The Anna Karenina Fix

by Viv Groskop

  In the first big speech of the play, it’s Olga who sets up Moscow as the ultimate destination. ‘I remember perfectly that it was early in May and that everything in Moscow was flowering then …’ Her passion for Moscow is strange, in a way. She’s twenty-eight years old (age is specified in the cast list, just like in Turgenev), she left Moscow at the age of seventeen and yet she still calls it ‘home’. It’s easy to see that it’s not really Moscow she wants. What she really wants is to be seventeen and full of potential, with her whole life ahead of her. Not to be nearly thirty and, as she would see it, on the shelf.

  Irina’s affinity for Moscow is even stranger. She would have been eight or nine years old when they left. Why should she care about Moscow? And yet she has inherited Olga’s negativity and has observed Masha’s disillusioned marriage close up. Plus, the sisters’ brother, Andrey, who has an annoying wife, is extremely dull and has failed to reach his full potential: ‘The summit of my ambitions is to become a member of the council … I, who dream every night that I’m a professor of Moscow University, a famous scholar of whom all Russia is proud.’ The cry of ‘To Moscow, Moscow, Moscow’ is just code for ‘Please don’t say this is my life. There must be something better somewhere else. Surely?’ And also: ‘Please someone get me away from the nightmarish people who appear to be my friends and family.’ We get it. The grass is always greener.

  Three Sisters is often seen as a work about isolation, both literal and metaphorical. The sisters feel they’re isolated because of where they are. But they are also emotionally isolated from each other because they judge their siblings’ choices and attitudes. The ‘other’ place everyone wants to be is portrayed as somewhere you never feel judged, you never feel sad, you never feel lonely, everyone loves you and you achieve exactly what you dreamed of. Who would not want the address of this place? This is one timeshare I would sign up for immediately. (I don’t think I could live there permanently. You have to be able to be a bit neurotic from time to time, otherwise you’d go mad. Who really wants to get everything they’ve ever asked for?)

  On and on it goes, the obsession with Moscow. Andrey: ‘In Moscow you can sit in an enormous restaurant where you don’t know anybody and where nobody knows you and you don’t feel all the same that you’re a stranger. And here you know everybody and everybody knows you, and you’re a stranger. A lonely stranger.’ Real life – what’s right here – is so disappointing. But what’s over there … it’s so much more satisfying. Irina: ‘What I wanted, what I hoped to get, just that is lacking here. Oh my God, I dream of Moscow every night. I’m just like a lunatic.’ Ferapont, the elderly peasant, knows the truth, of course. Moscow, he says, is a place where people eat forty or fifty pancakes in a sitting and die from it. (I would really like to go to this place.)

  What everyone lacks in this play is a sense of purpose. While several peasants dance attendance on them, bringing them things and complaining about competitive overeating of pancakes, they moan about being drowsy and tired and drained of meaning, drawling on idly about how wonderful it must be to be a ‘workman’: ‘How fine it is to be a workman … who breaks stones in the street, or a shepherd, or a schoolmaster … or an engine-driver … It’s better to be an ox or just a horse … than a young woman who wakes up at twelve o’clock, has her coffee in bed and spends two hours dressing. Oh it’s awful!’ Chekhov makes it clear from the comedy of this that his heart bleeds.

  Vershinin is the voice of the author in this play. He’s the one who knows that happiness is always something on the horizon. We need to head towards it, but, once we get there, it moves away again. So Moscow is not the solution. Just in the same way as the prisoner mentioned by Vershinin sees birds in the sky only when he is locked up and stops noticing them once he is free again, uprooting ourselves in search of a dream is not the answer. ‘When you go to live in Moscow, you’ll not notice it, in just the same way. There can be no happiness for us. It only exists in our wishes.’ (Vershinin is not immune to Chekhov’s black humour either, though. Shortly after this sensible, philosophical speech, he says, ‘My wife has poisoned herself again. I must go. I’ll go out quietly.’ I love the almost-Britishness of this. ‘Oh, how jolly inconvenient, someone has tried to commit suicide again. Please do excuse me.’)

  One of the most darkly amusing moments in Three Sisters is in Act 3, when there is a huge, dangerous blaze, causing a massive fire alarm to go off. Lives are in danger here, and what do they talk about? The fact that once there was a fire in Moscow. Of course! Still, the fire does act as a wake-up call; reality starts to set in with Irina: ‘We’ll never go away to Moscow … I see that we’ll never go …’ Although, moments later, she is imploring Olga to take them there.

  The significance of Moscow is not only that it represents a better life; it represents a shared dream. Delusion works only if others share it with us. The three sisters have to back each other up. None of them stands up and says, ‘Oh, come on, stop being ridiculous. The whole Moscow thing is never going to happen.’ The delusion is something that binds them all together and gives them a common sense of purpose. In this sense, Moscow is not necessarily a bad thing. It represents the hope they all share that things could and might be different. In terms of life lessons, this is a useful one: whatever your delusion about what you need in order to be happy is (‘I need to go to Moscow!’ ‘I need a pay rise!’ ‘I must buy more shoes!’), it becomes more powerful when it is reinforced by other people.

  By Act 4 – the only act in which Moscow is not mentioned – things have soured. We never quite know whether Moscow stands for hope or for delusion. But whichever is the case, ‘Moscow’ as an idea has disappeared by the end of the play. The final disaster is not so much for Olga but for Irina. ‘I am already twenty-three. I have already been at work for a long while and my brain has dried up. And I’ve grown thinner and plainer, older and there is no relief of any sort. I’m in despair and I can’t understand how it is that I am still alive, that I haven’t killed myself.’ Cheer up, Irina!

  There are some little clues strewn through Three Sisters which seem to me an indication that perhaps the ‘awful’, non-Moscow place where we find ourselves is never quite so bad as we think it is. Chekhov likes to mention food and drink, and they seem to have some great stuff on offer right where they are: goose baked with cabbage, Caucasian onion soup, chehartma (a Georgian soup), champagne. Do you really need to go to Moscow when you have all these things on your doorstep? Chekhov is, above all, a comedic dramatist, and you can’t help thinking that he’s really trying to flag up that the sisters’ pining for Moscow is something of a First World problem. (I would have also listed kvass, as Chekhov does, but it’s pretty disgusting, so I didn’t. It is a fermented beverage made from rye bread which tastes exactly as you would expect a fermented beverage made from rye bread to taste. It should not be listed in the same context as champagne.)

  Nabokov once described the tone of Chekhov’s stories as evoking a colour that was ‘between the colour of an old fence and that of a low cloud’. This doesn’t sound like much of a compliment. And yet it’s a good description of what Chekhov does. If Dostoevsky is the deep red of blood on an axe, Chekhov is the colour of sudsy dishwater. But in a good way. Chekhov deals in suggestion. He evokes. He doesn’t preach. And he isn’t afraid of small, domestic settings. He doesn’t look for the grand plan or the sweep of history. If Tolstoy is like someone creating an opera on the page, Chekhov is finishing a rather tricky jigsaw puzzle.

  Virginia Woolf argued that there was a certain precision about life that you only get from Chekhov. She wrote about the experience of reading in translation and of how a reader feels when they are connecting to a text written in another language. Why do we fool ourselves that we could hope to grasp any of the meaning when we don’t necessarily share the same values? Reading an author who hasn’t written in your own language deprives a text of the ‘ease’ and ‘absence of self-consciousness’ that Woolf sees as crucial for understanding. Woolf desc
ribed the Russian writers as being like men stripped of their clothes, manners and personalities after some terrible catastrophe such as an earthquake or a railway accident. This is the state they reach us in when we read them in translation. Why do we even pretend to understand them?

  But Chekhov, she said, transcends all this. His way of approaching things, she argued, is so unusual and so blunt that, at first, you feel taken aback and confused: ‘What is the point of it, and why does he make a story out of this?’ Sometimes, the writing makes no sense and has no particular beginning, middle or end. It often finishes ambiguously or inconclusively. ‘Men are at the same time villains and saints. We love and we hate at the same time.’ But this, she says, is proper honesty about what life is really like. The grass is not greener on the other side. It’s just as bad and just as good as where we already are.

  There is something about Chekhov that cuts through to the heart of things: simple, straightforward, human. It’s no accident that he was a doctor. Long before he became one of the greatest short-story writers and playwrights of all time, he trained at medical school. He wasn’t from a wealthy family to start off with. And by the time he was nearing the age when he wanted to train as a doctor, his father lost a huge amount of money, effectively making Anton Pavlovich the breadwinner. (Quick test. What was his father’s name? Yes, that’s right. Pavel. I have not mentioned patronymics in a while.) One of the things Chekhov did to make money during this period was to breed and sell goldfinches. Another was to write sketches for newspapers. The more successful he was as a writer, the more his medical career crossed over into his work: by the end of his lifetime, he had portrayed over a hundred doctors as fictional characters.

  Whether in spite of or because of his medical training, Chekhov was an optimist. Of all the writers I’ve mentioned so far, most of them had their moments of being extraordinarily depressed and sometimes even nihilistic. Chekhov is, by contrast, a breath of fresh air. He had no particular reason to be. His upbringing was fairly miserable; he had a bullying father. Chekhov complained that he ‘had no childhood in his childhood’, even though there were good times, including catching those goldfinches in ‘the big, wild garden’.

  Chekhov’s father was not a nice man, although he perhaps made up for that by being quite a character. He ran a corner store which sold household goods. He used to make his own mustard, and loved caviar. According to one family story, a drowned rat was once discovered in a barrel of cooking oil he wanted to sell. He had the barrel blessed by a priest and sold it anyway. One account of Chekhov’s childhood has his brother Nikolai tell how the four brothers shared a feather bed in the room next to the kitchen, constantly breathing in the stink of burnt sunflower oil.

  Before the age of five, Chekhov wrote, his first thought on waking was usually, ‘Am I going to get beaten today?’ And he complained that, after the beating, he was forced to kiss the hand that had punished him. ‘When I recall my infancy now, it seems to be hideous,’ he wrote in a letter in 1892, referring not so much to the beatings as to the fact that his parents were very keen to attend church and make him sing in the choir. He became an atheist as soon as he possibly could.

  Somehow, he rose above it all and became a person of extraordinary qualities, interested in writing and drama from an early age. At the age of thirteen, he used to paste on a beard and wear fake glasses to get into the theatre. He made his own family theatre, in which he played the mayor in Gogol’s The Government Inspector, wearing three pillows up his jumper as part of his costume. (This isn’t quite as exciting as Dostoevsky impersonating a Brazilian ape for weeks on end, but I still like it.)

  Chekhov has the most empathy of all the Russian writers. It could also be said that he led the least writerly life, continuing his medical work, often treating the poor for free. Maybe it’s an awful thing to say, but it makes me incredibly sad that Chekhov, a generous, giving and cheery soul, usually with fairly positive insights into the human condition, lived only until the age of forty-four (having by that time suffered from tuberculosis for years), whereas Tolstoy, who could be extremely mean and depressing, lived to twice that age, and used the second half of his life to develop a fairly bleak view of human existence. Them’s the breaks. If you believe in fate and look at Chekhov’s life, then you’d have to assume that Tolstoy was right in the end: life is arbitrary and awful, and good people die for no reason and bad people get to live long lives for no reason. There’s no Calendar of Wisdom that can explain that.

  Of all the people who would have the right to be resentful about his lot in life and envy that of others, Chekhov was a prime candidate. One night in March 1897, he started haemorrhaging from his mouth while having dinner with his editor and best friend, Suvorin, at the Hermitage restaurant in St Petersburg. His tuberculosis swiftly worsened. Instead of complaining and being bitter, he continued writing, creating some of his most lasting work. He was thirty-seven and so had seven years left to live, and during this time he wrote Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, all while suffering pretty horribly. Around the same time, he gave up practising medicine, except on himself, which made him sad, as he had enjoyed being a doctor very much. His own medical treatment shortly after this crisis? ‘Creosote vapour inhalation’ and ‘the application of a poultice’. Soon afterwards, he undertook a ‘kumiss cure’. (Kumiss is a beverage made from fermented milk. There is an unfortunate milky pattern emerging here for the terminally ill Russian writers. Also, stop fermenting things, guys! It’s gross!) The year after his diagnosis, Chekhov bought land near Yalta and started to spend more time in the Crimea for the sake of his health. The climate was considered to be better for him there. But he wasn’t especially happy: ‘My life is incomplete. I don’t drink, although I like drinking. I like it when it is noisy, but I don’t hear any noise. In a word, I now endure the condition of a transplanted tree which hesitates between taking root and starting to wither away,’ he wrote in a letter from the Crimea in 1900.

  He wrote to Tolstoy often, and the two of them met several times. Chekhov loved Tolstoy’s work, but he did not respect his pious message. (See? The ‘pious message’ thing is Tolstoy trying to turn himself into a hedgehog. Chekhov is definitely a fox. He accepts everything and loves plurality. Also, he did look a bit like a fox.) In return, Tolstoy liked Chekhov as a person, although he thought he wasn’t sufficiently opinionated. They first met when Chekhov went to visit Tolstoy at his estate and found the older author submerged while bathing in a pond, his beard floating on the surface. They chatted as Tolstoy bobbed around. Later, Tolstoy praised Chekhov’s ‘sincerity’ and acknowledged that he had discovered new forms of writing. In the few pictures of them together, they look an unlikely pair, Chekhov in a badly fitting dark suit, clipped beard and horn-rimmed glasses, Tolstoy in knee-high riding boots, peasant’s smock and something that looks like a white cowboy hat. In one picture, Chekhov’s body language is contrite, and Tolstoy is gesturing with his fist and looking directly at him while Chekhov gazes down at the floor like a schoolboy. Tolstoy was supposed to be the closest to godliness. But it’s Chekhov who looks suspiciously like a saint.

  One time when Tolstoy was saying goodbye to Chekhov, he whispered in his ear: ‘You know, I hate your plays. Shakespeare was a bad writer, and I consider your plays even worse than his.’ Chekhov did not take this too badly but said that he felt ‘funny and angry’ when he thought of this comment about his life’s work and reported that Tolstoy had added: ‘Where can I follow your character? To the couch in the living room and back. Because your character has no other place to go.’

  The story from Chekhov’s deathbed is legendary. The doctor wanted to send for oxygen, but Chekhov realized he would be dead by the time it got there. He wanted a glass of champagne instead. ‘I haven’t had champagne in a long time.’ He drank it slowly, stretched out on one side and quietly died. His wife, Olga Knipper, was with him at the time. According to an account inspired by her, ‘a huge black moth … burst into the room like
a whirlwind, beat tormentedly against the burning electric lamps and flew confusedly around the room’. Later the same night, the champagne cork flew out of the unfinished bottle with a bang. I don’t really care whether these details are fanciful or not. (It has been suggested that they are.) I want them to be true because they sound like something out of a Chekhov play.

  Chekhov was a stoic. In another age, he might have gone towards Zen Buddhism. He clearly learned to live with and accept his own frustrations and difficulties; he didn’t want to be someone else or be somewhere else. More things to love about Chekhov? He was a romantic without being sentimental. When he married Olga Knipper, he wrote about how strange a wedding day can feel and the sensation of ‘the champagne that you must hold in your hand while you smile vaguely’. He once wrote to her in a letter when they were apart: ‘Moscow! Moscow! These words are not the refrain of Three Sisters but of One Husband!’ He was said to have a ‘gloomy, sad voice’. When he talked about getting older, he said it made him feel like there was ‘a jug of sour milk’ in his heart. Most of all, he comes across as someone who was extremely kind to other people. Asked to write a short biography of his life, he notes: ‘In 1892 I took part in an orgy in the company of V. A. Tihonov at a name-day party.’ By this, he means, I think, that they had a few drinks. In a letter written after this party, he tells his friend: ‘You are mistaken in thinking you were drunk at Shtcheglov’s name-day party. You had had a drop, that was all. You danced when they all danced, and your jigitivka on the cabman’s box excited nothing but general delight. As for your criticism, it was most likely far from severe, as I don’t remember it. I only remember that Vvedensky and I for some reason roared with laughter as we listened to you.’ This is the definition of a good person: he makes someone else feel that it was fine for them to be very drunk.

  Chekhov is the definition of the sort of empathy Tolstoy began, when he was older, to regret displaying in his work. Chekhov is the master of compassion towards the self and towards others. He is the foxiest of them all. But he also understands the suffering of the hedgehogs and why they think their ‘one thing’ will save them. The three sisters are all hedgehogs; their one defining ideal is Moscow. The way of the hedgehog is, after all, very persuasive because it is the way of certainty. It’s hard to live with the open-ended ways of the fox because it means living with uncertainty. But, ultimately, if you are going to stay sane, you need to be more like Chekhov. It’s a lesson I have been very, very slow to learn.