"'Not badsome' ... Ivan said softly."
"Hugeous," "Thank you most dumbly," were among the sallies of wit which Ivan hurled at his audience from time to time.
The object of the story is as usual to emphasise the uselessness of the narrow lives of the inhabitants of a provincial town where men and women did absolutely nothing, took no interest in anything and looked askance at anyone who tried to speak intelligently on any topic of importance. There was nothing to do except eat and play vint. Tchehov shows us these people growing older but otherwise changing not at all, dragging down to their level even those who in their youth endeavoured to break loose from the bondage of aimlessness and inertia.
There is, however, a side of Tchehov which one would not expect in so relentless a realist. In The Black Monk we cross the border of the unseen and are in the society of mystics. No writer has so severely handled those who rely on old wives' fables and ignorant superstitions, but in this story he probes far down into the spiritual world and comes into line with Dostoievsky in a field which we are astonished to see him approach.
The phantom that appears periodically to Kovrin and so enhances his happiness may be an hallucination: it is completely in the vein of Smerdyakov and Ivan The Brothers Karamazov, though the conclusions are very different.
"'And what is the object of eternal life?'" asks Kovrin of the black monk, and the spirit answers: "'As of all life—enjoyment. True enjoyment lies in knowledge, and eternal life provides innumerable and inexhaustible sources of knowledge, and in that sense it has been said: "In my Father's house there are many mansions."'"
One of Tchehov's most remarkable traits is his capacity for getting right inside the very body of his characters. In An Anonymous Story, with a sureness of touch that we can only wonder at, he paints for us the hardships of a flunkey's life. Just as Turgenev seems to have been able to see into the most secret recesses of a young girl's heart, so Tchehov can put on the guise of an old man or a young boy lover, a jealous wife or an unfaithful husband, a garrulous father or a feckless waster at will, and actually become them for ten, twenty, fifty pages at a time without once giving us a chance to doubt the truth of his creation.
There are moments when we imagine that he leans rather to that side of life which we associate with authorship, hatred of domesticity. So many of his characters fall foul of conjugal relationships, but it is one of his worst characters who says that love is only a simple physical need, like the need for food or clothes, and instances the French workman who spends ten sous on dinner, five sous on wine, five or ten sous on women, and devotes his brain and nerves entirely to his work, and it is surely the voice of Tchehov himself who replies: "'Your everlasting attacks on female logic, lying, weakness and so on—doesn't it look like a desire at all costs to force woman down into the mud that she may be on the same level as your attitude to her?'"
There are many places in this long "anonymous story" where Tchehov himself seems to be speaking to us across the footlights. It is his voice again that I hear in Zinaida's "'The meaning of life is to be found only in one thing—fighting. To get one's heel on the vile head of the serpent and to crush it. That's the meaning of life. In that alone or in nothing.'"