THE GENTLE SUBVERSIVE

To Vladimir Nabokov

m ost people can visualize him easily enough: the dour, sickly man in a long black overcoat buttoned to the top, a black hat pulled low over his eyes, leaning wearily on his cane in a flowering Yalta garden. That photograph, taken shortly before Chekhov's death, is reproduced on the cover of Ernest J. Simmons's popular biography sold at all paperback stands. It also served David Levine as the model for his widely reproduced cari­cature, which appears in the New York Review of Books jigsaw puzzle and which shows Chekhov as an elongated gloomy black tapeworm. The other best-known image of Chekhov is that of the morose consumptive in an arm­chair, glaring balefully at the world through his pince-nez, all shaggy tweeds and shaggy gray beard. This one comes from a portrait painted in oil toward the end of Chekhov's life by a mediocre painter named Iosif Braz. An earlier portrait by Braz for which Chekhov sat looked so little like him that it was destroyed. The second try, not much more successful, ended up at the Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow, and it is to this day the most widely reproduced portrait of Chekhov. It is the one most likely to grace the jacket of a collection of his stories or plays, or to be appended to one of the numerous biographies that have been appearing in Western languages with increasing frequency. Chekhov himself disliked the Braz portrait, thought that it made him look as if he'd been sniffing grated horseradish, and would refuse to autograph reproductions of it; those who knew Chekhov believed that this portrait falsified his appearance.

The multivolume Russian editions of Chekhov's collected writings and of his letters reproduce dozens of photographs and paintings where he looks quite different. There is the broad-shouldered, open-faced young giant of the early 1880s, who wrote hundreds of humorous stories, frequented Mos­cow night clubs, studied medicine and suddenly realized, at the age of twenty-six, that he was becoming an important and admired writer. There is the strikingly handsome, elegantly dressed Chekhov of thirty (a trim goatee, but still no pince-nez), who had already written some of his major masterpieces—"The Steppe," "The Duel," "A Dreary Story"—and had witnessed successful productions of his play Ivanov. This Chekhov was celebrated throughout Russia. He had traveled to Sakhalin, to Ceylon, to France and Italy, had climbed Vesuvius and gone swimming in the Indian Ocean. There is the Chekhov of the mid-1890s, the author of The Seagull, the builder of schools, the famine fighter, the bed partner of celebrated actresses and stylish literary ladies. All these different Chekhovs are there in the photographs, and in his letters, and they are all equally essential for understanding the man and his work.

The shaggy beard, the pince-nez, the funereal clothes, the exhausted look are not falsifications. They also existed, but they belonged to the last three years of Chekhov's life, when his lungs were ravaged by tuberculosis and when it was plain to everyone except himself that he was about to die. This was the Chekhov who wrote "The Bishop" and The Cherry Orchard, and this seems to be the Chekhov that the world prefers to remember. The pictures of the dying invalid of Yalta go well with the widely held view that Chekhov was a man who wrote gloomy stories and plays about unhappy, spineless people leading frustrated and melancholy lives.

This legend, like most legends, contains a small grain of truth. Chekhov was capable of being frustrated and bored, as his letters show; and he was very good at depicting these states of mind in his work. But to reduce the entire man and the content of his work to this particular dimension is like hearing a full symphony orchestra perform a Beethoven symphony and deliberately ignoring all the instruments except the cellos. The view of Chekhov as The Voice of Twilight Russia (the title of Princess Nina Andronikova Toumanova's platitudinous, cliche-filled book in English which is still widely read), as the "poet of twilight moods," was created by Russian critics at the turn of the century, when Chekhov was still alive. He hated it, thought it stupid, and made a point of leaving the room if anyone brought it up. But many people close to him were receptive to this view, including his wife Olga Knipper, who in 1901 wrote to him: "My heart aches when I think of the quiet sadness that seems to be so deeply en­trenched in your heart/' To which Chekhov replied: "But, darling, that is utter nonsense! There is no sadness in me, there never was; most of the time life is bearable and when you are with me, things are really fine." (Letter to Olga Knipper, August 24, 1901.)

None of the major literary figures of his time who were Chekhov's friends and who loved him as a writer ever accepted this reductionist concept—not Lev Tolstoy, not Nikolai Leskov, not Ivan Bunin. But Kon- stantin Stanislavsky was certainly influenced by it in everything he wrote about Chekhov, and so were some of Chekhov's close personal friends, whose reminiscences occasionally reflect the prevailing critical views at the turn of the century, rather than their own memories and observations. Basically, the image of Chekhov as the melancholy bard of a vanishing Russia represents the final success of Russian nineteenth-century critics in their determined effort to label and pigeonhole a major writer who did not fit their traditional and simplistic recipes for classifying writers. And, of course, Stanislavsky's drawn-out, elegiac productions of Chekhov's plays, with which Chekhov disagreed and which he disliked but which set the pattern for later generations, also served to contribute to that particular image.

Chekhov's quarrel with the critical establishment of his time is one of the central facts of his literary biography. The issues debated and the posi­tions taken are enormously important, and they touch the very mainsprings of Russian cultural life both in nineteenth-century Russia and in the present-day U.S.S.R. The circumstances of Chekhov's advent as a serious writer have almost no precedent in Russian or any other literature. His acclaim by the reading public of the 1880s and '90s, the recognition of his talent by the finest older writers of his time were accompanied by a steady stream of jeremiads by leading literary critics, lamenting Chekhov's lack of human concern and of moral principles, warning their readers that this writer was dangerous and that by writing the way he did he was betraying the humanitarian traditions of his native literature. When fifteen years of this sort of attack failed to halt the spread of Chekhov's reputation, a new generation of critics managed to reduce the complexities of Chekhovian concern and compassion to their own moaning and melancholy level and thus at last to co-opt him into the very tradition to which he was so alien and so opposed. His second co-optation came in the 1930s and '40s, when orthodox Stalinist Soviet critics like Vladimir Yermilov created the even more false and fraudulent image of the optimistic, quasi-revolutionary Chekhov, whose main aim in writing what he wrote was to indict the bourgeoisie and the ruling classes. To understand the causes for all this requires at least a minimal glance at the Russian cultural history of the past century and a half.

The epoch of the Great Reforms of the 1860s looms particularly large in forming Chekhov's attitudes and the attitudes of his detractors, and it frequently comes up in his correspondence. Chekhov was a small child when the reforms took place, but their impact on his life was crucial. Most of the important Russian writers of the nineteenth century were born into families which, whether affluent or impoverished, belonged to the nobility. Anton Chekhov, on the other hand, was born into a family of emancipated serfs. Ilis grandfather, his father, his uncles had all known existence as human chattels owned by other men. The future writer was slightly more than one year old when Emperor Alexander II, reacting to Russian defeat in the Crimean War, initiated the most sweeping of his several major reforms, the emancipation of all serfs. With one stroke of the tsar's pen, some fifty-two million slaves became free human beings. Other reforms, almost as momentous, followed. Trials by jury replaced the horrors of the archaic judicial system based on written procedures kept secret from the parties to the case and under which the court was not even required to inform the accused of the exact nature of the charges. A net­work of semi-autonomous, elective local administrative units called zemstvos was instituted and given considerable powers to establish schools and hospi­tals, to build roads and to provide veterinary and insurance services at the local level. Under the zemstvo system, tsarist Russia was one of the first countries in the world to offer its citizens free medical, dental and surgical care in its village hospitals. Anton Chekhov was frequently involved in the zemstvo system and its hospitals in one capacity or another, and many of his stories and private letters contain fascinating insights into the workings of this often-forgotten institution.

There was a great deal that went wrong with the implementation of the reforms of Alexander II, and it has become customary in the West to dismiss them as partial solutions that did not change the basically oppres­sive system. But their results on the local level, as seen and described by Chekhov, brought an increase in freedom to millions of formerly enslaved human beings and provided them with better education and medical care and with a chance of getting a fair trial in the courts. Chekhov was not one to dismiss or to ridicule this kind of achievement.

But the epoch of the sixties left Russia with another legacy, one that directly affected literature. For all his reforming, Alexander II did not authorize anything resembling real freedom of the press or any sort of open criticism of the government, even when it came from a loyal oppo­sition, such as had by then become customary in most Western European monarchies. And, as most of the literate segment of society realized, many aspects of life in post-reform Russia deserved to be criticized. Many artic­ulate people wanted to express their disapproval in something more durable and widely disseminated than an illegal anti-government leaflet. In the liberalized atmosphere of the 1860s a very special kind of literary criticism was developed to deal with this predicament.

The precedent for this sort of criticism and for many of its basic methods had already been established in the 1840s by the fiery Romantic critic Vissarion Belinsky. To outwit the censor, Belinsky was the first to exploit the device of pretending to criticize the reality depicted in a work of fiction while actually telling his readers what he thought of the state of affairs in the country. It was also Belinsky who began the practice of dis­torting the content and the meaning of a work of literature or even the stated social views of a given writer when he felt it necessary for the pur­pose of his political sermon. Thus, in his influential series of articles on Gogol, Belinsky turned that most fantastic and surrealistic of Russian writers into a photographic realist, because such an approach enabled him to use Gogol's work for an indictment of existing Russian customs; further­more, Belinsky managed to read into Gogol's stories and plays a subver­sive, anti-government message, which the politically conservative Gogol had never intended and which horrified him. All objective facts notwithstand­ing, Belinsky's image of Gogol prevailed in Russian criticism until the end of the nineteenth century, and although the Symbolist and Formalist critics of the first three decades of our century did brilliant work in estab­lishing and asserting the full complexity and uniqueness of Gogol's genius, the simplistic Belinskian view has been forcibly revived in the Soviet Union in recent decades and has remained compulsory there ever since.

Despite Belinsky's excesses and his ruthless hounding of several fine writers who to this day have lesser reputations than they deserve merely because Belinsky could not find suitable texts for sermons in their work, his love for literature was genuine, and it earned him the friendship and respect of such men as Turgenev, Herzen and the young Dostoyevsky. His successors of the 1860s, the men who set the tone for all Russian literary criticism in Chekhov's time—Nikolai Chernyshevsky and his two young disciples, Nikolai Dobrolyubov and Dmitry Pisarev—were social critics who were forced to write about literature and art because that was the only way they could get around the censor.

Nikolai Chernyshevsky's battle against tsarist tyranny was a beautiful and courageous thing to behold. His notions of literature, however, were primitive, oppressive and ultimately irrational. Literature and the other arts were for Chernyshevsky inferior substitutes for real life. Their only useful aspect was their hypnotic power to show people the desirable direc­tions for society to take and to warn them against taking wrong paths by providing cautionary examples. Once these aims had been accomplished, art itself could be safely discarded. Chernyshevsky also postulated a pe­culiarly quantitative criterion for judging artistic quality: a large edition of a book by Gogol was artistically superior to Gogol's original manuscript of the same work and a full-dress production of an opera (any opera, presumably) was on an artistically higher level than a performance of a string quartet.

It was Lenin himself who best described the critical method of Cherny- shevsky's disciple Dobrolyubov. "He turned his discussion of Oblomov into a battle-cry, into a call to activism and revolutionary struggle," Lenin wrote admiringly, "and he turned his analysis of On the Eve into a genuine revolutionary manifesto, written in such a way that it remains unforgotten to this day." Of course even Lenin knew that these novels by Goncharov and Turgcnev did not contain the ideas that Dobrolyubov read into them or derived from them.

The third member of the critical trinity of the 1860s, Pisarev, Chekhov's particular bete noire, but actually the most readable and, in the long run, the most logical of the three, took the basic attitudes of his age to their ultimate conclusion and indicted all imaginative literature as frivolous and superfluous.

"Never, it would seem, was more scorn heaped upon literature generally, nor were people more eager to put literature in its place, to puncture its illusions, if not destroy it altogether," wrote Hugh McLean of this period in his masterful examination of the development of modern Russian literature. McLean summarizes the respective attitudes of the critics of the 1840s and 1860s as follows: "Belinskv had said that art should be a textbook of life; Chernyshevsky would make it a second-rate surrogate for reality; Pisarev would abolish it."

Dobrolyubov and Pisarev both died very young. The government man­aged to make a national martyr out of Chernyshevsky by putting him on trial on insufficient evidence, framing him with false testimony and banish­ing him to Siberia. But for most Russian critics of the last quarter of the nineteenth century and for their readers, Belinsky and Chernyshevsky were literary figures as important as Gogol, Turgenev and Tolstoy. Their prestige was unassailable, their opinions and pronouncements not to be questioned, and they managed to change the literary outlook of many generations of Russians. During the more repressive decades of the seventies and the eighties, literary criticism remained in the hands of their successors and erstwhile associates. These men could not match the by then canonized radical saints of the sixties in their revolutionary fervor, but they reiterated the demand that literature express simplistic political and sociological clichcs, and above all they continued the tradition of negating and vilifying all literature that did not conform to their insistence on easv didacticism.

The available histories of Russian literature usually overlook one basic fact of late-nineteenth-century intellectual life, with which Chekhov, like all Russian writers from the 1860s on, had to contend: the existence of two separate but equally repressive systems of censorship in the country. The de jure censorship of the tsarist government still had considerable powers in the 1880s. Its job was to weed out all expression of anti-govern­ment sentiments and to watch out for anv excessive liberties in the religious and sexual areas. The government censors could temporarily bar the pub­lication of Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata, and one of them managed to ban outright Chekhov's early play On the High Road because it was to his way of thinking "gloomy and filthy." But the censors' powers were visibly dwindling throughout the course of Chekhov's writing career, and if he could still worry in 1891 about the feasibility of making an ex-revolutionary the hero of a short story (Letter 63), a few years later sympathetic por­trayals of active revolutionaries became quite acceptable, as the publication of Tolstoy's Resurrection in 1899 eloquently demonstrated.

Far more powerful and, in the long run, even more oppressive was the de facto unofficial censorship by the anti-government literary critics, who not only ceaselessly demanded that all writers be topical, obviously relevant and socially critical, but also prescribed rigid formal and aesthetic criteria to which all literature was supposed to conform. Because a soberly realistic depiction of Russian life had been assumed since the days of Belinsky to be the most effective way of exposing social shortcomings, the critics of the 1860s, '70s and '8os fought an unending battle against fantasy, imagin­ation, poetry, mysticism, against excessive depth in psychological percep­tion, against all joy and humor that was not topical or satirical, and above all against any formal or stylistic innovations in literature and literary craftsmanship in general. Their rationale was that all these things could detract from the ideological message which was the sole aim of literature. The radical utilitarians would also have liked to attack religion and the Orthodox Church, but in this one area government censorship remained adamant and rigid. In matters of sex, however, the anti-government utilitar­ians were even more puritanical than the official censors. Pisarev was out­raged and revolted by the character of Lensky in Pushkin's Eugene Onegin because he mentions his fiancee's shoulders and bosom to a close friend, and Saltykov-Shchedrin was so shocked by the gynecological and sexual aspects of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina that he ridiculed the work as a "genito­urinary novel." The power of these critics to enforce their prejudices and taboos was awesome, and they used this power ruthlessly and often vindic­tively. There is no doubt that recognition of Dostoyevsky's true stature was delayed for decades because of Belinsky's disappointment in him after The Double and by the asininities that Dobrolyubov and Pisarev wrote about his later novels. Literary hacks like Zlatovratsky and second-raters like Gleb Uspensky enjoyed great and undeserved reputations as a result of the efforts of their utilitarian champions, while a writer of the stature of Nikolai Leskov was read out of Russian literature for the rest of the nine­teenth century because of an early novel in which he had satirized a socialist commune. Afanasy Fet, one of the greatest Russian poets of the century, was treated as a criminal and a public enemy by several generations of

Russian critics because he openly declared that he was neither willing nor able to discuss social issues in his poetry. And, of course, the sad decline of Russian poetry in the 1870s and '8os is directly attributable to the savage hounding and ridicule with which the critical fraternity of the period greeted the appearance of any poet of originality or technical ability.

One of the best fictional reflections of the effect that decades of utilitarian brainwashing had on many intelligent and socially aware Russian readers is to be found in Chekhov's short novel "Three Years" (1895), which contains the following literary discussion at the home of a wealthy intellectual of merchant-class origin:

"Л work of literature cannot be significant or useful unless its basic idea contains some meaningful social task/' Konstantin was saying, looking at Yartscv angrily. "If the book protests against serfdom or if the author indicts high society and its trivial ways, then it is a significant and useful piece of writing. But as for those novels and tales where it's oh and ah and why she fell in love with him, but he fell out of love with her,—such books, I say, are meaningless and to hell with them."

"I quite agree with you, Konstantin Ivanych," said Yulia Sergeyevna. "One writer describes a lovers' tryst, another describes infidelity, a third one —a reunion after separation. Can't they find any other subjects? There are, after all, many people who are ill, unhappy, worn out by poverty, who must be disgusted to have to read about such things."

Laptev was disturbed to hear his wife, a young woman of not quite twenty-two, speak of love so seriouslv and coldlv. He could guess why this was so.

"If poetry does not solve the problems that you consider important," said Yartsev, "why don't you try books on technology, on police and financial law or read scientific essavs? Whv should Romeo and Juliet have to deal with academic freedom or with sanitary conditions in prisons, instead of with love, when you can find any number of articles and handbooks 011 these other subjects?"

"But look here, you exaggerate!" Konstantin interrupted him. "We are not speaking of such giants as Shakespeare or Goethe. We speak of scores of talented and average writers who would be of much more use were they to leave love alone and take up indoctrinating the masses with knowledge and humanitarian ideas."

Some of the central issues of Russian intellectual history arc encapsu­lated in this brief dialogue. Konstantin's views 011 the uses of literature arc a minute summary of one of the basic theses of Peter Lavrov's Historical Letters (1870, final version 1891), which is perhaps the most representa­tive, influential and widely read single document of Russian nineteenth- century anti-government dissent (it is available in English in a brilliantly idiomatic translation by James P. Scanlan, who has also contributed an illuminating introductory essay). Yulia's reasons for rejecting literature that deals with love (and, by implication, with other personal and psycho­logical themes) are a simple-minded paraphrase of the reasons advanced by the Populist critics of Chekhov's time when they dismissed Tolstoy's Anna Karenina as socially irrelevant. Yartsev's mention of Shakespeare is a dodge, used repeatedly since Belinsky's time, to appeal to the prestige of recognized foreign classics in order to secure some freedom of expression for Russian literature. This dodge never worked, however: it was all very well for E. T. A. Hoffmann to write fantasies, because he was a foreign writer acknowledged throughout Western Europe, but a Russian writer, Vladimir Odoyevsky, who tried treating subjects similar to Hoffmann's, was condemned to literary death on the spot by Belinsky. Later on, in the 1870s, the defenders of Alexander Ostrovsky's play The Snow Maiden (it was attacked not for its insipid and mawkish poetry, but for bringing mythological creatures to the stage, which was contrary to the principles of realism) unsuccessfully cited the precedents of Shakespeare's The Tempest and Midsummer Night's Dream, but were told by the utilitarians that a man of Shakespeare's stature could permit himself a few aberrations; Shakespeare, after all, did not have the obligation to help the downtrodden Russian people which every Russian writer automatically had.

It was easy enough to see that the literary views of Russian radical utilitarians were primitive and simplistic. Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoyev- sky all saw and said as much. But Chekhov saw more. He saw that the men whom most of his contemporaries considered champions of freedom and giants of literary criticism were not any kind of literary critics at all, and that this whole critical dynasty, with the possible exception of Belinsky, neither liked nor understood literature. While the entire Russian intelligent­sia, save for its most reactionary segment, worshiped these critics and their tradition because of their opposition to the tsarist regime, Chekhov almost alone seemed to realize that men who fight tyranny and oppression by using tyrannical and oppressive means and who pursue their goals with ruthless and single-minded fanaticism are not likely to further the cause of freedom and bring about democracy in literature or in any other area. It took both courage and vision to discern this oppressive strain in the main­stream of Russian radical dissent, although even Chekhov could not fore­see the catastrophic effect on twentieth-century Russian literature and its writers of the officially imposed revival of radical-utilitarian criteria and literary ethics in Soviet times (backed by state-supported judicial enforce­ment of these views).

Chekhov's quarrel with the presuppositions of his epoch was fought in subdued and civilized tones, without ranting and without proselytizing. He preferred his literary work to speak for itself and reserved his polemics for his private correspondence and for an occasional editorial article, published, as a rule, anonymously. His natural mode of expression was understatement rather than diatribe. In fact, he would again and again overestimate the perceptive powers of his reading audience and even of close personal friends and have to explain his views and intentions all over after having stated them precisely and clearly in a story or in a personal letter. The total mis­understanding of the meaning of the play Ivanov by many people closely associated with its production is only the most spectacular example of this sort of thing in Chekhov's correspondence. Chekhov's letters of the late 1880s are particularly rich in intellectual drama because he has to articu­late his private ideas on the rights of the individual and of literature and on personal freedom to friends who in literary matters live and breathe the utilitarian traditions of their age, regardless of their social position or political orientation. The wealthy and mystical-minded society lady Maria Kiselyova, in objecting to "Mire" (Letter 9) used the same didactic-utili­tarian approach that the liberal editor Vukol Lavrov was to take a few years later in condemning Chekhov's "lack of principles." Indeed, for all the political polarization in nineteenth-century Russian society, by Che­khov's time the demand that all literature be didactic and contain some instantly obvious and certifiably relevant social idea became the norm for everyone, moderates and conservatives included. In Chekhov's story "In the Landau," a snobbish aristocratic young army officer, who moves in circles close to the imperial court, offhandedly condemns Turgenev for not having written about "freedom of the press or about social conscious­ness." And, in real life, a committee of three liberal professors of literature who were asked in 1899 by the management of the government-owned Imperial Theaters to judge the suitability of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya for presentation in official theaters turned the play down, among other reasons, for its lack of social relevance.

As long as Chekhov published his humorous and satirical early stories in humor magazines, serious and influential critics could afford to ignore him. But in 1886-88, when his startlingly original, seriously conceived mature stories began to appear in the leading literary journals, an alarm was sounded. The structural originality of "Heartache," "Anyuta" and "The Steppe" was seen as an affront to Russian realism, a betrayal of the most cherished traditions of Turgenev, Grigorovich and the simplistically under­stood Gogol. Above all, Chekhov's eschewing of all easily paraphrasable social tendentiousness, his preference for dealing with social realities rather than with social theories, was seen as subversive to their cause by the en­trenched utilitarians.

The principal keepers of the Belinskian-Chemyshevskian flame in the 1880s were the facile and prolific Populist hack Alexander Skabichevsky (1838-1910) and the more serious political thinker and journalist Nikolai Mikhailovsky (1842-1904). Because of their doctrinaire differences with the Russian Marxists and with Lenin, these men are styled "Populist critics" in Soviet literary histories and reference books and are denied the adulation accorded their predecessors of the 1860s, who are now described as "Revolutionary Democrats." But in actual fact, Skabichevsky and, to a lesser degree, Mikhailovsky form an important bridge between the utili­tarians of the sixties and Russian Marxist criticism, both before and after the October Revolution. Reading Skabichevsky's sarcastic articles on War and Peace and Anna Karenina, with their sneers at Tolstoy's lack of social awareness and purpose and their insistence that a few changes in the political system could instantly solve all of Anna's and Vronsky's emotional problems, today's Soviet readers should have an overwhelming sense of deja vu: this is exactly the tone, the method and the literary ethics of all those denunciatory articles that they have been reading for the last five decades about Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and so many others. And, since the main source of Soviet-Marxist aesthetics is Chernyshevsky and his various successors rather than anything Marx or Engels ever wrote, the similarities have logical and obvious causes.

Skabichevsky's initial comment on Chekhov's more serious work was that this writer was a mindless literary clown who would eventually die in the gutter, forgotten by everyone. Skabichevsky lived long enough to wit­ness Chekhov's later popularity and the general acceptance of his work; he accordingly toned down his hostility, especially when the impact of Chekhov's views had been neutralized by his being represented by the reductionist critics as the elegiac bard of a vanishing social order. But Mikhailovsky, the most popular and influential critic of the period, staked his entire literary reputation on discrediting Chekhov in the eyes of en­lightened and liberal readers; his failure to achieve this goal was the most momentous failure of the entire tradition he represented, and it was this failure that probably opened the door for the eventual liberation of Russian literature from utilitarian dictatorship during the Symbolist and Futurist periods. It is typical of Chekhov's personality that he managed to maintain cordial personal relations with Mikhailovsky and even nominated him for election to the Russian Imperial Academy. In an age when the views of Nikolai Mikhailovsky represented for the majority of thinking Russians the ultimate in literary wisdom (this is perceptively stressed by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in several episodes in August 1914) it was Chekhov who, in the course of a conversation with a young radical student, formulated the truest possible characterization of this critic: "Mikhailovsky is an im­portant sociologist and a failed critic; by his very nature he is incapable of understanding what imaginative literature is."

Mikhailovsky's stubborn rejection of Chekhov, his refusal to recognize that there was a humanitarian side to Chekhov's literary art, is usually regarded in Chekhov scholarship as a grotesque failure of literary taste, especially since Mikhailovsky was later to acclaim Maxim Gorky and Leonid Andreyev as being socially aware in ways that Chekhov for him was not. Yet perhaps in sticking to his guns to the last Mikhailovsky showed more honesty and more perception of Chekhov's true significance than did his successors of the turn of the century, who preferred to love a mourn­ful and despondent Chekhov created in their own image rather than face the full implications of what Chekhov actually represented. For, in his own quiet and gentle way, Chekhov is one of the most profoundly sub­versive writers who ever lived. He is as subversive of the sociological pre­suppositions of a Russian Populist such as Mikhailovsky as of the Christian mysticism of a Lev Shestov, whose widely circulated essay on Chekhov draws heavily on Mikhailovsky's earlier articles and cites some of the same examples to indict Chekhov from a position of Christian metaphysics.

The letters in the present volume provide numerous examples of the ways in which Chekhov's adherence to his "holy of holies . . . the most absolute freedom imaginable, freedom from violence and from lies" (Letter 23) could undercut the fundamental assumptions of the Russian Empire, its dissident critics and, in fact, the very basis of Western Judeo-Christian civilization. In this respect the letters themselves are eloquent enough. However, in order to point out the essential affinity between the views expressed in the letters and Chekhov's stories and plays, it might be worth­while to concentrate for a moment on the reflection in his creative writing of the three spheres of human activity which have always supposedly been safer to practice than to discuss: religion, politics and sex. Twentieth- century thinkers, such as Aldous Huxley in The Devils of Loudun and H. Rattray Taylor in Sex and History, have convincingly demonstrated that the basic human impulse from which religious, political and sexual ac­tivities all spring is often one and the same, and they have gone a long way toward explaining why repression in any one of these areas inevitably leads to repression in the other two. A study of the various forms of censorship exercised over Russian literature for the past two centuries should convince anyone that every curtailment of political expression and every liberalization is sure to be followed or accompanied by a correspond­ing increase or decrease of freedom in dealing with religious and sexual topics as well.

"Between the statements 'God exists' and There is no God' lies a whole vast field, which a true sage crosses with difficulty. But a Russian usually knows only one of these two extremes; what lies between them is of no interest to him and he usually knows nothing or very little." This maxim is to be found in Anton Chekhov's private notebooks not once, but several times. The tyrannical and pharisaic religious upbringing which Chekhov's father forced on his children resulted in a loss of faith by every single one of them once they became adults. While Anton did not turn into the kind of militant atheist that his older brother Alexander eventually became, there is no doubt that he was a nonbeliever in the last decades of his life. But his early religious upbringing never quite left him and it is very much in evidence both in his correspondence (with its frequent quotations from the Bible and from Orthodox prayers and its lapses into an ecclesiastical Old Church Slavic style for purposes of either solemnity or irony) and in the religious themes of many of his short stories. The Russian clergy appear in Chekhov's stories as frequently as do other social groups. In this Che­khov differs markedly from Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, who, for all their pre­occupation with religion, never thought of making an Orthodox priest, deacon or monk a central character in a work of fiction as Chekhov did in "The Bishop," "On Easter Eve," "Saintly Simplicity," "A Nightmare" and so many other stories. Most of these men of the Church are presented as full-blooded human beings with their own joys and problems; but we also find in Chekhov an occasional mean, dehumanized cleric, such as the heartless priest who appears briefly toward the end of "In the Ravine" or the nasty and vicious one who provides the comic element in "It Was Not Fated."

Chekhov's own favorite among the hundreds of stories he wrote was "The Student," a very brief story that, in moving and utterly simple terms, states the case for the importance of religious traditions and religious experience for the continuation of civilization. In Chekhov's last prose masterpiece, "The Bishop," the churchman-hero, sustained by his faith, faces the prospect of his own death with understanding and dignity, whereas a man much closer to Chekhov's own spiritual outlook, the pro­fessor of medicine in "A Dreary Story," who has no faith to lean on, deteriorates and withdraws from the life around him. The religious solace sought and found by Sonya in Uncle Vanya and by Yulia in "Three Years" are depicted by Chekhov with the utmost sympathy and understanding. And it was the nonbeliever Chekhov who, in the character of Lipa in "In the Ravine," created one of the most persuasive portraits of a meek Christian saint in Russian literature, comparable only to the similar crea­tion of another nonbeliever, Turgenev's Lukeria in "The Living Relic."

Yet, for all these examples, religion, Christianity and the Church in Chekhov's work are totally divorced from the very things they are tradi­tionally supposed to promote in Western civilization: morality, kindness and ethical treatment of fellow human beings. There are people in Che­khov's stories who are naturally good and kind, and religious belief or going to church are not shown to affect their natural goodness in one way or the other. But the unkind and the uncharitable in Chekhov's work, the ex­ploiters and the manipulators, can and do use religion self-righteously and with impunity to further their selfish ends. The closest we come to an out- and-out villain in Chekhov's writings is the pious, churchgoing peasant Matvei in "Peasant Women," who uses religious teachings and prayers to rid himself of the woman he has seduced, to betray her, to frame her for a crime she probably did not commit and, after her death, to exploit and terrorize her small son. Another churchgoing Christian, the shopkeeper Andrei in "The Requiem," condemns his actress daughter as a harlot and is enabled by his religious beliefs to persist in this condemnation even after his priest explains to him how wrong he is. A whole gallery of cul­tivated upper-class ladies in Chekhov's stories use their church-sanctioned positions as Christian wives and mothers to humiliate other human beings (the professor's wife in "A Dreary Story"), to assert their own smug superiority (Maria Konstantinovna in "The Duel") or to bludgeon another person into submission (the wife in "The Chorus Girl"). The wise old professor in "A Dreary Story" drives this point home when he remarks that "virtue and purity are little different from vice when they are prac­ticed in the spirit of unkindness."

While Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky both believed that Christian faith was the main source of moral strength for the impoverished and ignorant Russian peasants, Chekhov's much more closely observed and genuinely experienced picture of peasant life shows nothing of the sort. In the poverty- ridden world of "The Peasants," religion and the Church do nothing what­soever to raise the moral or ethical level of the benighted peasantry, whose religious expression takes the form of superstition or of empty and mean­ingless ritual (this story so contradicted everything Tolstoy believed about Russian peasant religiosity that he called it a "sin against the Russian people"). In Chekhov's most brutal and violent story, "The Murder," a family of peasant religious fanatics are led by their search for God to hate and brutalize each other and to commit a religiously motivated murder.

In a literature that had produced Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Leskov, the view that Christianity and religion in general are morally neutral is startling enough. This view is clearly subversive from the point of view of all established churches, but Chekhov's simultaneous insistence that religious experience can be tremendously enriching and rewarding when it brings consolation and spiritual profundity into people's lives sits very badly with his Soviet commentators and annotators, who are duty- bound to represent all religion as exploitative and reactionary. Chekhov's view of sex, however, is even more startling, coming as it does from a writer raised in the second half of the nineteenth century. For Chekhov, sex, like religion, is also a morally neutral quantity, whose moral and ethical impli­cations depend on the circumstances and the attitudes of the people involved. Had Chekhov stated such a view openly and militantly in the midst of the Victorian age in which he was living, he would have been dismissed as a crackpot by almost everyone. Because of his usual gentle and subdued mode of presentation, he was able to make his point without shocking too many people—but it was at the cost of having his views in this area almost overlooked.

In the eighteenth century, and especially during the reign of Catherine the Great, Russian literature enjoyed considerable freedom in treating sexual themes. Alexander Pushkin, who was the last nineteenth-century Russian writer to have profound ties with eighteenth-century traditions, was also the last to write openly and without guilt about the joys of sexual love. Pushkin's remarkably free treatment of sexual themes (including an early poem about female masturbation and a verse epistle addressed to a homosexual friend whom Pushkin invited for a visit, with the assurance that, although he himself was not available, he would be happy to intro­duce the visitor to some like-minded young men) was no longer possible when the long night of Victorian repression of all sexuality descended on Russia, as it did on other European countries. The change of sexual at­titudes is reflected in Pushkin's outlook as compared with that of Nikolai Gogol, who was only ten years younger. When the young Pushkin con­tracted gonorrhea, he informed some of his friends of the fact in a tone of puckish humor and with a touch of pride about having thus confirmed his full manhood. But when Gogol's mother, less than two decades later, mis­took a skin rash described in one of his letters for a venereal disease symp­tom, Gogol replied in a hysterical letter that if he had had such a loathsome disease he would have banished himself from the company of all decent men and never dared to see his mother again. It is highly instructive to compare Chekhov's nonjudgmental, matter-of-fact discussion of syphilis in Letter 91 to the just-cited letters of Pushkin and Gogol. Gogol might well be a special case, obsessed as he was by fear of the exposure of his homo­sexuality and by his terror of sexually available women. Because of all this, he shrouded the considerable sexual content of his work in such a mist of symbols and surrealist fantasies that it took the twentieth-century sensibility to discern it at all.

By mid-century, Victorian sexual taboos were fully operative in Russian literature and in Russian culture in general. For Dostoyevsky, the whole of the sexual sphere was sinful, depraved and threatening, albeit secretly at­tractive and fascinating, especially in its possibilities for mutual humiliation of the partners. It was clearly the sado-masochistic aspects of sex, its po­tential for human degradation, that interested Dostoyevsky most of all; and also its paradoxical role as a steppingstone toward redemption, as the ordeal of Sonya Marmeladova in Crime and Punishment was meant to demonstrate. For Tolstoy, on the other hand, sexuality, and especially fe­male sexuality, was a sin pure and simple. If at the time of War and Peace sexual relations could be justified for Tolstoy by procreation and by build­ing up a family, for the post-conversion Tolstoy, who wrote The Kreutzer Sonata and Resurrection, all sexuality, including sex within marriage, was an abomination that could lead only to total perdition. Against this back­ground of fear, guilt and sexual repression, Chekhov's attitudes toward sex come as a refreshing breath of sanity.

Of course, Anton Chekhov was a man of his time. He did not try to write of sexual love with the same freedom that Pushkin enjoyed and that he himself occasionally displayed in his private letters (making some of them unpublishable in Russian to this day). Nor could he permit himself the open treatment of the less-usual forms of sexuality which had been possible in the eighteenth century and became briefly possible again in the first two decades of the twentieth for certain Russian writers of the Symbol­ist period. But his ideal of the utmost literary objectivity prevented him from overlooking this basic human drive, from substituting the subjec­tively desirable in this sphere for that which actually exists, and from im­posing moralizing sanctions and inflicting morally motivated penalties on his "transgressing" (i.e., sexually liberated) characters, as had been the custom in the literature of his time.

In 1886, the year that marks Chekhov's attainment of full literary ma­turity, he wrote four masterful stories that show young women of various social strata in out-of-wedlock sexual involvements. In "Agafya," the young peasant wife of a railroad switchman is caught by her husband when she fails to return in time from a trvst with her lover; "Anvuta" is about an

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urban proletarian girl, who cohabits with a succession of university students; "The Chorus Girl" is another lower-class woman, active as a call girl in addi­tion to her job as an entertainer; and in "A Calamity," the wife of a well-to- do lawyer discovers hitherto unsuspected sexual desires within herself when an old family friend suddenly starts pursuing her with his attentions. What interested Chekhov in these stories is not that his heroines are having sexual experiences not sanctioned by the morality of the times, but rather what is done to them by others and what they do to themselves in con­nection with these experiences. Agafya comes to grief not because she has betrayed her husband, but because she needs her lover more than he needs her and because he refuses to take an interest in the consequences for her of their involvement. Anyuta is shown as an appealing, almost saintly creature, whose educated temporary lover is too tied down by social prej­udices and cultural stereotypes to appreciate her selfless kindness. The same prejudices and stereotypes, mechanically accepted by everyone in­volved, enable the client and his self-dramatizing, bitchy wife to subject the heroine of "The Chorus Girl" to undeserved humiliation and actually to rob her, with her own guilty compliance, of her few pieces of jewelry. And, while Sofya in "A Calamity" finds her newly discovered sexuality alarming and distasteful, it is because her discovery brings out the discrepancy be­tween the bourgeois wife and mother she thinks herself to be and her true self, and also because her sexual drive becomes obsessive, robbing her of the ability to decide freely on a course of action.

The very concepts of "adultery," "adultress," "the fallen woman," so very important in Russian literature of the Victorian age, simply do not exist as far as Chekhov is concerned. The fact that a man and a woman not married to each other may sleep together has no moral or immoral dimensions or value in his stories and plays. When sex is degrading in Chekhov (as it is in "A Calamity" or in "Ariadne"), it is because the people involved have degraded it, not because degradation is intrinsic to it as it so often is in Dostoyevsky. Nor does Chekhov accept the facile notion, made popular by Dobrolyubov in his celebrated essay on Ostrovsky's play The Thunderstorm, that in tsarist Russia marital infidelity could be a form of social protest. Even though the educated heroines of "The Duel" and "An Unknown Man's Story" tend to regard themselves as socially and politically liberated because they have left their husbands and are openly living with their lovers, Chekhov gently exposes their attitudes as wishful illusions, stemming from the same set of taboos and prohibitions that would have branded them "adultresses" or "fallen women" in the work of most of his contemporaries. Where a reader of Anna Karenina or of Resur­rection cannot forget for one moment that out-of-wedlock sex was the main cause of the troubles and sufferings of their heroines, the last and greatest of Chekhov's plays, The Seagull, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, make a point of depicting attractive, believable women whose unconventional sex lives have no bearing on his or our evaluation of their ethics and morals.

Nor is there even a vestige of the double sexual standard in the mature Chekhov. The courtship of the married Yelena by both Uncle Vanya and Dr. Astrov (which so outraged Tolstoy that he insulted one of the actors after a performance of Uncle Vanya) is presented in the same objective, nonjudgmental manner as the fact that Lyubov Ranevskaya is about to return to her kept lover at the end of The Cherry Orchard (which caused Vladimir Korolenko to protest that Chekhov should have exposed her as an "aristocratic slut" instead of enveloping her in a romantic aura). The husband in Tolstoy's Family Happiness puts his wife into a purgatory be­cause for a brief moment she considered the possibility of betraying him. Prince Andrei in War and Peace is unable even to imagine the possibility of forgiving the cheated and repentant Natasha, who had planned to be­tray him but actually did not. In contrast, Chekhov's Layevsky in "The Duel" is able to rise to the realization that it was his own selfish and callous behavior that drove his mistress into other men's arms and to beg for her forgiveness; his Kulvgin in Three Sisters is unimaginative and faintly ridiculous, but kind and magnanimous in his understanding and forgive­ness of his wife's extramarital love affair; above all, his generous and appealing Dr. Dymov in "The Grasshopper" is not in the least concerned with his own hurt pride as he tries to alleviate his wife's pain and suffering over her break with her lover. It is this kind of realization, common to eighteenth- and twentieth-century thinking, but rarely found in the nine­teenth, that women are as subject to sexual desires, obsessions and whims as men and should be judged by the same standards, that made the moti­vations of Layevsky in "The Duel" incomprehensible to Chekhov's elderly poet-friend Pleshcheyev. A similar thesis, embodied in Lorenzo da Ponte's libretto for Mozart's Cost fan tutte, outraged the nineteenth-century minds of both Beethoven and Wagner and, despite all the glories of Mozart's music, made that masterpiece the least performed of his operas throughout the nineteenth century.

In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir singled out Stendhal as the only major writer who understood the particular situation of women in a male-dominated world. Twenty years later, Kate Millett was to proclaim that Jean Genet's special vantage point as a homosexual, outcast and criminal enabled him to perceive the specific situation of women better than male writers blinded by their machismo. But had the work of Anton Chekhov been read in the West as it is written, rather than through the prism of inherited Russian critical distortions, many of his stories would surely be in the canon of the women's liberation movement. What other writer so habitually showed his female characters robbed of their individual­ity by the traditional roles society forces upon them? What better image of a woman reduced to the level of an inanimate object is there in litera­ture than the self-abnegating Anyuta, shivering from cold at the beginning of the story, while her lover, a medical student, uses her as an anatomical aid in studying for an exam, and later allows a friend to borrow her for a few hours, despite her objections, to serve without pay as a nude model? Chekhov's stories dealing with similar themes are too many to enumerate, but a few can be cited to demonstrate the nature of his concern and its depth. In "Big Volodya and Little Volodya" we are shown in the space of a few pages the plight of an intelligent young woman, recently married to a high-ranking army officer much older than herself, trying to share her religious and intellectual interests with her husband and, getting no re­sponse, turning to a young literary scholar who was her childhood friend. But the younger man (he has the same first name as her husband) refuses to take her genuine intellectual and spiritual hunger seriously and utilizes her despair to effect an easy sexual conquest. The military husband and the academic-intellectual lover both see the heroine's dissatisfaction as a symptom of hysteria and make no effort to understand it. The hopeless­ness of her situation is further emphasized by the two other female char­acters in the story, her closest friends, one of whom becomes an acid- tongued, disillusioned old maid loathing herself for her failure to find a husband, while the other gives up all worldly ambitions and withdraws to a convent.

A somewhat similar constellation of characters appears in another story from Chekhov's last period, "A Visit with Friends," which also depicts an upper-class group of three women and two men. There is an older sister, a beautiful and intelligent woman, who allows her own and her younger sister's property to be squandered by her husband, a fraud, a poseur and a wastrel, adored and pampered by all the women in the story. The visiting bachelor lawyer, from whose vantage point the story is told, wonders at this woman's uncritical devotion to her husband and her two little daughters and at her total absorption in her homemaking:

... he found it strange that this healthy, young, by no means stupid woman, who was in fact such a powerful and complex organism, should expend all of her energy, all of her life forces on such primitive, petty work as the building of this particular nest, which in any case had already been built.

"Perhaps this is how it should be," he thought, "but it is neither interesting nor intelligent."

The younger sister spends all her time yearning for the kind of domestic arrangements in which her older sister is caught. She longs for a marriage proposal from the visiting lawyer, not, Chekhov carefully makes clear, because she loves him or feels close to him, but because his proposal would enable her to fulfill what she has been brought up to believe is her bio­logical destiny. An alternative to the situation of these two sisters is repre­sented by their friend, a woman doctor who is independent and self- supporting, but crushed by loneliness and poverty. At the end of the story, the lawyer, bored by the matrimonial moonings of the younger sister, dreams of another kind of woman, the kind who could tell him "something fascinating and new, not related to either love or happiness, or else if she should speak of love, that it would be a call for a new way of life, lofty and rational, on the brink of which we might be living, the advent of which we might perhaps sense now and then."

The heroine of "Ariadne" has been brought up on the notion that the aim of a girl's life is to please men and to appeal to their sexual appetites. She grows into a calculating, cold-blooded predator, unable to enjoy any human relationship or even sex, preoccupied solely with the material ad­vantages her victims can provide. But, because of the naked selfishness and pettiness of her approach to life, Ariadne fails to make it as a big-time femme fatale. At the end of the story she seems to be headed for marriage with a dull, aged lecher. In an outburst of moral preaching, unique in the mature Chekhov, the author allows one of Ariadne's male victims to blame it all on the education that women get in Western societies:

"Yes, sir, it is all the fault of our education, my good man. In the cities the entire upbringing and education of a woman comes down es­sentially to converting her into a human animal, that is, to have her please the male and to teach her how to conquer this male. Yes, sir," Shamokhin sighed. "What is needed is to have the girls brought up and educated to­gether with the boys, to have both of them together at all times. A woman should be brought up to realize when she is wrong, just as a man is, because otherwise she is sure that she is always right. Convince a little girl from the cradle on that a man is not primarily a suitor, a prospective bridegroom, but a fellow human being equal to her in every way. Get her accustomed to think logically, to generalize, and stop assuring her that her brain weighs less than a man's and that therefore she may remain indifferent to the sciences, the arts, to cultural tasks in general. A young boy who is an apprentice shoemaker or housepainter also has a smaller-sized brain than an adult man, but he nevertheless takes part in the general struggle for survival, he works, he suffers. And we'd better drop this manner of blaming everything on physiology, pregnancy and childbirth, because first of all, a woman does not give birth every month, secondly not all women give birth, and thirdly a normal peasant woman works in the fields right up to the day before she gives birth, and is not harmed in any way. Also, we should achieve the most complete equality imaginable in our daily life. If a man offers the lady a chair or picks up the handkerchief she has dropped,—why, let her repay him in kind. I would not object if a girl of good family were to help me put on my overcoat or bring me a glass of water."

The inability of even educated and well-to-do women to attain personal freedom and independence without a man's help is a major theme of Chekhov's, recurring constantly in his work. It is present, in a muted and subdued form, in Three Sisters, but it is given a much more overt and eloquent treatment in such stories as "Lights," "A Woman's Kingdom" and "Anna on the Neck." In "The Darling," we are shown a woman who by choice gives up all her individual qualities and derives whatever existence or dimensions she may possess from the males in her life. Chekhov intended her as a humorous creation, but Lev Tolstoy saw in her the embodiment of some of his own most cherished notions about what a woman should be. In a very significant little critical article on "The Darling," Tolstoy argued that Chekhov accomplished the very opposite of what he had in­tended in this story, depicting, instead of the laughable creature he had in mind, a beautiful, saintly and totally fulfilled woman.

An instance of a woman genuinely liberating herself from the compul­sory biological and social roles which society and her family relentlessly impose on her and achieving an independent existence as an inwardly free individual is described in the very last story Chekhov wrote, "The Bride" (also known in English as "The Betrothed"). This story has become the traditional prize exhibit of orthodox Soviet critics, who are out to prove that at the end of his life Chekhov was moving toward espousing the cause of violent revolution. Although the text of the story does not state the exact future path that the heroine of "The Bride," Nadya, will follow, it is invariably assumed by the commentators in Soviet editions of Chekhov that in Nadya he has portrayed an upper-class girl who is about to become a revolutionary. This is the reasoning that underlies the commentary to "The Bride" in the twelve-volume Soviet edition of Chekhov's complete works, which states that this story is the most important thing Chekhov ever wrote. It must also explain why a recent American translator of "The Bride" renders the key phrase "to change the course of your life" (pere- vernut' zhizn') as "to revolutionize your life" every time it occurs in the story.

But to reduce "The Bride" to the cliches and platitudes that are com­pulsory in Soviet criticism is to deprive a unique and remarkable story of its particular and profound meaning. As was the case with Misail Poloznev in Chekhov's "My Life" (in some ways Misail is Nadya's male counter­part), Nadya's first step toward her personal liberation is taken when she begins to question the values of her family—her mother and her grand­mother in this case. Her distant cousin Sasha, a consumptive young revo­lutionary, adds fuel to her resolve to escape by preaching the imminence of a social revolution which will instantly change men into demigods and cover the face of the earth with beautiful buildings and fountains. A further degree of freedom is achieved by Nadya when she rejects the com­fortable marriage into which her entire culture is pushing her. When she escapes to St. Petersburg, her liberation from the small town where she was raised is complete. At this point the Soviet commentators prefer to stop; but in the text itself Chekhov takes his heroine still further in her quest for inner freedom. After living independently in St. Petersburg for a year, Nadya lias another encounter with the revolutionary Sasha. She is still attached to him and grateful for his help in her escape, but she has by now traveled beyond the stage of sloganeering, where he still remains: ". . . and now there was about Sasha, about his smile, about his entire figure something outmoded, old-fashioned, something that had had its day and had perhaps already gone to its grave." A revolution based on the promise of material affluence and on humanity reduced to a standardized common denominator rather than on freedom of thought and universal equality now holds as little attraction for Nadya as it did for Chekhov himself. "The Bride" is certainly as subversive of Soviet society today as it was of the society of Chekhov's day; hence the orthodox Leninist glosses in the Soviet commentaries and hence the hypnotic reiteration of the word

"revolutionary" and the avoidance of all mention of Nadva's achievement

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of an intensely personal inner liberation.

The principal implications of "The Bride" pertain not only to sexual politics, but to politics pure and simple. It is Chekhov's socio-political views, such as they are, that many of his Russian commentators have tried hardest to overlook or to distort. If Chekhov undercuts the traditional views on religion and sexuality by denying that these two areas have any inherent ethical or moral dimensions, politically the most subversive aspect of his thinking is his systematic demonstration of the illusory nature of all labels, categories and divisions of human beings into social groups and social classes, which are the starting point of all political theories of his time and ours. Chekhov's repeated insistence that "labels and trademarks" such as "liberal," "conservative," "Populist" or "neurotic," when used as a total description of any one person, are nothing but superstitions which keep people from perceiving the deeper moral and human realities implies a reasoned rejection of the political thinking that has been one of the mainstays of Russian literature and literary criticism from the 1840s on.

It is hard for foreign audiences to realize the determined audacity, bordering on insolence, with which Chekhov flies in the face of the cherished stereotypes of the Russian intelligentsia when he makes the pro­gressive and enlightened Dr. Lvov the villain of Ivanov, and yet shows the professional soldier Lieutenant Colonel Vershinin in Three Sisters as a socially aware idealist and the rising capitalist Yermolai Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard (who takes over the heroine's estate) as a complex and ap­pealing human being, who is, furthermore, on friendly and affectionate

terms with the revolutionarv-minded Petva Trofimov. It is this same kind

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of Chekhov-inspired rejection of stereotypes that makes the confrontation between the perceptive tsarist officer Colonel Vorotvntsev and the frightened, young radical Sasha Lenartovich in Solzhenitsyn's novel August 1914 so startling and convincing. In the Soviet Union, where the labeling and compartmentalizing of groups of people is the basis of an entire cul­ture, this aspect of Chekhov would be explosive indeed if anyone dared to bring it out into the open. The parable of litigation between the tavern keeper and the poor peasant, in which the jury of enlightened intellectuals decides in favor of the peasant solely because their culture assumes every tavern keeper to be an exploiter and every poor peasant a hero, appears in Chekhov's notebooks and is used in his story "The Name-Day Party." This parable is a beautiful illustration of the politically induced disregard of facts and the impairment of moral judgment that arise in any deeply polarized society. A recognizable present-day parallel would be a shootout between a white policeman and a black militant: regardless of how or why it happened, large groups of people would instantly want to believe that it must have been the black militant's fault, while other large groups, equally predictably, would want to blame it on the policeman. This is precisely what Chekhov's objection to labels and trademarks is all about.

Chekhov was almost as good as Tolstoy at puncturing the prevailing political illusions of the nineteenth century. He took on the illusion that industrialization is always beneficial in "A Woman's Kingdom" and "A Case from a Doctor's Practice"; the illusion that Russian peasants were a breed of Rousseauist saints in "The Phonies" (Svistuny in Russian), "The Village Elder" and "The Peasants"; and the Dostoyevskian notion of Russian messianism in "Three Years." But, unlike Tolstoy, he was not given to creating his own social myths and illusions. The principal docu­ment on Chekhov's socio-political views is of course his magnificent letter to Pleshchevev (Letter 23), which expresses his basic credo better than a whole volume of commentary could. Numerous insights into his political views and their evolution are to be found in other letters included in the present volume. However, since he did occasionally indulge in politically oriented polemics in his stories and plays, it may be worthwhile to point out a few such instances in his imaginative writing which may enhance and amplify the material found in the letters.

While Chekhov had little interest in political theories, programs and parties, he was tremendously sensitive to and aware of the human and moral realities that might underlie them. In his immature early stories, written for a quick ruble, he would occasionally serve up the kind of social and political satire for which the editors of humor magazines, general readers and the leading critics of the time all had a limitless appetite. As well as anyone, he could go through the motions of indicting corrupt high officials, hypocritical and groveling civil servants, harebrained society ladies, dishonest merchants and bribe-taking policemen. But, while still in his humor-magazine period, Chekhov managed to create one of the most profound political archetypes in all Russian literature, the figure of Sergeant Prishibeyev in the story of that name (1885). Prishibeyev is the quintes­sential authoritarian, an almost biologically depicted representative of the elderly human male, who is naturally convinced that people do not know what is good for them and need constant supervision if they are not to cause trouble, while he, the sergeant, knows what is right and has a God- given mission to tell everyone else what to do. Thirteen years later Chekhov provided Sergeant Prishibeyev with a companion figure in the person of the schoolteacher Belikov (in the story "The Man in a Shell"), the quintes­sential conformist, who is both the reverse of Prishibeyev's coin and his Siamese twin in the universal political landscape. Where Prishibeyev needs to run other people's lives, Belikov requires to be guided by rules and regu­lations devised by others. Not only does he require it for himself, but he needs to force everyone around him to conform to restrictions imposed from the outside, no matter how useless or nonsensical these restrictions may be.

It is easy to regard Prishibeyev and Belikov as satirical representations of political types peculiar to the tsarist Russia of Chekhov's time. But to do so is to miss the entire point of these two archetypes, both of which became instantly proverbial in Russia. Prishibeyev represents the embodi­ment of a widespread, recognizable human instinct (in Chekhov's story, he is actually put on trial for exercising unlawful authority), while Belikov, embodying an equally recognizable opposite instinct, complements Prishi­beyev the way a masochist complements a sadist and a criminal in Jean Genet's novels complements a policeman. Both types are observable in every kind of society, democratic as well as totalitarian. Both types are traditionally involved in political activity and, in fact, the more oppressive a given society, the more scope it affords its Prishibeyevs and Belikovs. But it took Chekhov's particular insight to detect them in their embryonic stage and to show that they were present not only in the official regime of his country, but in its revolutionary movement as well. The character of the idealistic, ideologically committed Dr. Yevgeny Lvov in Ivanov is a case in point. Moved by the most decent and humanitarian motivations imaginable, Lvov ends up treating those around him cruelly and unfairly because he insists on seeing everyone as a reflection of his ideological stereo­types instead of as an individual and fallible human being (see Letter 14 for Chekhov's own commentary on Dr. Lvov's character).

Even more telling is the character of the socially and politically active young girl, Lida Volchaninova, who appears in one of the most poetic stories of Chekhov's maturity, "The House with a Mansard." In his book on Chekhov, Kornei Chukovskv, a perceptive and knowledgeable Soviet critic, pretended to be puzzled why the do-gooder Chekhov depicted Lida so harshly and her idle younger sister with so much kindness and sympathy. "Hypnotized by Chekhov's magical craftsmanship, all of Russia fell poet­ically in love with this spineless, weak girl and came to despise her older sister for the very deeds and actions which not in literature, but in real life were so dear to Chekhov," Chukovsky wrote (the italics are his). "The Chekhov we know from innumerable memoirs and letters,—the district physician, the founder of libraries, the builder of schools—had he met Lida not in literature, but in life, would undoubtedly have become her faithful ally; but in literature he is her indicter and enemy."

In a book published in the Soviet Union, this is as far as Chukovsky could go in making his point, but the story itself tells us more. Yes, there is no doubt that Lida's social-improvement program parallels Chekhov's own. But this outwardly civilized partisan of civil rights is in her private life an authoritarian who keeps her mother and sister in fear and subjuga­tion. She is also a political fanatic. When her political convictions are brought into question and challenged by the artist-narrator with whom her sister is in love, Lida steps in and brutally breaks up their love affair. The very act of questioning her cherished political views is seen by Lida as a threat to her dominant position in the family—and she strikes out at her opponent with every ethical and unethical means she can muster. In this story, political fanaticism is as inhuman and as destructive as religious fanaticism was in "Peasant Women" and "The Murder."

Unlike Lida and Dr. Lvov, other Chekhovian characters who are com­mitted to revolutionary change are not necessarily dehumanized by rigid fanaticism and the dogmatic classification of all mankind into "us" and "them." There is the appealing Sasha in "The Bride," the naively idealistic Petya Trofimov in The Cherry Orchard and Vladimir, the intellectual would-be terrorist who narrates "An Unknown Man's Story" ("An Anony­mous Story" in Constance Garnett's English version). Vladimir could agree to commit a political assassination in principle, but he was unable to bring it off once he came to see his intended victim as an individual human being rather than an abstract political cipher. With the hindsight of the second half of the twentieth century, it is not difficult to imagine this entire group of dedicated, revolutionarv-minded young people succeeding in their efforts to overthrow the old regime and to redress its wrongs. But the next step would inevitably be for Dr. Lvov and Lida Volchaninova to purge the individualistic Sasha, the excessively idealistic Petya Trofimov and the ideologically unstable hero of "An Unknown Man's Story" to impose their own simple-minded dogmatism on everyone else and call the results the ultimate liberation. Yes, perhaps stubborn old Nikolai Mikhailovsky, who so persistently accused Chekhov of slandering the ideals of the Russian revolutionary movement, was more perceptive and honest than the official

Soviet criticism of our day, with its compulsory eulogies of the progressive Chekhov.

While Chekhov valued and appreciated the many genuinely liberating and democratic trends that the enlightened anti-government intelligentsia of his time was helping to further, his idea of social involvement and of activism was basically different from theirs. For Chekhov's contemporaries, as for many Western commentators on Russian literature today, the standard examples of socially involved turn-of-the-century writers are Tolstoy with his defiance of the government, his excommunication from the Orthodox Church and defense of persecuted religious sects, and the young Maxim Gorky, with his support of the revolutionary movement and his fund-raising campaigns for outlawed political parties. Such actions are remembered because they are dramatic; their effect depends on dramatizing current political issues by deliberately attracting public attention to them. But in its own way Anton Chekhov's life was probably more filled with direct involvement in valid social and human­itarian activity than that of any other writer one could name. His life was one continuous round of alleviating famine, fighting epidemics, building schools and public roads, endowing libraries, helping organize marine- biologv laboratories, giving thousands of needy peasants free medical treatment, planting gardens, helping fledgling writers get published, raising funds for worthwhile causes, and hundreds of other pursuits designed to help his fellow man and improve the general quality of life around him. If Chekhov's foreign admirers usually think of his trip to the penal colony on the island of Sakhalin as the one exceptional humanitarian act of his life, it is because this trip has been misrepresented by commentators to look like an act of open political defiance, such as Western readers have traditionally come to expect of Russian writers.

There are two main reasons why Chekhov's social activism has not been sufficiently stressed by his commentators and biographers (Kornei Chukovsky's book is the only one that emphasizes this aspect of Chekhov and does it ably and forcefully). One reason is that the genuinely modest Chekhov avoided personal publicity and would select causes not likely to attract sensation-seeking journalists. But the more important reason is that the basic outlook of the Russian liberal intelligentsia was derived from the field of the social sciences, humanities and, in some important in­stances, religion, while Chekhov's continuous commitment to medicine and the biological sciences in general gave him an entirely different set of priorities, both in his life and in literature. For his Russian contemporaries, Chekhov's efforts to prevent a cholera epidemic, his involvement in census taking both on Sakhalin and at his own estate of Melikhovo, his concern for the mistreatment of the Tatars, Gilyaks and Ainus, his alarm over the disappearance of wildlife were simply not as interesting as Tolstoy's or Gorky's open defiance of the tsarist government. This attitude is still evident in various Western biographies, television programs and biograph­ical plays, which project the same tired stereotypes of the dynamic activist Gorky contrasted with the withdrawn, sad and resigned Anton Pavlovich Chekhov. But perhaps we are at long last ready to perceive the true value of Chekhov's wider-ranging and, in the long run, more realistic humanitar­ian concerns, which are focused on the physical and biological realities of man's existence and future rather than on the topical political passions of a particular decade.

Chekhov himself was well aware of the paramount importance of his training in the biological sciences for his general outlook and for his forma­tion as a literary artist (Letter 130). This training and his constant reading of Darwin, of books by travelers and explorers such as Nevelskov and Przhevalskv, and of Russian biological scientists enabled him to bring to Russian literature dimensions and methods that were very much at odds with most of its previous assumptions. Instead of starting from a precon­ceived moral, sociological or religious position, Chekhov begins with scru­pulously unbiased observations of the life around him, and he refrains from deriving sweeping social generalizations from an insufficient body of observable facts. Whereas the attempts of Chekhov's French con­temporaries, especially Zola and Maupassant, to apply the methodology of the biological sciences to literary art sometimes reduced their peasant and proletarian characters to the level of laboratory animals subjected to vivisec­tion, Chekhov's unfailing humanity and compassion led him to an ap­proach closer to that of a doctor observing his patients for symptoms. However, Chekhov refrained from prescribing a cure—his vocation as a writer did not entitle him to prescribe panaceas for humanity's ills, some­thing that all too many Russian novelists and especially critics have had no qualms about doing.

Chekhov's very profound involvement with biology and its role as a key to much of his art have been noted by two Soviet critics of the Formalist generation, Boris Eichenbaum and Leonid Grossman (their articles are included in the fine collection of Chekhov criticism in English edited by Robert Louis Jackson for the Twentieth Century Views series). But, by and large, this important topic has not received the critical attention it requires and neither has the problem of the stylistic affinity of Chekhov's writing with the books of Russian nineteenth-century explorers and biol­ogists, to whom he felt so close and from whom he learned so much. The orientation of Chekhov's literary art toward the empirical sciences rather than toward intuitively grasped social theories, moral preaching or religious revelation presaged the later appearance of such similarly oriented twen­tieth-ccntury Russian writers as Vladimir Nabokov, equally well grounded in biology, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose training in physics and mathematics brings to his art a precision and objectivity that make his indignation and passion all the more persuasive.

Teaching courses on Chekhov at American universities in the second half of the 1960s was a particularly rewarding experience, because during those years the intellectual life of the Western world was gradually catch­ing up with many of Chekhov's insights and preoccupations which his contemporaries had chosen to overlook. His views on the situation of women provides one of the more spectacular examples of this. Another is his constant theme of the threatened environment and industrial pollution, with which he was concerned as early as the 1880s. This theme appears in "The Steppe" in the character of the cart driver Vasya, who is almost uncannily attuned to nature and to all living creatures (he goes into senti­mental ecstasies on observing a fox and is morally hurt when one of his colleagues wantonly kills a snake) and whose jaw is hideously swollen from the chemical poisoning resulting from his work at a match factory. In "The Reed Flute" (SvireV in Russian), one of the most crucial earlier stories, unaccountably omitted from most English-language collections of his work, Chekhov describes, in the highly poetic form of a colloquy be­tween an aged village shepherd and the steward of a nearby estate, the effect of the poor management of natural resources and laments the pol­lution of rivers and lakes and the predictable disappearance of wild animals and birds. Two years later, in 1889, he made this topic one of the central themes of the most openly polemical of his full-length plays, The Wood Demon. The attractive, positive hero of this play (the only instance of a character in Chekhov's plays who clearly expresses the author's views and has the author's full support) is the young landowner with a medical degree, Mikhail Khrushchev, whose main passion is saving the local forests and wildlife from senseless destruction. Khrushchev's conservationist efforts and his selfless medical aid to the surrounding peasants are regarded with suspicion by the other characters in the play because they cannot find a reductionist political or sociological label to pin on his activities. The most hostile attitude of all is taken by Alexander Serebryakov, a professor of literature, whose catch phrase for socially useful action is "delo delat' nado," which can mean both "you must do something useful" and, in the context of Chekhov's time, "you must do something for the cause." Coming from Serebryakov, the implication of the phrase is that writing articles of literary pseudo-criticism in the radical-utilitarian tradition is of more value for the Russian people than Khrushchev's program of medical and con­servationist action. Serebryakov's daughter Sonya (a character vastly differ­ent in The Wood Demon from the Sonya of Uncle Vanya) loves Khru­shchev and dramatically liberates herself at the end of the play from her father's cliche-ridden thinking, resolving to consider her loved one's actions on their own merits only.

The Wood Demon was an artistically unsatisfactory play in many ways, and Chekhov later discarded it, salvaging many of its characters, themes and portions of its actual text for his later and much more nearly perfect play, Uncle Vanya. The somewhat idealized Mikhail Khrushchev was replaced by the hard-drinking and cynical Dr. Astrov. But Astrov retained his prototype's conservationist interests and he is made to repeat verbatim Khrushchev's impassioned speech about the destruction of forests:

"Yes, I can see it when you cut down forests out of need, but why exterminate them? The forests of Russia are groaning under the ax, billions of trees perish, the dwellings of animals and birds are laid waste, rivers run shallow and dry up, marvelous landscapes disappear forever and all because the lazy man doesn't have the sense to pick his fuel up from the ground [the use of peat is meant]. (Turning to Yelena) Isn't that true, madam? One has to be a mindless barbarian to burn this beauty in one' stove, to destroy what we cannot create. Man was granted reason and creative abilities to increase that which was given him, but until now he has not created, but destroyed. There are fewer and fewer forests, the rivers dry up, wild animals are dying out, the climate is ruined and with each passing day the earth is becoming poorer and uglier."

This theme is given additional focus in the third-act scene between Astrov and Yelena (there was no corresponding scene in The Wood Demon) in which he shows her colored maps documenting the land spoliation and systematic disappearance of various species of wildlife. And yet the con­trast between the reality and value of nature conservation on the one hand and the sterility of simplistic social theorizing on the other, which is one of the main themes of Uncle Vanya, usually goes unperceived during the frequent productions of this play in Western countries. So does the irony of Professor Serebryakov's exit line, "You must all do something useful."

Chekhov returned to the ecological theme in one of his very last stories, "In the Ravine," which, because of the complexity and profundity of the questions it raises and the perfection of its technical realization, may well be the most impressive story he ever wrote. Here, the vivid picture of unchecked industrial pollution that poisons and disfigures the country­side, described in the opening pages, sets the scene for the examination of human greed, venality and corruption which are the subject of the story.

Chekhov's ideas on various topics that were subversive within the culture of his time and which might remain so in our day are not what made him the very great writer he is. His greatness lies more in the radically new ways he had discovered of perceiving and expressing the human pre­dicament and in the dazzlingly original literary forms he devised for con­veying his perceptions. These facets of Chekhov will not be found in his letters and neither will his great personal leitmotifs that flow from story to story and from play to play: the semantic tragedy that arises from the inability or unwillingness of human beings to communicate fully and from the inadequacy of language itself as a means of communication; and the changes in the texture of time's fabric which cause every attained goal to be different from what it was at the planning stage and which make a teleological approach to any undertaking or any personal relationship an absurdity. But a good understanding of the ideological underpinnings of his creative writing should enhance the understanding of his letters, just as the letters provide an essential key to the unstated implications of many of his stories and plays. In terms of illustrating Chekhov's views and atti­tudes, the artistically inferior plays of the middle period, such as Ivanov and The Wood Demon, are more revealing than the dramatic masterpieces of his last years, which he no longer bothered to infuse with his current ideological preoccupations.

Chekhov's libertarian views, his moral relativism, his recognition that there could be a variety of acceptable and valid approaches to many funda­mental issues, his hatred and resentment of dividing people into categories and pinning simplistic labels on them were clearly at variance with much of the Russian culture of his day and would be most unwelcome, were they to be openly recognized, in the Soviet Union. The uniqueness of his views within the Russian intellectual tradition has led to much distortion, both deliberate and unconscious, of Chekhov's attitudes by modern Russian commentators. Remarkably few Russians who have written on Chekhov have shown the perception and acceptance of his modes of thinking that we can find in the better discussions of his work by the more understanding foreign critics. There is nothing in Russian critical literature that for empathy and penetration could be placed next to the journals of the French critic Charles Du Bos (who understood Chekhov better than any other critic who ever lived, but who refrained from writing a book on him for fear that he didn't understand him enough), "The Russian Point of View" by Virginia Woolf or "Seeing Chekhov Plain" by Edmund Wilson. Crea­tive Russian writers and Russian poets, on the other hand, have been able to see into Chekhov with a freshness and spontaneity that seem beyond the grasp of Russian critics. So, by way of summary, three views of Chekhov by three of Russia's most outstanding twentieth-century poets are hereby offered.

In 1914, the twenty-one-year-old Vladimir Mayakovsky commemorated the tenth anniversary of Chekhov's death with a jaunty, irreverent little essay called "The Two Chekhovs." Written at a time when Mayakovsky was one of the leaders of Russian Futurism, the essay, for all its youthful desire to shock, remains to this day one of the most intelligent appraisals of Chekhov's role in Russian literature. In its level-headed insistence that Chekhov is important as an innovative literary artist rather than as a sociological phenomenon, Mayakovsky's Chekhov essay was the signal for the soon-to-develop Formalist school of Russian criticism (which was closely allied with Mayakovsky and his Futurists). Its concluding passages read:

Chekhov's language is as precise as "Hello!" and as simple as "Give me a glass of tea/' In his method of expressing the idea of a compact little story, the urgent cry of the future is felt: "Economy!"

It is these new forms of expressing an idea, this true approach to art's real tasks, that give us the right to speak of Chekhov as a master of verbal art.

Behind the familiar Chekhovian image created by the philistines, that of a grumbler displeased with everything, the defender of "ridiculous people" against society, behind Chekhov the twilight bard we discern the outlines of the other Chekhov: the joyous and powerful master of the art of literature.

In 1929, Boris Poplavsky, one of the finest poets of the Russian emigra­tion, the author of brilliant surrealist and at times mystical poems, made this entry in his personal journal:

Dostoeysky cannot help us live, he can only help us when we quarrel, separate, die. Tolstoy perhaps could, but how revolting is his eulogizing of bourgeois prosperity,—the Levins, the end of W. and P. Now Chekhov— yes, Chekhov can help us live, he and Lermontov.

A few pages later we read:

Chekhov teaches me to endure in my own spccial way, not to give up, to keep hoping, for there is much in Chekhov that is Roman, there is-much of some kind of "no matter what happens," of quand тёте.

And still further:

Chekhov is the most [Russian] Orthodox of Russian writers or more correctly the only Orthodox Russian writer. For what is Russian Orthodoxy if not absolute forgiveness, absolute refusal to condemn.

And in the early 1950s, Boris Pasternak's hero in Doctor Zhivago, who, like Chekhov, combined literature with medicine, wrote the lines that could not help but be the expression of the author's view as well:

Of things Russian, I love now most of all the Russian childlike quality of Pushkin and Chekhov, their shy lack of concern over such momentous matters as the ultimate aims of mankind and their own salvation. They understood all that very well, but they were far too modest and considered such things beyond their rank and position. Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky prepared for death, worried, searched for meaning, drew final conclusions, but those two were to the end distracted by the current private interests of their artistic calling and in this preoccupation lived out their lives also as a private matter of no concern to anyone else. And now, this private matter turns out to be of general concern and, like apples removed from the tree to ripen, keeps filling of itself in posterity with ever greater sweet­ness and meaning.

No, these three major Russian poets did not see Chekhov as a prophet of despair, as that jigsaw puzzle's ugly and morose tapeworm. All three would have agreed with Charles Du Bos, who wondered why so many people found depressing instead of bracing Chekhov's combination of an unflinching look at life's realities with a deep compassion. Perhaps the readers of Anton Chekhov's letters selected for this volume will also come to see this supreme realist in life and in literature as Mayakovsky, Pop- lavsky, Pasternak and Du Bos were able to see him, rather than as that hazy twilight creature of created legend who has been usurping the real Chekhov's place for so long.