There are some names on every litterateur’s mental to-read list which are vaguely suggestive of a virgin literary territory that must be treaded sooner or later – better sooner than later – so the literary bookworm in them can truly claim to have evolved .
Chekhov, for me, was one of those names. Coming to terms with my disappointment at not having found a single book to take home from the World Delhi Book Fair last year, I decided to enter the stall put up by Rupa with a determination to mine out gold. After all, I’ve prided myself for always bringing home gold from the literary minefield that was the Book Fair, and there was no chance in hell I was going to sacrifice that self-fashioned title.
So I took the plunge, headed straight for the World Fiction Series section, and began my search. There were French and Russian authors aplenty, and I had to pick one which would change my life. Which one should it be? Dumas? Balzac? Or Chekhov?
It was to be Chekhov. One of a book-lover’s many weaknesses is also their penchant with attractive book jackets. This copy of a selection of Anton Chekhov’s short-stories was an exquisite lime green, with the subtlest gold print. I had to take it home!
After the book was duly brought home, I underwent my usual New Book Drill: excitedly trying to read the book cover to cover before the sun went down. That, of course, ended how the New Book Drill usually ends – after a phase of obsessive, hurried reading, the book had to be put away in favor of the humdrum life. And, sigh, coursebooks.
Chekhov left me bewildered and disoriented. I could not understand the hype around Chekhov. For all I saw, his stories left me completely unsatiated and I’ll say it once more, bewildered. They ended before they, so to speak, even began.
So I went to the online literary community looking for solidarity, and realised that getting to appreciate Chekhov is a long and painful process. But it’s worth the undertaking, because it’s equally rewarding.
A semester later, I picked up Chekhov once more, this time for a paper on the study of the short-story as a genre.
Aren’t Russians the true radicals? Chekhov was my obvious choice. Read on:
Anton Chekhov and the Short Story: A Study of Form in Lady with a Lapdog and Fat and Thin
“But how far they were still from the end.”
The reader’s mood at the end of a Chekhovian short story is perhaps best described by this line from one of his own works, Lady with a Lapdog (1899) – “But how far they were still from the end.” – Not only do his stories refuse to provide any form of closure, very often, they do not even seem to have ended. Before one knows, one reaches the end of the story without feeling that the story, in fact, has reached its end. As the reader waits for something momentous to take place, she’s left at that- waiting – feeling disoriented and lightly dazed, hardly able to react to the story because it has been terminated without notice. The Guardian’s James Lasdun, on the occasion of Anton Chekhov’s 150th birth anniversary, captured the effect he produces quite succinctly: Chekhov faces us as a reflection of our own “unadorned ordinariness” as well as our “unfathomable strangeness.” (Lasdun)
While the short story was rid of the “Once upon a time…” convention before Chekhov and his contemporaries in late nineteenth century Russia, it is with his writing that the modern short story truly arrived– it overturned every convention that governed a ‘good’ short fiction, refused to acknowledge ends or even beginnings, providing the reader as it were with “slices” or “cross-sections” (May) of Russian life, with a measured, objective stance that seldom spent any time working out the implications in (and arising out of) the plot.
Chekhov, in his short career, nonetheless wrote prolifically, and out of hundreds of his short stories, I pick two for the purpose of this paper: A Lady with a Lapdog and Fat and Thin. The two stories are vastly different from each other in their subjects (Love, in the case of the former and class, in the latter) and length, the first one being several-thousands of words and the other one under a thousand. Moreover, A Lady with a Lapdog is one of Chekhov’s most recognized stories, while Fat and Thin is lesser known. Such a selection allows a wider frame of reference while discussing the form of the stories.
Fat and Thin is a pithy story of two men, Porfiry and Misha, who were once schoolboys together, and chance to run into each other at a train-station many years since their student days. The duality of human relationships is quirkily explored in their interaction, as the thin man, who ceaselessly speaks of his happy station in life, with his wife and children in tow, turns suddenly diffident to his friend, the fat man, when he realises that he has risen in social status far above what he would’ve anticipated. As the thin man, Porfiry, undergoes this transition so imperceptibly, changing his way of addressing the friend and his demeanour towards him in a split-second, the reader, just as the other friend, Misha, finds himself ill-at-ease and incomprehensive of the situation. And just like that, the story comes to a jerky end.
The implication of this arbitrary rendezvous between the two-friends eludes the audience in the first reading as one waits for a more perceptible frame to the story, which Chekhov resolutely refuses. Conrad Aiken’s observation that Chekhov does not frame the pictures that he paints, choosing to depict the mood of an “actual” moment, rings especially true in this story. In its arbitrariness, the story reads more like an episode, one, which, borrowing from Henry James, might be read as an instance of Chekhov “isolating a hard latent value” (Bell)from the everyday humdrum of life, which, to the passerby might appear insignificant.
Modern short-stories, especially those of Chekhov’s, are full of such episodes. The narrator of the story, an objective figure, appears to focus “on a revelatory break-up of the rhythm of everyday reality”, (May) instead of going into the “denseness of detail” and “the duration of time typical of the novel”, but hard to develop in the short story, owing to its shortness.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century in Russia, the contours of literally realism were also shifting. In Chekhov’s short stories, like many of the others who followed him, the tone of the scene takes greater precedence over plot. According to Eudora Welty, (May) his stories are “wrapped in an atmosphere”, and therefore held together by it, instead of the plot, which is hardly ever linearly progressive, but always understated, much like in Joseph Conrad’s impressionistic Heart of Darkness or Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness novel Mrs. Dalloway. (Chekhov was indeed the literary “nourishment” of modernists like Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield). One of Chekhov’s key techniques are impressionism and the early stream-of-consciousness, novelties that he introduced in the short-story, and also the probable reason why a lot of first-time readers of Chekhov find him difficult to appreciate – “Despite its relatively limited scope,.., a short story is often judged by its ability to provide a ‘complete’ or satisfying treatment of its characters and subject.” (Hansen) – With respect to this definition of the short story, Chekhov undoubtedly falls short. There’s hardly a sense of satisfaction or completeness with his stories. He provides a slice of life and leaves it at that – a slice out of a big loaf, disconnected, but best served that very way, cut out for inspection. It is also in this refusal to give in to the temptation of pat resolutions that makes Chekhov’s works so faithfully realistic.
In the second short-story, A Lady with a Lapdog, Chekhov snips off a definitive beginning and an ending from the plot, which, as compared to most of his other stories, does seem to have something of a trajectory and outline. However, what dominates the experience of the story is not its plot, but its mood.
The emphasis that Chekhov places on the mood of his story determines his form, and its influence can also be found in Katherine Mansfield, who recognized herself with Chekhov more than any other Russian author, and is manifest even through the titles of their stories: Chekhov has stories named after emotions and moods: Misery, Love, An Enigmatic Nature, et cetera, and Mansfield has her Bliss.
It’s difficult to discern much else from A Lady with a Lapdog, besides a “series of moods” driving the plot. Gurov finds himself frustrated and so he sets off to meet Anna Sergeyevna, and Anna, equally helpless in his absence, regularly sees him in Moscow. Yet, the sequence of events is not nearly as straightforward. While the action takes big leaps in time, we are introduced to slices of the drudgework of Russian life: In one instance, Gurov, while dropping his little girl to school, (he intends to go to meet Anna Sergeyevna later on) thinks of his dual life and of his ill-timed old age (falling in love did take him a long time, and now when it happened, he had not the luxury to openly indulge himself), and it is in those mundane everyday moments that his life, with its profundity, lays. The narrator does not take distract the reader from his setting by having Gurov take time off to exclusively think about the blundering events of his life, but it is blend-in with the experience of his life. (The stream-of-consciousness typical of Woolf begins to germinate here).
When the narrator exits the story, the door is left ajar for the reader to step in and wonder what happens to them next: the inconclusivity in the ending is very like life itself: the lovers are likely to continue meeting clandestinely as much as they are likely to work out a scheme to make their relationship public. But the mood, towards the end, is of dejection and frustration, of settled and advent old age, and the reader is disposed to take the cue. The realism of the story, faithfully mirroring Russian society of the time, also makes imagining a more favourable ending difficult, as not only the protagonists are married to their respective partners, but there’s also a considerable difference in their ages. Characterisation in this story has not been nipped, as we are able to grasp a sense of the temperament of the protagonists, but, we are made aware that “characters do not exist beyond their narrative framework”. Anna and Gurov meet each-other after having lived a good part of their lives, and hence, their past and future aspirations condition the short span of their togetherness witnessed in the story. Chekhov has a decided aversion to sentimentality in his short fiction, and constantly undercuts it with the triviality of daily life: “Time and again moments of potential solemnity are deflated by some mundane detail, the effect of which is a kind of constant assertion of the lifelike over the “literary”. Gurov, in A Lady with a Lapdog famously responds to Anne’s sudden onset of remorse after they consummate their affair, not by attempting to rise to her anguished, high-flown rhetoric, but by cutting himself a slice of watermelon and eating it in silence.” (Lasdun) Gurov, in a moment of self-examination (rarely allowed to Chekhov’s characters), wonders at the deception of love: “He always seemed to women different from what he was, and they loved in him not himself, but the man created by their imagination….” The disconcertion of falling in love “properly, really” for the first time is not shown to take fanciful flights. The concerns of the protagonists are, in fact, kept very real and objectivist, “quizzical” stance and propensity to be elusive may also be attributed to his own profession (that of a medic) and lifestyle – His biography by Donald Rayfield describes him as a “philanderer who enjoyed serially suborning the minds of women with whom he did not want real intimacy” (Independent)
Chekhov had his finger on the pulse of modern Russian society, and he rendered it in his fiction in revelatory, everyday moments, developing a narrative style that D.S. Mirsky says “allows nothing to ‘happen,’ but only smoothly and imperceptibly to ‘become'”. (May)
With Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, the short story form acquired a newfound serious reception, and it came to be considered as “the most appropriate narrative form to reflect the modern temperament.” He sowed the seeds the ‘modern character’, one we would see a lot of in T.S. Eliot later and one who had a strange way of “evaporating…because our view of them was never permitted for a moment to be external” (May)
As difficult, hence, as the process of getting to fall in love with Chekhov’s short stories is, it is profoundly fulfilling. Once one gets used to his sparse detail and enigma, there is no going back, for who else, other than Chekhov, can simply say “you live badly, ladies and gentlemen,” (Hansen) and yet not sound like a moralist?
Works Cited
Bell, Ian F.A. Henry James: Fiction as History. Rowman and Littlefield, 1985.
Hansen, Arlen J. Encyclopaedia Britannica. 8 November 2015. April 2016 <http://www.britannica.com/art/short-story#toc51050>.
Independent. Independent. 8 January 2010. April 2016 <http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/features/chekhov-the-first-truly-modern-master-1860893.html>.
Lasdun, James. The Guardian. 6 February 2010. April 2016 <http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/feb/06/anton-chekhov-short-stories>.
May, Charles. Reading the Short Story. May 2014. April 2016 <http://may-on-the-short-story.blogspot.in/2014/05/short-story-month-cont-anton-chekhov.html>.
Selected stories by Anton Chekhov, Masterpieces of World Fiction, Rupa.
Whims and Esprit 