Russian literature

by kniaz Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

Tchéhoff’s heroes are not people who have never heard better words, or never conceived better ideas than those which circulate in the lowest circles of the Philistines. No, they have heard such words, and their hearts have beaten once upon a time at the sound of such words. But the common-place everyday life has stifled all such aspirations, apathy has taken its place, and now there remains only a haphazard existence amidst a hopeless meanness. The meanness which Tchéhoff represents is the one which begins with the loss of faith in one’s forces and the gradual loss of all those brighter hopes and illusions which make the charm of all activity, and, then, step by step, this meanness destroys the very springs of life: broken hopes, broken hearts, broken energies. Man reaches a stage when he can only mechanically repeat certain actions from day to day, and goes to bed, happy if he has “killed” his time in any way, gradually falling into a complete intellectual apathy, and a moral indifference. The worst is that the very multiplicity of samples which Tchéhoff gives, without repeating himself, from so many different layers of society, seems to tell the reader that it is the rottenness of a whole civilisation, of an epoch, which the author divulges to us.

Speaking of Tchéhoff, Tolstóy made the deep remark that he was one of those few whose novels are willingly re-read more than once. This is quite true. Every one of Tchéhoff’s stories—it may be the smallest bagatelle or a small novel, or it may be a drama—produces an impression which cannot easily be forgotten. At the same time they contain such a profusion of minute detail, admirably chosen so as to increase the impression, that in re-reading them one always finds a new pleasure. Tchéhoff was certainly a great artist. Besides, the variety of the men and women of all classes which appear in his stories, and the variety of psychological subjects dealt in them, is simply astounding. And yet every story bears so much the stamp of the author that in the most insignificant of them you recognise Tchéhoff, with his proper individuality and manner, with his conception of men and things.

Tchéhoff has never tried to write long novels or romances. His domain is the short story, in which he excels. He certainly never tries to give in it the whole history of his heroes from their birth to the grave: this would not be the proper way in a short story. He takes one moment only from that life, only one episode. And he tells it in such a way that the reader forever retains in memory the type of men or women represented; so that, when later on he meets a living specimen of that type, he exclaims: “But this is Tchéhoff’s Ivánoff, or Tchéhoff’s Darling!” In the space of some twenty pages and within the limitations of a single episode there is revealed a complicated psychological drama—a world of mutual relations. Take, for instance, the very short and impressive sketch, From a Doctor’s Practice. It is a story in which there is no story after all. A doctor is invited to see a girl, whose mother is the owner of a large cotton mill. They live there, in a mansion close to, and within the enclosure of, the immense buildings. The girl is the only child, and is worshipped by her mother. But she is not happy. Indefinite thoughts worry her: she is stifled in that atmosphere. Her mother is also unhappy on account of her darling’s unhappiness, and the only happy creature in the household is the ex-governess of the girl, now a sort of lady-companion, who really enjoys the luxurious surroundings of the mansion and its rich table. The doctor is asked to stay over the night, and tells to his sleepless patient that she is not bound to stay there: that a really well-intentioned person can find many places in the world where she would find an activity to suit her. And when the doctor leaves next morning the girl has put on a white dress and has a flower in her hair. She looks very earnest, and you guess that she meditates already about a new start in her life. Within the limits of these few traits quite a world of aimless philistine life has thus been unveiled before your eyes, a world of factory life, and a world of new longings making an irruption into it, and finding support from the outside. You read all this in the little episode. You see with a striking distinctness the four main personages upon whom light has been focused for a short moment. And in the hazy outlines which you rather guess than see on the picture round the brightly lighted spot, you discover quite a world of complicated human relations, at the present moment and in times to come. Take away anything of the distinctness of the figures in the lighted spot, or anything of the haziness of the remainder—and the picture will be spoiled.

Such are nearly all the stories of Tchéhoff. Even when they cover some fifty pages they have the same character.

Tchéhoff wrote a couple of stories from peasant life. But peasants and village life are not his proper sphere. His true domain is the world of the “intellectuals”—the educated and the half-educated portion of Russian society—and these he knows in perfection. He shows their bankruptcy, their inaptitude to solve the great historical problem of renovation which fell upon them, and the meanness and vulgarity of everyday life under which an immense number of them succumb. Since the times of Gógol no writer in Russia has so wonderfully represented human meanness under its varied aspects. And yet, what a difference between the two! Gógol took mainly the outer meanness, which strikes the eye and often degenerates into farce, and therefore in most cases brings a smile on your lips or makes you laugh. But laughter is always a step towards reconciliation. Tchéhoff also makes you laugh in his earlier productions, but in proportion as he advances in age, and looks more seriously upon life, the laughter disappears, and although a fine humour remains, you feel that he now deals with a kind of meanness and philistinism which provokes, not smiles but suffering in the author. A “Tchéhoff sorrow” is as much characteristic of his writings as the deep furrow between the brows of his lively eyes is characteristic of his good-natured face. Moreover, the meanness which Tchéhoff depicts is much deeper than the one which Gógol knew. Deeper conflicts are now going on in the depths of the modern educated men, of which Gógol knew nothing seventy years ago. The “sorrow” of Tchéhoff is also that of a much more sensitive and a more refined nature than the “unseen tears” of Gógol’s satire.

Better than any Russian novelist, Tchéhoff understands the fundamental vice of that mass of Russian “intellectuals,” who very well see the dark sides of Russian life but have no force to join that small minority of younger people who dare to rebel against the evil. In this respect, only one more writer—and this one was a woman, Hvóschinskaya (“Krestóvskiy-pseudonyme”), who can be placed by the side of Tchéhoff. He knew, and more than knew—he felt with every nerve of his poetical mind—that, apart from a handful of stronger men and women, the true curse of the Russian “intellectual” is the weakness of his will, the insufficient strength of his desires. Perhaps he felt it in himself. And when he was asked once (in 1894) in a letter—“What should a Russian desire at the present time?” he wrote in return: “Here is my reply: desire! He needs most of all desire—force of character. We have enough of that whining shapelessness.”

This absence of strong desire and weakness of will he continually, over and over again, represented in his heroes. But this predilection was not a mere accident of temperament and character. It was a direct product of the times he lived in.

Tchéhoff, we saw, was nineteen years old when he began to write in 1879. He thus belongs to the generation which had to live through, during their best years, the worst years which Russia has passed through in the second half of the nineteenth century. With the tragic death of Alexander II. and the advent to the throne of his son, Alexander III., a whole epoch—the epoch of progressive work and bright hopes had come to a final close. All the sublime efforts of that younger generation which had entered the political arena in the seventies, and had taken for its watchword the symbol: “Be with the people!” had ended in a crushing defeat—the victims moaning now in fortresses and in the snows of Siberia. More than that, all the great reforms, including the abolition of serfdom, which had been realised in the sixties by the Hérzen, Turguéneff, and Tchernyshévskiy generation, began now to be treated as so many mistakes, by the reactionary elements which had now rallied round Alexander III. Never will a Westerner understand the depth of despair and the hopeless sadness which took hold of the intellectual portion of Russian society for the next ten or twelve years after that double defeat, when it came to the conclusion that it was incapable to break the inertia of the masses, or to move history so as to fill up the gap between its high ideals and the heartrending reality. In this respect “the eighties” were perhaps the gloomiest period that Russia lived through for the last hundred years. In the fifties the intellectuals had at least full hope in their forces; now—they had lost even these hopes. It was during those very years that Tchéhoff began to write; and, being a true poet, who feels and responds to the moods of the moment, he became the painter of that breakdown—of that failure of the “intellectuals” which hung as a nightmare above the civilised portion of Russian society. And again, being a great poet, he depicted that all-invading philistine meanness in such features that his picture will live. How superficial, in comparison, is the philistinism described by Zola. Perhaps, France even does not know that disease which was gnawing then at the very marrow of the bones of the Russian “intellectual.”

With all that, Tchéhoff is by no means a pessimist in the proper sense of the word; if he had come to despair, he would have taken the bankruptcy of the “intellectuals” as a necessary fatality. A word, such as, for instance, “fin de siècle,” would have been his solace. But Tchéhoff could not find satisfaction in such words because he firmly believed that a better existence was possible—and would come. “From my childhood”—he wrote in an intimate letter—“I have believed in progress, because the difference between the time when they used to flog me, and when they stopped to do so [in the sixties] was tremendous.”

There are three dramas of Tchéhoff—Ivánoff, Uncle Ványa (Uncle John), and The Cherry-Tree Garden, which fully illustrate how his faith in a better future grew in him as he advanced in age. Ivánoff, the hero of the first drama, is the personification of that failure of the “intellectual” of which I just spoke. Once upon a time he had had his high ideals and he still speaks of them, and this is why Sásha, a girl, full of the better inspirations—one of those fine intellectual types in the representation of which Tchéhoff appears as a true heir of Turguéneff—falls in love with him. But Ivánoff knows himself that he is played out; that the girl loves in him what he is no more; that the sacred fire is with him a mere reminiscence of the better years, irretrievably past; and while the drama attains its culminating point, just when his marriage with Sásha is going to be celebrated, Ivánoff shoots himself. Pessimism is triumphant.