Reminiscences of Anton Chekhov

by Maksim Gorky; Ivan Alekseevich Bunin; A. I. Kuprin

But he would confess now and then, that the dramatic form is losing its interest now.

“The drama must either degenerate completely, or take a completely new form”—he said. “We cannot even imagine what the theatre will be like in a hundred years.”

There were some little inconsistencies in Anton Pavlovitch which were particularly attractive in him and had at the same time a deep inner significance. This was once the case with regard to note-books. Chekhov had just strongly advised us not to have recourse to them for help but to rely wholly on our memory and imagination. “The big things will remain”—he argued—“and the details you can always invent or find.” But then, an hour later, one of the company, who had been for a year on the stage, began to talk of his theatrical impressions and incidentally mentioned this case. A rehearsal was taking place in the theatre of a tiny provincial town. The “young lover” paced the stage in a hat and check trousers, with his hands in his pockets, showing off before a casual public which had straggled into the theatre. The “ingenue,” his mistress, who was also on the stage, said to him: “Sasha, what was it you whistled yesterday from Pagliacci? Do please whistle it again.” The “young lover” turned to her, and looking her up and down with a devastating expression said in a fat, actor's voice: “Wha-at! Whistle on the stage? Would you whistle in church? Then know that the stage is the same as a church!”

At the end of that story Anton Pavlovitch threw off his pince-nez, flung himself back in his chair, and began to laugh with his clear, ringing laughter. He immediately opened the drawer of his table to get his note-book. “Wait, wait, how did you say it? The stage is a temple?” … And he put down the whole anecdote.

There was no essential contradiction in this, and Anton Pavlovitch explained it himself. “One should not put down similes, characteristic traits, details, scenes from nature—this must come of itself when it is needed. But a bare fact, a rare name, a technical term, should be put down in the note-book—otherwise it may be forgotten and lost.”

Chekhov frequently recalled the difficulties put in his way by the editors of serious magazines, until with the helping hand of “Sieverny Viestnik” he finally overcame them.

“For one thing you all ought to be grateful to me,”—he would say to young writers.—“It was I who opened the way for writers of short stories. Formerly, when one took a manuscript to an editor, he did not even read it. He just looked scornfully at one. ‘What? You call this a work? But this is shorter than a sparrow's nose. No, we do not want such trifles.’ But, see, I got round them and paved the way for others. But that is nothing; they treated me much worse than that! They used my name as a synonym for a writer of short stories. They would make merry: ‘O, you Chekhovs!’ It seemed to them amusing.”

Anton Pavlovitch had a high opinion of modern writing, i. e., properly speaking, of the technique of modern writing. “All write superbly now; there are no bad writers”—he said in a resolute tone. “And hence it is becoming more and more difficult to win fame. Do you know whom that is due to?—Maupassant. He, as an artist in language, put the standard before an author so high that it is no longer possible to write as of old. You try to re-read some of our classics, say, Pissemsky, Grigorovitch, or Ostrovsky; try, and you will see what obsolete, commonplace stuff it is. Take on the other hand our decadents. They are only pretending to be sick and crazy,—they all are burly peasants. But so far as writing goes,—they are masters.”

At the same time he asked that writers should choose ordinary, everyday themes, simplicity of treatment, and absence of showy tricks. “Why write,”—he wondered—“about a man getting into a submarine and going to the North Pole to reconcile himself with the world, while his beloved at that moment throws herself with a hysterical shriek from the belfry? All this is untrue and does not happen in reality. One must write about simple things: how Peter Semionovitch married Marie Ivanovna. That is all. And again, why those subtitles: a psychological study, genre, nouvelle? All these are mere pretense. Put as plain a title as possible—any that occurs to your mind—and nothing else. Also use as few brackets, italics and hyphens as possible. They are mannerisms.”

He also taught that an author should be indifferent to the joys and sorrows of his characters. “In a good story”—he said—“I have read a description of a restaurant by the sea in a large city. You saw at once that the author was all admiration for the music, the electric light, the flowers in the buttonholes; that he himself delighted in contemplating them. One has to stand outside these things, and, although knowing them in minute detail, one must look at them from top to bottom with contempt. And then it will be true.”