander Gladkov that the founders of the Moscow Art Theatre chose to follow not in Treplev’s but in Trigorin’s footsteps by faithfully reproducing the notorious “neck of a broken bottle glittering on a dam” in their early productions.5 In his play The Death of Meyerhold (2003), the writer and director Mark Jackson opens act 1 with a rehearsal of The Seagull at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1898. The play brilliantly exposes and exploits the dramatic possibilities of the Chekhov-Stanislavsky-Meyerhold triangle. Jackson comments, “Chekhov took Meyerhold under his wing, in a way, defending him to Stanislavsky. It seems as if certain segments in The Seagull were practically written with the two of them [Stanislavsky and Meyerhold] in mind! Though we know this isn’t really the case, it doesn’t seem too far-fetched when one compares the roles with the men who played them.”6 Jackson sees Stanislavsky and, to a lesser extent, Nemirovich-Danchenko as Meyerhold’s major opponents. At the same time, Chekhov is presented as a kind of guardian angel, while Meyerhold is portrayed as his grateful and faithful admirer. I don’t believe that Meyerhold’s attitude toward Chekhov was as straightforward as it may seem at first glance. It evolved. In this chapter I will look at how this attitude changed from 1898 to 1908 with a view to getting a better understanding of the importance of Chekhov and of his character Treplev in Meyerhold’s personal and artistic development. N. I. Gitovich, in Literaturnoe nasledstvo: Chekhov 68 (1960): 435–48. Figures in parentheses correspond to page numbers in this edition. 3 E. A. Polotskaia, “Chekhov i Meierkhol´d,” in Literaturnoe nasledstvo: Chekhov 68 (1960): 430. 4 V. A. Shcherbakov, “Chekhov i Meierkhol´d,” in Chekhoviana: Chekhov i “serebrianyi vek,” ed. M. O. Goriacheva (Moscow: Nauka, 1996), 204. 5 Aleksandr Gladkov, Meierkhol´d, vol. 1 (Moscow: Soiuz teatral´nykh deiatelei, 1990), 150. 6 Mark Jackson, private letter to the author. Although now it is almost impossible to picture Stanislavsky playing any other role but that of Treplev’s rival, in fact, he was first assigned to play the role of Dorn and only later was reassigned to play the role of Trigorin; discussed in S. D. Balukhaty, The Seagull Produced by Stanislavsky, trans. David Magarshak (New York: D. Dobson, 1952), 63. At some point, Nemirovich-Danchenko wanted Meyerhold to play the role of Trigorin as well. See V. E. Meierkhol´d, Nasledie, vol. 1 (Moscow: O. G. I., 1998), 213.

Reading Chekhov through Meyerhold’s Eyes    Chapter 6

Chekhov and Meyerhold The two famous photographs showing Chekhov and Meyerhold together among members of the theater in spring 1899 are tableaux vivants that were meant to illustrate a productive union between a playwright and the world of theater. Although one of the photographs is known as “Chekhov Reading The Seagull to the Actors of the Moscow Art Theatre,” both pictures were taken several months after the play’s first night, on the occasion of Chekhov’s brief visit to Moscow in early May. On May 15, Chekhov informed Pavel Iordanov that everybody who was currently taking part in The Seagull had posed for a picture with him. “The pictures show an interesting group of people,” Chekhov remarked.7 And interesting they were in more than one way. One picture shows Chekhov reading from his book, whereas the other portrays him looking straight into the camera. In this photograph, while everybody else pretends to be caught off guard and is either immersed in conversation (Artem), showing a notebook to the smaller group (Stanislavsky), reading (Tikhomirov), or eying other people (Roksanova, Vishnevsky, Luzhsky, and Meyerhold), Chekhov is the only one who is looking straight at the viewer. He appears oblivious of Nemirovich-Danchenko’s comments. Nor does he follow the gaze of Knipper, who is looking past him, apparently, at or through an unseen window. Chekhov is strangely armless—the arm and hand that are in the foreground belong to Artem. He is leaning slightly forward and to the left in order to be in full sight of the camera. Despite the awkwardness of his pose, Chekhov looks natural and at peace with himself. Meyerhold is positioned across from him, at the other end of the picture. Whether instructed to do so by the photographer or not, Meyerhold is studying Chekhov’s face and appears to be the only person in the picture to be interested in Chekhov to the exclusion of everything else. (Stanislavsky, for example, is positioned with his back to Chekhov.) Meyerhold’s hand clutches the armrest, and it looks as if he is about to jump to his feet. Meyerhold’s fixation on Chekhov makes him appear rude to Stanislavsky, whom he openly ignores, although structurally Meyerhold belongs to the Stanislavsky group (teacher and students). In 1899, Chekhov’s fame was at its peak. It is not accidental, therefore, that Meyerhold was captured looking up to the celebrated Chekhov rather than to the less well-known Stanislavsky as an example of success. And he was indeed looking at the right artist. In answer to Meyerhold’s plea “to help him 7 Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v tridtsati tomakh, part 2, Pis´ma, 8:179.

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in his work to prepare for the role” of Johannes in Lonely Lives by Hauptmann, Chekhov wrote: Don’t stress his nervousness to the point of allowing his neuropathological nature to obstruct or subjugate what is important: his loneliness, the sort of loneliness that only lofty, yet healthy (in the highest sense) personalities experience. Project a lonely man, and show his nervousness only insofar as the script indicates. . . . I know Konstantin Sergeevich [Stanislavsky] will insist on playing up his excessive nervousness; he’ll take an exaggerated view of it. But don’t give in, don’t sacrifice the beauty and power of your voice and delivery for something as trivial as a highlight. Don’t sacrifice them, because the irritation is in fact only a detail, a triviality.8

That the tubercular Chekhov felt it necessary to explain what he meant by “a healthy personality” reveals what he himself might have thought while projecting his own personality for posterity in the photograph with The Seagull cast. One can also attribute this 1899 photograph to a different genre (and, indeed, probably its intended one): the picture of a writer surrounded by his characters. As much as the professional photographer was responsible for Meyerhold’s position in this photograph, Chekhov and Stanislavsky were responsible for defining Meyerhold’s life by creating the character of Treplev. In order to understand why Meyerhold identified himself so completely with his character Treplev, we have to recall that The Seagull was written at a time when most playwrights, and to a certain extent Chekhov, would write their plays for specific theaters and would have in mind specific actors with their physical appearances and individual abilities to portray specific dramatic types. The process was reciprocal—the actors did their best to look like their characters in real life, while the playwrights did their best to create roles that would suit these specific actors.9 In My Life in Art Stanislavsky recalls the general atmosphere of the rehearsals of The Seagull in 1898: The directors did everything to help the young actors and show them the right path to art [by creating the] outer mood [of the play]. Very often this 8 Heim and Karlinsky, Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought, 368. 9 See Aleksandr Chepurov, A. P. Chekhov i Aleksandrinskii teatr na rubezhe vekov (St. Petersburg: Baltiiskie sezony, 2006), 86.

Reading Chekhov through Meyerhold’s Eyes    Chapter 6 mood influenced the actors. They felt outer truth, thought of their own life and these reminiscences evoked feelings of which Chekhov spoke. In such moments the actor stopped playing; he began to live the role, became the character he was portraying. This character naturally reflected the soul of the actor. Another person’s words and actions became the actor’s words and actions.10 It was a creative miracle. It was that most important and necessary mystery of the soul for which it is well worth to make sacrifices, endure, suffer and work in our art.11

In his recollections, Stanislavsky also comments on the unusually “complex and hard conditions” under which The Seagull was staged.12 Of course, the gravity of Chekhov’s illness in 1898 became apparent only after his death in 1904. But even if Stanislavsky retrospectively exaggerated the pressure the actors were under in 1898, his recollections do give a taste of the general atmosphere that molded such highly sensitive and impressionable actors as Meyerhold. The conditions under which we produced The Seagull were complex and hard. Chekhov was ill with a new attack of tuberculosis. His spiritual condition was such that if The Seagull should fail as it did when first staged in Petersburg, he would not be able to bear the blow. Another failure could prove fatal. . . . When we were on the stage there was an inner whisper in our hearts: “You must play well, you must play better than well; you must create not only success, but triumph, for if you do not, the man and writer you love will die, killed by your hands.”13

By all accounts, the rehearsals of The Seagull were typically conducted in an atmosphere of all-consuming fear, anxiety, and mutual love and adoration. Everybody was encouraged to look for new forms, new meanings, new relationships, and new sources of inspiration. Chekhov loomed large for everyone taking part in this production. In his letter to the writer Pёtr Boborykin, 10 In 1918, Meyerhold recalled his acting of the role of Treplev in 1898 speaking about himself in the third person singular: “When his suicide was announced, the actor who played Treplev would [always] fall down backstage.” Meierkhol´d, Nasledie, 1:241. 11 Konstantin Stanislavsky, My Life in Art (Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2004), 266; Stanislavsky’s italics. 12 Konstantin Stanislavsky, My Life in Art (Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2004), 266. 13 Ibid.

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Nemirovich-Danchenko gives the following account of why Chekhov was so dear and close to his own heart: Chekhov has special significance for me most likely because he and I are almost the same age, and he expresses all the distant sentiments that both he and I entertained in the years of our youth. He is like a talented me. So, it’s only natural that my soul feels such a deep affinity for him. . . . When I’m busy staging his plays, I feel like I’m staging mine. In him, I see myself as a writer, but a writer that is endowed with his [superior] talent.14

For Meyerhold the role of the unfortunate and perpetually unappreciated Treplev presented an outlet for the anger and resentment that he felt after he was asked to give up playing the role of the tsar Fedor Ioannovich in Aleksei Tolstoy’s eponymous play, a role that he had developed and cherished unlike any other role.15 Thus, despite Chekhov’s insistence that “suffering should be portrayed as it is in real life, that is, not with the arms and legs but by a glance, a nuance, gracefully, not with gesticulations,”16 his recommendations were largely ignored. According to Nemirovich-Danchenko, Meyerhold’s Treplev of act 1 was already the ruined and disillusioned Treplev that he was expected to become only by the beginning of act 4.17 Meyerhold’s infatuation with this character in part explains why he had increasingly fewer parts to play at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1899–1900. Chekhov’s suggestions to the founders to engage Meyerhold in the roles of Voinitsky and even Serebryakov were met with disapproval because Nemirovich-Danchenko feared that Meyerhold would play every other role the way he had played the role of Treplev—that is, with an overemphasis on psychological instability.18 One can easily understand why an aspiring artist like Meyerhold was attracted to The Seagull. It was the first play that portrayed Russian decadents (meaning innovators in 1898) in a truly sympathetic light. It also warned about 14 Danchenko is quoted in Igor Sukhikh, Chekhov v zhizni (Moscow: Vremia, 2010), 290. 15 Meyerkhol´d, Nasledie, 1:179. 16 In his letter to Knipper of January 2, 1900 (from which this quote is taken) Chekhov repeated verbatim some of the sections from the above quoted letter to Meyerhold: “I have written to Meyerhold in an effort to persuade him not to overdo his characterization of a tense person” (Donald Rayfield, Anton Chekhov: A Life [London: Harpers Collins, 1997], 431). 17 Polotskaia, “Chekhov i Meyerkhol´d,” 419. 18 Ibid., 420.

Reading Chekhov through Meyerhold’s Eyes    Chapter 6

the risks of upsetting young talented people—they might commit suicide. As is known, the first production of The Seagull at the Alexandrinsky Theater in St. Petersburg in 1896 brought Chekhov a lot of pain. He resolved never to write for the theater again. His fate as a playwright strangely repeated that of Treplev’s: a fiasco in 1896 and an impressive comeback two years later.19 Until Chekhov’s death, Meyerhold saw him as his mentor and a kindred spirit, and his letters to Chekhov are a testimony to his utter loneliness and his need for Chekhov’s art. Moscow. End of December 1901 We read time and again what you have written, Anton Pavlovich! Once again “The Duel,” “Ward No. 6,” “In the Line of Business. . . ” These stories bring back memories of our youth, sad but carefree. Once again the suppressed tears, the caress of poetry and the tremulous anticipation of a better future. . . . It is easier to live with you because you instill in people faith in a better future and help them be patient. Let others change their devotion to writers as if they were jackets; thousands of people like I will remain faithful to you forever, Anton Pavlovich. I have never felt as strong an affinity for anybody as I do for you. You are used to praise, and you are bored with such letters. Be that as it may. You are the essence of my life these days and I must thank you for your support. I vigorously shake your hand, and if I may, kiss you. Your loving Meyerhold. (443) Kherson (theater), September 1, 1903 Dearest Anton Pavlovich. It seems to me that you are angry with me for some reason. Tell me frankly. Why does it seem so to me? In response to our message (a photograph), you wrote Lazarevsky, but you never wrote a single line to me. I feel very hurt. (445)20

19 It would be safe to assume that, despite their difference in age, Chekhov’s personal life was largely known to Meyerhold. Because of Chekhov’s growing attachment to Knipper and the theater’s investment in her relationship with Chekhov, Chekhov came to be looked on as cultural property that had to be guarded and taken care of. His health, his disposition, his movements and plans for future plays and stories were largely known to the members of the theater. 20 Meyerhold and Lazarevskii sent Chekhov a photograph of the two of them from Sevastopol in 1903. The photograph bears the inscription by Meyerhold: “From pale Meyerhold to his God.” This photograph is on display in Chekhov’s study in the Chekhov Museum in Yalta (“Pis´ma Meierkhol´da k Chekhovu,” 445n).

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Part Two    Transcending Death Kherson, September 23, 1903 I’m so happy that you’re not angry. Forgive me for expressing my suspicion to you. I continue to be such a suspicious person. I was happy to hear that Olga Leonardovna is going to write to me. Tell her that I’ll be looking forward to her letter. So many good memories about you and her come to the surface of my mind. . . . The Theater, which I gave so much of my soul to, the tears I shed in your The Seagull, your kindness toward me, all of those things. . . . Life used to be so good. So you’re going to send me The Cherry Orchard. Please, don’t forget, dearest Anton Pavlovich! (446)

As Meyerhold’s intimate letters indicate (and as is hinted by the 1899 photograph), with regard to Chekhov Meyerhold acted more like the love-sick Nina Zarechnaya than the theater innovator Treplev. In a way, Meyerhold was similar to Nina in his unscrupulousness when he was urging Chekhov in 1904 to change his allegiance to the Moscow Art Theatre (and, by extension, also to his wife Olga Knipper) and join forces with him and another talented actress and entrepreneur, Vera Komissarzhevskaya. Although Chekhov did not respond to Meyerhold’s entreaties, he did like Meyerhold and wrote the role of the unfortunate Tuzenbakh in The Three Sisters with Meyerhold in mind. The play enjoyed a much greater success, however, once this role was assigned to Vasily Kachalov. Unlike Meyerhold, Kachalov interpreted his lovelorn Tuzenbach not as a misanthropic loner but as a charming dreamer.21 When Meyerhold left the Moscow Art Theatre in 1902, he kept on performing in Chekhov’s plays as well as directing several productions in provincial theaters. But his favorite role was invariably that of Treplev. For his own production of The Seagull in Kherson, Meyerhold invented a mise-en-scène with the dying seagull. The seagull was not killed by Treplev outright but only mortally wounded. According to a theater critic, the audience was invited to share the agony of the dying bird that lasted several minutes onstage: “The agony was not evoked by any stage effects but was seen in the expressions on the actors’ faces and was felt in the tone of their voices.”22 Meyerhold was so much taken with the role of a misunderstood artist that he threatened to 21 Polotskaia, “Chekhov i Meierkhol´d,” 421. 22 An anonymous critic, A. N-n, is quoted in Irina Uvarova, Smeёtsia v kazhdoi kukle charodei (Moscow: RGGU, 2001), 98.

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kill himself. Why didn’t he, then? The answer is that, fortunately, by 1906 he may have found a way to save Treplev from disgrace. To sum up at this point: Meyerhold’s relationship with Chekhov was a fusion of Meyerhold’s attitude toward the “real” Chekhov and the actor’s deep affection for one of the playwright’s most compelling stage characters—Konstantin Treplev, with whom Meyerhold openly identified. Treplev usually draws our sympathy owing to his talent and his unfortunate life. How does one combine the benefits of being an underdog and an outcast with the benefits of being famous, successful, and reasonably happy—these were the questions that, I think, Meyerhold might have been trying to answer in the period from 1904 to 1908. In other words, it seems that by 1904 Meyerhold had reached a dead end, a point of stasis, and he had to take Treplev and himself to a new stage of development. To appreciate what he did, we will first need to look at the text of The Seagull.

The Seagull The action of the play takes place at Sorin’s estate where he lives with his nephew Konstantin Treplev. Arkadina, who is Sorin’s sister and Kostya’s mother, comes for a short visit with her younger lover, the successful writer Trigorin. It turns out that Kostya has written a play that he is going to perform for his mother and other members of the household. The girl he loves, Nina Zarechnaya, plays the leading role in Kostya’s play. The play’s performance ends in a fiasco due to numerous interruptions from the audience. Nina feels disillusioned with Kostya and quickly falls in love with Trigorin, who is equally smitten with her. Kostya attempts to kill himself; fortunately, without success. As a result, Arkadina leaves the estate with Trigorin, and Nina follows shortly afterward. Act 4 takes place two years later. Kostya has apparently turned into a marginally successful writer and continues to live with his uncle. Once again, his mother and Trigorin come for a visit, and Treplev makes peace with the older writer. We learn that Nina Zarechnaya has had a child by Trigorin, but he abandoned her. She comes to visit Kostya and admits that she is still in love with Trigorin. Kostya commits suicide. End of play. For the purpose of my argument, we need to picture Treplev as a young man who feels himself to be a freeloader or, in Freudian terms, an illegitimate son in the house of his uncle and in the company of his mother and

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her lover.23 The relations with the mother and the mother’s lover are complicated, aggravated further by the fact that Treplev’s mother is no ordinary woman but a popular actress and the lover is no ordinary man but a famous writer. In short, Treplev is a deeply conflicted, enigmatic character whose play is interrupted by his mother (in a sense, conveniently so),24 so that we will never know whether the play itself is good or bad. Two years later his life will similarly be interrupted at the moment we are about to find out whether he is talented or not. The question I am leading up to is: Why does Kostya write his play? Somehow, we take it as a given, but, really, why would a man at the age of twenty-five decide to write a play and perform it with his mother and her lover as his intended audience? Kostya tells his uncle that all his life he has felt unseen, unrecognized, and unappreciated in the company of his mother’s esteemed guests: “They put up with me just because I am her son. Who am I? What am I?” (748). So, the answer to our question would seem obvious: by writing and staging his play Kostya tries to make his mother, her lover, and his beloved Nina acknowledge him. They don’t. And even Nina, whom Treplev shows in a particularly attractive and flattering light with the moon and the lake as her background, forgets about him, although it was her acting in Kostya’s play that initially attracted Trigorin to her. Later, Trigorin doesn’t read Treplev’s latest story; Arkadina simply never reads her son’s works at all. Treplev is utterly unappreciated, unseen, and unrecognized. His readers don’t know what he looks like, since he publishes under a pseudonym. Even his pseudonym is not revealed to us. How could Kostya’s various attempts at winning love and recognition go so wrong? Arkadina remarks that if Kostya had truly wanted to please her (and by pleasing her he would have been recognized by her), he would have written a different play. Does she have a point? At first Arkadina shows great sophistication. She quotes from Hamlet, including lines that show her (through the character of Gertrude) in an unattractive light. Kostya is forced to quote back. Then, when his play begins, Arkadina acts like an unsophisticated theatergoer who might rush to the stage 23 Sigmund Freud, “Family Romances (1909); “Leonardo da Vinci, A Memory of His Childhood” (1910). 24 When Nina arrives in act 1, she tells Sorin and Treplev that “in half an hour I’ve got to go, we must hurry” (749). If this is true, then what we might be missing are just a few concluding lines in Treplev’s play and not a big chunk of it as some critics believe. All quotations from The Seagull are from Chekhov, The Complete Plays, trans. Laurence Senelick (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006). Figures in parentheses correspond to page numbers in this edition.

Reading Chekhov through Meyerhold’s Eyes    Chapter 6

to save Desdemona before Othello has his chance to strangle her.25 Arkadina refuses to take Kostya’s play as a play. She acts as if, in the words of Stanley Cavell, “she is not granted the concept of play-acting.”26 Like a child who is brought to the theater for the very first time, she misunderstands theatrical conventions, for example: “What a stink of sulfur. Is that necessary?”—“Yes” (754). It’s as if Kostya and Arkadina have switched places. It’s easy to imagine Arkadina taking little Kostya to the theater, and there he would have asked her the same question: “Is this the way it should be, mother?” Arkadina would have explained that what he was seeing was only a play. Why does she act this way? We know from Sorin that she had been in a bad mood all day prior to the performance of the play. Her quotation from Shakespeare is meant to disarm Kostya. She signals to him that, unlike an unsuspecting Shakespearian character, she knows what Treplev has in store for her. Then she realizes that Kostya’s play has nothing to do with her (at least, not directly). It seems that Arkadina would rather have seen a play about her affair with Trigorin than a play that has no relevance to her life at all. Having not made it as a character into Kostya’s play, Arkadina obviously feels rejected and denied as an actress and even as a mother. As strange as it might seem, Arkadina’s remarks were aimed as much at destroying as at reestablishing some contact with her son. It is not so much Kostya who needs to remind her that she is his mother as she who feels the urge to remind him that he is her son. That’s exactly what she does on her arrival: “My darling son, when are we to begin?” (753). So, what went wrong? In his groundbreaking article “The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear,” Cavell examines the audience’s relationship with the actors/characters in the theater. Cavell believes that if we grasp what stops us from acknowledging the pain of actors/characters within the confines of the theater, we will have learned how to acknowledge the pain of others (or simply the presence of others) in real life—that is, “when doing nothing is no longer something which has a place insured by ceremony.” 27 Cavell postulates what he calls the grammar of existence of a character on the stage:

1. A character is not and cannot become aware of us. Darkened, indoor theaters dramatize the fact that the audience is invisible. A theater

25 This example of unsophisticated behavior in the theater is taken from Stanley Cavell, “The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear,” in Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 327–28. 26 Ibid., 330. 27 Ibid., 346.

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whose house lights were left on . . . might dramatize the equally significant fact that we are also inaudible to [the actors], and immovable (that is, at a fixed distance from them). I will say: We are not in their presence.

2. They are in our presence. This means, again, not simply that we are seeing and hearing them, but that we are acknowledging them (or specifically failing to). Whether or not we acknowledge others is not a matter of choice, any more than accepting the presence of the world is a matter of choosing to see or not to see it. Some persons sometimes are capable of certain blindness or deafness toward others; but, for example, avoidance of the presence of others is not blindness or deafness to their claim upon us; it is as conclusive an acknowledgement that they are present as murdering them would be. Tragedy shows that we are responsible for the death of others even when we have not murdered them, and even when we have not manslaughtered them innocently. As though what we have come to regard as our normal existence is itself poisoning. But doesn’t the fact that we do not or cannot go up to them just mean that we do not or cannot acknowledge them? One may feel like saying here: The acknowledgement cannot be completed. But this does not mean that acknowledgement is impossible in a theater. Rather it shows what acknowledgment in actuality is. For what is the difference between tragedy in a theater and tragedy in actuality? In both, people in pain are in our presence. But in actuality acknowledgment is incomplete, in actuality there is no acknowledgement, unless we put ourselves in their presence, reveal ourselves to them. We may find that the point of tragedy in a theater is exactly relief from this necessity, a respite within which to prepare for this necessity, to clean out the pity and terror which stand in the way of acknowledgement outside.



3. How is acknowledgement expressed; that is how do we put ourselves in another’s presence? In terms which have so far come out, we can say: By revealing ourselves, by allowing ourselves to be seen. When we do not, when we keep ourselves in the dark, the consequence is that we convert the other into a character and make the world a stage for him. . . . The conditions of theater literalize the conditions we exact for existence outside—hiddenness, silence, isolation—hence make that existence plain. Theater does not expect us simply to stop theatricalizing; it knows that we can theatricalize its conditions as we can theatricalize

Reading Chekhov through Meyerhold’s Eyes    Chapter 6

any others. But in giving us a place within which our hiddenness and silence and separation are accounted for, it gives us a chance to stop.28 Cavell’s observations apply to The Seagull in the most direct sense. In fact, in The Seagull the theatricalized behavior is doomed to failure right from the start. “Masha in black” remains unread by Treplev and even by Medvedenko. Treplev’s attempt to theatricalize his behavior and attract attention has an effect opposite to his desire: his mother and the others reject him. Above all, Treplev sees Nina primarily as a character in his play and ignores her complaints about it: that it is “so hard to act” in it; “there are no live people in it”; it has no action and no love interest (750–51). Then, later, Treplev’s piece of theatrics involving the dead seagull does not find its target either. Whatever Treplev says, he isn’t listened to or understood. But he is not an innocent victim. By writing and staging his play he sets in motion a machine that turns his life into a disaster. By converting his mother and his acquaintances into an audience, Kostya “only furthered the very sense of isolation which made him wish for an audience” in the first place.29 The idea of seeing or not seeing, of recognizing and not being recognized, is one of the recurrent motifs in The Seagull. In act 4, Nina tells Kostya: “I was afraid you hated me. Every night I have the same dream that you look at me and don’t recognize me” (799). The Russian word for hate includes the root “to see”: nenavidet’. In act 1, prior to Kostya’s play, Arkadina quotes a line from Hamlet also with an emphasis on seeing: “My son, Thou turn’st mine eyes into my very soul” (753).30 Which means: You turned my eyes into my own soul. You didn’t make me look at the other person. I can see only myself. And further on Arkadina insists on being blind to Kostya’s achievements: “So far as I can tell, there’s no new forms in it, nothing but a nasty disposition” (755). Treplev’s suicide shows what the actions on the part of the other characters lead to his death. By introducing a play within a play, Chekhov creates a tangled relationship between the world of theater and the world of real life within his play. Kostya’s play has no ending. It is prevented from being finished. There’s no catharsis, no feeling that the play was a play, or that on its completion normal life resumes, with Chekhov’s characters acting as normal people do— that is, with full responsibility for their actions. With the full understanding that they are no longer watching other people performing in front of them but 28 Ibid., 332–34. 29 Ibid., 351. 30 William Shakespeare, Hamlet 3:4.

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rather are in relationships with these people, and their actions will mutually affect one another. To develop Cavell’s ideas, Kostya’s suicide is the suicide of a character in a play that the other characters have been watching since act 1. Now they will have to get up and start living normal lives. What they will do next is a big question. All we know is that Dorn denies Kostya his death: it remains unacknowledged. Instead, Dorn suggests that Trigorin take Arkadina somewhere else—again to stop her from seeing her son’s dead body and also from recognizing his pain and tragedy. It seems that the characters haven’t learned their lesson(s). They will continue doing what they have been doing in the “theater.” We, as spectators, are denied the grand finale we long for, which would include Arkadina’s tears, Nina’s misery, Sorin’s grief, and, probably, Masha’s suicide. It is not surprising that spectators rarely identify with Treplev. Many find his behavior pitiful, childish, and unbecoming for a man of twenty-seven. And Chekhov only encouraged this attitude by calling his play a comedy. Although Treplev boldly calls for new forms and condemns traditional theater for showing only “how people eat, drink, make love, walk [and] wear their jackets” (747), he is blissfully unaware that Chekhov’s outer play, of which Treplev’s own play is only a segment, is precisely about how people do these things. So, to repeat my question once again: If Meyerhold wanted to be identified with Treplev, but also wanted to live a long productive life, how might he have combined the benefits of being an underdog and an outcast with the benefits of being famous, successful, and reasonably happy?

Meyerhold and His Stylized Theater If, in the early 1900s, Meyerhold frequently quoted Chekhov’s letter to him about the role of Johannes as a mandate for his future innovations.31 By 1906, when Meyerhold was searching for his own new forms, he had adopted a critical attitude toward his former mentor. First, Meyerhold’s attacks against the naturalistic theater became largely focused on the Moscow Art Theatre and its famous productions of Chekhov’s plays. Chekhov, according to Meyerhold, “fostered passivity among the actors.”32 Nor did Chekhov inspire any reaction 31 Polotskaia, “Chekhov i Meierkhol´d,” 433. Although only one letter of Chekhov to Meyerhold had survived, it didn’t stop Meyerhold from quoting utterances that Chekhov had supposedly made in his presence. (Most of them are related to the 1898 production of The Seagull at the MAT.) 32 Vsevolod Meyerhold, “The Naturalistic Theater and the Theater of Mood,” in Meyerhold on

Reading Chekhov through Meyerhold’s Eyes    Chapter 6

from the audience, while, according to Meyerhold, the role of the spectator was of paramount importance: “In the theater the spectator’s imagination is able to supply that which is left unsaid. It is this mystery and the desire to solve it which draw so many people to the theater.”33 Meyerhold supports his observation with a quote from Schopenhauer, who wrote: Works of poetry, sculpture and the other arts contain a rich treasury of the deepest wisdom; through them speaks the very nature of things to which the artist merely gives voice in his own simple and comprehensible language. Of course, everyone who reads or looks at a work of art must further the discovery of this wisdom by his own means. In consequence, each will grasp it according to his talent and actual ability, just as a sailor can plumb his lead only to the depth which his line allows.34

Thus, Meyerhold continues, “the spectator in the theater aspires—albeit unconsciously—to that exercise of fantasy which rises sometimes to the level of creativity.”35 In 1907, in his article “First Attempts at a Stylized Theater,” Meyerhold developed his ideas about interaction between the author, actor, and spectator even further. Here Meyerhold talks about two types of theater, which differ in their “methods of organizing the four basic theatrical elements—author, director, actor and spectator.”36 The classical theater organizes these four elements in a triangle (Theater-Triangle), while the new, innovative theater organizes these elements in a straight line ( Theater of the Straight Line).

1. In the “Theater-Triangle” the director explains his mise-en-scene in detail, describes the characters as he sees them, prescribes every pause, and then rehearses the play until his personal conception of it is exactly reproduced in performance.



2. In the “Theater of the Straight Line,” the director, having absorbed the author’s conception, conveys his own creation (now a blend of the author and the director) to the actor. The actor, having assimilated

Theatre, ed. and trans. Edward Braun, 4th ed. (London: Methuen, 2016), 25. 33 Ibid., 29. 34 Ibid., 30. 35 Ibid. 36 Vsevolod Meyerhold, “First Attempts at a Stylized Theater,” in Meyerhold on Theatre, 58

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the author’s conception via the director, stands face to face with the spectator (with director and author behind him), and freely reveals his soul to him, thus intensifying the fundamental theatrical relationship of performer and spectator.37 Meyerhold then suggests the following routine for turning a written text into a spectacle: The director describes his plan during the discussion of the play. . . . He inspires the actors with the devotion to the work, and imbues them with the spirit of the author and with his own interpretation. But after the discussion all the performers remain completely independent. Then the director calls a further general meeting to create harmony from all the separate pieces. How does he set about this? Simply by balancing all the parts which have been freely created by the various individuals involved in the collective enterprise. In establishing the harmony vital to the production, he does not insist on the exact representation of his own conception. . . . Instead he retires behind the scenes at the earliest possible moment and leaves the stage to the actors. . . . In this way the spectator is made to comprehend the author and the director through the prism of the actor’s art. Above all, drama is the art of the actor. 38

The director sees himself only as a “bridge between actor and spectator”: Having assimilated the author’s creation, the actor is left alone, face to face with the spectator, and from the friction between these two unadulterated elements, the actor’s creativity and the spectator’s imagination, a clear flame is kindled.39 “Ultimately,” Meyerhold wrote a year later, “the stylistic method presupposes the existence of a fourth creator in addition to the author, the director and the actor—namely, the spectator. The stylized theater produces a play in such a way that the spectator is compelled to employ his imagination creatively in order to fill in those details suggested by the stage action.”40 Meyerhold sees the main task of stylized theater as “the restoration of tragedy and comedy,” which he sees as a panacea for the “mood of Chekhovian 37 Ibid., 60. 38 Ibid., 61. 39 Vsevolod Meyerhold, “The Stylized Theater,” in Meyerhold on Theatre, 73; Meyerhold’s emphasis. 40 Ibid.; Meyerhold’s emphasis.

Reading Chekhov through Meyerhold’s Eyes    Chapter 6

theater, which transforms acting into the passive experiencing of emotions and reduces the actor’s creative intensity.”41 From Meyerhold’s comment that “the stylized theater avoids the ‘mood’ of Chekhovian theater,” we may conclude that by 1907 Chekov had lost, in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, the capacity to bestow cultural and artistic capital on his followers, interpreters, and readers.42 But his character Treplev had not. For Meyerhold in the 1900s—and this is true of any contemporary director or playwright—the briefest evocation of Treplev would immediately have set the stage for avant-gardist experimentation. Not surprisingly, in his pioneering article on Wagner, “Tristan and Isolde” (1910), Meyerhold relies on a slightly distorted quotation from Treplev to illuminate his ideas: “Music, which determines the tempo of every occurrence on the stage, dictates a rhythm which has nothing in common with everyday existence. The life of music is not the life of everyday reality. ‘Neither life as it is, nor life as it ought to be, but life as we see it in our dreams’ (Chekhov).”43 While being critical of Chekhov and his theater, Meyerhold continued to promote Treplev as an unquestionable authority on new forms in the theater. In the 1920s, on several occasions, Meyerhold quoted his favorite line of Treplev about traditional theater being good only at showing “how people eat, drink, make love, walk, [and] wear their jackets.”44 Ironically, when Stanislavsky tried to reinsert Chekhov back into the cultural cannon in the late 1920s, he did this by drawing attention to Treplev’s cultural legacy and to his relevance to any seeker of new (in that context pro-Bolshevik) art forms: Has any of us deeply grasped Treplev’s monologue about new art? Do the actors know this new commandment of ours? They know it by heart, of course, like they know the Lord’s prayer, but do they understand the 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid. Chekhov and his characters are notoriously famous for their lonely struggles and utmost despair. After the revolution of 1905, let alone the revolution of 1917, such behavior became to be regarded as ignoble, and many educated people were not willing to be associated with it. Only in 1946 did the Soviet critic Vladimir Ermilov (1904–65) dare to highlight Chekhov’s optimistic worldview in his book-length study, Chekhov. That this was a rather unusual approach to Chekhov’s legacy becomes evident from Maria Chekhova’s letter to Yermilov in which she praised him for debunking the dominant myth of Chekhovthe-pessimist. According to Maria Pavlovna, this myth had done a lot of harm to her brother’s reputation. See A. P. Kuzicheva, Chekhovy: Biografiia sem´i (Moscow: Artist. Rezhissёr. Teatr, 2004), 419. 43 Meyerhold, “Tristan and Isolde,” in Meyerhold on Theatre, 85. 44 A. Ia. Al´tshuller, Chekhov v aktёrskom krugu (St. Petersburg: Stroiizdat, 2001), 116–17.

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Treplev’s Legacy Who was the true innovator—Meyerhold or Treplev? Most critics believe that the reason Meyerhold became so infatuated with Treplev was because he was already looking for new ideas and new forms, and playing the role of Treplev allowed him to voice his thinking from the stage. In other words, Meyerhold was a prototype for a character like Treplev. Alexander Gladkov takes a different position, and I agree with him rather than with other students of Meyerhold. “It would be wrong and premature to believe that [Meyerhold] filled Treplev with his painful search for ‘new forms’ that was akin to Treplev’s,” Gladkov writes in his famous recollections of Meyerhold.46 He continues: The contrary would be more correct: it was Treplev’s searching that shaped the young artist’s sensibilities, and it was Treplev’s discontent, inner turmoil, and searing tragic dissatisfaction with himself that nourished what was soon to become Meyerhold’s firm convictions. Leaf through Meyerhold’s diaries, notebooks, and letters, and you won’t find any trace of his “yearning for new forms” anywhere in them before The Seagull, Chekhov, and Treplev. [Before that stage in his life] the young actor is full of admiration for Stanislavsky’s directorial art—still strongly influenced by the Meiningen Theatre, the masters of the Maly Theatre, and contemporary Russian realistic prose. After The Seagull, Meyerhold is a changed man. Treplev freed him from the temptation to be imitative— even if the models for imitation were of the highest order—and brought him the greatest happiness and highest responsibility art can afford—the ability to be true to one’s own nature.”47

In many ways, Chekhov had played the role of Meyerhold’s biographer avant la lettre, having provided Meyerhold with a frame, to use Tomashevsky’s 45 Stanislavsky, My Life in Art, 338. 46 Gladkov, Meierkhol´d, 1:152. 47 Ibid.

Reading Chekhov through Meyerhold’s Eyes    Chapter 6

d­ efinition of the role of a biographer,48 which Meyerhold continually filled and refilled with his own content until he died. Meyerhold may be one of the few creative personalities whose life-creation project was brought to fruition and one of the very few who have succeeded in simply being happy and successful. In fact, he may have been the only one. If Meyerhold as an artist was indeed shaped by the role of Treplev, then what, in fact, did he learn from this character? As we know, the question of whether Treplev was conceived by Chekhov to be a truly talented artist cannot be resolved, since we never see his entire play. Moreover, Nina Zarechnaya, the leading actress in Treplev’s play and the love of his life openly admits that she doesn’t like his writings and finds the famous monologue, which was specifically written for her, very boring. In fact, she finds it so dull that she refuses to recite it again in act 2 despite Masha’s request. Given Meyerhold’s well-documented infatuation with Treplev, it is possible to conclude that his discourse on stylized theater was, in part, informed by Treplev’s failure as a writer and a director. Treplev resolves his creative problems by committing suicide. In his turn, Meyerhold sets out to absolve Treplev of any major responsibility for the failure of his play by transferring the main responsibility for the success of a performance from the author of the play and its director to the actors and the audience. Actors are expected to be completely liberated and show unbounded creativity, while the audience is expected to demonstrate remarkable imagination “in order to fill in [the] details suggested by the stage action. Meyerhold’s rebellion against Chekhov and his alleged theater of mood might be seen as Treplev’s belated rebellion against his creator—Chekhov. Meyerhold’s Treplev perishes not because he is a bad writer but because Chekhov failed to give Nina her complete liberation as an actress and denied Arkadina the creative imagination necessary to appreciate her son’s innovative play.49 In his “On the Death of Igor Stravinsky,” 48 In 1925, the Pushkin scholar Boris Tomashevskii explained that the major thrust of a literary biography is to create “a frame”; that is, “the life of a poet constitutes the frame that befits his creative activity.” Tomashevskii, Pushkin: Sovremennye problemy istoriko-literaturnogo izucheniia (Leningrad: Obrazovanie, 1925), 56. 49 I am not going to discuss how successful Meyerhold was in applying his prescriptions to his own work with the actors. The goal of this chapter is merely to point to some possible ways in which Meyerhold’s thought and theoretical writings might have been influenced by his lifelong internalization of Treplev. It would suffice to mention that Meyerhold met the actress Zinaida Raikh and fell in love with her in the 1920s; for years to come he would literally shower Raikh with his imaginative brilliance and devoted attention in order to enable her to perform to the best of her artistic and creative potential. See Maia Turovskaia, Babanova: Legenda i biografiia (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1981), 86–103.

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Vladimir Il´in offers an intriguing definition of artistic genius. He insists that “creative genius may have nothing or little to do with what is conventionally called talent or ability.”50 To support his insight, Il´in refers his readers to The Seagull: Chekhov’s uncanny insight in The Seagull has revealed to us this terrifying tragedy that has only one resolution: either suicide or a superhuman, one might say “Beethovenesque,” effort (that is, heroic and all-out) in confronting single-handedly blind and cruel Fate in order to fell it, grab it by the throat, kneel on its chest, and kill it as you would kill a murderer. . . . Beethoven succeeded in doing that, and so did Wagner.51

We might add that Meyerhold succeeded in this respect, too.

50 V. N. Il´in, “K konchine I. F. Stravinskogo,” Vozrozhdenie (La Renaissance) 232 (1971): 44–54, 50. 51 Ibid.

CHAPTER 7

Living with Tolstoy and Dying with Chekhov: Ivan Bunin’s Liberation of Tolstoy (1937) and About Chekhov (1953) as Two Modes of Auto/ Biographical Writing I may not die as a poet, But I am dying as a man.1 —Georgy Ivanov, “Drug druga otrazhaiut zerkala”

I

n 1927, Martin Heidegger submitted that death “belongs to being-in-the   world.” That “many people initially and for the most part do not know about death must not be used to prove that being-toward-death does not ‘universally’ belong to Dasein; rather, it only proves that Dasein, fleeing from it, initially and for the most part covers over its ownmost being-toward-death. Dasein dies factically as long as it exists, but initially and for the most part in the mode of falling prey.”2 By falling prey, Heidegger means leading an “inauthentic” existence that allows one to pretend that death does not matter. Dasein convinces himself that while other people die, his own death is not his immediate concern. As Heidegger’s footnote to this section indicates, in his ­discussion 1 “Допустим, как поэт я не умру, / зато как человек я умираю.” 2 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh, rev. Dennis J. Schmidt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 242.

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of death being an integral part of human experience, he was indebted to Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Ilych (1886).3 Despite the casualness of Heidegger’s reference, it is clear that the whole of chapter 1 of part 2 of Being and Time (“The Possible Being-a-Whole of Dasein and Being-Toward-Death”) is heavily influenced by Tolstoy. It is unlikely that the writer Ivan Bunin (1870– 1953) read Heidegger, but he definitely read Tolstoy. Bunin, then, might have agreed with Heidegger’s observation that “death does not just ‘belong’ in an undifferentiated way to one’s own Dasein, but it lays claim on it as something ­individual.”4 Chekhov expressed a similar idea in his notebook: “I will lie in the grave alone just as I have lived alone throughout my life.” Bunin found this statement “remarkable.”5 Throughout his life, Bunin was acutely aware of death, rarely enjoying a moment of complete obliviousness to it. He hardly ever lived the life of Heidegger’s “the they” (with all its rituals of taming and tranquilizing the uncanny). Instead, he buttressed himself with thoughts about the lives and deaths of his revered contemporaries. This mode of operation did not make death appear less of an immediate concern, but it gave Bunin a creative outlet for his angst. It allowed him to achieve a Heideggerian, unreachable wholeness while being alive. Biography scholars are often interested in why people like to read about other people’s lives and rarely ponder the reasons for writing about other people’s lives, apart from citing such obvious motives as earning money, notoriety, and recognition. In this chapter I offer new reasons for Bunin’s interest in telling the stories of his great literary contemporaries. I am going to outline the role of Chekhov and Tolstoy in Bunin’s life and situate Bunin’s two major attempts at writing their biographies within the context of his own oeuvre. In his famously dyspeptic sketches of his other illustrious contemporaries (such as Aleksandr Blok, Aleksei Tolstoy, and Maxim Gorky), Bunin rushes to discredit them; in his two major biographies, Bunin is not interested in telling a sensational story. He appears to be oblivious of his readers and publishers. (There are no comments about the reception of his biographies in any of his letters or diary entries.) What matters to Bunin is his contact, his intimate relationship, with his subjects. Nor does he have any apparent anxieties about his mission as a biographer; any debates on this subject (like those launched by Andre Maurois 3 Being and Time, 244n12; Heidegger’s italics. 4 Ibid., 252; Heidegger’s italics. 5 Ivan Bunin, About Chekhov: The Unfinished Symphony, trans. Thomas Marullo (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 58.

Living with Tolstoy and Dying with Chekhov    Chapter 7

and Virginia Woolf in the 1920s and the 1930s) do not concern him. He feels completely entitled to write about Chekhov and Tolstoy. When he learns about the flood of Alexander Pushkin biographies in the 1930s, he protests: It is I who should have written “a novel” about Pushkin. Is there anyone who can feel [Pushkin] as acutely as I do? Pushkin is our very essence; he is in my blood. I vividly envision Aleksandr Sergeevich, slightly redhaired and swift of movement, getting off his horse, which he rode to visit the Smirnovs or the Wulfs, walking into the mudroom, where some Senka is sleeping on top of a chest and where the stench of unaired quarters is so overpowering that it is hard to breathe, walking through to his own room, throwing open the window onto a golden moon amid the clouds, and immediately slipping into some kind of a Spanish mood. . . . You have to live this; you have to be born in this.6

Can biography, in Andre Maurois words, “be a means of expression, a means of escape for the author?”7 Can a biographer use his work to make a statement about his own disposition, predicament, and outlook (something that Virginia Woolf found particularly objectionable in the studies of her contemporary Lytton Strachey),8 or should he strictly adhere to the details of his subject’s life? According to Colm Tóibín, “almost any imaginative writer who creates a set of motives and signature tones for a character from history ends by writing a sort of autobiography. Sometimes this can happen unconsciously; the character begins as a set of facts, and slowly melts into a set of fictions.”9 Bunin was definitely a talented and imaginative writer who clearly identified with his subjects. He therefore presents a fascinating case study.

Friendship with Chekhov, Meetings with Tolstoy In his older age, Bunin, according to Nina Berberova, was a malicious snob with little regard for other people’s feelings. Once, while dining on a roasted chicken 6 Bunin is quoted in Oleg Mikhailov, Zhizn´ Bunina: Lish´ slovu zhizn´ dana . . . (Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 2002), 55. 7 Andre Maurois, Aspects of Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1929), 7. 8 Virginia Woolf, “The Art of Biography,” in Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 6, 1933–1941 (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000). 9 Colm Tóibín, New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families (New York: Scribner, 2012), 159–60.

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(Bunin’s favorite meal) at Berberova’s country house, he couldn’t resist sniffing at the meat prior to eating it, a habit that Berberova found most disgusting and regarded as his way of showing his superiority. In Bunin’s recollections of his fellow literati, Berberova wrote, he also became objectionable, stubborn, repetitive, and prone to humiliate others. The only way to turn him into an agreeable memoirist and a storyteller was to prompt him to talk about his “meetings” with Tolstoy and his “friendship” with Chekhov: “Sometimes [Mark] Aldanov succeeded in bringing the conversation round to Bunin’s meetings with ‘Lev Nikolayevich’ or his friendship with ‘Anton Pavlovich.’ In such cases, he spoke well, using wonderful Russian, the way he wrote about them. And he wrote of them the way he spoke of them.”10 “The hours, days, and sometimes even months that I spent at [Chekhov’s dacha in Yalta]—together with my conscious awareness of my closeness to its host . . . will always be [among] the best memories of my life,” Bunin wrote in his unfinished work About Chekhov.11 To say that Bunin admired Tolstoy is to say nothing. “Even as a boy, I already had some notion of who he was—not from his books, but from the conversations in our home,” Bunin writes in his essay on Tolstoy in 1927. I remember how my father would laugh whenever he [told] us about how [our] gentry neighbors would read War and Peace. One would read only War; the other, only Peace. . . . Even at that time, though, my feelings for Tolstoy were not simple. My father, who like Tolstoy, took part in the defense of Sebastopol, told me: “I knew him somewhat. I met him during the Sebastopol campaign.” When I heard this, I looked at him with wideopen eyes: My father had seen Tolstoy in person.12

For Bunin, Tolstoy was a constant source of bewilderment and inspiration. People who admired Tolstoy were Bunin’s friends. People who didn’t admire him or, like Maxim Gorky, didn’t hold Tolstoy in high enough esteem eventually turned into Bunin’s enemies. In 1896 Bunin fell in love with Ekaterina Lopatina and even proposed to her mainly because of their shared respect for Tolstoy and her striking recollections of her meetings with Tolstoy when she was a young 10 Nina Berberova, Kursiv moi (Moscow: Soglasie, 1996), 307. 11 Bunin, About Chekhov, 18. 12 Ivan Bunin, “Tolstoy” (1927). Ten years later, this opening section with slight modifications became chapter 6 in Bunin’s Liberation of Tolstoy. Here I quote Ivan Bunin, Liberation of Tolstoy: A Tale of Two Writers, trans. Thomas Marullo (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 41.

Living with Tolstoy and Dying with Chekhov    Chapter 7

girl, which he later incorporated into his Liberation of Tolstoy. As a young man, Bunin learned how to hoop barrels: “What did I need those hoops [for]? Again, because they somehow joined me to Tolstoy and gave me the secret hope that I might see him someday and come into close contact with him.”13 One of the things that Chekhov and Bunin had in common was their admiration of Tolstoy. It was apparently Chekhov who urged Bunin to write down his recollections of his meetings with Tolstoy. For years after their deaths, Tolstoy and Chekhov provided Bunin with “positions from which,” to borrow a phrase from Lionel Trilling, he could “scrutinize modern life.”14 Bunin often liked to draw on the authority of Chekhov and Tolstoy in his own campaigns against various representatives of the “new art.” In October 1913, he wrote in his recollections of Chekhov: Chekhov found ridiculous and disgusting the representatives of the so-called new arts. Tolstoy aptly dubbed them “a caricature of stupidity with too much salt in it.” Being the epitome of a sense of proportion, nobility, supreme human accessibility, and artistic chastity, Chekhov certainly couldn’t help being disgusted by these “overly salty” caricatures of stupidity, extreme pretentiousness, brazen-faced shamelessness, and invariable mendacity. He would often say with an air of severe and somber contemplation: “Once Tolstoy dies, everything will go to the dogs!” “Literature, too?” “Literature, too.” But he himself died before his time. Were he alive today, Russian literature wouldn’t be in its current dismal state of vulgarity and baseness, with its muddle-headed prose writers and inarticulate versifiers shouting at the top of their lungs about their genius in crowded taverns.15

Tolstoy was on Bunin’s mind in January 1922 when he learned about the death of his beloved brother Yuly. While grieving for his brother, he realized that his ability to sense everything so “sharply that it physically hurts” is part and parcel of being a great writer like Tolstoy.16 “I am a supremely authentic artistic being,” 13 Ibid., 44. 14 Lionel Trilling, “Why We Read Jane Austen,” in The Last Decade: Essays and Reviews, 1965– 75, ed. Diana Trilling (New York: Harcourt, 1979), 210. 15 I. A. Bunin, “Iz zapisnoi knizhki,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Petrograd: A. F. Marks, 1915), 6:307. 16 Ivan Bunin and Vera Bunina, Ustami Buninykh. Dnevniki, ed. M. Green, 2 vols. (Moscow: Posev, 2004), 2:62.

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he concluded.17 On the day of his own death, Bunin talked with his younger friend Aleksandr Bakhrakh about Tolstoy, and on the evening of the very same day he asked his wife to read Chekhov’s letters to him. They even had a discussion about Chekhov’s correct birthday—was it January 17 or January 16?18 Bunin was not always eager to advertise his indebtedness to either Chekhov or Tolstoy. In an “Autobiographical Remark” that Bunin wrote at Semën Vengerov’s request in 1915, Tolstoy is almost lost in the long enumeration of the writers and works that Bunin found particularly important for his formative years as a writer. Already, then, I treated Tolstoy with admiration. But, at the same time, I was enamored of Flaubert and also of “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign.” I was enthralled by the Ukrainian “broodings” [of Taras Shevchenko]— those that were the loftiest and the most somber. And I admired some works by [Adam] Mickiewicz, especially his Crimean sonnets, ballads, and some passages from his Pan Tadeusz. In fact, it was because of Mickiewicz that I began learning Polish.19

Chekhov barely rates a mention, and when he does it is alongside a minor writer, Gleb Uspensky. If the meeting with Tolstoy created a powerful impression on Bunin, by contrast, Bunin is only “touched by something” in Chekhov: “Certain things in Chekhov (his humorous stories I didn’t know then) also touched me — but the fact is, he wrote [too] quickly and thinly.”20 In 1928, when Bunin had a choice to write a biography of Tolstoy, Chekhov, or Maupassant, he chose to write about Lermontov instead.21 This latter project never came to fruition, but Bunin’s decision does make sense. In 1928, his interest in Chekhov, with whose works Bunin’s writings were routinely compared, was on the wane, while his growing admiration for Tolstoy did not yet require an outlet. Besides, by 1928, the year of Tolstoy’s centennial, everybody who had anything to say about Tolstoy had written about him. Many uprooted and disgruntled intellectuals used Tolstoy as some kind of emotional and aesthetic yardstick with which measure their own lives and 17 Ibid., 2:63. Bunin’s italics. 18 Vera Bunina’s letter about Bunin’s last day and his funeral is quoted in Andrei Sedykh [Iakov Tsvibak], “I. A. Bunin,” in Dalёkie, blizkie (Moscow: Zakharov, 2003), 220–28. 19 Bunin, “Avtobiograficheskaia zametka,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 6:327. 20 Ibid., 6:326. 21 Bunin and Bunina, Ustami Buninykh, 2:154.

Living with Tolstoy and Dying with Chekhov    Chapter 7

achievements. The desire to see Tolstoy as the embodiment of everything that was good in Russian literature started to subside in the late 1920s.22 It was differences between Bunin and Tolstoy, rather than similarities, that Petr Struve chose to highlight in his speech to honor Bunin’s award of the Nobel Prize in Literature in November 1933.23 It is clear from Struve’s remarks that, by 1933, Tolstoy had become some kind of an underdog and was himself in need of preservation and protection. More often than not, Tolstoy needed to be “liberated” from his own self-accusations and denunciations that by then had been disseminated through the multiple publications of his diaries, journals, memoirs, and biographies.24 All these developments explain why Bunin had finally decided, in 1936, to write his own biography of Tolstoy—it was published in 1937 as Liberation of Tolstoy (Osvobozhdenie Tolstogo). But they do not explain ­everything.

The Liberation of Tolstoy In 1933, Bunin became the first Russian writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. By all accounts, he greatly appreciated this honor and, like Tolstoy at the zenith of his fame, he opened his private life to the public. In his unfinished manuscript, Nikolai Roshchin, a budding writer and a longtime lodger at 22 See E. P. Ponomarёv, “Lev Tolstoi v literaturnom soznanii russkoi emigratsii 1920–1930-kh godov,” Russkaia literatura 3 (2000): 202–11. 23 “Russian literature had a predominantly populist nature. It was the literature of ‘a repentant nobleman.’ . . . Lev Tolstoy molded the glorified figure of Ivanushka the Fool. If we exclude Chekhov, who never was an ‘Intelligent’ in the archetypal sense of the word and, besides, didn’t have a chance to experience 1917 and the subsequent period, then it was Bunin who became the first great Russian author to free himself from the enchantment of populism. This does not mean that Bunin disliked the Russian people and did not see or portray the quintessential character traits of the most ordinary people around him. What he did was refuse to idealize plebeianism or to worship physical menial labor, ‘callused hands,’ the ‘sweat of hard work,’ the ‘rulers of the Earth,’ illiteracy, and vulgarity. Any Rousseauism or Tolstoyism is totally alien to Bunin” (Pёtr Struve, “I. A. Bunin,” Rossiia i slavianstvo 227 [December 1933]: 2). 24 See, for example, A. M. Evlakhov, Konstitutsional´nye osobennosti psikhiki L. N. Tolstogo (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel´stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1930), in which Evlakhov writes: “[Tolstoy] is a narrow-minded moralist, pedantic and cloying; he is a morality enforcer, who in reality does not believe either in other people or in himself; he has pasted his morality all over himself, and it looks on him as something entirely external, superficial, and completely alien to him—‘like a saddle on a cow’” (83). Evlakhov’s work was obviously known to Bunin. In Liberation he discusses Evlakhov’s observations by referencing him as “one Moscow professor” (98–99).

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Bunin’s villa in Grasse, informed his readers about the artistic paradise that the Nobel Laureate had created in his home in the early 1930s. From Bunin’s notes on the manuscript, it is clear that Bunin read it and approved of it. Roshchin wrote in part: [Bunin] spent a long time looking for a place to settle down—like a bird searching for a place to build its nest. Finally, he found it in the south of France—in sunny, welcoming Provence. He found a modest Provence house on the side of a hill overlooking the town of Grasse. Here Bunin began to live permanently in 1923, only leaving home for Paris during the winter months and staying in Paris, where he had a lot of friends, for as long as his means permitted. It was here, at his modest “Belvedere” villa, that he picked up the phone on November 9, 1933, to be told that he had been awarded a Nobel Prize. . . . In friendly literary circles, the “Belvedere” villa was referred to as the “convent of muses,” because it housed not only Bunin but also his wife and various young writers who would live with them for extended periods of time. Among the numerous visitors who would have tea and dinner at the table under the large palm tree in the “Belvedere” grounds were the Merezhkovskys, Teffi, Zaitsev, Aldanov, Khodasevich, Rakhmaninov, Professor Rostovtsev, and many others. They would ascend the stony path leading to the villa to spend a day or two there but sometimes would stay on as house guests for a month or even longer, as Bunin was a generous and affable host. He would get up early, soon after sunrise, and wash himself at a faucet in the yard. The morning would be spent at work in his study. It would not be until midday that he would emerge from his study to get his letters and newspapers from the mail carrier who would come up to the house at this time. After a late breakfast he would go back to work until teatime. From time to time, there would be long walks down to the valley or up into the mountains past the observation spot where Pauline, Napoleon’s sister who had for a time lived in Grasse, used to sit on the stone bench, still preserved. . . . But on some days, Bunin is not to be seen—he’s working without leaving his room. “Writing is hard work, assiduous and backbreaking,” Bunin likes to repeat. And in his case, it’s not an exaggeration, given his daily schedule. In the evenings, he likes to read out loud. Then the whole household would congregate in the master’s study. The lights are burning peacefully, the wood stove is murmuring in winter, and people sit on

Living with Tolstoy and Dying with Chekhov    Chapter 7 his bed and on the couch. He reads Russian and French authors—most recently [Francois] Mauriac, of whom he is very fond. Listening to Bunin is sheer pleasure because he is an incredibly good reader. These quiet idyllic evenings are reminiscent of those long past days when landowners’ families in remote rural areas would fill their evenings with reading.25

Although the cohabitation of various ill-matched lodgers under the same roof was never peaceful even under the best of circumstances, from 1934 onward there are numerous indications that Bunin could hardly bear it. In fact, Liberation of Tolstoy was written amid the disintegration of the idealized Tolstoyan way of life that Bunin had set up for himself in Grasse. In 1934 he broke up with Galina Kuznetsova, his mistress and muse of many years. It also took Bunin many years to overcome the pain of her departure. In the meantime, Bunin’s relationship with his wife and their lodger Leonid Zurov (whom his wife insisted on treating like a son) was becoming increasingly similar to Tolstoy’s relationship with Sophia Andreevna and their sons—a situation that contributed to Tolstoy’s decision to leave Yasnaya Polyana in 1910. The word “liberation” features prominently in Vera Bunina’s description of her life with her husband. Ironically, it was not Bunin, but his wife, who, in order to reconcile herself to Bunin’s stressful cohabitation with many people, including his mistress, under the same roof, experienced a religious “awakening” by gradually “liberating” herself from her attachment to her husband: Twenty-seven years of my life together with [Bunin]. [Remembering their honeymoon trip to the Holy Land]. [Bunin] would sometimes speak well of Christ, of the Transfiguration, and I think he did something to make me closer to Him. Now we are apart. He stopped somewhere along the way, while I continue striving for higher things closer to Him. But I’m still a long way from freeing myself from everything.26

Bunin felt lonely and estranged, and looked up to Tolstoy for moral support and inspiration. The only diary entry that Bunin made in 1934 (or the only entry that survives from 1934) describes an almost Tolstoyan fainting episode

25 This manuscript can be found in the archive collection at the Amherst Center for Russian Culture, where it is erroneously identified as Vladimir Zenzinov’s manuscript. Its earlier version was first published as “Literaturnyi ugolok (Villa ‘Belveder’)” in Segodnia, Riga, January 1, 1929. 26 Bunin and Bunina, Ustami Buninykh, 2:245.

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that he had in the summer. As is known, periodic fainting spells plagued Tolstoy in his later years and became a favorite subject of his self-analysis. One summer day in Grasse, I had a totally unexpected fainting episode outside the gate to “Belvedere” . . . . I . . . suddenly disappeared, without being at all aware of what was happening with me. All of me disappeared in the blink of an eye. I was suddenly no more. It happened so suddenly and lightning quick that I completely missed the instant. The next thing I knew I was lying on the couch in my study with my chest all wet because they had tried to make me drink some water when I was unconscious. . . . A sudden death is probably the same.27

Apart from various short autobiographical essays that he wrote at the request of various publishers and students of Russian literature, Bunin’s most concentrated reflections on life, death, talent, and the futility of all efforts are contained in his little-known story “Cicadas” (1925). It was here that Bunin first introduced his key concepts, such as “liberation” and “propensity for ruin.” The story contains passages that were later incorporated into Liberation of Tolstoy. In “Cicadas,” Tolstoy does not play a determining role. It is as if Bunin is hanging over an abyss and cannot move either way. Is he going to die? “No, my time hasn’t arrived yet!” Bunin writes in the conclusion of the story.28 When Bunin embarked on writing “Cicadas,” he was recovering from the shock of the Bolshevik Revolution, the civil war, and his subsequent emigration to France. Any doubts about his place in the Russian literary tradition that he might have had in previous years could only intensify in France. An autobiography, in John Sturrock’s deft definition, “is a record of singularization. In reflecting on his life, the autobiographer traces the purposeful, seemingly anticipated course of his own separation from others, his escape from among the great mass of the anonymous . . . the desired process of singularization is carried through at a price of isolation from the community, from the uncomprehending, ignorant, or resistant ‘other.’”29 The period from 1921 to 1937 (with many forced separations and irrecoverable losses) was not particularly conducive to Bunin’s contemplating any further alienation from his cultural and social milieu.30 He had to find 27 Ibid., 2:244; Bunin’s italics. 28 Ivan Bunin, “Tsykady,” in Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 9 (Berlin: Petropolis, 1935), 23. 29 John Sturrock, “Theory versus Autobiography,” in The Culture of Autobiography: The Culture of Self-Representation, ed. Robert Folkenflik (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 27, 35. 30 See my discussion of Bunin’s need to reinvent himself in the 1920s in Galina Rylkova, “From Cursed Days to ‘Sunstroke’: The Authenticity of Ivan Bunin’s Recollections of the Bolshevik

Living with Tolstoy and Dying with Chekhov    Chapter 7

other venues for speaking about his personal life, such as his semi-autobiographical novel, The Life of Arseniev, and the biographies of his celebrated contemporaries, such as Chekhov and Tolstoy. In Liberation of Tolstoy, he does not seek to prove Tolstoy’s unquestionable singularity, all he attempts to do is understand and justify Tolstoy’s inexplicable desire to start a radically new life at the age of eighty-two. In his introduction to his first novel, Childhood, Tolstoy divides all his potential readers into those who can understand his intentions and those who can’t. Bunin would definitely fall into the former category. In the 1930s, Bunin reads and rereads Tolstoy’s own works; Alexandra Tolstaya’s memoirs of her father, which he admires; Mark Aldanov’s Tolstoy’s Riddle; and Vladimir Zhdanov’s analysis of Tolstoy’s relationship with Sophia Andreevna, to name but a few books that preoccupied him. He sees striking similarities everywhere. It is through reading about Tolstoy’s life that Bunin tries to determine what he, Bunin, is meant to be, and most important, what is to become of him and his legacy. Bunin repeatedly calls for an attentive reading of Tolstoy’s texts: Go back to reading Tolstoy and you will understand how completely unfounded most accusations against him are. On more than one occasion Bunin claims that he is uniquely qualified to write about Tolstoy. They are both representatives of the Russian nobility; they were born within a hundred kilometers of each other, and who could understand better than Bunin not only the peculiarities of Tolstoy’s speech—Aleksandr Goldenveizer is no good in Bunin’s eyes—but also the full magnitude of Tolstoy’s talent and personality? Bunin has an almost sensual admiration for Tolstoy—even the shape of the master’s fingernails is inimitably Tolstoyan. When Tolstoy spoke, his eyes, “which otherwise lacked a definite color, would suddenly become blue, black, gray, brown. They shone with all the colors of the rainbow.”31 Bunin repeatedly describes Tolstoy’s face as beautiful. Even if one rejects his claims about Tolstoy’s handsomeness, it is clear that they had a lot in common, such as their origin, their close friendship with their brothers, a long marriage, the loss of their dearly loved sons at an early age—Bunin lost his only son Nikolai when he was four years old—and, most important, their lifelong preoccupation with death. It is clear from his diary entries that from 1934 onward Bunin expects nothing from life but death at any moment. The word “expectation” is an Revolution in the 1920s,” in The Myriad Legacies of 1917: A Year of Wars and Revolution, ed. Maartje Abbenuis, Neil Atkinson, Kingsley Baird and Gail Romano (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 125–50. 31 Bunin, Liberation of Tolstoy, 69.

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understatement. Bunin fears and loathes death and finds no consolation in thinking about it philosophically: I’m now pretty sure that I will never see Tahiti, the Himalayas, or Japanese groves and shrines. . . . Never! All this will exist forever, but for me, it will be over and done with also forever. This is inconceivable.32 There is one single thing at the bottom of my soul: these days will keep on shining for thousands of years, and I will not exist. Just like that.33 I hailed a cab on the embankment and rode to a Russian church. . . . I strolled about the churchyard, went around the church and found the entrance to the underground coffin storage area where I will one day be taken to. It was cold, the weather was good, it was late afternoon. I felt sad, stupid, and hopeless. Looking for this entrance made me feel miserable. It was stupid. There was no need to do it.34 I was smart, extra-smart, talented, inconceivable, part of the divine that is my whole life with its uniqueness, thoughts, and feelings—how can it ever disappear? This cannot be true.35

While reading Tolstoy’s diaries, Bunin ascribes to Tolstoy his own overwhelming nostalgia for the life not over yet: [Tolstoy writes,] “I passed by some sheds. I remember the nights that I spent there, the youth and beauty of Dunyasha (I never had a tryst with her), her strong, womanly body. Where is that body now?” Here it is again: “That strong womanly body”. But what deep sorrow emerges from this “Where is it now!” What can compare with the poetic charm and sadness of these lines? Perhaps no one else in world literature could feel the various types of earthly flesh with such sharpness, if only because no one else had yet another gift, that is, such a piercing feeling of doom, of the decay of all worldly flesh, felt with an intensity that was innate and that filled his entire life.36

32 Bunin and Bunina, Ustami Buninykh, 2:274; Bunin’s italics. 33 Ibid., 284. 34 Ibid., 356. 35 Ibid., 358. 36 Bunin, Liberation of Tolstoy, 94.

Living with Tolstoy and Dying with Chekhov    Chapter 7

Despite his apparent affinity with the older writer, in Liberation of Tolstoy Bunin mostly shuns the limelight himself and sets up Tolstoy as the prophet of all prophets, the universal man, and the new messiah of the twentieth century. Tolstoy’s life (unlike Bunin’s) unfolds teleologically, following its own inner logic. One critic justifiably compared Liberation of Tolstoy to the New Testament: “Tolstoy’s life is beginning to become ‘the Good News’ for people, and the text created by Bunin is becoming a new gospel, telling people of a man who defeated death.”37 All his life, Bunin insisted, Tolstoy strove to understand what life and death were, and he gave an answer by leaving his family estate and dying peacefully at the unknown railway station of Astapovo: “When one thinks about Tolstoy’s very long life, remarkable for all that he said and did, one immediately sees that the highest point of that life, [the] one that explains everything, was his flight from Yasnaya Polyana and his death at that train ­station.”38 Bunin is at his best when he shares his personal memories of his meetings with Tolstoy and when he analyzes the texts, which he knows well. Bunin is by far less convincing when he tries to moralize and extract useful lessons from Tolstoy’s life, and particularly from his last days. Vera Bunina was not amused by her husband’s attempts at rearranging their lives in accordance with Tolstoy’s prescriptions and resolutions: “[Bunin] continues to admire the way Tolstoy died. He admires Tolstoy’s endless efforts to understand death. I personally find those efforts pathetic. If there is anything striking in them at all, it is precisely their impotence and helplessness.”39 Whether in response to remarks such as these or quite spontaneously, in the concluding chapters Bunin contrasts Tolstoy’s indefatigable preoccupation with death with Chekhov’s alleged unwillingness to think about it on a daily basis. Bunin remembers Chekhov saying, “Tolstoy sometimes disturbs me. For instance, he writes this absolutely wonderful piece, ‘How Much Land Does a Person Need?’ And he writes it in a way that no one will match in a thousand years. But what does he say? That a person needs only six feet of land. That is nonsense. A person does not need six feet of land but the entire earth. Only a dead person needs six feet. But the living need not think about death and dying.”40 “The living must not think about death and dying,” Bunin repeats with disapproval. “But it is futile to preach such a thing to ‘madmen’ who see 37 Ponomarёv, “Lev Tolstoi v soznanii russkoi emigratsii,” 210. 38 Bunin, Liberation of Tolstoy, 29 39 Bunin and Bunina, Ustami Buninykh, 2:232–33. 40 Bunin, Liberation of Tolstoy, 120–21.

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the world not as others do but rather as ‘beings from other worlds,’ as people ‘who have given themselves over to philosophy.’ What did Prince Andrei experience when he heard Natasha sing? And about another hero who heard someone sing, Chekhov would write: ‘As she sang, he felt as though he were eating a ripe, tasty melon.’”41 This childishly unfair and far-fetched comparison of Prince Andrei to an intentionally unreliable narrator of Chekhov’s My Life only shows how far Bunin was prepared to go in his task of illustrating Tolstoy’s superiority and singularity both as a man and a writer. Liberation of Tolstoy was written in the mid-1930s after Bunin completed his major work, The Life of Arseniev, the autobiographical novel largely responsible for his Nobel Prize. Despite his numerous efforts and resolutions to “finish” The Life of Arseniev—that is, to describe the remaining forty years of Arseniev’s life—the project remained “unfinished,” for obvious reasons. Its main subject, Bunin, remained alive, and it was difficult for him to come up with a definitive account of his own life and accomplishments. (Nabokov’s Speak, Memory also ends with his arrival in the United States, coincidentally.) Donald Polkinghorne describes any autobiographer’s predicament as follows: “We are in the middle of our stories and cannot be sure how they will end; we are constantly having to revise the plot as new events are added to our lives. [The] Self, then, is not a static thing or a substance, but a configuring of personal events into an historical unity, which includes not only what one has been but also anticipations of what one will be.”42 It seems that writing about Tolstoy—whose life was finished and open to definitive interpretations in the 1930s—provided Bunin with a much-needed escape from his attempts to write the story of a much older Arseniev-Bunin.

Back to Chekhov In the early 1950s, Bunin decided to revisit his recollections of Chekhov, which he wrote in 1904 and in 1914, this time focusing on Chekhov’s alleged affair with a minor writer, Lidia Avilova (1864–1943). This was going to occupy a large portion of his book, About Chekhov: As for the book about Chekhov, I expect it to come out in the summer of 1954 in time for the fiftieth anniversary of Chekhov’s death. [Vera 41 Ibid., 122. 42 Donald Polkinghorne, Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 150.

Living with Tolstoy and Dying with Chekhov    Chapter 7 Nikolaevna] and I are hoping to finish this book very soon. The book may turn out to be remarkable mainly because Chekhov had a big love in his life. I believe the only true love he had was for Avilova, whom I knew at the time when she was very young and beautiful but married with three children, and so couldn’t join her life with Chekhov’s, although she was deeply in love with him.43

Bunin’s perpetual oscillation between Tolstoy and Chekhov as role models suggests that with creative people like Bunin each new period of their artistic development demands a new source of validation. Bunin lived to be eightythree, and it was only natural for him in his sixties to feel a stronger affinity for Tolstoy, who died when he was eighty-two, than for Chekhov, who died at forty-four. With Tolstoy, Bunin concentrated on the very last week of his life and worked hard to make everything else fit in with this particular finale. With Chekhov, such a unifying theme or “hub” (to quote Tolstoy on another subject) was apparently difficult to find, until Bunin discovered that Chekhov’s love life was rich and tragic (like Bunin’s). Chekhov’s private life had not been as sterile as Bunin imagined it. This realization quickly promoted Chekhov to the status of Bunin’s other eternal companion, Tolstoy. Avilova’s published recollections of her meetings and correspondence with Chekhov were brought to Bunin’s attention in the early 1950s. Even if Avilova’s version of her lasting relationship with Chekhov was highly subjective, it served its purpose by giving Bunin a welcome distraction and renewing his interest in Chekhov’s biography. It is remarkable that, on his deathbed, Bunin, instead of immersing himself in thoughts of death as he had done for twenty years previously, returned to writing about what he knew best—namely, doomed, fragile relationships between men and women, the subject of his famous stories and novels, notably, The Life of Arseniev. Bunin’s death on November 8, 1953, cut his work short. About Chekhov—as posthumously redacted by Vera Bunina—incorporates a voluminous amount of material, including various Vikenty Veresaev-like citations. The book also contains remarkable long letters that Avilova wrote Bunin from Prague in the early 1920s. It was reading about Chekhov and rereading Chekhov’s own works (quotes from which are extensive and perceptively selected) that kept Bunin in an unusually altruistic mode of writing. Berberova’s 43 Rosa Fedulova, “Lettres d’Ivan Bunin à Mark Aldanov, vol. 2, 1948–1953,” Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique 23, no. 3 (1982): 469–500, 491.

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accounts of his being cantankerous and unbearable are undermined by Bunin’s manifold appreciation of Chekhov’s achievements. Bunin is exceptionally kind in his comments not only about Chekhov himself but also about the works of other memoirists and interpreters, such as Mikhail Grigoryevich Kurdyumov, whose monograph Heart in Turmoil (Serdtse smiatennoe) Bunin quotes at length, reveling in their joint recognition of Chekhov’s uniqueness. Bunin writes, “Kurdyumov thinks that Three Sisters, Uncle Vanya, and The Cherry Orchard are Chekhov’s best plays. I don’t agree: The Seagull is the best and the only one. But I have to admit that I evaluated his plays incorrectly. Kurdyumov is right when he says that ‘the main invisible character in Chekhov’s plays— and also in his other works—is the mercilessly escaping time.’”44 Bunin’s own elation gets confirmation in Chekhov’s published letters and notebooks: “As I have learned from a letter to [Olga] Knipper, Chekhov wrote about me on the day following my arrival [in Yalta]: ‘Bunin is full of joie de vivre.’ Anton Pavlovich almost always had an exciting effect on me.”45 The unfinished version of About Chekhov consists of two parts. The largely fragmented part 2 (unlike part 1, which is predominantly focused on Chekhov) suggests that Bunin was going to settle his final scores with his literary contemporaries. He credits Chekhov with a superhuman ability to foresee the downfall of Russian modernism when it was only in its primal stages. Bunin and Chekhov, like Dante and Virgil, are there to witness the existence of the literary inferno that Bunin creates as his ultimate commentary on his time and his milieu. Chekhov told me that “decadents” were more than just hoodlums. “What kind of decadents are they!” he exclaimed. “They are the most hale and hearty peasants. They should be arrested and forced to serve in the army.” . . . Indeed, could any one of them be regarded as healthy in the conventional sense of this word? They were no longer called decadents and symbolists but futurists, argonauts, and mystical anarchists. Writers such as Gorky and Andreev were followed by the wasted and wan Artsybashev and by Kuzmin with his half-bare skull and deathlike face, made up like a corpse or prostitute. All of them were cunning and sly, since they all possessed the qualities of God’s fools and of insane and hysterical people to call attention to themselves. 44 Ivan Bunin, O Chekhove, http://az.lib.ru/b/bunin_i_a/text_1840-1.shtml. Kurdyumov’s book, Serdtse smiatennoe, was published in Paris, in 1934. It is not clear why Bunin discovered it only twenty years later. 45 Bunin, About Chekhov, 40.

Living with Tolstoy and Dying with Chekhov    Chapter 7 What a remarkable accumulation of these unhealthy, abnormal types came into existence during Chekhov’s time! How they ­multiplied in the years after his death! There was the consumptive [Zinaida] Gippius who, not for nothing, wrote under a man’s name. There was Bryusov, who was consumed with a mania for glory. There was the mute and stonily inert Sologub—“a brick in suit,” Rozanov once called him—the author of “quiet boys” and The Petty Demon, with its pathological hero, Peredonov, the singer of death and the “father” of his own devil. There was the frenzied Volynsky, the stormy “mystical anarchist” Chulkov, and the stunted and terrible-looking Minsky, with his huge head and stagnant eyes.46

My comparison of Bunin with Dante is not as fanciful as it might seem. Harold Bloom praises Dante above all for his invention of Beatrice.47 She provides the poet with guidance and serves as the ultimate justification for his otherwise questionable deeds and numerous affronts to his esteemed contemporaries. As compared to a somewhat similar passage that Bunin wrote in 1913 (discussed earlier in this chapter), in About Chekhov Bunin shows a Dantean ability to make each character uniquely memorable. Each portrayal, however unfair and malicious, contains a life and its commensurable place in eternity, so to speak. By thinking about Chekhov and by immersing himself in Chekhov’s writings shortly prior to his own death, Bunin achieves what Dante believed to be the meaning of the Israelites’ flight from Egypt—“the conversion of the soul from grief and misery of sin to the state of grace.”48

Biographer’s Liberation In the 1930s, biography, in Virginia Woolf ’s words, was still “a young art.”49 “Could not biography produce something of the intensity of poetry, something of the excitement of drama, and yet keep also the peculiar virtue that belongs

46 Ibid., 132–33. 47 Harold Bloom, “The Strangeness of Dante: Ulysses and Beatrice,” in The Western Canon (New York: Riverhead Books, 1994), 73–75. 48 Dante is quoted in Charles S. Singleton, Journey to Beatrice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1958), 6. 49 Virginia Woolf, “The Art of Biography,” in The Death of the Moth, and Other Essays, https:// ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91d/chapter23.html.

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to fact—its suggestive reality, its own proper creativeness?” she wondered.50 Woolf looked closely at the various biographies, most notably those of Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth, written by her long-time friend and rival Lytton Strachey,51 and concluded: [Biographies] are not destined for the immortality which the artist now and then achieves for his creations. . . . Even Dr. Johnson as created by Boswell will not live as long as Falstaff as created by Shakespeare. Micawber and Miss Bates we may be certain will survive Lockhart’s Sir Walter Scott and Lytton Strachey’s Queen Victoria. For they are made of more enduring matter. The artist’s imagination at its most intense fires out what is perishable in fact; he builds with what is durable; but the biographer must accept the perishable, build with it imbed it in the very fabric of his work. Much will perish; little will live. And thus we come to the conclusion, that he is a craftsman, not an artist; and his work is not a work of art, but something betwixt and between.52

Woolf might be right, and Bunin’s Tolstoy and Chekhov might not live as long as their characters, Prince Andrei and Uncle Vanya. But Bunin did not seek immortality through these biography projects. Bunin’s enduring work on his recollections of Chekhov and Tolstoy can best be described in terms of Ernest Becker’s “creative projection” or “transference heroics.”53 While transference is often seen as something degrading to its subject, Becker, in fact, describes it as a “marvelous talent” and “a form of creative fetishism.” How wonderful and how facile to be able to take our whole ­immortality-striving and make it part of a dialogue with a single human being. . . . Transference heroics gives man precisely what he needs: a certain degree of sharply defined individuality, a definite point of reference for his practice of goodness, and all within a certain secure level of safety and control. . . . [Transference] represents a natural attempt to be healed and to be whole, through heroic self-expansion in the ‘other.’ . . . People create the reality they need to discover themselves.54 50 Ibid. 51 On this rivalry, see Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey: The New Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 605–16. 52 Woolf, “Art of Biography.” 53 Becker, Denial of Death, 158. 54 Ibid., 155–58.

Living with Tolstoy and Dying with Chekhov    Chapter 7

In his desire to project and test his anxieties against the lives of his famous contemporaries, Bunin was not alone. As the critic Boris Eikhenbaum revealed in 1932 in his letter to another celebrated student of Tolstoy, Victor Shklovsky, “There is nothing left in life for me, except for work and sleep. But for Tolstoy, I would probably already be dead. He is a kind of mistress to me.”55 Bunin was fortunate to have two “mistresses.” Both were dead and, like Dante’s Beatrice, were there only to soothe and instruct. Death for Tolstoy was a great enabler. It presented him with numerous possibilities. In Liberation of Tolstoy, Bunin recalls Tolstoy’s obsession with the idea that a man bitten by a mad dog will definitely die within six weeks. When told differently (that some people may not die at all), Tolstoy exclaimed: “Oh, what a pity. I very much liked the idea that people die when they are bitten. I think that it is just great. A dog bites a person, and the person knows that he will die within six weeks. In the meantime, he can do what he wants; he can hit someone with truth right between the eyes!”’56 Thinking about death allowed Tolstoy to purge his previous thoughts and commitments and start every day anew. Bunin, by contrast, had to suppress his worries about his health, his fears about his wife’s health, and, above all, thoughts of his own mortality. Thinking about death was debilitating for him. His brother’s death plunged Bunin into a lasting depression during which he couldn’t write at all. In general, Bunin abhorred funerals and, as much as he could, avoided any occasion to look at people in coffins. He left instructions to cover his body immediately after his death so that nobody could see him dead. For Bunin, such a seemingly death-embracing or death-defying person as Tolstoy offered an instructive lesson, which he was, however, unable to use. Whereas in 1937, when the Bunins enjoyed relative financial stability, he found the idea of “liberating” oneself from one’s emotional bonds and material goods attractive, from the late 1930s through the early 1950s, when the Bunins were poverty-stricken and often had little to eat, this ideal of complete liberation from one’s attachments in life may have lost some of its attraction and relevance. In 1948, Berberova, who was becoming increasingly disenchanted with Bunin, recorded seeing an overflowing chamber pot that he had deliberately left in full view in his apartment.57 In 1953, he was so poor that a new set of 55 B. Eikhenbaum to V. Shklovsky, April 25, 1932, quoted in Igor Sukhikh, “Tolstoi Eikhenbauma: Energiia postizheniia (1915–1959),” Neva 4 (2009), http:/ /magazines.russ. ru/neva/2009/4/su19.html. 56 Bunin, Liberation of Tolstoy, 95. 57 Berberova, Kursiv moi, 298. As Bunin was undoubtedly aware, in his old age, Tolstoy took great pleasure and responsibility in emptying his own chamber pot by himself, even

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underwear was a luxury.58 In his last hand-written diary entry of May 2, 1953, he even testifies to his need of reminding himself of his fear of death: And still it’s something like succumbing to tetanus. In an extremely short time I will cease to exist—and the state and destiny of absolutely everything will be unknown to me. I will join the ranks of Finikov, Rogovsky, Shmelev, Panteleimonov, and others. . . . And all I am doing is using my obtuse reason to make myself feel amazed and frightened.59

Some of his very last words, as recorded in Vera Bunina’s diary—“I am dying, no appetite, even chicken has lost its appeal”—came to be Bunin’s ultimate comment on what a dying man feels.60 Were all those years of fear, mortal anguish, and preparation for the ultimate transition wasted? Was Chekhov right that “the living need not think about death and dying?” In the following chapter I offer my reading of Chekhov’s last play and suggest how it might help us make better choices in the twenty-first century.

if it meant keeping everyone waiting indefinitely while he was performing this task. See Evlakhov, Konstitutsional´nye osobennosti psikhiki L. N. Tolstogo, 101. 58 Fedulova, “Lettres d’Ivan Bunin à Mark Aldanov,” 493. 59 Bunin and Bunina, Ustami Buninykh, 2:406; Bunin’s italics. 60 Ibid., 407.

CHAPTER 8

“There is a way out”: The Cherry Orchard in the Twenty-First Century

Since the appearance of Chekhov’s early stories, criticism has been preoccupied with the question: Where is Chekhov in his works? What is his point of view and how does he stand in relation to his heroes, their moods and ideas? —Robert Louis Jackson, Chekhov: A Collection of Critical Essays

T

he Cherry Orchard (1903) happened to be the last work of Chekhov. This has been prompting students of Chekhov to treat it as his final testament and to look for some eternal truths hidden between its lines. Those steeped in Russian literature naturally assume that in his last year(s) the dying Chekhov was concerned more about the future of Russian society than his thinning hair and the misbehavior of his intestines, which he described meticulously to his more intimate correspondents. The Cherry Orchard is also notable for Chekhov’s unsuccessful attempts to make the Russian public accept his play as a comedy in contrast to the dramatic (merging on tragic) interpretation suggested by Konstantin Stanislavsky and the Moscow Art Theatre in 1904.1 The standard definition of comedy as something that starts poorly but has a splendid finale (unlike tragedy where things start well but end poorly) fails to

1 Stanislavsky wrote to Chekhov in 1903: “This is not a comedy, not a farce as you have written, this is a tragedy, whatever escape toward a better life you open up in the last act. . . . I wept like a woman. I wanted to control myself but I couldn’t. I hear what you say: ‘Look you must realize it is a farce’ . . . no, for simple men this is a tragedy. I feel a special tenderness and love for this play.” Quoted in James N. Loehlin, Chekhov: The Cherry Orchard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 4.

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convince many students of Chekhov. What is there to celebrate when the old orchard—the epitome of beauty—is being chopped down in act 4? The Cherry Orchard, nevertheless, does fit the bill of a comedy. In act 1, Lopakhin explains the gravity of the situation to everyone concerned: As you already know, the cherry orchard will be sold to pay your debts, the auction is set for August twenty-second, but don’t worry, dear lady, don’t lose any sleep, there’s a way out. . . . Your estate lies only thirteen miles from town, the railroad runs past it, and if the cherry orchard and the land along the river were subdivided into building lots and then leased out for summer cottages, you’d have an income of at the very least twenty-five thousand a year. . . . The location is wonderful, the river’s deep. Only, of course, it’ll have to be spruced up, cleared out . . . for example, tear down all the old sheds, and this house, say, which is absolutely worthless, chop down the old cherry orchard.2

Lyubov Andreevna Ranevskaya (the owner) is devastated and unreservedly rejects Lopakhin’s plan. Her beloved orchard and the estate, in her view, cannot be wiped out, no matter what. “I love this house, without the cherry orchard I couldn’t make sense of my life, and if it really has to be sold, then sell me along with the orchard,” she moans in act 3 (1022). However, in act 4, Ranevskaya talks about losing the estate as a foregone conclusion: “Good-bye, dear old house, old grandfather. Winter will pass, spring will come again, but you won’t be here anymore, they’ll tear you down” (1036). The situation is resolved of its own accord, with the friend of the family Lopakhin buying the estate and beginning to cut down the orchard before the estate’s owners have even moved out. Even as the orchard is being cut down, all the characters start to feel much better, sleep better, and some of them are downright happy. Even Lopakhin, whom Chekhov entrusts with cutting down the orchard, continues to be everyone’s dear friend. How do the characters achieve this sense of inner equilibrium? What exactly makes Ranevskaya and the others resign themselves to the situation and calm down? Of course, one can see the cherry orchard as the embodiment of the outdated prerevolutionary way of life or—nowadays—of everything (such as education and culture, children’s creative development, libraries, museums, 2 Anton Chekhov, The Complete Plays, trans. Laurence Senelick (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 991. Figures in parentheses correspond to page numbers in this edition.

“There is a way out”    Chapter 8

provincial theaters, nature preserves, recreation parks, and many other things) that does not bring easily calculable annual profits. But one also needs to examine the play from a perspective that presumably Chekhov himself might have had in the period between 1902 and 1904 when the play was written and staged. Chekhov was a professional doctor. “When someone has been sick for a long time, everybody in his household, deep inside, wishes him to be dead,” Chekhov recorded in one of his last notebooks.3 This raises two questions: At what point is it possible and reasonable to accept the inevitability of someone’s death and to stop providing medical treatment to a terminally sick person; and how can this be done with the least possible suffering both on the part of the sick person and his or her close circle? Chekhov’s short life span coincided with what Philippe Aries describes as a transition from one cultural view of death to another.4 Chekhov died at a time when death was becoming increasingly medicalized through relocation from private homes to hospitals and various hospices, and consequently treated as invisible or denied. This concept of death (as something that “turns [one’s] stomach . . . like the biological acts of man” and that has accordingly to be postponed at all cost) has been prevalent ever since the end of the nineteenth century and contributes to our definition of death today.5 Aries’s analysis can be used to explain the allegedly ruthless scene from The Cherry Orchard, in which the owners hear their beloved orchard being destroyed, and thus become aware of its imminent end. Why didn’t Lopakhin have enough tact to wait until they were all gone? Because being tactful was not an issue: the resolution of the play is not as cruel as many critics seem to imply today. The orchard, like a typical nineteenth-century person, is dying in a familiar setting, surrounded by friends and family. That is also why all attempts to send the old servant Firs to the hospital fail: he is left to die in his masters’ house, in full view of the sympathetic theatergoers, who have come to know and love him in the course of a three-hour-long performance. In the twenty-first century, when medical science and technology have developed to such an unprecedented extent that they can sustain a sick person’s life for incredibly long periods of time, the question of when one needs such 3 Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v tridtsati tomakh, part 1, Sochineniia, 17:38. 4 Aries distinguishes between five cultural views of death that were typical of different historical periods: “the tame death,” “the death of the self,” “remote and imminent death,” “the death of the other,” and “the invisible death.” See Philippe Aries, The Hour of Our Death (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981). 5 Ibid., 563, 569.

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interventions and when they should stop has arisen in all its uncomfortable starkness. And the problem is not so much the amount of money that prolonging somebody’s life requires or the fact that oftentimes the person in question is in a coma and, for all intents and purposes, is dead to the outside world; the problem is also that prolonging a sick person’s life often requires all the physical and mental resources of both the patient and his or her family members, who cannot resign themselves to the idea that curing the patient is impossible and that many of the medical procedures not only fail to alleviate the patient’s pain but may cause the patient unfathomable suffering. Is it better to prolong suffering or accept the inevitable and devote the remaining time to easing the person’s suffering, to interacting with the sick person, and to achieving mutual forgiveness? How can one relinquish what is immeasurably dear but can no longer be preserved?6 The Cherry Orchard helps us think through many situations in the ­twenty-first century. When writing the play, Chekhov was already a very sick person. He must have thought about how different people would react to his death. In act 1, Gaev (Ranevskaya’s brother) sums up the situation: “If a large number of cures is suggested for a particular disease, it means the disease is incurable” (998). That is the news that one has to come to terms with. It takes time. From my perspective, The Cherry Orchard is, first and foremost, a story about how a group of people collectively resigns itself to the death of the dearly loved old grandfather (staryi dedushka, act 4). That is precisely how Ranevskaya refers to the old house with the orchard. In this chapter I offer a new look at the structure of The Cherry Orchard. How, for example, is one to explain the seemingly nonsensical ball in act 3? It begins to make perfect sense once one realizes that some people can only come to terms with certain information and internalize certain knowledge if they are in motion. Ranevskaya is such a person. Chekhov takes his characters and his audience through four stages of coming to terms with the terrible news that the orchard and the house are doomed. In Ranevskaya’s case, he helps her deal 6 See the growing literature devoted to these issues: Ira Byock, Dying Well: The Prospect of Growth at the End of Life (New York: Riverhead Books, 1997); Ian Dowbiggin, A Merciful End: The Euthanasia Movement in Modern America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Sandra M. Gilbert, Death’s Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006); and Robert Orfali, Death with Dignity: The Case for Legalizing PhysicianAssisted Dying and Euthanasia (Minneapolis: Mill City Press, 2011), and Steve Gordon and Irene Kacandes, Let’s Talk About Death: Asking the Questions that Profoundly Change the Way We Live and Die (Amherst: Prometheus, 2015), to name but a few.

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with shock and overcome her refusal to accept the inevitable. She leaves quite content. So how is this achieved from act to act? In the first act, the news of the grave condition of the orchard is introduced in the context of the company’s very early/late arrival, great confusion, and general tiredness. The thought that the orchard will soon be lost does not sink in. In the second act, everyone is sitting motionlessly in the vicinity of a cemetery, listening to one another talk and finally tacitly arriving at the decision to do nothing. It should be noted that making a decision and learning to live with it are two separate matters. In the third act, the same decision is further internalized through motion. Ranevskaya announces that she wishes to return to Paris and admits that she is still in love with the person who was partially responsible for everybody’s financial ruin and, as a result, for the ruin of the cherry orchard. All this happens while she dances with Petya Trofimov, talks with him, then quarrels, makes up with him, and finally dances with him again. Her urging Petya to find himself a mistress— that is, “to fall”—suddenly materializes with Petya’s actually taking a tumble down the staircase. The fourth act is devoted to the general exodus. Everybody has to vacate the premises physically—walk or ride away. What I suggest is to consider each act on the basis of how new unexpected information is absorbed and internalized in it: act 1 is visual, act 2 is audial (also called auditory and aural), and act 3 is kinesthetic or kinetic. Act 4 is also kinesthetic but in a different way: the characters’ bodily movements are employed not to absorb new information but to reinforce or consolidate certain newly acquired skills. Let us take a closer look at each act and its characters.

Act 1 Act 1 portrays a predominantly visual perception of the external world. It is emphasized that it is May, the orchard is in bloom, there are many lengthy descriptive passages. (Dunyasha describes Yepikhodov; Ranevskaya is described by Lopakhin; Anya describes Ranevskaya’s life in Paris; she also describes her drowned brother Grisha; Lopakhin describes himself, etc.) The characters are invited to recognize/recall something by seeing. “Will [Ranevskaya] recognize me?” Lopakhin worries (983). Anya: “Mama, do you remember what room this is?” (984). Varya: “Your rooms, the white and the violet, are still the same as ever, Mama dear” (984). Gaev to Ranevskaya: “The orchard’s all white. You haven’t forgotten, Lyuba? There’s that long pathway leading straight on, straight on, like a stretched ribbon, it glistens on moonlit

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nights. You remember? You haven’t forgotten?” (995). Gaev suddenly has a revelatory moment (almost an epiphany): “Lyuba, do you know how old this cupboard is? . . . This cupboard was built exactly one hundred years ago. . . . (Stroking the cupboard.) Dear, venerated cupboard! I salute your existence, which for over a century has been dedicated to enlightened ideas of virtue and justice; your unspoken appeal to constructive endeavor has not faltered in the course of a century, sustaining (through tears) in generations of our line, courage, faith in a better future and nurturing within us ideals of decency and social consciousness” (993). Ranevskaya starts hallucinating: “Look, our poor Mama is walking through the orchard . . . in a white dress! (Laughs with joy.) There she is” (996). The verbs “Seeing” and “looking,” and their derivatives, abound in this act. Varya, after Lopakhin fails to propose to her, states: “It’s hard for me even to look at him.”7 Here is how Ranevskaya describes her return home from France: “God knows, I love my country, love it dearly. I couldn’t look at it from the train, couldn’t stop crying” (990). The characters repeatedly compare one another’s looks. Gaev tells Anya that she looks exactly like her mother when she was Anya’s age (989). Ranevskaya tells Varya that she “looks the same as ever, like a nun” (984). By the end of act 1, however, Ranevskaya starts noticing that everyone has changed and grown old, as if she is finally exhausted by her sight-seeing activity: “Well now, Petya? Why have you become so homely? Why have you got old? . . . You got old too, Leonid” (997). Ranevskaya clearly experiences everything through her body, and sheer contemplation or prolonged periods of listening to other people make her uncomfortable and less prone to understanding them. Anya describes her mother’s reaction to the deaths of her husband and a son: “Six years ago father died, a month later our brother Grisha drowned in the river, a sweet little boy, seven years old. Mama couldn’t stand it, she went away, went away without looking back . . . (Shivers.) How well I understand her if only she knew” (987–88). In act 2 Ranevskaya describes the same situation in her own words: “I went abroad, went for good, never to return, never to see that river again . . . I shut my eyes, ran away, out of my mind” (1007). To move away, to perform a physical action—that is how kinesthetic people react to a new environment/situation. That is how they tend to process any new information. Anya 7

Here I am using Michael Heim’s translation, which is closer to the original Russian “tiazhelo mne ego videt´.” Chekhov, The Essential Plays, trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 200.

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u­ nderstands Ranevskaya completely because she is similarly kinesthetic. If Anya welcomes the new life, she has to be moving forward; and she complements this act kinesthetically by throwing the keys to her mother’s estate into a deep well. Ranevskaya incessantly displays the urge to move, touch, hug, and kiss. When she receives the telegrams from her estranged lover, she first tears them to pieces without reading; later in the play, she reads them, and only then does she tear them to pieces, as if she needs this procedure to engrain in her mind the irrevocability of her decision to stop living with a man who does not respect her and who in part is responsible for squandering the family fortune. Young children are naturally kinesthetic. They need to touch, smell, put new things in their mouths, and crawl on different types of surfaces in order to learn how to interact with the world. Act 1 abounds in the words “nursery,” “childhood,” “child,” and “children.” In fact, some characters are emotionally transported to their childhood experiences. Ranevskaya says: “The nursery, my darling, beautiful room. . . . I slept here when I was a little girl . . . (Weeps.) And now I feel like a little girl . . . (She kisses her brother and Varya and then her brother again.)” (984). Gaev (Ranevskaya’s next of kin) also reacts to everything kinesthetically. Throughout the play he utters interjections and makes bodily movements with his imaginary cue as if he is involved in a continual game of billiards. He irritatingly sucks some hard candies and has a heightened sense of smell (“it smells of chicken/herring/patchoulis”), which is typical of people with a kinesthetic learning ability. It is not surprising, therefore, that Gaev and Ranevskaya fail to understand Lopakhin, who has a very logical and visual state of mind. He can easily visualize what he is talking about, while Ranevskaya needs an object, something that she can touch and feel: “Can I really be sitting here? (Laughs.) I feel like jumping up and down and swinging my arms. (Covers her face with her arms.)” (990). Lopakhin invites her to listen to him and to contemplate a wonderful future that he envisions for her and her estate. But Ranevskaya literally cannot sit still. lopakhin. The only thing I want is for you to believe in me as you once did,

for your wonderful, heartbreaking eyes to look at me as they once did. . . . ranevskaya. I can’t sit still, I just can’t. . . (Leaps up and walks about in great excitement.) I won’t survive this joy. . . . Laugh at me, I am silly. . . . My dear little cupboard. (Kisses the cupboard.) My little table. (990)

Lopakhin continues to paint his attainable and prosperous future, while both Gaev and Ranevskaya are incapable of following his train of thought.

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Ranevskaya: “I don’t quite follow you, Yermolai Alekseich. . . . Chop it down? My dear, forgive me, but you don’t understand at all” (991). “What drivel!” Gaev echoes with indignation (992).

Act 2 Much has been written about the use of space in Chekhov’s plays. In the case of The Cherry Orchard, however, it is not only important to appreciate where the action takes place, but also where it does not: it never takes place in the orchard.8 The whole of act 2 takes place beside the road near the cemetery. The orchard can be seen at a distance behind the “towering poplars” and is visually fused with the decrepit tombstones (1001). In this act the characters tacitly agree to do nothing about the orchard. Acoustically, this state of dreadful inertia is punctuated by “the sound of a breaking string, dying away mournfully” (1012). Act 2 is predominantly aural: Yepikhodov plays his guitar, and he wants to have a heart-to-heart conversation with Dunyasha. But Dunyasha is smitten with Ranevskaya’s valet Yasha, his Parisian sophistication and ability to “discuss anything” (1004). Sharlotta pours out her feelings, but no one is interested. Most of the time the characters are sitting static, obliged to listen to one another. Ranevskaya talks at length about her sins. Petya delivers his famous monologues about “human pride” (1010) and about “all Russia [being] our orchard” (1015). Lopakhin unsuccessfully attempts to make Ranevskaya say something in response to his proposition to rent out the orchard and the adjacent land to the growing population of summer folk: “Give me a one-word answer: yes or no? Just one word!” (1004). Ranevskaya characteristically conveys her disgust at making such irreversible decisions by complaining about the smell and invoking a succession of unpleasant sensations that she has recently experienced at a railroad restaurant: “Who’s been smoking those revolting cigars around here. . . . And why did I go out to lunch. . . . That nasty restaurant of yours with its music, the tablecloths smelt of soap. . . . Why drink so much, Lyonya? Why eat so much?” (1004–5). Gaev also feels out of sorts and itches to break away from this awkward situation: “You ride to town and have lunch . . . yellow to the center! I should go home first, play one game.” (1004). Finally, both Ranevskaya and Gaev decide that Lopakhin’s plan is “vulgar,” which makes him 8 This is remarkable, given that in Chekhov’s earlier plays, Platonov and Ivanov, whole acts take place in the orchards or gardens.

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lose his patience: “I’ll burst into tears or scream or fall down in a faint. It’s too much for me! You are torturing me to death!” (1006). Lopakhin’s words would have been infinitely more understandable to Ranevskaya had he indeed implemented his threats. Later, she remarks to Lopakhin: “You all live such gray lives, you talk such nonsense” (1007). At the end of act 2, Petya (an eternal student) and Anya, Raneveskaya’s seventeen-year-old daughter, are left alone. Petya is in love with Anya, and he chooses his words carefully so that they will appeal to her kinesthetic way of processing his novel ideas: “Varya’s afraid we’ll suddenly fall in love, so she hangs around us all day. Her narrow mind can’t comprehend that we’re above love. Avoiding the petty and specious that keeps us from being free and happy, that’s the goal and meaning of our life. Forward! We march irresistibly toward the shining star, glowing there in the distance! Forward! No dropping behind, friends!” (1014). Not surprisingly, Anya finds Petya’s utterances irresistible: “Anya (stretching up her arms). You speak so well! . . . The house we live in hasn’t been our house for a long time, and I’ll go away, I give you my word” (1014). In his final crescendo, Petya employs all available means of communicating his enthusiasm—visual, aural, and kinesthetic, as if Chekhov wanted his monologue to reverberate with every listener: “I foresee happiness, Anya, I can see it already. . . . Here is happiness, here it comes, drawing closer and closer, I can already hear its footsteps. And if we don’t see it, can’t recognize it, what’s wrong with that? Others will see it” (1015–6). To avoid Varya, Petya and Anya decide to go to the river. Act 2 ends with an empty stage and with Varya’s voice yelling: “Anya! Anya!” (1016).

Act 3 In act 3, Ranevskaya throws a party for the local people and invites a renowned Jewish orchestra. The fete is made to coincide with the day of the auction. Everyone has to dance, and when “the Station Master stops in the middle of the ballroom [to] recite Aleksey Tolstoy’s ‘The Sinful Woman’,” the guests barely listen to him, “and the recitation breaks off ” (1024). Characters continually rush in; then they hurriedly leave the scene. They stumble; they whirl. Even those who do not dance perform various tricks of magic (like Sharlotta) or play billiards and break cue sticks (like Yepikhodov). Keeping up the appearance of a debonair hostess might have provided someone with an excuse to suppress his or her fears, at least for the duration of the party. Ranevskaya, however, drops her pretenses and openly acknowledges her worst anxieties and a hidden

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desire to reunite with her Parisian lover. She does this while dancing with Petya, while being literally in his arms, while challenging him, and while allowing herself to be confronted by him. The evening is interrupted by the arrival of Gaev and Lopakhin, who has succeeded in acquiring the cherry orchard for himself. Varya first mistakenly hits him with a stick (an inversion of intimacy) and, when she learns that he is the new owner, “removes [her household] keys from the belt, throws them on the floor in the middle of the drawing room and exits” (1029). Lopakhin’s concluding remarks deploy a series of verbs that denote physical action. His stumbling movements accentuate them; it is only logical that Ranevskaya was finally able to hear him. lopakhin.

(Reproachfully.) Why, oh, why, didn’t you listen to me? My poor, dear lady, you can’t undo it now. (Tearfully.) Oh, if only this were all over quickly, if somehow our ungainly, unhappy life could be changed quickly. . . . So what? Music, play in tune! Let everything be the way I want it! (Ironically.) Here comes the new landlord, the owner of the cherry orchard! (He accidentally bumps into a small table and almost knocks over the candelabrum.) I can pay for everything! (1030)

Meanwhile, Anya rushes to console Ranevskaya by suggesting a set of physical actions that she can perform in response to her loss of the beloved estate: “Come with me, come, dearest mother, let’s go away from here, let’s go! . . . We’ll plant a new orchard, more splendid than this one, you’ll see it, you’ll understand, and joy, peaceful, profound joy will sink into your heart, like the sun when night falls, and you’ll smile, Mama! Let’s go, dearest! Let’s go!” (1030).

Act 4 In act 4, Chekhov leads all characters through a series of kinesthetic exercises and rituals. They are made aware of their bodies, the ways they move and gesticulate. Petya instructs Lopakhin to “break [himself] of that habit—arm waving. . . . You’ve got delicate, gentle fingers, like an artist, you’ve got a delicate, gentle heart” (1033), and pompous Yasha tells the heartbroken Dunyasha that if she “behaves respectably, then [she] won’t have to cry” (1035). Sharlotta is singing for the first time, which Gaev interprets as a sign of her being happy. Earlier he observes that everyone looks healthier and even sleeps better after they have lost their family estate.

“There is a way out”    Chapter 8 her daughter ardently.) My precious, you are radiant, your eyes are sparkling like two diamonds. Are you happy? Very? anya. Very! A new life is beginning, Mama! gaev (gaily). As a matter of fact, everything’s fine now. Before the sale of the cherry orchard, we were all upset, distressed, but then, once the matter was settled finally, irrevocably, everyone calmed down, even cheered up. . . . I’m a bank employee now, I’m a financier . . . yellow to the center, and you, Lyuba, anyway, you’re looking better, that’s for sure. ranevskaya. Yes. My nerves are better, that’s true. . . . I sleep well. (1036) ranevskaya. (Kissing

It is difficult to say good-bye to many happy memories, but no one is going to suffer for long. “In twenty minutes we start for the station,” Lopakhin announces at the beginning of this act. Absolutely everyone has to leave the house at exactly the same time. ranevskaya. We are going—and there won’t be a soul left here. lopakhin. Not until spring. (1041)

“Outside it’s October, but sunny and mild,” Lopakhin says a few minutes earlier. Then why is there such a rush to start cutting down the orchard on the day of everyone’s departure, especially if tomorrow, we are told, there will be no one to continue with the job? The only explanation is that they start to cut down the trees so that every character can start internalizing the finality of this moment, absorbing its irrevocability through every pore of their skin, hearing the sound of wood being chopped while they are leaving their beloved house forever. The characters keep repeating, as if hypnotized, that they are leaving: “Varya is leaving; I have to leave; Now I can leave; We have to leave; Let’s go!; Time to leave!; Let’s go!; Let’s go!; We are going; We are leaving, we are leaving” (“Варя уходит.” “Надо уходить.” “Теперь можно и ехать.” “Надо ехать.” “В дорогу!” “Господа, пора ехать!” “Идем, господа!” “Идем!” “Идем!” “Мы идем.”) There will be no return. It is as if Chekhov wants to teach his characters (all of them without exception) how to depart, how to leave, how to bid farewell. The main function of the eighty-seven-year-old Firs is to witness this exodus, to confirm that, indeed, everyone has left. Although the lonely and sick Firs may come across as a tragic figure before the final curtain, his imminent death should not be seen as a tragedy. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788– 1860) might argue that Firs is at the age when people die naturally, slowly and

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b­ lissfully, almost without noticing that they are dying.9 “My mistress has come home! I’ve been waiting! Now I can die,” Firs declares joyfully in act 1 (988). Nobody takes his words seriously, but perhaps they should have. In The Enigma of Health, Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) writes about the turning point in a doctor’s relationship with his dying patients: Although there is a great deal that we can hide and repress, fabricate and replace, even a doctor who is able to help patients survive critical phases of their organic life through the extraordinary means of automated and mechanical substitutes for functioning organs is still, eventually, forced to recognize the patient as an individual human being. This takes place when, finally, the doctor is confronted with the momentous decision as to when the instrumental preservation of the patient’s merely vegetative existence can, or ought to be, withdrawn.10

In Chekhov’s play, the cherry orchard epitomizes this “merely vegetative existence,” and Chekhov, along with his characters, assumes the responsibility for bringing this existence to an end. Chekhov’s contemporaries and subsequent generations of critics tend to identify Chekhov with the dying orchard. But this is only one aspect of this relationship. Chekhov acts both as a patient and a physician. (Significantly, The Cherry Orchard is Chekhov’s only drama without a doctor.) The patient, his relatives, and we (readers and theatergoers) are given time to accept the idea that death is imminent, to prepare for this misfortune, and to spend some meaningful time together. The Cherry Orchard is the last play in Chekhov’s famous quartet that includes The Seagull (1896), Uncle Vanya (1897), Three Sisters (1900), and The Cherry Orchard. Even a cursory look at the first three plays reveals one overarching theme: the characters’ continual inability to break away from what   9 See: “Little by little in old age, the passions and desires, with the susceptibility for their objects, are extinguished; the emotions no longer find anything to excite them; for the power of presenting ideas to the mind always becomes weaker, its images fainter; the impressions no longer cleave to us, but pass over without leaving a trace, the days roll ever faster, events lose their significance, everything grows pale. The old man stricken in years totters about or rests in a corner now only a shadow, a ghost of his former self. What remains there for death to destroy? One day a sleep is his last, and his dreams are.” Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation/Supplements to the Fourth Book, http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/ The_World_as_Will_and_Representation/Supplements_to_the_Fourth_Book. 10 Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Enigma of Health: The Art of Healing in a Scientific Age, trans. Jason Gaiger and Nicholas Walker (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 79.

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is dear to them but which turns their existence into a perpetual hell. In The Seagull, Konstantin Treplev wants to distinguish himself and to break away from his mother and the art and the lifestyle that she has come to embody. He succeeds in leaving her only by committing suicide. In Three Sisters, the title characters’ problem is not that they cannot go to their beloved Moscow but that they cannot discard this useless dream and start living in the present, making the most of what is available to them at the moment. In Uncle Vanya, Voinitsky complains that he could have been another Schopenhauer, Dostoevsky, or Nietzsche had he had the strength and willpower to leave his mother and his sister’s family. Uncle Vanya has received a lot of attention as the first play devoted to ecological issues. Indeed, one of the play’s characters, Astrov, argues for the preservation of forests, and he starts planting trees to avert the looming ecological catastrophe. But while Astrov talks a lot about the need to preserve natural resources, he forgets that people are just as important as any animals and trees. By the end of the play, Astrov goes back to his nursery while the rest of the characters find themselves in total disarray. As Gadamer reminds us about the initial meaning of the word ecology, The Greek word oikos meant the domestic house and in this connection we also speak of the ‘household’. One learns to keep house with the means, energy and time that are available. The Greek word, however, means something more than this. For it includes not only the ability to manage by one’s self, but also the ability to manage along with other people. One form of help which each of us can provide for ourselves, it seems to me, is to learn properly how to integrate this reliance on one another into our own lived existence.11

In the Cherry Orchard the trees are chopped down while the characters survive. The characters learn how to negotiate and endure together under the most stressful of circumstances. And this might be one of the enduring lessons of this boundless play.

11 Gadamer, Enigma of Health, 79.

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A Boring Story: Chekhov’s Trip to Germany in 1904 Artists and contemplative men of all kinds . . . do not fear boredom as much as work without pleasure; they actually require a lot of boredom if their work is to succeed. For thinkers and all sensitive spirits, boredom is that disagreeable “windless calm” of the soul that precedes a happy voyage and cheerful winds. They have to bear it and must wait for its effect on them. —Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

A

ceremony reminiscent of the final farewells in The Cherry Orchard was   organized for Chekhov on January 17, 1904, at the Moscow Art Theatre to celebrate his forty-fourth birthday and, more important, the twenty-fifth anniversary of his writing career. Despite his protestations—Chekov repeatedly pointed out that the anniversary of his literary career was not due until March 1905—the organizers of the event dragged him onstage during the intermission between acts 3 and 4 of the very first production of The Cherry Orchard. As much as they wanted to shower Chekhov with love and affection, they were equally worried that he was not going to live another year. The sight of a “hunched, pale and emaciated” writer, who was noticeably having difficulty standing during the long speeches in his honour, made some theatergoers beg him to sit down, for they feared that he was going to collapse onstage before the ceremony was over.1 Given the effect that these celebrations had on Chekhov and even on the impartial onlookers, it is now generally believed that Chekhov chose to spare his siblings and his mother the sight of his demise when he agreed to be taken 1 See Donald Rayfield, Anton Chekhov: A Life (London: Harpers Collins, 1997), 587; and Anna Muza, “Chekhov’s Jubilee and the Jubilee in Chekhov,” Bulletin of the North American Chekhov Society 17, no 2: 1–23.

A Boring Story: Chekhov’s Trip to Germany in 1904    Chapter 9

abroad to seek the advice of German specialists in June 1904, one month prior to his death. “Like in life, there is nothing accidental in art,” Chekhov advised a budding poet, Boris Sadovskoi, shortly before his departure for Germany.2 But what about death? Is there anything accidental in death? It was in 1890, after his brother’s sudden death from tuberculosis, that Chekhov first seriously faced up to his own mortality for the first time and embarked on his longest journey to the island of Sakhalin. In 1904, he went to another extreme, in the opposite direction—first crossing a sizable portion of Russia and then the whole of Germany to reach his final destination— in all senses of the term—Badenweiler, near the Swiss border. While the Russian fleet was fighting the Japanese in the Far East, Chekhov was battling his terminal illness in the Schwarzwald. Both campaigns ended in fiasco. A trip to Germany was never high on Chekhov’s travel agenda, which in the 1900s gave priority to France, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland, even though he was married to a Russified German, Olga Knipper, who valued German doctors with their emphasis on strict diet and hygiene. Badenweiler, as his letters attest, was a source of continuous bewilderment and disappointment for Chekhov. “Badenweiler is the most unusual spa town, but I have yet to understand exactly what is so unusual about it,” Chekhov wrote in his letter to Vasily Sobolevsky on June 12, 1904.3 And a few lines later: “The food is good and plentiful, extremely so. But I can just imagine how crushingly dull life here must be most of the time!” “Have I already bored you with my prattling?” Chekhov inquired cautiously in his concluding paragraph.4 “Everything is fine, except that it is very monotonous and boring,” Chekhov reassured his sister on June 26.5 “There is no such thing as a well-dressed German woman. Their lack of taste induces deep despondency,” he complained to her two days later, which happened to be his last letter ever.6 Did Chekhov die of boredom in the direct sense of the word? “Boredom,” “tedium,” “dull,” “boring,” and their variants are some of the most frequently used words in Chekhov’s lexicon. In The Steppe (1888), for example, the word “boredom” (skuka) and its derivatives (skuchishcha, skuchno, skuchat´, soskuchit´sia, skuchnyi, skuchaiushchii) is used eighteen times. In “A Nervous Breakdown” (“Pripadok,” 1889), the student Vasilyev, 2 Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v tridtsati tomakh, part 2, Pis´ma, 12:108. 3 Barlett and Phillips, Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters, 528. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., 529. 6 Ibid., 531.

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finding himself in a brothel, feels uneasy and tells his friends that he “feels bored and disgusted.”7 When faced with a prostitute, he finds nothing better to do than to ask her if she is equally bored. “Don’t you find it boring here at times? . . . Then why don’t you leave if you’re bored?” he keeps pressing her.8 Later at home, when he tries to figure out what makes women prostitute themselves, Vasilyev concludes that an important part in turning women into prostitutes is played by boredom.9 Likewise, in The Duel (1891) Nadezhda Fedorovna describes her lover, Laevsky, as “an honest man with ideas, but monotonous, eternally shuffling in his slippers, biting his nails, and boring her with his caprices.”10 Nadezhda actively seeks the company of other men, an indulgence she readily justifies in view of her being “the most beautiful young woman” in a small seaside town: “The long, unbearably hot, boring days, the beautiful, languorous evenings, the stifling nights, and this whole life, when one did not know from morning to evening how to spend the useless time.”11 All along, Laevsky knows that Nadezhda expects him to have a heart-to-heart conversation with her, but he decides against it, since “talking would be boring, useless, and wearisome.”12 Their relationship goes from bad to worse but is saved by a miracle. At the end of the novella, a completely reborn Laevsky thinks to himself that life is like that too: “In search of the truth, people make two steps forward and one step back. Suffering, mistakes, and the tedium of life (skuka zhizni) throw them back, but the thirst for truth and [their] stubborn will drive them on and on. And who knows? Maybe they’ll row their way to the real truth.”13 All his life Chekhov was running away or “rowing away” from boredom only to get back to it when life threatened to become too interesting. Boredom explains many events in Chekhov’s life. He makes sudden plans to move from one place to another, and the only reason he cares to provide is that he is bored and needs an instantaneous change of scenery. In May– June 1889, Chekhov tended to his dying brother, Nikolai, on a country estate in Ukraine. In his letters from that period, Chekhov complained about   7 Anton Chekhov, “A Nervous Breakdown,” in The Party and Other Stories, trans. Ronald Wilks (London: Penguin, 1985), 219.   8 Ibid., 221–22.   9 Ibid., 227. 10 Anton Chekhov, The Duel, in The Complete Short Novels, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 146. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., 164. 13 Ibid., 237.

A Boring Story: Chekhov’s Trip to Germany in 1904    Chapter 9

being bored, letting his correspondents know that his brother’s days were ­numbered and that his ­assistance was crucial.14 And yet, with the full understanding that his brother’s illness was terminal, on June 16 (one day prior to his brother’s death), Chekhov, nevertheless, decided to make a trip to visit the Smagin family. The Smagins lived far away, so the trip was meant to last five days. On June 26, Chekhov recorded the outcome of this bizarre journey in his letter to Aleksei Pleshcheev: I will remember as long as I live the muddy road, the gray sky, and the trees weeping with rain; I say I’ll always remember that because in the morning a pathetic-looking peasant brought a soaked telegram from Mirgorod that said: “Kolia has passed away.” You can imagine my mood. I had to ride back to the station, then go by train and wait at the stations for eight hours. . . . In the town of Romny, I had to wait from 7 p.m. to 2 a.m. Out of sheer boredom, I went wandering around the city. I remember sitting in a garden: it’s dark and freezing, I’m beset by the darkest ­melancholy [скука аспидская], and behind the brown wall I’m sitting by, I can hear some actors rehearsing some melodrama.15

A month later he gave a detailed account to the very same Pleshcheev of his “unexpected” trip to Crimea: “There are many young ladies in Yalta, but not one of them is pretty. . . . As a result of the heat and my wretched, melancholy mood, the story [“A Boring Story”] is turning out rather boring.”16 Chekhov, as is well known, was notoriously reluctant to talk about his tuberculosis and the effects of the disease on his body. Yet he made no secret of his other malady—his tendency to become easily bored. He often sounded like he was more afraid of dying from boredom than from tuberculosis. 14 See his letter to Vladimir Tikhonov of May 31: I’d be happy to escape to Paris and take a look at the universe from the height of the Eiffel Tower, but, alas, I’m bound hand and foot and have no right to move even one step away. My brother, who is now living with me, is ill with consumption. The weather is splendid. . . . But because of the above-mentioned circumstance life is boring and dreary. Thankfully, there are some kind people who visit me and share my boredom, otherwise things would be too bad. . . . At one point, I began writing a comedy, but I wrote two acts and dropped it. It’s turning out boring. There’s nothing more boring than boring plays, and I’m now capable of writing only in a boring way, so I’d better stop doing it. (Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v tridtsati tomakh, part 2, Pis´ma, 3:219–20)

15 Ibid., 3:227. 16 Barlett and Phillips, Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters, 189–90.

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Boredom, the philosopher Lars Svendsen states, “defines the entire content of life in a ­negative way, because it is that which has to be avoided at any price.”17 Chekhov’s repeated references to his being bored, however, have been traditionally interpreted not as his commentary on himself but as social commentary of a general nature, as if the writer was saying that Russian life was far from being perfect and made whoever observed it bored. For years, Chekhov’s readers have refused to read his “A Boring Story” for what it is—a clinical study of a man suffering from acute boredom. This despite the tale’s unambiguous title and its revealing range of symptoms, such as Nikolai Stepanovich’s restlessness, lack of appetite, painful insomnia,18 and repeated complaints about his life having no meaning.19 In fact, Chekhov’s obsession with meaningfulness in general, as can be seen in his ardent desire to make people better, points to his very personal fear of meaninglessness, which is closely related to boredom. “Boredom,” Svendsen insists, “is not a question of idleness but of meaning.”20 Human beings are addicted to meaning. We all have a great problem: Our lives must have some sort of content. We cannot bear to live our lives without some sort of content that we can see as constituting a meaning. Meaninglessness is boring. And boredom can be described metaphorically as a meaning withdrawal. Boredom can be understood as a discomfort, which communicates that the need for meaning is not being satisfied. In order to remove this discomfort, we attack the symptoms rather than the disease itself, and search for all sorts of meaning surrogates.21

Svendsen further distinguishes between “situative” boredom and “existential” boredom, which correspond to Flaubert’s “common” boredom and “modern” boredom.22 Although it is often difficult to differentiate between the two, Chekhov would have probably described his boredom as situative, rather than 17 Lars Svendsen, A Philosophy of Boredom, trans. John Irons (London: Reaktion Books, 2005), 27. 18 “To those readers who have possibly never been bored I can say by way of comparison that deep boredom is related, phenomenologically speaking, to insomnia, where the I loses its identity in the dark, caught in an apparently infinite void. One tries to fall asleep, takes perhaps a few faltering steps, ending up in a no-man’s land between a waking state and sleep” (ibid., 13). 19 For a good summary of the symptoms associated with boredom, see Sean Desmond Healy, Boredom, Self, and Culture (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1984). 20 Svendsen, Philosophy of Boredom, 34. 21 Ibid., 30. 22 Ibid., 42.

A Boring Story: Chekhov’s Trip to Germany in 1904    Chapter 9

existential, which might explain his insatiable desire to move from one place to another. “To Moscow, to Moscow! That’s not The Three Sisters talking, it’s One Husband,” Chekhov wrote to Knipper from Yalta in November 1903.23 When Dmitry Merezhkovsky (1865–1941)—like many others before and after him—asserted in 1906 that Chekhov together with his characters wallowed in his boredom, getting high on the tediousness of his life like an alcoholic who gulps glasses of wine to make himself happy, he could not have been further from the truth.24 A son of a hard-working but unsuccessful shopkeeper, Chekhov feared and loathed to be bored, the state which in his mind most certainly was associated with idleness. When he had only months to live and was feeling truly miserable, Chekhov repeatedly requested Viktor Goltsev, the editor of the periodical Russkaia mysl´, to send him other people’s manuscripts for his detailed commentary and revisions. Even in one of his letters from Badenweiler, Chekhov reproached himself for his allegedly “incurable laziness.”25 According to Svendsen, “the most hyperactive of us are precisely those who have the lowest boredom thresholds.”26 Whether Chekhov realized it or not, his well-documented passionate ­interest in the Russo-Japanese War during his last months may well have stemmed from his desire to make his life more “interesting.” In Badenweiler, Chekhov keenly read the few Russian newspapers that were available to him and made his wife translate all German reports from the front. Although Knipper later blamed the war for shortening Chekhov’s life, because he tended to take the news about the Russian defeats so close to heart, in fact, the war might have prolonged his life by making life “exciting” and by keeping boredom at bay. Likewise, Chekhov’s exaggerated concern for Tolstoy’s health in the 1900s can be seen in the light of Chekhov’s subconscious desire for some major catastrophe to engulf the Russian literary world. Chekhov’s recurring remark, “Once Tolstoy dies, everything will go to the dogs [Вот умрет Толстой, все пойдет к черту]!” sounds, perversely, more like wishful thinking, a fearful hope for something really drastic to happen.27

23 Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v tridtsati tomakh, part 2, Pis´ma, 11:311. 24 D. S. Merezhkovskii, “Chekhov i Gor´kii” [1906], in A. P. Chekhov: Pro et contra, ed. I. N. Sukhikh (St. Petersburg: Izdatel´stvo Russkogo khristianskogo universiteta, 2002), 697–99. 25 Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v tridtsati tomakh, part 2, Pis´ma, 12:126. 26 Svendsen, Philosophy of Boredom, 39. 27 Chekhov is quoted in I. A. Bunin, “O Chekhove,” in Sobranie sochinenii v deviati tomakh, vol. 9 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel´stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1967), 207.

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Chekhov did not live to see any major historical upheavals: he was born one year before the abolition of serfdom and died half a year prior to the 1905 Russian Revolution. His usual strategy for dealing with boredom was to embark on some expedition, as he did when he went to the island of Sakhalin in 1890, or to focus on uncovering the boredom of other people. All I wanted was to tell people honestly, “Look at yourselves. Look at what bad, boring lives you lead.” That’s the most important thing for people to understand. And when they do understand it, they will certainly create a new and better life. I won’t see it, but I know that everything will be different, that nothing will be like the lives we now lead.28

By the time Chekhov reached Badenweiler he could no longer resort to his proven tactics, that is, writing about other people’s boredom or seeking immediate distraction and diversion. “The problem was not so much that his imagination had run dry as that he found putting words on paper physically exhaustive,” Henry Troyat writes.29 In the 1900s, the quality of Chekhov’s life was such that he was increasingly turning into a passive observer and becoming less of an active player, thus becoming even more prone to boredom than ever before. Chekhov’s recorded impressions of Germany are invariably negative. “Either the Germans have entirely lost whatever taste they once had, or they never had any,” he remarked in his letter to Sobolevsky.30 “German women dress in the vilest possible taste, and the men also. I did not see a single good-looking woman in Berlin, nor one who had not made herself hideous by the clothes she arrayed herself in,” Chekhov concluded. 31 According to Svendsen, an observer tends to differentiate “interesting” from “boring” “from a purely aesthetic perspective. . . . The aesthetic gaze registers only surface, and this surface is judged by whether it is interesting or boring.” “The aesthetic gaze has to be titillated by increased intensity or preferably by something new, and the ideology of the aesthetic gaze is superlativism,” Svendsen continues.32 Thus, it is not surprising that Chekhov found German women and Germans in general tasteless.

28 Chekhov’s remark to Vladimir Tikhonov is quoted in Henry Troyat, Chekhov, trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1986), 296. 29 Troyat, Chekhov, 300. 30 Barlett and Phillips, Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters, 528. 31 Ibid., 528. 32 Svendsen, Philosophy of Boredom, 27.

A Boring Story: Chekhov’s Trip to Germany in 1904    Chapter 9

He criticized their clothes because that was all he could see from his balcony at the Sommer hotel in Badenweiler. The trip to Germany turned out to be meaningless on all accounts. It brought Chekhov a lot of humiliating experiences and unnecessary discomfort, as was the case when the Chekhovs were asked to leave the upmarket Romersbad Hotel in Badenweiler because the manager was afraid that the sight of Chekhov coughing incessantly might upset other guests. Having trained as a doctor, Chekhov should have known that Germany was not the best place for him to go to in 1904, when his sickness could be easily identified by ordinary Germans as something potentially lethal to their health thanks to Robert Koch’s well publicized discovery of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in 1882 and subsequent failure to cure the disease with his “tuberculin” in the 1890s. Given Chekhov’s rapidly deteriorating physical state—tuberculosis from his lungs had spread to his bones and spine—all doctors, including the German ones, were powerless to avert his imminent death and could only ease his pain and insomnia by increasing the dose of heroin and other opiates. The meaninglessness of the trip by far exceeded Chekhov’s worst expectations. He made frenetic attempts to give it some significance by buying several vests in Berlin, ordering himself a flannel suit in Freiburg, making plans to visit a dentist in Basel, and, finally, trying to leave Germany by going first to Italy and then returning to Yalta by sea. Nietzsche defines boredom as “that disagreeable ‘windless calm’ of the soul that precedes a happy voyage and cheerful winds.”33 In Badenweiler, Chekhov gasped for a real sea breeze to relieve him from boredom and self-consuming restlessness. “Dear Grigory Ivanovich,” he wrote to his friend Rossolimo on June 28 from Badenweiler, I want to ask you a favor. One evening a while ago you were telling me about your travels to Mount Athos with L. L. Tolstoy. . . . Did you go from Marseilles to Odessa? With Austrian Lloyd? If so, please for the love of God seize your pen at once and write and tell me on which day and at what hour the steamer sails from Marseilles, how many days is the voyage to Odessa, what time of day or night the steamer gets to Odessa, is it comfortable on board, that is could there be separate cabin for me and my wife, is there a decent restaurant, is it clean . . . were you generally happy 33 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Random House, 1974), 108.

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Part Two    Transcending Death with everything? What I require above all is peace and quiet, and everything necessary for a man who is very short of breath. I beg you to write! Let me know also how much the tickets cost. . . . How desperately boring this German spa town of Badenweiler is! 34

On March 25, 1916, the poet Aleksandr Blok (1880–1921) recorded in his notebook: It was Chekhov’s letters written shortly before his death that filled me with real nighttime horror the other day. They had more impact than Tolstoy’s leaving home. “Olga has left for Basel to have her teeth fixed,” “this time round all the molars will have golden crowns to last a lifetime.” First, [Chekhov’s] admiration for Germans, then a sense of boredom and bad taste (so familiar at a German health resort). And suddenly, a similar letter, only the last one. Finality [and] inevitability.35

Blok, who like Chekhov, was particularly susceptible to boredom, which he tended to drown in alcohol or by “ushering” in calamities, such as revolutions, easily agreed with Chekhov’s unflattering remarks about the Germans. As his entry suggests, a relatively healthy Blok would have felt just as bored and frustrated in Germany as Chekhov. Why Germany, then? With his attention span and ability to retain the novelty of impressions significantly impaired by his debilitating sickness, why would Chekhov agree to be taken to a predictably “boring” place such as Badenweiler? “I am going there to die,” He confessed to a literary colleague, Nikolai Teleshov, shortly before his departure.36 Did Chekhov think he was going to die sooner than he actually did? It is remarkable that he did not pack any summer clothes for this trip and, consequently, suffered from an excruciating heat wave that hit western Europe in the summer of 1904: “The heat here is unbearable, it just makes you want to cry aloud for help, and I have no light clothes here, I’m dressed as though for Sweden.”37

34 Barlett and Phillips, Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters, 530. 35 Aleksandr Blok, Zapisnye knizhki: 1901–1920 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel´stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1965), 292. 36 N. D. Teleshov, “A. P. Chekhov,” in A. P. Chekhov v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, ed. A. K. Kotova (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel´stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1960), 489. 37 Barlett and Phillips, Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters, 530.

A Boring Story: Chekhov’s Trip to Germany in 1904    Chapter 9

Did Chekhov plan to leave Germany alive? Why, in any case, would a bedridden man want such drastic changes as moving from his beloved Moscow to an utterly unknown German resort? As James Wood perceptibly suggests, “Perhaps, the gap between yearning for a new life—the most familiar gesture of Chekhov’s characters, and one the writer saw firsthand among his own family [and experienced himself, I may add]—and yearning for no life, is small.”38 Chekhov’s works and notebooks offer plenty of support for Wood’s assertion. Life (whether new or lived) is not there simply to be enjoyed. It is there to be lived through and, therefore, always a burden and a challenge. One can recall the unsettling conclusion to Chekhov’s Three Years (Tri goda, 1895), where the main character, Laptev, is filled with despondency at the thought of having to keep on living for another thirteen or even thirty years. When his wife declares her love for him—something he had been eagerly awaiting for three years— he feels as if they had been married not for three years but for ten, and wants nothing but a good lunch. “To live eternally is similar to having no sleep at all.”39 “Death is frightening, but eternal life is even more frightening.”40 These famous dictums from Chekhov’s notebooks suggest that by the 1900s he may have started to equate any kind of living with boredom. Since life is boring, death is a blessing, if only because it is something new that puts an end to one’s colorless existence. In that sense Badenweiler might have seemed a perfect place to end one’s life. Even before he had a chance to come to know Badenweiler, Chekhov already expected it to be dreadfully dull as if he wanted it to be even worse than it actually was. Even the proverbial beauty of drinking champagne prior to his death in Badenweiler was utterly predictable. As it has been repeatedly pointed out, there was a long-standing tradition of serving wine or a glass of champagne to a dying German patient. Beethoven’s last words that are rarely recalled were, nevertheless, no less meaningful and beautiful than Chekhov’s last remark that every Chekhov scholar knows by heart—“It’s been such a long time since I’ve had champagne.” Shortly before his death, Beethoven (who died in Vienna in 1826), according to eyewitnesses, ordered wine and uttered in Latin, “Plaudite, amici, comoedia finita est.” “When the four bottles of wine arrived, Beethoven

38 James Wood, “What Chekhov Meant by Life,” in The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (New York: Random House, 2000), 89. 39 Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v tridtsati tomakh, part 2, Pis´ma, 4:146. In May 1904, Chekhov managed to have only one restful night. See ibid., 12:106. 40 Ibid., 17:67.

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172 murmured his last words: ‘Pity, pity, too late.’”41 From this perspective, it is possible to give an unconventional answer to the question that has puzzled Chekhov scholars ever since his death: Why did he say his last words—Ich sterbe (I am dying)—in German, which he didn’t know? The answer is he might have done it to maximize the novelty of the final transition. Chekhov’s stay in Badenweiler happened to be longer and perhaps more unbearable than he had envisaged. He made his last written commentary on the Badenweiler tedium on June 28 and died in the early hours of July 2. In a situation where no escape was possible—he was so ill that any travel was ruled out—it is tempting to ponder the possibility that Chekhov actually resigning himself not only to the inevitability of death but also to the inevitability of boredom during this short period. Or, maybe, like Nietzsche earlier and Anna Akhmatova later, he discovered that tediousness is just as good a foundation for creativity?42 On July 1, Chekhov ordered his exhausted wife, who had spent several sleepless nights by his bedside, to take a brisk walk in the park and a dip in a swimming pool. When Knipper (an obvious kinesthetic) returned, Chekhov made up a story to amuse her. The story was about a cook who, for no apparent reason, ran away from a wealthy health resort leaving its spoiled guests hungry. Chekhov described the feelings of each guest so vividly that Knipper burst out laughing: “Anton Pavlovich’s captivating way of telling the story made me laugh uncontrollably, and it seemed that a heavy load had been lifted off my mind.”43

41 Deborah Hayden, Pox: Genius, Madness, and the Mysteries of Syphilis (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 83. 42 Akhmatova echoed Nietzsche in her remarks on creativity in the 1960s: “Did you know that creativity is based on boredom? Many people don’t know that. It’s when things are going smoothly, without any bumps, and you’re comfortably off and don’t have to do anything. . . . So I go now to my ‘shack’ [budka] and get ready to be creatively bored working on my ‘Pushkin’ there.” Akhmatova is quoted in G. V. Glekin, “Vstrechi s Akhmatovoi: Iz dnevnikovykh zapisei 1959–1966 godov,” 4; Irina Men´shova’s typewritten copy, a shorter version, was published in Voprosy literatury 2 (1997): 302–23. 43 Knipper’s letter to her mother is quoted in Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v tridtsati tomakh, part 2, Pis´ma, 12:379.

Epilogue Oyster Fever: Chekhov and Turgenev

W

 hatever Chekhov might have thought about the conclusion of his life, his funeral was far from boring. Knipper’s immediate idea was to bury her husband in Germany. But her plans were quickly dashed. At the request of Chekov’s family and friends, as well as various cultural figures, the body was transported back to Russia and buried in Moscow on July 9 at the cemetery of the New Virgin Convent. Curiously, on July 5, the newspaper Moskovskie vedomosti reported an outbreak of a typhoid epidemic that spread from Constantinople and the Sea of Marmara to England and France. French s­ cientists blamed the disease solely on oysters that they believed had absorbed contaminated water during the rainy season. Not surprisingly, English o­ yster-eaters were the first victims of this epidemic.1 By a perverse coincidence, the article was published beside one entitled “Chekhov and Moscow.” The author of the piece grieved over Chekhov’s “sudden death” and informed his readers about the funeral arrangements.2 By a further ironic twist, due, most likely, to a declining demand for fresh oysters during the epidemic, Chekhov’s body was allotted a refrigerated car to travel across the Russian Empire. At the border crossing in Verzhbolovo, Chekhov’s coffin was moved from the German car to a Russian refrigerator car for transporting fresh oysters.3 While it was definitely better for the coffin to travel in a car designed to protect a highly perishable commodity, Chekhov’s contemporaries, who came 1 “Iz nauchnogo mira,” Moskovskie vedomosti, July 5, 1904, 4. 2 “Chekhov i Moskva,” Moskovskie vedomosti, July 5, 1904, 4. 3 One can find a detailed account of the events surrounding the transportation of Chekhov’s body from Badenweiler to Moscow in M. Dolinskii and S. Chertok, “Poslednii put´ Chekhova,” Russkaia literatura 2 (1962): 190–201 Unfortunately, both authors are silent about how exactly and why Chekhov’s body was placed in the refrigerator car. I am grateful to Michael Finke and Radislav Lapushin for bringing this article to my attention.

174 to meet the train first in St. Petersburg and then in Moscow, were all shocked by the sight of a “dirty green” car bearing the inscription “For Oysters.” Even ten years after the event, the famous literary historian Semën Vengerov (1855– 1920) could not think without a shudder about his first impressions of meeting the infamous train at Warsaw Station in St. Petersburg: We all made our way toward the woeful car containing the remains of the beloved writer and were absolutely flabbergasted to see the now famous inscription on the side of the car with A. P. Chekhov’s casket—“Car for Oysters.” Yes, one has to die at the right time, too. . . . And what a story the departed great writer could have written, based on this.4

From that day onward, the “oyster car” became associated with Chekhov’s death and has been traditionally interpreted either as “an apotheosis of vulgarity” (Maxim Gorky, and many others)5 or as an amusing little twist of fate reminiscent of Antosha Chekhonte’s style, a sign of Chekhov’s ability to control life even after his own death: “Even after [Chekhov] is dead, life goes on as if it were tuned to one of his scripts.”6 Some commentators, such as Dmitry Merezhkovsky, believed that the oyster car was Chekhov’s well-deserved punishment for his lack of faith and for his groping for nonexistence and universal destruction and chaos.7 I would like to suggest another interpretation of the oyster finale of Chekhov’s life. According to Knipper’s memoirs, the night preceding Chekhov’s peaceful death was horrendous on all accounts. Chekhov’s heart was failing. He was gasping for breath and urged Knipper to open the door to the balcony. She reluctantly complied watching with terror as a thick, milky fog outside was rising up to our floor and, like some viscous ghosts of the most fantastic shapes, crawled into the room, flowing all over it—and this all night long. . . . In order that Anton Pavlovich wouldn’t notice, on regaining consciousness, that I wasn’t sleeping and kept a watch 4 S. A. Vengerov, “Vagon dlia ustrits,” Solntse Rossii 228 ( June 1914): 25. 5 M. Gor´kii, “A. P. Chekhov,” in A. P. Chekhov v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, 506. 6 See Katherine Tiernan O’Connor’s “Chekhov’s Death: His Textual Past Recaptured,” in Studies in Poetics, Commemorative Volume: Kristina Pomorska (1928–1986), ed. Elena Semeka-Pankratov (Columbus: Slavica Publishers, 1995), 40. 7 D. S. Merezhkovskii, “Chekhov i Gor´kii,” 40.

Oyster Fever: Chekhov and Turgenev over him, I had a book in my hands, pretending to read. At one point, coming to, he asked me, “What are you reading?” and, since the little volume of Chekhov’s stories was open at “A Strange Story,” I gave him the title. He smiled and said quietly, “You silly thing, who on earth ever carries around their husband’s books with them?” and lost consciousness again.8

“There is, needless to say,” Katherine O’Connor writes, “no story entitled ‘A Strange Story,’ although there is his story ‘A Boring Story’ (Скучная история), which is probably what Olga meant to say but which she failed to name correctly.”9 As O’Connor observes, Knipper had plenty of opportunity to correct her mistake; however, even the later editions of her memoirs retain her reference to “A Strange Story.” What if Knipper was indeed reading “A Strange Story” and not “A Boring Story,” as O’Connor suggests? While “A Boring Story” is a story by Chekhov, “A Strange Story” (“Strannaia istoriia”) is a tale Ivan Turgenev (1818–83) wrote in Germany in 1869 and that belongs to his so-called fantasy tales. Turgenev’s story is about a seventeen-year-old girl, Sophie, who after her mother’s death leaves her wealthy family to tend to a holy fool, Vasily. She sees him as her role model because she respects what she calls his “true” spirituality and devotion. They travel from one place to another with no possessions and little to eat. During their last encounter, the narrator sees that the body and the feet of the holy fool are covered with ulcers, which Sophie is trying to treat with butter that she luckily got from one of Vasily’s admirers. When Sophie is eventually made to return to her family, she stops talking and dies shortly thereafter. The narrator is clearly moved and impressed by Sophie’s inner strength and determination. Given that Knipper, according to people who knew her well, was a pleasantly selfish and self-centered woman, it is easier to imagine her reading about Turgenev’s female character, whose mission in life—tending to a sick but extraordinary man—would have seemed similar to hers in Badenweiler, than about the old professor Nikolay Stepanovich in “A Boring Story.”10 In fact, Knipper’s reference to the thick milky fog spilling into their room is an almost direct reference to the part of Turgenev’s story in which the narrator meets Vasily for the first time, during one of his séances, and sees the spirit of his old tutor.   8 Knipper’s letter to her mother is quoted in Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v tridtsati tomakh, part 2, Pis´ma, 12:378–79.   9 O’Connor, “Chekhov’s Death,” 43. 10 See Vasilii Shverubovich, O starom Khudozhestvennom teatre (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1990); and Sof´ia Piliavskaia, Grustnaia kniga (Moscow: Vargius, 2001).

175

176 Then [Vasily] disappeared again, as if a fog had enveloped him, appeared . . . and disappeared again . . . appeared again, and then I was within the range of his labored, almost wheezing breathing. . . . A fog descended again, and suddenly, out of this fog, beginning with his white hair standing on end, there gradually began to emerge old Descaire’s head.11

Did Chekhov in his delirium realize that his wife was referring not to his story but to Turgenev’s? If he did, this may offer another possible reading of his smile in response to Knipper’s words. When Chekhov was twenty-six, he also took part in a séance. There he saw the spirit of Turgenev who told him that his life was “drawing to a close.” Turgenev always loomed large for Chekhov. Not only critics but also Chekhov himself never stopped comparing his works to those by the older writer.12 In 1903, on several occasions, he informed Knipper that he was immersed in rereading Turgenev’s works, only to conclude that Turgenev was hopelessly outdated.13 This comment notwithstanding, Chekhov was no doubt intimately familiar with the details of Turgenev’s life. Although he parted with many books in the course of his life, Chekhov retained the first 1884 edition of Turgenev’s letters. No doubt, he knew them well. He repeatedly made fun of Turgenev’s last letter to Tolstoy, in which the younger writer was famously called “the great writer of the Russian land” and was urged to resume writing fiction, by addressing various female actresses as “great actress of the Russian land” (“великая актриса земли русской”). The letters that Turgenev wrote during the last year and a half of his life, when he was suffering from his incurable disease, are strikingly Chekhovian, or, to be more precise, Chekhov’s intimate letters from the last four to five years of his life are steeped in Turgenev’s ordinary humanness and understanding. Turgenev noticed the first symptoms of his disease (spinal cancer) in March 1882 and soon became immobilized. He was particularly upset that he had to postpone indefinitely his plans to go to Russia the following summer. The doctors told him that there was nothing seriously wrong with him, although 11 I. S. Turgenev, “Strannaia istoriia,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v dvadtsati vos´mi tomakh (Moscow: Nauka, 1965), part 1, Sochineniia, 8:147. 12 In The Seagull, Chekhov even makes his allegedly successful Trigorin suffer from an inferiority complex. He tells Nina: “You know what my friends will say as they file past my grave? ‘Here lies Trigorin. A good writer, but no Turgenev.’” Anton Chekhov, The Essential Plays, trans. Heim, 29. 13 Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v tridtsati tomakh, part 2, Pis´ma, 10:70, 194; 11:184.

Oyster Fever: Chekhov and Turgenev

he might have to spend months and even years in bed.14 At first Turgenev was frustrated and bored (“my personal life has stopped”), but then he found strength to resign himself to his new situation, comparing himself to “an oyster that nobody can eat.” He also wrote in his letters, “As it turns out one can go on living even when one is incapable of standing, walking, and riding.” “Look at oysters. They live like this. I have even come to the conclusion that it is quite all right . . . being an oyster.”15 But, during his last months, Turgenev suffered excruciating pain and seriously contemplated suicide. Turgenev died on August 22/September 3. Nearly a month later, on September 19/October 1, his coffin was put on a train from Paris to Berlin and from there to the border town of Verzhbolovo. In Verzhbolovo, much to the surprise of the representative of the funeral commission, Turgenev’s body arrived “without any accompanying people [who, as it turned out, had all been detained at the border crossing] and without any documentation, except for the luggage declaration, which stated ‘[number] 1—dead body,’ no name, no last name!”16 In Verzhbolovo, the coffin had to remain for another three days so that it arrived in St. Petersburg exactly on Tuesday, September 27/October 8, as had been previously planned by the funeral commission and as had been deemed appropriate by the authorities.17 As both Stasyulevich’s and Utevsky’s reports suggest, the circumstances surrounding Turgenev’s death and his funeral became a hotly discussed issue among Russian intellectuals. Turgenev died in the little French town of Bougival, near Paris, surrounded—to the dismay of many Russians, including his friends—“only” by his adopted family, the family of his life-long passion Pauline Viardot, the famous opera singer. Utevsky’s monograph contains generous praise of the Viardot family, explaining that Turgenev had been given a lot of love and care when he required them most. In 1874, young Vengerov approached Turgenev with some queries related to his work Russian Literature through Its Contemporary Representatives: Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (Russkaia literatura v eё sovremennykh predstaviteliakh: Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev, 1875). He was particularly interested in finding out why it had taken Turgenev so long to liberate his serfs. In response, Turgenev wrote what he called a “candid” letter. When he received Vengerov’s monograph in 14 On Turgenev’s death, see L. S. Utevsky’s pioneering Smert´ Turgeneva. 1883–1923: Trudy Turgenevskogo obshchestva (St. Petersburg: Atenei, 1923). 15 These particular excerpts from Turgenev’s letters from the first 1884 edition of his letters are quoted in Utevskii, Smert´ Turgeneva, 21–25. 16 M. M. Stasiulevich, “Pokhorony I. S. Turgeneva,” Vestnik Evropy, November 1883, 439. 17 Ibid., 436–37.

177

178 1875, Turgenev was disappointed both with the critic’s interpretations and his writing style. More important, he was appalled by Vengerov’s decision to publish Turgenev’s private letter without his permission.18 His growing annoyance with Vengerov led Turgenev to inform Vengerov in 1875 that their views on literature and art “were completely different.”19 Apparently, in 1904, and later in 1914, Vengerov did not recall the references to oysters in Turgenev’s letters. If he had, he might have felt better about the infamous inscription “For Oysters” on the funeral car.20 If one subscribes to the idea of Chekhov shaping life even after his death, it is tempting to see the oyster car in the light of Harold Bloom’s theory of literary influence. The younger writer, according to Bloom, must “swerve” from the work of his predecessors to prove his singularity.21 Chekhov’s allegedly and seemingly meaningless and boring trip to Germany and back may well have been an audacious swerve toward superiority. Did Chekhov think about Turgenev during his last days in Badenweiler?22 Even if he didn’t, the oyster car 18 See Turgenev’s letters to Vengerov and commentaries in I. S. Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v dvadtsati vos´mi tomakh, part 2, Pis´ma, 10:256, 620, 621; 11:85–87, 92, 174, 490–92, 495, 542. 19 Ibid., 11:174. 20 Isadora Duncan (1878–1927) firmly believed that oysters were somehow linked to artistic disposition and creativity. See her recollection of her prenatal existence: The character of a child is already plain, even in its mother’s womb. Before I was born my mother was in great agony of spirit and in a tragic situation. She could take no food except iced oysters and iced champagne. If people ask me when I began to dance, I reply, “In my mother’s womb, probably as a result of the oysters and champagne—the food of Aphrodite. . . . I was born by the sea, and I have noticed that all the great events of my life have taken place by the sea. (Isadora Duncan, My Life [1927] [New York: Liveright, 1955], 9)

See also the discussion (with references to the findings of R. D. Timenchik) of the associative series “pearls,” “molluscs,” and “oysters” in the texts by Innokenty Annensky and Turgenev in Aleksandr Kushner’s chapter “Sredi liudei, kotorye ne slyshat,” in Apollon v trave (Moscow: Progress-Pleiada, 2005), 319–20. In the 1960s, Anna Akhmatova admitted to a younger interlocutor that all her life she found herself in an impossible situation: “One can’t even slightly praise me, because I am extremely vulnerable, like an oyster.” Akhmatova is quoted in Glekin, “Vstrechi s Akhmatovoi,” 4. Interestingly, the critic Erikh Gollerbakh described Nikolai Gumilev’s manner of speaking in the early 1910s as also related to oysters: “His voice jumps from bass to almost descant, drawing words out and swallowing them like oysters.” Gollerbakh, Gorod muz (Leningrad: n.p., 1930), 132. 21 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 22 Chekhov’s story about a cook who runs away from a posh hotel, upsetting the plans of hungry guests, resembles the numerous anecdotes about the forgetfulness of Turgenev. Turgenev was in the habit of inviting guests for dinner, telling them in advance what a d­ elicious meal

Oyster Fever: Chekhov and Turgenev

that carried his body from Verzhbolovo to St. Petersburg and then to Moscow strangely reaffirmed his filial-like bond with Turgenev. From 1904 onward Chekhov has been seen by the reading public not as someone inferior to Turgenev but as the more talented writer. “Chekhov’s death has shown that Russian society loves him more than we could ever imagine,” Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko reported to Konstantin Stanislavsky on July 25, 1904. “Never during his life was he put on the same level with Pushkin, Tolstoy, and higher than Turgenev, but today this is done almost unanimously.”23 Interestingly, in 1908, in the commemorative issue of Teatr i iskusstvo devoted to Turgenev, the critic Vladimir Botsyanovsky compared Turgenev to a lovable and memorable but, nevertheless, secondary character in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. Turgenev’s last days in Bougival reminded Botsyanovsky of the old sick Firs, left behind by his masters in a deserted house: Fate tore [Turgenev] away from the only thing dear to him [his family estate Spasskoe] and, in return, gave him essentially nothing. . . . The same way it treated Firs, fate separated Turgenev from his beloved “cherry orchard” and trapped him inside walls, which his groans took a long time to penetrate and to be heard. . . . They were heard only toward the end of his life or, rather, after his death.24

Turgenev was arguably the first great Russian writer who had been expected to die “at home” yet died away from home. Chekhov’s death, in turn, marked a further development in such “expectations.” From then on, few writers— including Tolstoy—were expected to die in their own beds or even to find their resting place in their homeland. It is not surprising that Chekhov’s younger contemporary Boris Zaitsev (1881–1972), who spent the last fifty years of his life in France, described in 1954 the time he and his wife spent from meeting the coffin with Chekhov’s remains at Nikolaevsky Station in Moscow to the actual burial ceremony, not as “an apotheosis of vulgarity” (as described by Gorky) or as one of Chekhov’s practical jokes, but as some kind of an ever-­lasting pilgrimage and epiphany. He recalled:

they were going to be treated to, but when they arrived at the appointed hour, they were told that the host was out and that the domestic staff did not have any instructions about a dinner. See Avdot´ya Panaeva, Vospominaniia (Moscow: Zakharov, 2002), 126. 23 Nemirovich-Danchenko is quoted in Chekhov, 12:233. 24 Vl. Botsianovskii, “Pamiati I. S. Turgeneva,” Teatr i iskusstvo 33 (1908): 563.

179

180 A departing cloud, raindrops falling from trees, the fragment of a rainbow intersecting the cloud like a peacock’s tail, the gold of the church cupolas, the shiny crosses, swallows shooting through the air, the grave, and the crowd of mourners—all of those were Chekhov departing this life for the eternal rest at the New Virgin Convent, where he would come from clinics, when he felt better, and stand modestly close to the wall inside the cathedral listening to the liturgy and the nuns’ singing. . . .

As they walked along the Domnikovskaya Street, “a tailor’s puffy-from-drink, haggard face appeared in the sidewalk basement window: ‘Is it a general’s funeral?’ ‘No, a writer’s.’ ‘A li-te-ra-ti’s!’”25

25 Boris Zaitsev, Chekhov, in Dalëkoe (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel´, 1991), 387.

Index A

Adler, Alfred, xii Agamben, Giorgio, xvi–xvii Akhmatova, Anna, xv, 172, 178n20 Aldanov, Mark, 16, 132, 136, 139 Alexandrinsky Theater (St. Petersburg), 115 Al´tshuller, A. Ya., 125n44 Archives of Psychiatry (a journal), 8 Aries, Philippe, 151 The Hour of Our Death, 151n4 Avilova, Lidia, 142–43 Augustine, 19

B

Bakhrakh, Aleksandr, 134 Balukhaty, S. D., 110n6 Basinskii, Pavel, 24n9, 27n18 Becker, Ernest, xii, xvin14, xviii, 10n19–20, 13–15, 19n37–38, 58–59, 62–63, 68, 76–77, 146 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 33, 128, 171 Beranger, Pierre–Jean de, 5 Berberova, Nina, 131–32, 143–44, 147 Blok, Alexander, 130, 170 Bloom, Harold, 145, 178 The Anxiety of Influence, 178n21 “The Strangeness of Dante: Ulysses and Beatrice,” 145n47 Biriukov, Pavel, 29n23, 37n44, 47n76 Boborykin, Pёtr, 113 Botsianovskii, Vladimir, 179n24 Bunina, Vera Nikolaevna, 133n16, 134n18, 137, 141–43, 148 Bunin, Ivan, death, 130, 133–34, 138–41, 144–45, 147–48 Grasse, 136–38 The Nobel Prize in Literature, 135, 136, 142 Works: About Chekhov, 129–45 “Cicadas,” 138 Liberation of Tolstoy, 132–33, 135–42, 147

The Life of Arseniev, 139, 142–43 “Tolstoy,” 132 Bunin, Yuly, 133 Bunyan, John, 16–17

C

Cavell, Stanley, 119–21 “The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear,” 119–21 Chekhova, Maria, 102, 125n42 Chekhov, Anton, passim Badenweiler, 105, 163, 167–72, 173n3, 175, 178 Boredom, 69, 80–81, 84–85, 88–89, 127, 162–73, 175, 178 car for Oysters, 173–98 death, xviii, 64, 67, 69, 75, 79–81, 88, 113, 115, 130, 133, 141–42, 148, 149, 160, 163, 171–72, 173–74, 178–80 family (relationship with), 63, 65–83, 163, 165, 173 Germany, 162–72 German women, 163, 168–69 Moscow, 33, 61, 71–73, 86, 161, 167, 171, 173–74, 179 Moscow Art Theatre, 101, 103–4, 109–11, 114, 116, 122, 149, 162 photographs (of), 99, 101–5, 111–12 Sakhalin, island, xiv–xv, 22, 63, 65, 67–75, 81–83, 97, 102, 163, 168 Siberia, 65, 67, 71–73 Taganrog, 73, 87 tuberculosis, 66, 68, 113, 163, 165, 169 Verzhbolovo, 173, 177, 179 Yalta, 66, 132, 144, 165, 167, 169 Works: “The Bishop,” 91, 92 “The Black Monk,” 91 “A Boring Story,” 69, 88, 162–72, 175 “The Bride,” 91, 92 The Cherry Orchard, xviii, 91–92, 105, 116, 144, 149–62, 179

182

Index “The Darling,” 82, 92 The Duel, 61, 115, 164 “Grisha,” 76, 88 “Gusev,” 77–78, 83 Ivanov, 55, 62 “Kashtanka,” viii, 74–81, 88, 103 “The Late Flowers,” 91 “A Letter,” 82 My Life, 142 “A Nervous Breakdown,” 163–64 Platonov, 156n8 The Seagull, xviii, 55, 59, 61, 91–92, 104, 109–22, 126, 128, 144, 160–61, 176n12 Arkadina, 117–19, 121–22, 127 Nina, 62, 116–18, 121–22, 127 Treplev, Konstantin (Kostya), 92, 117–22, 161 Trigorin, xv, 110, 117–19, 122, 176n12 “The Sleepy,” 91–92 The Steppe, viii, 76, 84–97, 163 Three Sisters, 61, 116, 144, 160–61, 67 Three Years, 171 Uncle Vanya, xviii, 54–64, 101, 144, 146, 160–61 “Vanka,” 72 The Wood Goblin, 62, 69 Chekhov, Nikolai, xiv–xv, 66, 69, 81, 164 Chertkov, Vladimir Grigorievich, viii, 21–53, 54, 63, 100, 101 The Intermediary (a literary venture), 46–53 Cheyne and Stokes, x–xi Creative projection or transference heroics, 146

E

D

H

Dante, Alighieri, xiii–xiv, xvii, 21–22, 69, 144–45, 147 The Divine Comedy, xvii, 22, 62 Inferno, xiii, 22, 69 Beatrice, 22, 145, 147 Pilgrim, 21 Virgil, 22, 144 Purgatory, xiii Paradise, xiii Depression, 6, 8, 10, 11, 13, 36, 40, 80, 87, 147. See also melancholy Dillon, Brian, 3n1, 17n32 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, xiv, 7, 57, 161 Duncan, Isadora, 178n20 Dupont, Judith, 43n67, 45

Edel, Leon, xvii Eikhenbaum, Boris, 23, 37n43, 48n79, 52n92, 147 Erofeev, Venedikt, xv–xvi Evlakhov, A. M., 135n24, 148n57 Konstitutsional´nye osobennosti psikhiki L. N. Tolstogo, 135n24, 148n57 Evreinova, Anna, 95

F

Ferenczi, Sandor, viii, xii, 43, 45 mutual analysis, 43–46 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 5, 70 Fet, Afanasii, 3, 5, 6, 35, 37, 40–41 Finke, Michael, 69n7, 86n11, 173n3 Frankl, Viktor, 70 logotheraphy,70 Freud, Sigmund, xii, 3, 43, 117, 118n23

G

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 160–61 The Enigma of Health, 160–61 Gippius, Zinaida, 145 Gitovich, N. I., 110n2 Gladkov, Aleksandr, 110, 126 Girard, René, 57 triangular desire, 57 Gogol, Nikolai, xiii–xv, 19–20, 38, 85, 89–90, 96–97 Dead Souls, xiii, 38, 96 Goldenveizer, Aleksandr, 139 Goncharov, Ivan, xiii Gorky, Maxim, 18n34, 130, 132, 144, 174, 179 Grigorovich, Dmitrii, 7, 84, 85, 87–89, 92–94 Hauptmann, Gerhart, 112 Heidegger, Martin, xii, 129–30 Hypochondria, 3–20

I

Ibsen, Henrik, 61–62 Il´in, Vladimir, 128 Immortality (artist’s/writer’s), xvi, 25, 59–60, 82, 146 Impasse, 20 Iordanov, Pavel, 111

J

Jackson, Mark, 110 The Death of Meyerhold, 110

Index Jackson, Robert Louis, 149 James, William, xii, 10, 16, 19, 80 The Varieties of Religious Experience, 16n28, 80n28 Jaques, Elliott, 11

K

Kachalov, Vasiliy, 116 Karlinsky, Simon, xiii, 38n48, 67, 71, 84n3, 97n26, 112n8 Katkov, Mikhail, 7 Khotiaintseva, Aleksandra, 79 Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye, xii, 19, 65 Kleinman, Arthur, 11 somatization, 11 Knipper, Olga Leonardovna, 103, 104, 111, 114n16, 115n19, 116, 144, 163, 167, 172, 173–76 Koch, Robert, 169 Komissarzhevskaya, Vera, 116 Korolenko, Vladimir, 84 Kushner, Aleksandr, 178 Kurdyumov, Mikhail Grigorievich, 144 Heart in Turmoil, 144 Kuzicheva, A. P., 125n42 Kuzminskaya, Tatiana, 25 Kuznetsova, Galina, 137

L

Lapushin, Radislav, vii–viii, 86n11, 173n3 Leikin, Nikolai, 72 Leont´ev (Shcheglov), Ivan, 72, 84, 85 Lermontov, Mikhail, 134 Luther, 19

M

Malcolm, Janet, 30–31, 80n29 Maurois, Andre, 130–31 Maude, Aylmer, 48n77, 53 Maupassant, Guy de, 18–20, 134 Megalomania, 22, 29, 80 Melancholy, 16, 66, 87, 165 Merezhkovsky, Dmitry, 136, 167, 174 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, viii, xviii, 103, 104, 109–28 “First Attempts at a Stylized Theater,” 123–25 “The Naturalistic Theater and the Theater of Mood,” 122–23 “Tristan and Isolde,” 125 Mikhailov, Oleg, 131n6 Moi, Toril, 61 Montaigne, Michel, xi–xii, 81

Moskovskie vedomosti (newspaper), 173 Muza, Anna, viii, 162n1

N

Nemirovich-Danchenko, Vladimir Ivanovich, 103, 104, 110, 111, 114, 179 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 80, 161, 162, 169, 172 Nordau, Max, 80 Northern Herald (periodical), 84, 85, 95

O

O’Connor, Katherine Tiernan, 174n6, 175 Olesha, Yury, x–xi, xv

P

Paperno, Irina, 22, 30 Pascal, Blaise, xi–xii Pleshcheev, Aleksei, 66, 71, 85, 87, 89, 165 Polkinghorne, Donald, 142 Polonsky, Yakov, 85 Polotskaia, E. A., 110n3, 114n17–18, 116n21, 122n31 Popoff, Alexandra, 7n12, 22, 24, 25, 46n74, 51n88–89, 52 Potapenko, Nikolai, 83 Pushkin, Alexander, xiv, 7, 37, 50, 97, 127n48, 131, 172n42, 179

R

Radstock, the Lord, 31 Raikh, Zinaida, 127n49 Rank, Otto, xii, xvi, 27, 28, 58–59 Art and Artist, xvi, 27–28 Rayfield, Donald, 97n27, 114n16, 162n1 Remizov, Aleksei, 109n1 Repin, Ilya, 8, 50 Roshchin, Nikolai, 135–36 Rossolimo, Grigorii, 169 Rozanov, Vasily, 23, 145 Russo-Japanese War, 163, 167

S

Said, Edward, 86 beginning intention, 86 a foundling, 86, 87, 92 Saltykov-Shchedrin, Mikhail, 46n74 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 57, 70–71, 123, 159, 160n9, 161 Sedykh, Andrei [Iakov Tsvibak], 134n18 Severn, Elizabeth, 45 Shakespeare, William, 119–21, 146 Hamlet, 118, 121 King Lear, 119–21

183

184

Index Shenk, Joshua, xvi Shklovsky, Victor, xvii, 147 Simmons, Ernest, 26 Stanislavsky, Konstantin, 103, 104, 110–13, 125–26, 149, 179 My Life in Art, 112, 113n11–13, 126n45 Stasiulevich, M. M., 177n16–17 Strachey, Lytton, 131, 146 Strakhov, Nikolai, 4, 6, 8, 20n39, 28–30, 35–36, 38, 40 Stravinsky, Igor, 127–28 Struve, Petr, 135 Sturrock, John, 138 Sukhikh, Igor, 114n14, 147n55, 167n24 Sukhotin, Mikhail, 51 Suvorin, Aleksei Sergeevich, 61, 67–69, 72, 74, 75, 87, 88, 95–97 Svendsen, Lars, 166–68 A Philosophy of Boredom, 166–68 Svistunov, Petr Nikolaevich, 38–39

T

Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilych, 29 Teleshov, Nikolai, 170 Tóibín, Colm, 131 Tolstaya, Alexandra, 139 Tolstaya, Sophia (Sophia Andreevna /S. A./ Sonya [Tolstoy’s wife]), 7, 24–34, 36–37, 42, 51, 53, 54, 137, 139 My Life, 37 Who Is to Blame? In Response to “The Kreutzer Sonata” by Leo Tolstoy, 32–33 Tolstaya, Tatiana (Tanya), 8, 26, 51 Tolstoy, Aleksei Konstantinovich, 114 Tolstoy, Aleksei Nikolaevich, 130 Tolstoy, Alexandrine, 6, 31, 34, 36–39, 41 Tolstoy, L. L. (Tolstoy’s son), 37n43, 45n73, 169 Tolstoy, Leo (Lev Nikolaevich), x–xi, xiv, xvii–xviii, 3–54, 63, 75, 79–80, 97–101, 114, 129–48, 157, 167, 169–70, 176, 179 Creativity (conditions for), xvii, 28–29, 33, 35, 47, 48, 52–53 Death, x–xi, xvii, xviii, 3–20, 23, 27, 28, 41–42, 49–52 Health, 3–20 Writer’s block, 35–38, 47–48 Works: ABCs, 25 Anna Karenina, x, 4–6, 9–10, 24–26, 28, 30–33, 37, 47n76 Karenin, Aleksei, 30–31 Levin, Konstantin, 4–6, 9–10, 12, 15, 30

Oblonsky, Stiva, 30–31 Princess Lidiya Ivanovna, 30–31 The Case of Guy de Maupassant, 18–20 Childhood, 26, 139 A Confession, 6, 10, 12, 16–17, 21, 28 The narrator in The Death of Ivan Ilych, 8–9, 12–17, 19–20, 24, 26, 130 The Decembrists, 6, 30, 37–41 The Devil, 16 Hadji Murat, 50–51 “How Much Land Does a Person Need?,” 141 The Kreutzer Sonata, 26, 28, 32–33 Resurrection, 51–52 War and Peace, 24–26, 32, 37, 46, 132 What Is Art?, 50–51 What Then Must We Do?, 22, 47–48 Tomashevsky, Boris, 126, 127n48 Transference, 58, 146 Trilling, Lionel, 133 Troyat, Henry, 168 Tsar Nicholas I, xiii Turgenev, Ivan Sergeevich, xiii, 17n33, 18, 38, 106, 173–80 Bougival, 177, 179 Oysters (being compared to), 173–80 Spasskoe (family estate), 179 spinal cancer, 176 “A Strange Story,” 175 Verzhbolovo, 173, 177, 179 Turovskaia, Maia, 127n49

U

Uspensky, Gleb, 134 Utevsky, L. S., 177

V

Vengerov, Semën, 134, 174, 177–78 Viardot, Pauline, 177

W

Wagner, Richard, 80, 125, 128 Wilde, Oscar, 80 Wood, James, 171 Woolf, Virginia, 131, 145–46

Y

Yasnaya Polyana (Tolstoy’s estate), xvii, 7, 23–24, 27, 30, 35n37, 37n43, 53, 100, 137, 141 Young, William H., 13

Index Z

Zakhar´in, Grigorii Antonovich, 20n39 Zaitsev, Boris, 136, 179, 180n25 Zhdanov, Vladimir, 139

Zhukovsky, Vasily, 96 Zilboorg, Gregory, 10 Zubareva, Vera, 86n12, 89n19, 90n22 Zurov, Leonid, 137

185