After they have slept together for the first time, Dmitri Dmitrich Gurov and Anna Sergeyevria von Diderits, the hero and heroine of Anton Chekhov's story "The Lady with the Dog" (1899), drive out at dawn to a village near Yalta called Oreanda, where they sit on a bench near a church and look down on the sea. "Yalta was hardly visible through the morning mist; white clouds stood motionless on the mountain-tops," Chekhov writes at the start of the famous passage that continues:
"The leaves did not stir on the trees, grasshoppers chirruped, and the monotonous hollow sound of the sea rising up from below, spoke of the peace, of the eternal sleep awaiting us. So it must have sounded when there was no Yalta, no Oreanda here; so it sounds now, and it will sound as indifferently and monotonously when we are all no more. And in this constancy, in this complete indifference to the life and death of each of us, there lies hid, perhaps, a pledge of our eternal salvation, of the unceasing movement of life upon earth, of unceasing progress towards perfection. Sitting beside a young woman who in the dawn seemed so lovely, soothed and spellbound in these magical surroundings - the sea, mountains, clouds, the open sky - Gurov thought how in reality everything is beautiful in this world when one reflects: everything except what we think or do ourselves when we forget our human dignity and the higher aims of our existence."
Today, I am sitting on that same bench near the church looking at the same view. Beside me is my English-speaking guide Nina (I know no Russian), and a quarter of a mile away a driver named Yevgeny waits in his car at the entrance to the footpath leading to the lookout point where Gurov and Anna sat, not yet aware of the great love that lay before them. I am a character in a new drama: the absurdist farce of the literary pilgrim who leaves the magical pages of a work of genius and travels to an "original scene" that can only fall short of his expectations.
Chekov's villa in Autka is a two-storey stucco house of distinguished, unornamented, faintly Moorish architecture, with an extensive, well-ordered garden and spacious rooms that look out over Yalta to the sea. Maria Chekhova, his sister, who lived until 1957, preserved the house and garden, fending off Nazi occupiers during the war and enduring the insults of the Stalin and Khrushchev periods.
It remains furnished as in Chekhov's time: handsomely, simply, elegantly. As Chekhov cared about women's dress (it does not go unnoted in the work and is always significant), he cared about the furnishings of his houses. Perhaps his love of order and elegance was innate, but more likely it was a reaction against the disorder and harshness of his early family life. His father, Pavel Yegorovich, was the son of a serf who had managed to buy his freedom and that of his wife and children.
Pavel rose in the world and became the owner of a grocery store in Taganrog, a town on the sea of Azov, in southern Russia. The store, as Chekhov's best biographer, Ernest J Simmons, characterises it in Chekhov (1962), resembled a New England general store - selling things like kerosene, tobacco, yarn, nails, and home remedies - though, unlike a New England store, it also sold vodka, which was consumed on the premises in a separate room.
Chekhov's oldest brother, Alexander, wrote of a freezing winter night on which "the future writer", then a nine-year-old schoolboy, was dragged by his father from the warm room where he was doing his homework and made to mind the unheated store. The reticent Anton himself left no memoir of his childhood sorrows, though there are passages in his stories that are assumed to refer to them. In "Three Years" (1895), for example, the hero, Laptey, says to his wife, "I can remember my father correcting me - or, to speak plainly, beating me - before I was five years old. He used to thrash me with a birch, pull my ears, hit me on the head, and every morning when I woke up my first thought was whether he would beat me that day."
Chekhov had what he described, in a letter to a former classmate in 1899, as "autobiographophobia". Seven years earlier, when VA Tikhonov, the editor of a journal called Seven, asked him for biographical information to accompany a photograph, Chekhov made this reply:
"Do you need my biography? Here it is. In 1860 I was born in Taganrog. In 1879 I finished my studies in the Taganrog school. In 1884 I finished my studies in the medical school of Moscow University. In 1888 I received the Pushkin Prize. In 1891 I made a trip to Sakhalin across Siberia - and back by sea. In 189I I toured Europe, where I drank splendid wine and ate oysters. In 1892 I strolled with VA Tikhonov at [the writer Shcheglov's] name-day party. I began to write in 1879 in Strekosa. My collections of stories are Motley Stories, Twilight, Stories, Gloomy People, and the novella The Duel. I have also sinned in the realm of drama, although moderately. I have been translated into all languages with the exception of the foreign ones. However, I was translated into German quite a while ago. The Czechs and Serbs also approve of me. And the French also relate to me. I grasped the secrets of love at the age of 13. I remain on excellent terms with friends, both physicians and writers. I am a bachelor. I would like a pension. I busy myself with medicine to such an extent that this summer I am going to perform some autopsies, something I have not done for two or three years. Among writers I prefer Tolstoy, among physicians, Zakharin. However, this is all rubbish. Write what you want. If there are no facts, substitute something lyrical."
With the opening of the Soviet archives, hitherto unknown details of Chekhov's love life and sex life have emerged. But the value of this new information, much of it derived from passages or phrases cut out of Chekhov's published letters by the puritanical Soviet censorship, is questionable.
That Chekhov was not prudish about or uninterested in sex is hardly revealed by his use of a coarse word in a letter; it is implicit in the stories and plays. Chekhov would be unperturbed, and probably even amused, by the stir the restored cuts have created - as if the documentary proof of sexual escapades or of incidents of impotence disclosed anything essential about him, anything that crosses the boundary between his inner and outer life.
Chekhov's privacy is safe from the biographer's attempts upon it - as, indeed, are all privacies, even those of the most apparently open and even exhibitionistic natures. The letters and journals we leave behind and the impressions we have made on our contemporaries are the mere husk of the kernel of our essential life. When we die, the kernel is buried with us. This is the horror and pity of death and the reason for the inescapable triviality of biography.
The attentive reader of Chekhov will notice a piece of plagiarism I have just committed. The image of the kernel and the husk comes from another famous passage in "The Lady with the Dog", in the story's last section. Gurov, after parting with Anna at the end of the summer and returning to his loveless marriage in Moscow, finds that he can't get her out of his mind, travels to the provincial town where she lives with the husband she doesn't love, and is now clandestinely meeting with her in a hotel in Moscow, to which she comes every month or so, telling her husband she is seeing a specialist. One snowy morning, on his way to the hotel, Gurov reflects on his situation:
"He had two lives: one, open, seen and known by all who cared to know, full of relative truth and of relative falsehood, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances; and another life running its course in secret. And through some strange, perhaps accidental, conjunction of circumstances, everything that was essential, of interest and of value to him, everything that made the kernel of his life, was hidden from other people; and all that was false in him, the sheath in which he hid himself to conceal the truth - such, for instance, as his work in the bank, his discussions at the club... his presence with his wife at anniversary festivities - all that was open. And he judged of others by himself, not believing in what he saw, and always believing that every man had his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy and under the cover of night."
"The Lady with the Dog" is said to be Chekhov's riposte to Anna Karenina, his defence of illicit love against Tolstoy's harsh (if ambivalent) condemnation of it. But Chekhov's Anna (if this is what it is) bears no real resemblance to Tolstoy's; comparing the two only draws attention to the differences between Chekhov's realism and Tolstoy's. Gurov is no Vronsky and Anna von Diderits is no Anna Karenina. Neither of the Chekhov characters has the particularity, the vivid lifelikeness of the Tolstoy lovers. They are indistinct, more like figures in an allegory than like characters in a novel.
Nor is Chekhov concerned, as Tolstoy is, with adultery as a social phenomenon. His story has a close, hermetic atmosphere. No one knows of the affair, or suspects its existence. It is as if it were taking place in a sealed box made of dark glass that the lovers can see out of, but no one can see into. The story enacts what the passage about Gurov's double life states. It can be read as an allegory of interiority. The beauty of Gurov and Anna's secret love - and of interior life - is precisely its hiddenness. Chekhov often said that he hated lies more than anything. "The Lady with the Dog" plays with the paradox that a lie - a husband deceiving a wife or a wife deceiving a husband - can be the fulcrum of truth of feeling, a vehicle of authenticity.
But the story's most interesting and complicated paradox lies in the inversion of the inner-outer formula by which imaginative literature is perforce propelled. Even as Gurov hugs his secret to himself, we know all about it. If privacy is life's most precious possession, it is fiction's least considered one.
A fictional character is a being who has no privacy, who stands before the reader with his "real, most interesting life" nakedly exposed. We never see people in life as clearly as we see the people in novels, stories and plays; there is a veil between ourselves and even our closest intimates, blurring us to each other. We know things about Gurov and Anna - especially about Gurov, since the story is told from his point of view - that they don't know about each other, and feel no discomfort in our voyeurism. We consider it our due as readers.
It does not occur to us that the privacy rights we are so nervously anxious to safeguard for ourselves should be extended to fictional characters. But, interestingly, it does seem to occur to Chekhov. If he cannot draw the mantle of reticence over his characters that he draws over himself - and still call himself a fiction writer - he can stop short of fully exercising his fiction writer's privilege of omniscience. He can hold back, he can leave his characters a little blurred, their motives a little mysterious.
In 1888, 11 years before "The Lady with the Dog", he responded to a letter from the writer Ivan Shcheglov, criticising another story, "Lights", which had not been well received: "A psychologist should not pretend to understand what he does not understand. Moreover, a psychologist should not convey the impression that he understands what no one understands. We shall not play the charlatan, and we will declare frankly that nothing is clear in this world. Only fools and charlatans understand everything."
Chekhov hid the secrets of his literary nest as well as those of his personal one; he was close-mouthed about his compositional methods and destroyed most of his drafts. But he didn't merely withhold information about his literary practice; the practice itself was a kind of exercise in withholding. In his letter of March 1886 to the writer Dmitri Grigorovich, who had encouraged him early on, Chekhov noted a curious habit he had of doing everything he could not to "waste" on any story "the images and scenes dear to me which - God knows why - I have treasured and kept carefully hidden", and, again, writing to his publisher and friend Alexei Suvorin in October 1888, he cited "the images which seem best to me, which I love and jealously guard, lest I spend and spoil them", adding, "all that I now write displeases and bores me, but what sits in my head interests, excites, and moves me".
In the English-speaking world, Chekhov is better known as a dramatist than as a story writer. Everyone has seen a Cherry Orchard or an Uncle Vanya, while few have even heard of "The Wife" or "ln the Ravine". But Chekhov was never comfortable as a playwright. "Ah, why have I written plays and not stories!" he wrote to Suvorin in 1896. "Subjects have been wasted, wasted to no purpose, scandalously and unproductively."
A year earlier, when the first draft of The Seagull had been coolly received by theatre people and literary friends, Chekhov had written to Suvorin, "I am not destined to be a playwright. I have no luck at it. But I'm not sad over it, for I can still go on writing stories. In that sphere I feel at home; but when I write a play, I feel uneasy, as though someone were peering over my shoulder."
Chekhov wrote "The Steppe" (1888) in a month and "The Name-Day Party" (1888) in three weeks; it took him almost a year each to drag the Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard out of himself. Ill health undoubtedly played a role, but there is reason to think that the feeling of being watched as he worked, of no longer being alone in his room, was implicated as well.
Of course, writing a play is never as private an act as writing a story or a novel. As he works, the playwright feels a crowd of actors, directors, scenery designers, costumiers, lighting specialists and sometimes even an audience at his back. He is never alone, and he evidently likes the company. But, just as Chekhov never resolved his ambivalence toward actual guests, so he never resolved his ambivalence toward the imaginary figures who, peering over his shoulders when he wrote for the theatre, inhibited him as he was not inhibited when he wrote stories. (In 1886, though, when his stories first began attracting notice, he reported a similar feeling of invasion to his friend Viktor Bilibin: "Formerly, when I didn't know that they read my tales and passed judgment on them, I wrote serenely, just the way I eat pancakes; now, I'm afraid when I write.")
The theatre drew and repelled Chekhov in equal measure. When, in 1898, he was approached by Nemerovich-Danchenko of the newly formed Moscow Art Theatre, for permission to perform The Seagull, he refused. As Nemerovich-Danchenko reported in his memoirs: "He neither wished nor did he have the strength to undergo the great agitation of the theatre that had occasioned him so much pain." Nemerovich persisted, however, and prevailed. Had he not, The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard might still be rattling around the imaginary lumber room where Chekhov stored the subjects he didn't want to "waste".
In one story at least Chekhov may have practised a veiled form of autobiography. That story is "Kashtanka" (1887), narrated from the point of view of a female dog, and presented as a story for children. In fact, it is a dark, strange, rather horrible (as well as wonderful) fable that I, for one, would never read to a child. Kashtanka is a hungry and ill-treated animal who gets lost, is adopted by a kindly man, and then is reunited (by her own choice) with her abusive original owner.
The kindly man finds Kashtanka shivering in the doorway of a bar during a snowstorm and takes her home and feeds her. He is an animal trainer who has a circus act performed by a cat, a gander and a pig. He adopts Kashtanka, starts teaching her tricks, for which she proves to have great aptitude, and one day brings her to the circus to perform in the act with the others. The original owner, an alcoholic carpenter, happens to be in the audience with his son, and when the two of them call to her, Kashtanka leaps out of the ring to go to them, and unhesitatingly, and even joyfully, resumes her life of privation.
Chekhov prepares for the ending by depicting the household of the kindly master as a faintly sinister place. An uneasiness is always present, a kind of uncanniness that reaches a climax one night when the gander utters a horrible shriek and then pathetically dies, as the dog howls and the standoffish cat huddles against her. When read as a parable of alienation - a case study of homesickness - the dog's return to the original master takes on a sort of tragic inevitability. We know that the sleek, well-groomed animal Kashtanka has become under the care of the kindly circus master will soon again be a bag of bones, beaten by the carpenter and tortured by the son. But she will be cured of her unease; she will be where she belongs, leading her own proper life, rather than a life that is not really hers.
When Chekhov wrote "Kashtanka" he was himself living an alien new life. In 1886, he had been abruptly catapulted from obscurity to celebrity. After years of struggling to make ends meet, writing humorous sketches to support his family, he had been taken up by literary Russia's greatest circus master, the millionaire publisher Suvorin, and pronounced a genuine artist. But being a part of Suvorin's circus act made Chekhov as tense as it made him happy. We have seen his dismay at no longer being able to produce stories the way he eats pancakes. His letters now also begin to express an ambivalence toward writing that was to remain with him. They suggest that the literary artist, like the animal performer, is doing something unnatural, almost unseemly.
If it was Chekhov's fate to be a reluctant literary performer, it was also his fate to remain with his impossible "original owners". His adoption by Suvorin was as inconsequential as Kashtanka's adventure with the circus master. Chekhov's autocratic father, the kindly, uneducated mother, the feckless older brothers, the not brilliant younger ones, and the unmarried Maria were the people to whom he felt connected.
Literally as well as figuratively, Chekhov never left home. When he married the actress Olga Knipper in 1901, he did as he had promised in a letter to Suvorin several years earlier, and lived apart from his wife: "Very well then, I shall marry if you so desire. But under the following conditions: everything must continue as it was before; in other words, she must live in Moscow and I in the country, and I'll go visit her. I will never be able to stand the sort of happiness that lasts from one day to the next, from one morning to the next." He kept his parents with him in Moscow and Melikhovo, and, after his father's death, in 1889, he brought his mother to his house in Yalta.
It is hard to think of a Chekhov play or story in which no death occurs (or over which, having already occurred, it doesn't hover, as the drowning of Ranevskaya's son hovers over The Cherry Orchard). Death is the hinge on which the work swings. "The Lady with the Dog" is an apparent exception - no one in the story dies or has died. And yet death is in the air. Gurov's spiritual journey - his transformation from a connoisseur of women to a man tenderly devoted to a single ordinary woman - is a journey of withdrawal from life. His life as a womaniser wasn't nice, but it was vital; his secret "real life" in the Moscow hotel has a ghostly quality. He and Anna are like people for whom "the eternal sleep awaiting us" has already begun.
Anna Sergeyevna is pale, and dressed in grey ("his favourite grey dress"); Gurov, catching a glimpse of himself in the mirror, sees that his hair is grey. The colour of ashes has already begun to infiltrate the story. When Gurov - like Orpheus descending to the underworld - travelled to S-, he found a long grey fence in front of Anna Sergeyevna's house and in his hotel room "the floor was covered with grey army cloth, and on the table was an inkstand, grey with dust".
In the Moscow hotel room, Gurov notes that "he had grown so much older, so much plainer during the last few years", and goes on to observe of Anna Sergeyevna: "The shoulders on which his hands rested were warm and quivering. He felt compassion for this life still so warm and lovely, but probably already not far from beginning to fade and wither like his own." He sounds almost as if he were speaking of a corpse. In Yalta, only a year or two earlier, he had been struck by Anna's youth, by "how lately she had been a girl at school doing lessons like his own daughter". (She was 22.) He had (twice) noted her schoolgirlish "diffidence" and "angularity". But now this woman who could be his daughter is on the verge of "fading" and "withering".
His actual daughter accompanies him on his walk to his tryst in the Moscow hotel. What is Chekhov getting at with his theme of the two daughters? Is he anticipating Freud's mythopoeic reading of King Lear in "The Theme of the Three Caskets"? Does Anna Sergeyevna - like Cordelia - represent the goddess of death? Has Gurov, like the professor in Harkov (and Chekhov in Yalta), come to the end of the line? We do not ask such questions of the other Russian realists, but Chekhov's strange, coded works almost force us to sound them for hidden meanings.
Chekhov's irony and good sense put a brake on our speculations. We don't want to get too fancy. But we don't want to miss the clues that Chekhov has scattered about his garden and covered with last year's leaves. These leaves are fixtures of Chekhov's world, and exemplify Chekhov's way of endowing some small quiet natural phenomenon with metaphorical meaning. One hears them crunch underfoot as one walks in the allée where this year's leaves have already sprouted.
· This is an edited extract from Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey, by Janet Malcolm, published by Granta on February 6 at £13.99