Heartbreak and Chekhov

I’m going through one of the worst times—perhaps the hardest—of my life. Heartbreak.

So I turned to Chekhov.

At a time of heartache and dejection, Chekhov seems like a perfect companion, making one feel less lonely—there are others who also feel unhappy, who also struggle, who also find life hard and unfair—but his stories aren’t just bleak or cynical. I love the warmth, the compassion in Chekhov. And even though he doesn’t aim for moral instruction—as Tolstoy does—he still gets me to think about my life as he depicts, over and over again though in different ways, people wasting their lives and/or being unkind to others. 

I’ve just finished Volumes 1 and 2 of Constance Garnett’s 13 volumes. Volume 1 is good, especially “Three Years”, which I have read in the NYRB Peasants and Other Stories, but most of the stories feel relatively early, more like sketches. In Volume 2, most of the stories feel more substantial, and they are wonderful.

In “Mire”, a lieutenant comes to a Jewish woman named Susanna telling her to repay a debt to his cousin, as he (the lieutenant) needs the money in order to get married. The cousin and his wife wait all day only for him to return the next day, not only without money but also without the IOU, having been seduced by Susanna. Angry, the cousin himself goes to Susanna to get back his money, and also returns the following day. 

“Kryukov flopped on the sofa, thrust his head in the pillow, and shook with suppressed laughter. A minute later he got up, and looking at the surprised lieutenant, with his eyes full of tears from laughing, said:

“Close the door. Well . . . she is a fe-e-male, I beg to inform you!”

“Did you get the IOUs?”

Kryukov waved his hand and went off into a peal of laughter again.

“Well! she is a female!” he went on. “Merci for the acquaintance, my boy! She’s a devil in petticoats…”” 

It’s an excellent scene. 

“Of Susanna Moiseyevna and the IOUs they said nothing. Both of them felt, somehow, ashamed to speak of the incident aloud. Yet they remembered it and thought of it with pleasure, as of a curious farce, which life had unexpectedly and casually played upon them, and which it would be pleasant to recall in old age.” 

But it doesn’t end there. The lieutenant decides to leave, and the married cousin one day cannot resist the temptation to go to Susanna again. The final scene—the shock, the shame, the anger—is magnificent. 

In both “Excellent People” and “Neighbours”, Chekhov writes about strained brother-sister relationships. 

In “Excellent People”: 

“His sister had become a stranger to him. And he was a stranger to her.”

In “Neighbours”, the relationship between the brother and sister changes because she comes to live with a married man, despite the family’s disapproval. 

“It seemed to Pyotr Mihalitch that she had not changed in the least during the last week, except that she was a little paler. She looked calm and just as usual, as though she had come with her brother to visit Vlassitch. But Pyotr Mihalitch felt that some change had taken place in himself. Before, when she was living at home, he could have spoken to her about anything, and now he did not feel equal to asking her the simple question, “How do you like being here?” The question seemed awkward and unnecessary. Probably the same change had taken place in her. She was in no haste to turn the conversation to her mother, to her home, to her relations with Vlassitch; she did not defend herself, she did not say that free unions are better than marriages in the church; she was not agitated, and calmly brooded over the story of Olivier. . . . And why had they suddenly begun talking of Olivier?”

I love the subtlety in Chekhov. Pyotr Mihalitch sets off in anger to have a talk with his sister Zina and Vlassitch, but the meeting doesn’t happen as he has imagined in his head: 

“And Pyotr Mihalitch felt all the bitterness and horror of his position. He thought of his deserted home, the closed piano, and Zina’s bright little room into which no one went now; he thought there were no prints of little feet on the garden-paths, and that before tea no one went off, laughing gaily, to bathe. What he had clung to more and more from his childhood upwards, what he had loved thinking about when he used to sit in the stuffy class-room or the lecture theatre—brightness, purity, and joy, everything that filled the house with life and light, had gone never to return, had vanished, and was mixed up with a coarse, clumsy story of some battalion officer, a chivalrous lieutenant, a depraved woman and a grandfather who had shot himself. . . . And to begin to talk about his mother or to think that the past could ever return would mean not understanding what was clear.”

Chekhov’s writing about a brother and sister, but that could be true for everything: life changes, people change, and the past could never return.

Another story I love in Volume 2 is “At Home”, in which a young woman named Vera returns to an estate she has inherited: 

“The space, the lovely peace of the steppe, told her that happiness was near at hand, and perhaps was here already; thousands of people, in fact, would have said: “What happiness to be young, healthy, well-educated, to be living on one’s own estate!” And at the same time the endless plain, all alike, without one living soul, frightened her, and at moments it was clear to her that its peaceful green vastness would swallow up her life and reduce it to nothingness. She was very young, elegant, fond of life; she had finished her studies at an aristocratic boarding-school, had learnt three languages, had read a great deal, had travelled with her father—and could all this have been meant to lead to nothing but settling down in a remote country-house in the steppe, and wandering day after day from the garden into the fields and from the fields into the garden to while away the time, and then sitting at home listening to her grandfather’s breathing? But what could she do? Where could she go? She could find no answer, and as she was returning home she doubted whether she would be happy here, and thought that driving from the station was far more interesting than living here.” 

Chekhov writes with compassion, and gets one to sympathise with Vera’s loneliness and restlessness. But somehow, in a subtle way, he changes one’s perspective of Vera towards the end of the story, as she becomes so wrapped up in her own problems and in her passivity that she does nothing when her servants are treated badly. 

“At Home” pairs well with “The Princess”, the story about a princess who feels unhappy about her life but finds consolation in philanthropy, only to be told the painful truth that her charities help nobody but her own self-satisfaction: “There was nothing but the desire to amuse yourself with living puppets, nothing else. . . . A person who does not feel the difference between a human being and a lap-dog ought not to go in for philanthropy.” But Chekhov has no illusion about human nature—the honesty shocks her, but doesn’t transform her. 

In Volume 2, I also love “Expensive Lessons”, about a man who hires a Frenchwoman to teach him French and gets nothing out of his lessons, but who continues taking lessons and falls in love with her; and “The Chemist’s Wife”, a little sketch about an unhappy wife. 

Chekhov is such a wonderful writer.