The Russian Anton Chekhov died of tuberculosis at the age of 44 in 1904, having authored over 500 short stories, several plays and numerous private letters, all of which remain in print today. His abusive and despotic father who had been born a serf made a living as a grocer only to go bankrupt when Anton was in his teens. Anton had five siblings. When the family fled to Moscow so that his father could avoid being sent to debtor’s prison Anton became its financial mainstay. He earned money writing comical sketches for magazines while simultaneously training to be a doctor at medical school. It is clear he was a resourceful young man with enormous energy. His ability to tell stories seems to have been inherited from his mother, who nonetheless became physically and emotionally broken by the experience of living in poverty in the capital. 

Many of the stories are vignettes, brief episodic sketches of persons and situations Chekhov had encountered. These tales may seem strange and idiosyncratic to us now but they attempt to reflect how life was for ordinary people in this vast sprawling country in which 80 percent of the population were feudal serfs until 1861 when Tsar Alexander nominally freed them. I say nominally because they subsequently faced heavy redemption payments for land, high rents, and continued land hunger, often leaving them worse off and fueling social unrest. Hence Chekhov was writing during the pre-revolutionary period when a stark gap existed between the vast, impoverished masses and a small, wealthy elite. It has been argued that “his best stories and plays lack complex plots and neat solutions. Concentrating on apparent trivialities, they create a special kind of atmosphere, sometimes termed haunting or lyrical”. We may confidently assert that in terms of political and social conscience he was to 19th century Russian literary history what Charles Dickens was to the British equivalent. Lenin is on record as saying that it was Chekhov’s writing that turned him into a revolutionary.

One of my favourite stories here is called ON THE WAY. A man and his young daughter are taking shelter from a snow blizzard at a remote inn when someone arrives, not so much a person, it seems, but a bundle of protective clothing. Once the bundle is unwrapped a small woman emerges and the man, waking from sleep, engages her in conversation – or rather delivers a long earnest monologue about his life’s predicament and philosophy. This I think is Chekhov giving us his idea of the archetypal Russian. A passionate windbag who treks across the wilderness in pursuit of fulfillment, who is patriarchal, self-obsessed and so needy for a sense of meaning that he is capable not only of demeaning all the women who have ever loved him (of which his adjacent suffering daughter is just one example) but also of fluttering from one belief system to another. The woman, who knows the barren solitary place to which her interlocutor is intent on heading, warns him not to go but he is incapable of paying heed, such is his sadomasochistic obstinacy. “The mine is run by a maniac, a despot, a bankrupt,” she implores him, “and you won’t even get a salary!” The story has that bleak elemental quality you find in King Lear as the bereft monarch rants insanely on the heath during a tempest. The world is absurdly chaotic and hostile, without apparent meaning and yet man can do nothing else but struggle against all these vile contradictions to try to survive in it. The lady wraps herself back up into the protective bundle and disappears on her sleigh into the howling blizzard, leaving him behind wondering if she might just have been the key to his salvation had she stayed.  In this allegory it feels as if Chekhov is saying, “These are our two choices as Russians, indeed as human beings cast adrift – either to do continual battle with reality and find meaning OR to completely insulate ourselves from it.” I find it compellingly told and epic in its starkness.

Sometimes the stories have the feel of a parable or morality tale, although explicit moralising is always carefully avoided. The Russia described here is lawless, corrupt and fraught with danger. Even those with legal authority are invariably not trusted – or should I say, especially those. Robbery is almost a normative way of life, even to be envied as a career in one tale; while the government inspectorate, routinely dispatched to provincial towns from Moscow, are vain self-important incompetents who are too easily flattered and hoodwinked. And as for the peasants they have neither rights nor a sense of entitlement. They simply have a commodity value to those of a higher rank who require cheap labour and once that value no longer exists they are utterly dispensable. 

This is the subject of the most shockingly brutal story in the collection, IN THE RAVINE, that portrays provincial capitalism and its beneficiaries at their venal worst. The baby murderer, Aksinia, bears here no explicit authorial moral judgement. She is presented factually, a commonplace parvenue – ruthless, ambitious, the manipulative opportunistic intruder who displaces the head of an affluent family. As in all Chekhov’s tales some characters take succour from God, others steadfastly refuse to believe. Why things exist as they do is a mystery. Why is evil so prevalent while night is so peaceful and beautiful? Go figure out the answer for yourself, the writer tells us. We are left in the final paragraph with the image of impoverished maltreated peasants giving succour to the same misanthropic scoundrel who has three years earlier so heartlessly maltreated them. It is not difficult for us to imagine the impact a story like this would have made in educated progressive circles where socialist revolutionaries were already secretly plotting to overthrow the governing elite.