by Chekhov, Anton; Bartlett, Leverhulme Research Fellow in Russian Cultural History Rosamund ;
Chekhov’s modernism lies not only in his sophisticated treatment of themes like human alienation, but also in his innovatory approach to structure, and it was characteristic of his fierce independence as a writer (he valued freedom above all else) that the story with which he made his literary debut in a ‘thick journal’, ‘The Steppe’, was as experimental as anything he ever wrote. Closer to a prose poem than a story, its eight long chapters follow a 9-year-old boy’s journey across the steppe, but there is no plot. As the earlier stories in this collection show, however, this was a revolution begun even before Chekhov joined the ranks of ‘serious’ writers. In ‘Fortune’, for example, which was the ‘dress-rehearsal’ for ‘The Steppe’, there is no ‘event’ other than a conversation three people have about buried treasure, and the story begins and ends in silence. Discarding the traditional plot-driven structure of the short story liberated Chekhov from having to observe other conventions. It meant that he could begin and end his stories inconclusively, for example, and challenge his readers’ perceptions of what made up a short story. As Woolf observed in her essay ‘Tchehov’s Questions’, the initial discomfort the reader feels at Chekhov’s steadfast refusal to provide answers, as well as ‘the choice of incidents and of endings’, gives the impression ‘that the solid ground upon which we expected to make a safe landing has been twitched from under us’. But somehow, she continues, things imperceptibly ‘arrange themselves, and we come to feel that the horizon is much wider from this point of view; we have gained an astonishing sense of freedom’.15 Chekhov would no doubt have nodded his head in approbation.
Plotlessness certainly does not amount to formlessness. Chekhov was a meticulous craftsman who exhorted his protégés to work continually on improving their style. Twentieth-century writers recognized this, and were to benefit hugely from Chekhov’s innovations. As Eudora Welty has commented:
The revolution brought about by the gentle Chekhov to the short story was in every sense not destructive but constructive. By removing the formal plot he did not leave the story structureless, he endowed it with another kind of structure–one which embodied the principle of growth. And it was one that had no cause to repeat itself; in each and every story, short or long, it was a structure open to human meaning and answerable to that meaning. It took form from within.16
Another aspect of Chekhov’s craftsmanship is evident in his use of language. When Tolstoy famously said that Chekhov was ‘Pushkin in prose’, he had in mind the ability of both writers to achieve maximum expressiveness with the minimum of means, and their beguiling simplicity and clarity. What is also remarkable about both Pushkin and Chekhov is the apparent timelessness of their writing; when reading their works, one often has the impression that they are our contemporaries, so modern does their language seem. And this is what Mayakovsky had in mind when he wrote his astringent anniversary tribute:
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.17
Lyricism
Chekhov’s prose is also Pushkinian in its lyricism. Irony came as second nature to both writers in their prose, but was sometimes suspended in favour of straightforward, heartfelt sentiment. In Chekhov’s case, the two are also sometimes combined. It is no coincidence that the artist-narrator in ‘The House with the Mezzanine’ is a indolent landscape painter, for example. Tone is what is important in this story–one of lyricism, elegy, and nostalgia, but shot through with an ambivalence created by the irony directed at all the characters, but particularly at the narrator, so that the story never becomes too portentous. Lyricism for Pushkin and Chekhov did not mean the self-conscious application of ‘poetic’ effects, but pellucidity and lightness. Moments of epiphany in Chekhov are thus invariably understated, as in the last paragraph of ‘The Student’, which is in fact one long, carefully measured sentence whose impact is vital for the story’s overall effect:
And when he was crossing the river on the ferry, and then when he was walking up the hill, looking down at his own village and across to the west, where the cold crimson sunset was glowing in a narrow band, he realized that truth and beauty, which had guided human life in that garden and at the high priest’s, had continued to do so without a break until the present day, and had clearly always constituted the most important elements in human life, and on earth in general; and a feeling of youth, health, and strength–he was only twenty-two years old–and an inexpressibly sweet expectation of happiness, of unfathomable, mysterious happiness, gradually overcame him, and life seemed entrancing and miraculous to him, and full of sublime meaning.
It is perhaps because D. S. Mirsky defined Chekhov first and foremost as a realist in the 1920s that he was immune to the beauties of his language. Chekhov’s Russian, according to Mirsky, is ‘colourless and lacks individuality. He had no feeling for words. No Russian writer of anything like his significance used a language so devoid of all raciness and nerve.’18 Chekhov’s words are certainly very plain; there are few metaphors or similes, and the linguistic register seems as homely as the characters in his stories. The beauty of his language lies not in the words themselves, however, but in the way they are put together. In keeping with the often modernist form of Chekhov’s fiction, his prose is often musical rather than naturalistic. A key element of this musicality is the creation of a particular tone and prose rhythm in which no word or phrase is wasted, but on the contrary used in a very deliberate way. Rhythm is achieved through phrasing and carefully inserted pauses, as in the following passage from ‘Gooseberries’:
They returned to the house. And only when they had lit the lamp in the large drawing room upstairs, and Burkin and Ivan Ivanych were sitting in armchairs dressed in silk robes and warm shoes, and Alyokhin was walking about the room, freshly washed and with his hair brushed, in a new frock-coat, clearly enjoying the feeling of being warm and clean and wearing dry clothes and light shoes, and the beautiful Pelageya was offering tea with jam on a tray, treading noiselessly on the carpet and smiling gently, only then did Ivan Ivanych begin his story, and it seemed that it was not just Burkin and Alyokhin listening to it, but also the young and old ladies and officers who were looking at them sternly and calmly from their golden frames.
Neither the long sentences often found in Chekhov’s stories (which sometimes fill entire paragraphs), nor their clauses punctuated by strings of commas and semi-colons are thus to be viewed as evidence of stylistic negligence. Chekhov was characteristically reticent about his own methods, but a letter he wrote to an aspiring author in 1897 is revealing. He exhorted her ‘to learn the correct and literate use of punctuation marks because in a work of art they often play the part of notes in a musical score, and you cannot learn them from a text book, but only from instinct and experience’.19 The care that Chekhov took in constructing his cadences can be seen with particular clarity in his late story ‘The Bishop’:
The monks’ singing that evening was harmonious and inspired; there was a young monk with a black beard leading the service; and as he heard about the bridegroom who cometh at midnight, and about the bridal chamber being adorned, the bishop did not feel repentance for his sins, or sorrow, but a spiritual calm, a quietness, and he was carried away by thoughts of the distant past, of his childhood and youth, when they had also sung about the bridegroom and the bridal chamber, and now that past seemed vivid, beautiful, and joyful, as it had probably never been.
Rhythmical phrasing is also c
reated through particular combinations of long and short sentences and sentences which end in rows of dots. This is particularly marked in a haunting and poetic story like ‘Gusev’, where the open-ended, imprecise style of narration intentionally mirrors the semi-conscious state of the story’s characters as they lie dying in the sick bay of a ship carrying them home to Russia. The rows of dots, after all, also have a role in contributing to the creation of mood:
And again there is stillness... The wind is running through the rigging, the screw propeller is throbbing, waves are crashing, bunks are creaking, but the ear has grown used to all this long ago, and it seems that everything all around is sleeping and staying silent. It is dull. The three sick people who played cards all day–two soldiers and a sailor–are already asleep and delirious.
It feels like the sea is becoming rough. Underneath him, Gusev’s bunk goes slowly up and down as if it is sighing: once, twice, three times... Something hits the floor with a clang: a mug must have fallen.
Another kind of musical structure is built up through the use of Wagnerian-style leitmotifs, as William Gerhardie noted in his 1923 study.20 On one level there is the varied repetition of the colour grey in ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’: Anna has grey eyes, she wears a grey dress, the hotel room Gurov stays in is grey, and his hair is turning grey. On another level there is the complex pattern of associations that is created in ‘The Student’, in which the student Ivan’s loss of faith is juxtaposed with Peter’s betrayal of Christ, for example, and a link created between the widows’ bonfire and the fire which burns on the night of Christ’s betrayal. Musicality of a different variety can also be detected in Chekhov’s stories through his (probably) unconscious use of a kind of sonata form. An exposition-development-recapitulation structure is particularly noticeable in stories such as ‘Fortune’, ‘The Black Monk’, and ‘The House with the Mezzanine’.21
Although in the English-speaking world Chekhov’s fame as a dramatist began to eclipse his standing as a prose writer early on (this has interestingly never been the case in Russia), it is important to recognize the extent to which the success of his plays rests on techniques he had refined through writing stories. This is particularly true of his ability to create mood and atmosphere by means of the lyrical devices outlined above. As critics like Donald Rayfield have commented, ‘Chekhov remains a story writer when he composes drama’.22 The four great plays of Chekhov’s last years were written when a great number of his prose masterpieces were already behind him, but they are closely related to the stories both in terms of their subject matter and their themes. During a particularly long pause in the middle of The Cherry Orchard, his last work, for example, we hear the mysterious sound of a breaking string. The play’s romantic dreamers typically refuse to believe the rational explanation that ‘a bucket must have broken loose in the mines somewhere far away’. Chekhov had first heard this sound when he was a young man, while he was staying with friends who lived near the mining area in the hills north of Taganrog. He first introduced the sound of the breaking string into ‘Fortune’, the story written immediately following his travels in the steppe in 1887. Recalling that line in The Cherry Orchard, completed less than a year before he died, was Chekhov’s veiled way of alluding to his own life, to the austere landscape which had inspired some of his most poetic writing, and to his earlier work–in particular, one of the stories he had written which he had been most pleased with from an artistic point of view. No wonder the stage directions indicate that the sound is distant, ‘as if it had come from the sky’, and ‘dying away, sad’.
1 Letter to Suvorin, 10 Oct. 1888, in Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters, ed. R. Bartlett (London, 2004).
2 Dmitri Filosofov, ‘Lipovyi chai’, in M. Semenov and N. Tulupov, Chekhovskii yubileinyi sbornik (Moscow, 1910), 199; repr. in A. P. Chekhov: Pro et Contra, ed. I. Sukhikh (St Petersburg, 2002).
3 Petr Bitsilli, ‘Chekhov’, Chisla, 1 (1930), 167; cited in Andrew Field, The Complection of Russian Literature (London, 1971), 173.
4 Bartlett, Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters.
5 Vladimir Mayakovsky, ‘Dva Chekhova’, Novaya zhizn’, 7 (1914); repr. in A. P. Chekhov: Pro et Contra.
6 E. J. Dillon, ‘Recent Russian Literature’, Review of Reviews (July–Dec. 1891); cited in Victor Emeljanow, Chekhov: The Critical Heritage (London, 1981), 57.
7 Isaiah Berlin, ‘Meetings with Russian Writers’, Personal Impressions, ed. Henry Hardy (London, 1980), 188.
8 Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature (London, 1983), 255.
9 William Gerhardie, Anton Chehov: A Critical Study (London, 1923), 14; cited in Rene Wellek, introduction to Chekhov: New Perspectives, ed. R. and N. D. Wellek (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1984), 22.
10 Virginia Woolf, review of The Wife and Other Stories, Times Literary Supplement, 16 May 1918; cited in Wellek, Chekhov, 19.
11 D. S. Mirsky, Modern Russian Literature (London, 1925), 91.
12 Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, ed. V. O’Sullivan with Margaret Scott, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1984–96), ii. 320; cited in Adrian Hunter, ‘Constance Garnett’s Chekhov and the Modernist Short Story’, Translation and Literature (Spring 2003), 71.
13 J. Middleton Murry, ‘The Method of Tchehov’, Athenaeum, 8 Apr. 1922; cited in Hunter, ‘Constance Garnett’s Chekhov and the Modernist Short Story’, 70.
14 Raymond Carver, ‘The Unknown Chekhov’, in No Heroics Please: Uncollected Writings (New York, 1992), 146.
15 Virginia Woolf, ‘Tchehov’s Questions’, The Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed. Andrew McNeillie, 4 vols. (London, 1987), ii. 245.
16 Eudora Welty, The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews (New York,
17 Vladimir Mayakovsky, ‘The Two Chekhovs’ (1914); cited in Simon Karlinsky, ‘Introduction: The Gentle Subversive’, Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought, tr. Michael Henry Heim in collaboration with Simon Karlinsky (New York, 1973), 31.
18 D. S. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature from its Beginnings to 1900 (New York, 1958), 382.
19 Bartlett, Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters.
20 Gerhardie, Anton Chekhov, 14
21 See R. Bartlett, ‘Sonata Form in Chekhov’s “The Black Monk” ‘, in Andrew Wachtel (ed.), Intersections and Transpositions: Russian Music, Literature and Society (Evanston, Ill., 1998), 58–72.
22 Donald Rayfield, Understanding Chekhov (London, 1999), 240.
NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION
Translation is at best an approximate art—an ongoing process that (thankfully) can never be permanently fixed. Foreign works of literature need the periodic transfusion of new translations in the way that musical compositions need to be continually re-interpreted by performers in order for them to live. This is particularly true when the works in question seem to invite radically different approaches in interpretation, as in the case of Chekhov’s prose. While the position with translations of the classic nineteenth-century Russian realist novels remains relatively stable, Chekhov’s ambiguity and contemporaneity have justified the need for new translations from each successive generation ever since the pioneering versions of Constance Garnett (The Tales of Tchehov, 1916—22). If Garnett’s translations convey well the flavour of the era in which the stories were written, they nevertheless seem very archaic now, and contain occasional mistakes and lacunae. Later versions are more accurate, but are also ineluctably rooted in particular time periods. In seeking to create something timeless, by choosing locutions which might enable Chekhov’s language to transcend both the era in which his stories were written, and that of the translation, in so far as it is possible (the rationale, after all, which lies behind the frequent new translations of Chekhov’s plays), new translators of Chekhov must at the same time be aware of the finite life-span of their own versions.
Raymond Carver’s well-justified belief that Chekhov’s stories ‘are as wonderful (and necessary) now as when they first appeared’1 perhaps holds the key to presenting them in a new translation at the begi
nning of the twenty–first century, namely in a modernist light. Not only the delicate irony with which Chekhov probes the absurdity and tragedy of human existence, but the poetry and musicality of his prose risk being lost in translation if viewed exclusively through the prism of realism, which has often been the case in the past. The aim of these new translations is to render Chekhov’s spare and unadorned language with as much precision as possible, bringing out its modernist, non-naturalistic qualities, while at the same time shaping the prose in an idiomatic way. It is for this reason that some of Chekhov’s most lyrical and poignant prose has been selected for this anthology. The present collection brings together stories from across the range of Chekhov’s literary career which have a particular focus on the themes of love and loss.
Chekhov’s language is direct and straightforward, and the temptation to ‘poeticize’ it has been resisted, out of a conviction that it is lyrical enough as it stands. Translators can also succumb to ‘improving’ the original by smoothing phrasing and the repetition of certain words, as if this was carelessness on the author’s part, rather than deliberate intention, and that temptation has also largely been resisted here. With a view to transposing Chekhov’s prose rhythms, which contribute so subtly to the creation of atmosphere, his combinations of long and short sentences have in most cases also been preserved. The translator of Chekhov needs to be sensitive to his cadences and overall sense of form, paying as much attention to phrasing and sentence length as to the creation of a particular tone or mood. These translations also seek to remain faithful to Chekhov’s idiosyncratic use of punctuation (which is interestingly echoed in his private correspondence), particularly the numerous commas and semi-colons that provide the breathing spaces in his long sentences, and the impressionistic rows of dots with which many of his sentences end.
