10/3/04: Chekhov coldly.(Literature)(Critical Essay)

AT THE POETRY READING a month ago, Marion H cited a remark by Chekhov to the effect, "When you wish to move the heart, write more coldly." Having recently read through the collected Chekhov short stories and four of the plays, I found this remark arresting. In Part Four of "A Dreary Story", Chekhov has his old, insomniac professor--a man conscious he is dying--repudiate the belles-lettres of his day by objecting to the need for writers to have "a warm attitude to man".

I have found Chekhov compelling. His storytelling combines a vivid austerity of detail with a quality of dispassionate compassion. So my question is: How, by looking at their lives more coldly, did Chekhov in fact extend the range and warmth of a reader's sympathy for his people from that which is aroused by the earlier conventions of character-based fiction as we find in the Russian psychological realists, or the French and English novelists of his own time and since?

I can start with a further question: What is it draws us on in a Chekhov story? Partly it is the trust that here is the veritable life on the street, at the dining table, at the picnic. It is life chance-met rather than stage-managed. It will intrigue us but never stray far from what a random photograph could very well include. It is radically observant of, faithful to, the texture of an epoch and Chekhov's chosen Russian places, the Crimea, the steppe, the named and unnamed cities and towns, and the texture of Russian reactions to that time and those places. In having these qualities, his fiction also sustains the old faithfuls of storytelling--intrigue and resolution, depiction of vivid types, foreground and background.

But we relate to the characters differently. After the past several weeks saturation in Chekhov I can recall now no Chekhovian names, even though his characters invariably possess names. No Pip or Master Copperfield, no Tess or Casaubon, no Bovary, Besoukhov, Schweik, Raskolnikov or Oskar remain in mind. And while I have the sense of significant parts of a society having been drawn from the life, it is as though the characters have combined vivid necessity with anonymity, like people one might meet in a doctor's waiting room. We are being given, after all, a doctor's-eye view of humanity, intimate particulars combined with encountering humanity in the round, and this attentive objectivity in Chekhov is given tension by his awareness of his own medical condition and the nursing of his tubercular brother.

Are Chekhov's people better described as "instances" rather than "individuals"? We-ell, his characterisation has this fine (and concise) necessity, his characters breathe and have crisp definition. But it is as if they are individuals who purposely aspire to be no more than instances of what is happening in a given human society at a given epoch. That is to say, something critical has happened in Chekhov to the idea of the hero/heroine. A patient can be sympathetic but is debarred from being the hero. The substance depicted in Chekhov is as much the condition of a people as it is the predicament of any one of his persons.

Thus the ...