Rediscovering Chekhov: “Three Years” and “A Woman’s Kingdom”

I have read many books about marriages falling apart, such as Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, Effi Briest, Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda, The Custom of the Country, The Kreutzer Sonata, and so on. Chekhov’s long story or novella “Three Years” stands out as something quite different, something unique. I can’t help thinking that only Chekhov can pull off such a story—a story of a loveless marriage that starts in unpromising terms but doesn’t end in adultery or separation, a story in which nothing seems to happen but the characters mature over time and come to develop a bond with each other.

I find it hard to write about Chekhov’s art. Several years ago when I first read Chekhov, the same year I discovered other Russian writers, I found him a bit too quiet, too open and ambiguous, especially with the open, inconclusive endings. Now I’ve rediscovered him and found him to be a wonderful writer, but still find it hard to write about his writing. Like Ozu in cinema, Chekhov is subtle, quiet, without illusion about human nature. He avoids overt drama. How do you write about subtlety? How do you write about quietness? 

One of the things I’ve noticed is that in depiction of reality and approach to character, Chekhov is close to Tolstoy (more than Gogol or Dostoyevsky): both appear (deceptively) simple; both notice details, and capture all the complexity, all the shades and nuances; both aim for a truthful depiction of reality and present characters as they are, without judgment (though Chekhov goes further in this regard); both create complex, multifaceted characters and write about a wide range of characters, with compassion, etc.

Chekhov’s Russia, however, is very different from Tolstoy’s Russia—Tolstoy tends to focus on the upper class in his major works whereas Chekhov seems to write more about the middle class and working class. It’s fascinating to go from Anna Karenina, where women are aristocrats and do nothing, to Chekhov’s “A Woman’s Kingdom”, where the main character Anna Akimovna is a female factory owner. Most importantly, Chekhov and Tolstoy differ in temperament. Chekhov is neither interested in social issues nor in underlying messages, and his narrators are more invisible. His style is also quieter. Reading Tolstoy, I’m often overwhelmed and have some strong emotions, which I don’t really feel with Chekhov, but his stories often have a lingering effect. In “Three Years” for example, he skips everything about the baby’s illness and death, as well as the parents’ grief, and instead condenses everything into a single paragraph, a note from Laptev to his friend Yartsev before he and his wife return to Moscow. Tolstoy would write these scenes, Chekhov doesn’t. Then he writes that Yulia sometimes goes into a room to cry alone, but he doesn’t go with her. He writes enough, and it’s affecting. 

It’s hard to write about Chekhov because it’s hard to single out something as particularly good. Once in a while there’s a striking detail, such as the scene in “Three Years” where Laptev’s brother Fyodor has a mental breakdown, gets confused about the rooms, and when giving some water, bites into the jug and breaks into sobs. Generally Chekhov’s greatness is in the overall mood and overall effect, and everything contributes to it.

In “Three Years”, you see a good, timid man named Laptev, who is no longer young, fall in love with a woman named Yulia and propose to her, which she declines then accepts, because she feels bad for rejecting the offer of a kind man and because she’s afraid of rejecting a proposal only to later become an old maid. She isn’t attracted to him and doesn’t love him, and he knows it. Soon after the wedding, both realise they have made a terrible mistake, both feel miserable, and both keep asking themselves why this has happened. Yulia prefers to go out or spend time with Laptev’s friends, and they seem to know her better than he himself does. There’s a passage where Laptev wonders what Yulia thinks, talks, or prays about—her mind, her whole being is closed to him. But slowly, in a subtle and almost magical way, Chekhov lets us see that they mature over the three years, and that they come to respect and even love each other. There is no bang at the end, no sudden epiphany, and in a sense it’s not an obviously happy ending, but there is a realisation, there is hope, there is something different, and we know that they can now go through the difficulties of life together. 

In “A Woman’s Kingdom”, you meet Anna Akimovna, a factory owner and philanthropist. You see her sense of helplessness as she tries to manage a factory and other work and doesn’t quite know how. You see her terrible loneliness, her yearning to be loved, to get married. Others tell her to live, to have fun and have many lovers, or to get married and have some flings on the side, but all Anna Akimovna wants is a simple marriage with a workingman—a workingman like her father once was. She thinks she falls in love with Pimenov, a man working in the factory, and in a moment of fun and careless excitement, announces to others that she wants to get married to him, only to later realise that such dreams are impossible. 

“She lay down without undressing and sobbed with shame and depression: what seemed to her most vexatious and stupid of all was that her dreams that day about Pimenov had been right, lofty, honorable, but at the same time she felt that Lysevich and even Krylin were nearer to her than Pimenov and all the workpeople taken together. She thought that if the long day she had just spent could have been represented in a picture, all that had been bad and vulgar—as, for instance, the dinner, the lawyer’s talk, the game of “kings”—would have been true, while her dreams and talk about Pimenov would have stood out from the whole as something false, as out of drawing; and she thought, too, that it was too late to dream of happiness, that everything was over for her, and it was impossible to go back to the life when she had slept under the same quilt with her mother, or to devise some new special sort of life.” 

(translated by Constance Garnett) 

Barely anything happens in “A Woman’s Kingdom”, and yet the story haunts your mind—it’s too late to dream of happiness, and Anna Akimovna feels everything’s over for her. 

Wonderful stuff.