The appeal of Chekhov

Nabokov says in Strong Opinions: 

“The word “genius” is passed around rather generously, isn’t it? At least in English, because its Russian counterpart, geniy, is a term brimming with a sort of throaty awe and is used only in the case of a very small number of writers, Shakespeare, Milton, Pushkin, Tolstoy. To such deeply beloved authors as Turgenev and Chekhov Russians assign the thinner term, talánt, talent, not genius. […] Genius still means to me, in my Russian fastidiousness and pride of phrase, a unique, dazzling gift, the genius of James Joyce, not the talent of Henry James.” 

And yet: 

“Mr. Karlinsky has put his finger on a mysterious sensory cell. He is right, I do love Chekhov dearly. I fail, however, to rationalize my feeling for him: I can easily do so in regard to the greater artist, Tolstoy, with the flash of this or that unforgettable passage (“…  how sweetly she said: ‘and even very much’ ”—Vronsky recalling Kitty’s reply to some trivial question that we shall never know), but when I imagine Chekhov with the same detachment all I can make out is a medley of dreadful prosaisms, ready-made epithets, repetitions, doctors, unconvincing vamps, and so forth; yet it is his works which I would take on a trip to another planet.”

Nabokov makes a similar point in Lectures on Russian Literature: 

“Russian critics have noted that Chekhov’s style, his choice of words and so on, did not reveal any of those special artistic preoccupations that obsessed, for instance, Gogol or Flaubert or Henry James. […] Thus Chekhov is a good example to give when one tries to explain that a writer may be a perfect artist without being exceptionally vivid in his verbal technique or exceptionally preoccupied with the way his sentences curve. […] The magical part of it is that in spite of his tolerating flaws which a bright beginner would have avoided, in spite of his being quite satisfied with the man-in-the street among words, the word-in-the-street, so to say, Chekhov managed to convey an impression of artistic beauty far surpassing that of many writers who thought they knew what rich beautiful prose was.”

Unlike Nabokov, I do think Chekhov has genius—like Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Gogol—whereas Turgenev has talent. But I too find it difficult to talk about Chekhov’s greatness, to rationalise my love for his writings.

When I read Alice Munro for the first time last year—a darling of Book Twitter, until the recent explosion—I enjoyed the stories a lot, but I remember thinking she’s very good but not Chekhov good. Alice Munro is also a subtle writer, writing about the lives of ordinary people and the little moments that are full of meaning. In a way, she should perhaps appeal more to me, writing about women, and she’s contemporary—TSK on Twitter said “being closer to us in time, her stories are fresher and more alive”—and yet I have never felt a connection with Alice Munro the way I feel about Chekhov (and now I clearly won’t). 

But it’s not just Alice Munro. I just love Chekhov more than any other short story writers; and in literature in general, I feel closer to Chekhov than anyone else, even Shakespeare and Tolstoy. 

Why? 

Part of it must be the authorial persona. Some writers—like Chekhov, Cervantes—have a more lovable persona than others—like Tolstoy, George Eliot. Tolstoy the artist may be able to depict a wide range of perspectives and inhabit the mind of more or less any character* but you can tell—you can feel on the page—that Tolstoy the man is judgemental. Same with George Eliot. 

It’s not that Chekhov doesn’t judge or doesn’t condemn. That is something people like to repeat when they talk about Chekhov, but all you have to do is to read “Ward No.6” or “In the Ravine” and you can see that isn’t true—Chekhov’s moral sense is clear, as he writes about people’s egotism, callousness, and cruelty to each other. But he is compassionate and humane. He makes us feel understood. He provides solace in moments of despair. 

He conveys, better than anyone, those brief moments of sadness that we sometimes feel. Take, for example, this passage from “The Beauties”: 

“I felt this beauty rather strangely. It was not desire, nor ecstacy, nor enjoyment that Masha excited in me, but a painful though pleasant sadness. It was a sadness vague and undefined as a dream. For some reason I felt sorry for myself, for my grandfather and for the Armenian, even for the girl herself, and I had a feeling as though we all four had lost something important and essential to life which we should never find again. My grandfather, too, grew melancholy; he talked no more about manure or about oats, but sat silent, looking pensively at Masha.” 

Later, in the same story: 

“On the platform between our carriage and the next the guard was standing with his elbows on the railing, looking in the direction of the beautiful girl, and his battered, wrinkled, unpleasantly beefy face, exhausted by sleepless nights and the jolting of the train, wore a look of tenderness and of the deepest sadness, as though in that girl he saw happiness, his own youth, soberness, purity, wife, children; as though he were repenting and feeling in his whole being that that girl was not his, and that for him, with his premature old age, his uncouthness, and his beefy face, the ordinary happiness of a man and a passenger was as far away as heaven....” 

(translated by Constance Garnett) 

I’m not a guard with a “battered, wrinkled, unpleasantly beefy face”, but I recognise that melancholy feeling.

This is why, when I feel down, I turn to Chekhov. 

Chekhov appeals to me also because he’s a humanist, and humane. Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky constantly write about God and constantly wrestle with their faith; Chekhov doesn’t pretend to know the answers to any of those big questions, but he’s capable of depicting goodness without faith, and conveying—in life as well as in writings—a sense of purpose without religion. He also rejects ideology, and rejects extremes. 

If anyone asks who my literary heroes are, my immediate answer would be Chekhov. I might perhaps also mention Vasily Grossman or Primo Levi—it might be a bit too early to say—but my one literary hero would be Chekhov. 

What about you? Why do you like Chekhov? 

*: except Hélène. 

Separating the art from the artist

The art vs artist subject pops up again after the Alice Munro news—on one side are people who can no longer read Alice Munro, condemning her for having compassion for fictional characters but not for her own daughter; on the other side are those who call for separating the art from the artist, saying that we shouldn’t have to approve of the writer’s personal behaviour in order to enjoy their work—but is it always so clear-cut and simple? I don’t think so. 

Are the unpleasant things present in their works? 

You can read Dickens’s novels and ignore the stuff he wrote elsewhere about Indians, but you can’t read Edith Wharton without seeing her attitudes about Jews. You can enjoy Gabriel García Márquez’s novels and ignore his friendship with Fidel Castro, but you can’t watch many 60s French films without seeing their naïve enthusiasm for communism and the Soviet Union. Much harder to focus on merit and ignore an author’s unpleasant side if it’s present in their works. 

Things could also be complicated. You can see on the page Tolstoy’s sexist views on women and unhealthy relationship with sex, but at the same time, he created some of the finest female characters in literature, such as Anna, Dolly, Natasha, Marya, Sonya, Vera, and so on. 

Then what do you do with films? You can ignore Hitchcock’s treatment of his actresses, but could you watch Last Tango in Paris (again) once you know what’s actually happening to Maria Schneider on the screen? 

Talent and importance 

I’m happy never watching another Jackie Chan film for the rest of my life. I probably won’t bother with Sean Penn either. But to never watch a Roman Polanski film would be a much harder choice to make—Chinatown is a masterpiece. 

Most people would agree that Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky are in many ways nasty, or have nasty views, but you would miss out on a lot if you refused to read them, or read them and only focused on the nastiness. But I’m not convinced it’s a huge loss that I haven’t got to Solzhenitsyn—he wrote some important books and people read them despite many wrong-headed views—but I’ve got Vasily Grossman, I don’t get the impression Solzhenitsyn is a must-read.

Time 

There’s a difference between being antisemitic in the 19th century and repeating antisemitic tropes and blood libel today. There’s a difference between having sympathy for communism in the 1960s and praising Stalin or Mao Zedong today. 

I would add, especially after reading a piece recently about Roger Waters, that there is nothing naïve and embarrassing about being unable to separate the art from the artist if the artist is alive and being vile before your very eyes. 

The deader the artist, the better.

Among the writers who mean the most to me, Shakespeare and Cervantes died 400 years ago—they’re no longer capable of surprising and disappointing us, but if something resurfaces, I wouldn’t even flinch—their contemporary Caravaggio after all was a murderer, it doesn’t matter.  

We all draw a line somewhere 

As long as people don’t call for censorship and other forms of cancelling, I don’t think it’s necessarily fair to dismiss someone as philistine or naïve if they’re unable to read a writer—Alice Munro for example—after a shocking and disappointing revelation.

We all draw a line somewhere. For some people, it’s sexual abuse (and its complicity). For some, it’s betrayal of children. For some, it’s racism (especially towards their own group). For some, it’s condonation of terrorism. For some, it’s denial of genocide. And so on and so forth. Certain things are more personal, certain things are felt more strongly.

For example, due to my background, I have no interest in writers who praise communism, or Vietnamese writers who live in Western countries but never say anything critical about the communist government. 

If some people are no longer able to read Alice Munro, why condemn them? Nobody is obliged to read Alice Munro. 

Separating the art from the artist is the ideal—we should appreciate the great works of art that very flawed people have nevertheless given us—but it’s not always possible and that’s fine. 

Alice Munro’s “Walker Brothers Cowboy” and “Dance of the Happy Shades”

As a short story writer, Alice Munro is in the line of Chekhov. I like that she has great control and writes enough, suggesting much more underneath the surface. I like that she writes stories in which nothing happens, and yet at the end, something seems to happen to us. 

“Walker Brothers Cowboy” (in Selected Stories) is the first Alice Munro story I’ve ever read, and I like it a lot. It’s narrated by a young girl. Her father once had a fox farm but lost everything and now works for the Walker Brothers. 

“He sells cough medicine, iron tonic, corn plasters, laxatives, pills for female disorders, mouthwash, shampoo, liniment, salves, lemon and orange and raspberry concentrate for making refreshing drinks, vanilla, food coloring, black and green tea, ginger, cloves, and other spices, rat poison.”

The story flows slowly, naturally—the narrator introduces her father, then the location, then her father’s job, then her mother, then the story of the family—everything flows naturally—then the girl and her younger brother, to give the mother a rest, join the father on his trip to sell things at people’s houses, and we follow them—where is the story going? we wonder—then having done his job, he continues driving beyond his territory and meets a woman he hasn’t seen for a long time. That’s when “Walker Brothers Cowboy” takes a little turn, the way Chekhov’s stories always do. A little turn that gets you to see everything differently.

There are quite a few subtle things I like. For example, we’re not told till that moment in Nora’s house, when it’s necessary, that the father is called Ben Jordan. We’re never told about the relationship between him and Nora. We’re never told about the incompatibility between him and his wife. Everything gradually unfolds, and Alice Munro adds nothing superfluous. 

But the thing I particularly like is that she gets us to see the father differently: 

“She and my father drink and I know what it is. Whisky. One of the things my mother has told me in our talks together is that my father never drinks whisky. But I see he does. He drinks whisky and he talks of people whose names I have never heard before.” 

It’s so “soft” that it doesn’t feel like an epiphany. Shortly after, Nora puts music on and turns towards the girl: 

““A big girl like you and so good-looking and can’t dance!” says Nora. “It’s high time you learned. I bet you’d make a lovely dancer. Here, I’m going to put on a piece I used to dance to and even your daddy did, in his dancing days. You didn’t know your daddy was a dancer, did you? Well, he is a talented man, your daddy!”” 

These little moments make us see the father in a different light, and get us to care about him—about the man he once was, the man he might have been. At the same time, Alice Munro has the young daughter narrate the story and therefore adds the perspective, the relatable feeling when one discovers something new, something unexpected about one’s parents, about who they used to be and what they were like before getting married and becoming parents.  

“So my father drives and my brother watches the road for rabbits and I feel my father’s life flowing back from our car in the last of the afternoon, darkening and turning strange, like a landscape that has an enchantment on it, making it kindly, ordinary and familiar while you are looking at it, but changing it, once your back is turned, into something you will never know, with all kinds of weathers, and distances you cannot imagine.” 

The ending enlarges the story. 

“Dance of the Happy Shades” is a story in which there’s even less happening: it’s about one of the boring “parties”— more like recitals—of an old piano teacher named Miss Marsalles, who “was unable to criticize except in the most delicate and apologetic way and her praises were unforgivably dishonest; it took an unusually conscientious pupil to come through with anything like a creditable performance”. 

I could summarise the plot and write about the story but I’m more interested in the writing. 

“Even the shadow behind her of another Miss Marsalles, slightly older, larger, grimmer, whose existence was always forgotten from one June to the next, was not discomfiting—though it was surely an arresting fact that there should be not one but two faces like that in the world, both long, gravel-colored, kindly, and grotesque, with enormous noses and tiny, red, sweet-tempered and shortsighted eyes. It must finally have come to seem like a piece of luck to them to be so ugly, a protection against life to be marked in so many ways, impossible, for they were gay as invulnerable and childish people are; they appeared sexless, wild, and gentle creatures, bizarre yet domestic, living in their house in Rosedale outside the complications of time.” 

Like Chekhov, Alice Munro doesn’t have an ornate style, a style that draws attention to itself. But the style, or perhaps the voice, of “Dance of the Happy Shades” is more interesting than in “Walker Brothers Cowboy”—probably because it’s narrated by a pupil who doesn’t love Miss Marsalles? 

Like the narrator, most of Miss Marsalles’s pupils now are the children of her old pupils: 

“Here they found themselves year after year—a group of busy, youngish women who had eased their cars impatiently through the archaic streets of Rosedale, who had complained for a week previously about the time lost, the fuss over the children’s dresses, and, above all, the boredom, but who were drawn together by a rather implausible allegiance—not so much to Miss Marsalles as to the ceremonies of their childhood, to a more exacting pattern of life which had been breaking apart even then but which survived, and unaccountably still survived, in Miss Marsalles’ living room. The little girls in dresses with skirts as stiff as bells moved with a natural awareness of ceremony against the dark walls of books, and their mothers’ faces wore the dull, not unpleasant look of acquiescence, the touch of absurd and slightly artificial nostalgia which would carry them through any lengthy family ritual.” 

Not ornate, but not bland. 

“The plates of sandwiches are set out, as they must have been for several hours now; you can see how the ones on top are beginning to curl very slightly at the edges. Flies buzz over the table, settle on the sandwiches, and crawl comfortably across the plates of little iced cakes brought from the bakery. The cut-glass bowl, sitting as usual in the center of the table, is full of purple punch, without ice apparently and going flat.

[…] My mother seems unable, although she makes a great effort, to take her eyes off the dining-room table and the complacent journeys of the marauding flies. Finally she achieves a dreamy, distant look, with her eyes focussed somewhere above the punch bowl, which makes it possible for her to keep her head turned in that direction and yet does not in any positive sense give her away. Miss Marsalles as well has trouble keeping her eyes on the performers; she keeps looking towards the door. Does she expect that even now some of the unexplained absentees may turn up?” 

I shall not write about the little turn in the later part of the story, nor the ending. But I’d note that throughout the story, the narrator, clearly influenced by her genteel mother, sees and depicts Miss Marsalles as a pathetic, rather absurd old woman, a mediocre piano teacher who foolishly thinks she can see into children’s hearts; Alice Munro builds it up till that little turn near the end of the story, and then gets us to see Miss Marsalles and all the characters in a different light. And she presents her characters as they are, without moralising, in a style that doesn’t draw attention to itself.

It is very good.