The Lady with the Little Dog and Other Stories 1896-1904 Read online

  THE LADY WITH THE LITTLE DOG AND OTHER STORIES

  ANTON PAVLOVICH CHEKHOV, the son of a former serf, was born in 1860 in Taganrog, a port on the Sea of Azov. He received a classical education at the Taganrog Gymnasium, then in 1879 he went to Moscow, where he entered the medical faculty of the university, graduating in 1884. During his university years he supported his family by contributing humorous stories and sketches to magazines. He published his first volume of stories, Motley Tales, in 1886 and a year later his second volume, In the Twilight, for which he was awarded the Pushkin Prize. His most famous stories were written after his return from the convict island of Sakhalin, which he visited in 1890. For five years he lived on his small country estate near Moscow, but when his health began to fail he moved to the Crimea. After 1900, the rest of his life was spent at Yalta, where he met Tolstoy and Gorky. He wrote very few stories during the last years of his life, devoting most of his time to a thorough revision of his stories, of which the first comprehensive edition was published in 1899–1901, and to the writing of his great plays. In 1901 Chekhov married Olga Knipper, an actress of the Moscow Art Theatre. He died of consumption in 1904.

  RONALD WILKS studied Russian language and literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, after training as a Naval interpreter, and later Russian literature at London University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1972. Among his translations for Penguin Classics are My Childhood, My Apprenticeship and My Universities by Gorky, Diary of a Madman by Gogol, filmed for Irish Television, The Golovlyov Family by Saltykov-Shchedrin, How Much Land Does a Man Need? by Tolstoy, Tales of Belkin and Other Prose Writings by Pushkin, and six other volumes of stories by Chekhov: The Party and Other Stories, The Kiss and Other Stories, The Fiancée and Other Stories, The Duel and Other Stories, The Steppe and Other Stories and Ward No.6 and Other Stories. He has also translated The Little Demon by Sologub for Penguin.

  PAUL DEBRECZENY is Emeritus Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina. He has translated the complete prose fiction of Alexander Pushkin and is the author of The Other Pushkin: A Study of Alexander Pushkin’s Prose Fiction (1983) and Social Functions of Literature: Alexander Pushkin and Russian Culture (1997); and a volume of co-edited essays, Russian Narrative and Visual Art: Varieties of Seeing (1994). He also co-edited Chekhov’s Art of Writing: A Collection of Critical Essays (1977).

  ANTON CHEKHOV

  The Lady with the Little Dog and Other Stories

  Translated with Notes by RONALD WILKS

  With an Introduction by PAUL DEBRECZENY

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published 2002

  1

  Translation, Chronology and Publishing History and Notes © Ronald Wilks, 2002

  Introduction © Paul Debreczeny, 2002

  ‘The House with the Mezzanine’, ‘Ionych’, ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ and

  ‘Disturbing the Balance’ newly translated 2002. ‘Peasants’, ‘Man in a Case’,

  ‘Gooseberries’, ‘About Love’, ‘In the Ravine’ and ‘The Bishop’ first published 1982,

  pre-existing translations © Ronald Wilks, 1982. ‘My Life’ first published 1985,

  pre-existing translation © Ronald Wilks, 1985. ‘A Visit to Friends’ and ‘The Bride’

  first published 1986, pre-existing translations © Ronald Wilks, 1986

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the editors has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject

  to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

  re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s

  prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in

  which it is published and without a similar condition including this

  condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  EISBN: 978–0–141–90685–0

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  FURTHER READING

  CHRONOLOGY

  NOTE ON TEXT

  PATRONYMICS

  The House with the Mezzanine

  Peasants

  Man in a Case

  Gooseberries

  About Love

  A Visit to Friends

  Ionych

  My Life

  The Lady with the Little Dog

  In the Ravine

  Disturbing the Balance

  The Bishop

  The Bride

  PUBLISHING HISTORY AND NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  Anton Chekhov’s fictional output in the last period of his life was relatively small, for several reasons. Most of his creative energy went into writing his four great plays, discussing them with directors of the Moscow Art Theatre, participating in some of the rehearsals, and, incidentally, marrying one of the actresses. Much of his time was also taken up by selecting and revising his earlier stories for a collected edition for which he had signed a contract with a publisher. Living mostly on his estate, Melikhovo, he was heavily involved with the life of the surrounding villages, building schools, restoring a church, and, as a doctor, receiving an endless stream of the impoverished sick, whom he treated free of charge. These experiences are reflected in the stories he wrote about peasant life. His own advancing tuberculosis forced him, in 1898–9, to sell his estate and move to the warmer climate of Yalta, where he stayed, off and on, until his last trip to Germany in June 1904. Although the number of stories he wrote in this period is relatively small, those he did write are among his great masterpieces.

  The last decade of Chekhov’s life coincided with the emergence and rapid growth of Russian Modernism. Its literary variety, first labelled Decadence, then Symbolism, was intertwined with a vigorous new transcendental philosophical movement. Chekhov, personally acquainted with some of its representatives, responded to the movement as early as 1894 in his ‘Black Monk’, whose visionary hero he surrounded with an aura of poetry, while subjecting his condition to a cool medical diagnosis. Similarly, in his drama The Seagull, written in 1895, Treplev’s play within the play, which Arkadina promptly designates ‘decadent’, is a gentle parody of the new movement, not without lyrical overtones. Since Chekhov the agnostic had little use for the symbol as a glimpse of higher reality, he kept apart from the symbolists, but this does not mean that he shunned symbols as literary devices. Indeed, his stories are teeming with symbols, but they convey meanings within a human frame of reference.

  As a result of Chekhov’s aloofness from the noisily arising symbolist movement and his avoidance of showy displays of new forms, this most influential of modernist short story writers can also be characterized, paradoxically, as the last of the nineteenth-century realists. In order to understand Chekhov the modernist, one needs to view Modernism as a broader movement, embracing far more than Symbolism.

  Perhaps it will take us closer to understanding Chekhov the modernist if we look at his attitude to contemporary movements in the visual arts. One of the major stories opening his late period, ‘The House with the Mezzanine’ (1896), is subtitled ‘An Artist’s Story’ and is narrated by a painter. The world in this story is perceived as artistic space: the ‘vast colonnaded ballroom’ where the narrator stays is a forbidding place, ‘especially at night when the ten big windows were suddenly all aglow in the lightning’, and it is contrasted with the house on the neighbouring estate, a ‘dear, innocent old house that seemed to be staring at me with its attic windows’. Moreover, the artistic vision of the narrator, who is a landscape painter, is close to that of an impressionist. As he enters the Volchaninovs’ estate he notes that ‘a vivid golden light quivered here and there and transformed spiders’ webs into shimmering rainbows’, which suggests the perception of an impressionist, attempting to capture the transitory, shimmering appearance of surfaces. When he passes by the house with the mezzanine for the first time, he perceives the two young women as just two more items in the landscape, one with ‘a mass of auburn hair and a small stubborn mouth’, and the other with ‘a large mouth and big eyes’. Most telling is his perception that in the moonlight: ‘Dahlias and roses in the flowerbeds in front of the house were clearly visible and all of them seemed the same colour.’ All this could be attributed simply to Chekhov’s characterization of his hero, just as he used the vision of the black monk to characterize Kovrin. It is intriguing, however, that an impressionistic vision seems to inform not only the perceptions of the character but also
the literary structure of the story. Like the impressionists, the author shows a preference for colour over line and mood over precise detail. The events of the story take place in the blurred distance of six or seven years before their recollection, with the result that the narrator is hard put to remember every detail and concentrates his attention on recreating the mood of that memorable summer. We are told that Zhenya reads all day, but never told what exactly she reads; after a summer of walking and talking with her the narrator is able only to ‘suspect’ that ‘she was extremely intelligent’; and he must have fallen in love with her, he surmises, because of the tender way she met him and saw him off. A characteristic feature, which is clearly the handiwork of the behind-the-scenes author, is a refusal to foreground important events, such as Lida’s obvious jealousy and angry bustling around the house after she has seen the painter and her sister returning from their walk on a particular Sunday. Deep philosophical questions about the existence of God and life everlasting are less important than Zhenya’s charming way of asking them, running ahead of the narrator in order to look him straight in the eye. Even the narrator’s big quarrel with Lida, which is a decisive moment in plot development, turns on arguments that are either banal or absurd, revealing that the mood and the characters’ interplay are more important than ideas. Such a refusal to foreground the important resembles the impressionists’ rejection of perspective in favour of a two-dimensional picture plane.

  Impressionism arrived in Russia relatively late because public taste, for a long time, was held under the sway of the so-called Itinerants, a late-blooming realistic school, which depicted ‘the hardships of the common people in [their] canvases’, to use the words the painter attributes to Lida. By the 1890s, however, the school was beginning to lose its freshness, and a plein air school, a forerunner of Impressionism, gained ascendance, only to be rapidly superseded by Expressionism and various other post-impressionist trends. Chekhov was no doubt familiar with these trends, most explicitly through his friend Isaak Levitan, whose landscapes closely approached Impressionism. He also referred to Expressionism in his 1892 story ‘The Grasshopper’.

  It has been debated among critics whether Chekhov himself could be regarded as a literary impressionist. Without going into details of the debate, let me just say that ‘The House with the Mezzanine’ itself, certainly the most impressionistic of Chekhov’s prose writings, does not stay within the confines of Impressionism. Impressionists generally chose cheerful subject matter, celebrating life in a burst of colour. Chekhov, by contrast, appears only to lure his readers into believing that they are being treated to bittersweet reminiscences with a serene, though melancholy, mood. In fact, when the readers’ senses are lulled into lyrical receptiveness, he assaults them with a jarring, disconcerting conclusion.

  Lida’s crass act of wilfulness, Zhenya’s meek submission (‘If you only knew how bitterly Mama and I are crying’), and the artist’s passive acceptance induce the disturbing feeling that something has gone wrong. The bewilderment created by the denouement forces the reader to examine the text once more. If the narrator is so unwilling to make an effort to find Zhenya, was he really in love with her? Did he really spend the summer idly loafing around the countryside, or did he have a productive time? Did he simply affect the pose of the flâneur, while casually tossing off masterpieces? After all, we see him sketching, and Zhenya admiring his sketches – the favourite genre of the impressionists – on their walks. In that case, did he just take advantage of her as a muse and an admirer, and have little use for her once the productive summer was over? Or else, did he need both young women and the setting of their charming house with its park for inspiration, so that Zhenya by herself would not have sufficed? Another possible reading of the text would be that the real emotional give-and-take took place between the artist and Lida, rather than her younger sister. It is noteworthy that the time Lida comes over to Belokurov’s house she tells the artist that she and her mother, admirers of his art, would welcome him at their house (with no mention of Zhenya). Judging by his depictions of her, there is no doubt that he finds her very attractive, too. Instead of trying to win her affections, however, he taunts her by going on walks with her sister, by grumbling about her giving medical advice to poor people in the absence of a doctor, and finally by his outlandish claim that all her practical efforts to improve life in the neighbourhood are useless. It is his allegation that she dislikes him because he is a landscape painter, despite her original statement to the contrary; he delights in provoking her and finds her most inspiring when she is standing by the front porch, riding crop in hand, graceful and beautiful, but, as her subsequent behaviour shows, irritated by the sight of her sister returning from her walk with him. It seems as though the nervous tension created by him among the three of them were what sustained his inspiration. Whatever the case may be, Chekhov puts his reader to work, which is his salient feature as a modernist writer.

  Chekhov’s deliberate elusiveness is in large part a response to civic-minded literary criticism demanding that the writer spoon-feed a social message to the reader. Descendants of the radicals of the 1860s and 1870s, civic-minded critics still prevailed in Chekhov’s time because the concept of literature as a torchbearer of truth, serving the people, had been deeply ingrained in the public consciousness. This concept of literature was embraced by a new semi-intelligentsia that had arisen as a result of the social and educational reforms introduced by Alexander II in the 1860s. The newly established local government organizations (elective district councils) called zemstvos (one of which Lida is fighting to influence in ‘The House with the Mezzanine’) demanded low-level managers, statisticians, white-collar workers for various tasks, and above all teachers. Many of the people filling these positions were radical students who had been expelled from the university or had simply joined the ‘going to the people’ movement out of idealism. Since their social credo was a faith in the innate ability of Russian peasants to rise above their station, they were broadly labelled ‘populists’ (narodniki). Clinging to the ideas of the sixties, this social group was not open to cultural innovations. The decadents and symbolists, conspicuously out to shock the reader with their difficult forms, were never able to reach it. Chekhov, too, was apt to épater le narodnik, for which he received ample criticism from the mid-1880s on, but in his reticent way he avoided outré modes of writing. (Nor did he wish to lose readership, dependent as he was on his literary income.) He wrote in a style perfectly comprehensible on the surface but full of pitfalls deep down.

  Some of the themes Chekhov chose in his last period were sure to capture the attention of readers concerned with social issues. ‘Peasants’ (1897), for example, focuses on the brutality of peasant life, whose locus of evil is the tavern, where the men spend on vodka the last of their meagre earnings, and from where they come home drunk to beat their wives. Nikolay, who has returned from the city with his wife, Olga, and his daughter, Sasha, to his parents’ house because he had fallen sick, realizes from his supine position over the stove that the peasants’ misery is to a great extent their own fault. Olga, too, in a reported thought actually beyond her mental powers, comes to question: ‘Who maintains the pubs and makes the peasants drunk? The peasant. Who embezzles the village, school and parish funds and spends it all on drink? The peasant. Who robs his neighbour, sets fire to his house and perjures himself in court for a bottle of vodka? Who is the first to revile the peasant at district council and similar meetings? The peasant.’

  When a house burns, the villagers are incapable of taking any meaningful action, and the fire would blaze out of control if the neighbouring landowner’s son, watched admiringly by his two pretty sisters, did not put it out with the help of his husky men. The authorities are present only to collect taxes and rates, taking away a family’s basic necessity, the samovar, in lieu of payment. Most peasants are illiterate, and when little Sasha, the only literate member of the family since she had been going to school in the city, reads from the Bible to them, they are moved to tears by Old Church Slavonic words that they do not understand. In general, they have no idea what their Russian Orthodox faith means, and when they pray to icons, they resemble pagans worshipping idols.