Stories Read Free Page B

certainreforms in the treatment of prisoners and the administration of the colony. Later Chekhov also sent shipments of books to the island’s library.
    Faithful to his family, to medicine, to the places that marked his life—Taganrog, Sakhalin, Melikhovo, Yalta—Chekhov was also faithful to his friends. A case in point is his resignation from the Russian Academy in quiet protest when the young Maxim Gorky was refused membership. His relations with Alexei Suvorin are another case in point, and a more telling one. The publisher of
New Time
became more and more conservative and pro-government ashe grew older. Chekhov was far from sharing Suvorin’s views and often wrote him caustic letters about them, but they remained friends. The only real break between them came over the Dreyfus affair. Chekhov had suffered a severe hemorrhage of the lungs in March of 1897 and was living in Nice when the Dreyfus case was reopened. He became a staunch Dreyfusard, and even went to Paris in April of the next year to meet with Dreyfus’s brother and the journalist Bernard Lazare, whose articles had forced the reopening of the case, and offer them his support. Suvorin meanwhile took a strongly anti-Dreyfus and anti-Semitic position in his magazine, which so disgusted Chekhov that he stopped meeting and corresponding with him. But they made peaceagain before too long. Chekhov even managed to remain on good terms with his chief ideological opponent, Nikolai Mikhailovsky, whom he referred to privately as “an important sociologist and failed literary critic.”
    Chekhov was less faithful to the women who fell in love with him—and many did. There was Lika Mizinova, with whom he was “nearly” in love, but then failed to keep a rendezvous while traveling abroad in 1894. There was the novelist Lydia Avilova, whom he called to his bedside when he was hospitalized with consumption in 1897, and who left slightly deluded memoirs about their romance. There was also the mysterious “fiancée” he mentions in a letter, whose family nickname, “Missyus,” he gave to the younger sister in “The House with the Mezzanine.” It wasonly in 1899 that he met the woman he would finally marry: Olga Knipper, a young actress in the Moscow Art Theater. It was there, in the theater of Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko, that his last plays were staged:
The Seagull,
which became the company’s “totem,” in 1898, followed by
Uncle Vanya
in 1899. In 1901, the year of their marriage, came the triumphant production of
Three Sisters,
and in 1904, just months before his death, the still greater triumph of
The Cherry Orchard.
    Chekhov’s admiration for men of “heroic action” like Przhevalsky, and his own energetic activity as a doctor, a builder of schools and clinics, are oddly contradicted by the weakness, anguish, ineffectuality, and resignation of the protagonists in his stories and plays. In fact, contradiction runs deep in Chekhov’s nature. It is not hard to find examples. He was the most humane of writers, yet his stories areas merciless as any ever written. He constantly portrayed himself in his work, and constantly denied it. His art has an air of impassivity, but is fueled by indignation and protest. He believed in progress, yet he shows only the natural and human waste it has caused. He scorned the new Symbolist movement in literature, but the surface objectivity of his work gives way time and again to a visionary symbolism of his own (of which “The Black Monk” is the most obvious, and least successful, example). This well-known Chekhovian ambiguity is not a halfhearted mixture of contraries. Resignation and revolt are equally extreme in his work and are mysteriously held together, though they ought to tear his world apart.
    We may find the source of these contradictions in Chekhov’s attitude toward science. “Goethe the poet coexisted splendidly with Goethe the naturalist,” he wrote to Suvorin, expressing his own ideal. He had no