Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

CHEKHOV, ANTON PAVLOVICH Rus sian dramatist and story-writer, born on Jan. 17, 186o, in Tagan rog on the Sea of Azov. This name is also spelled Tchekhov, Tchehov and Chehov. His father was a tradesman and the son of a serf. The writer was educated at the gymnasium of his native town, and in 1879 went to the University of Moscow, where he studied medicine. He took his degree in 1884 but practised very little (except during the cholera epidemic of 1892-93). He began his literary career while yet a student, and soon became one of the most welcome contributors to the comic papers. His early stories appeared over the signature Antosha Chekhonte. In 1886 some of his stories were published in book form (Particoloured Stories). The book had a great success and attracted the attention of the publisher and editor Suvorin, who became his friend.

In 1887 he produced his first play Ivanov. In 1890 he travelled to the convict island of Sakhalin and the result of his journey was Saghalien Island (1891), which had a considerable effect on the mitigation of the penal regime. From 1891 to 1897 he lived with his parents on a small estate he had acquired not far from Mos cow. After 1897, as he was threatened with tuberculosis, he was forced to live the greater part of the year in the Crimea and abroad. In 1896 he produced his second play, The Seagull, which was a complete failure in St. Petersburg (Leningrad). But in 1898 it was revived by the Moscow Art theatre of Stanislaysky and proved a great success. Henceforward Chekhov's connection with that theatre became very close. Uncle Vanya (1899), The Three Sisters (19o1) and The Cherry Orchard (1904) were pro duced there. In 1901 he married the actress Olga Knipper. In 190o he was elected an honorary fellow of the Academy of Science, but resigned his fellowship when the election of Maxim Gorky was cancelled by the Government. He died on July 2, 1904, at Badenweiler in the Black Forest.

Early Work.-The

early stories of Chekhov, up to about 1886, are chiefly humorous. They are, in Russia, the most widely popu lar part of his work, and more people know him by them than by My Life or The Three Sisters. Chekhov's humour is not strik ingly above the level of the papers he wrote for. But very early he began to lay the foundations of that manner which is the essen tial Chekhov. Such a story as The Chorus Girl (1884) is almost a mature masterpiece. It was, however, only of ter 1886 that he found the necessary leisure and independence to give definite expression to his imaginative experience. The years 1886-88 are a period of transition during which he experimented in various directions. To these years belong a series of stories of atmosphere against a background of nature (The Steppe, Happiness, Easter Eve) where the lyrical element of his genius received its fullest expression, and short stories of morbid experience in which the knowledge of the doctor is balanced by the sense of form of the artist. By 1889, however, he had attained perfection in his style. To this and the following years belong a succession of master pieces, the principal of which are A Dreary Story (1889), The Duel, Ward No. 6 (1892), The Teacher of Literature , Three Years: An Artist's Story, in Russian The House with the Maisonette (1893), Peasants (1897), The Darling, lonitch, The Lady with the Dog (1898), The New Villa (1899), The Bishop (1902).

Chekhov's art has been described as psychological, but his psy chology ignores the individual. His characters are not persons but just men and women, the genus homo, an indifferentiated mass of humanity, divided into watertight compartments by the phenom enon of individuality, which does not make one being different from another but only inaccessible to him. A typical story by Chekhov is the life-story of a "mood," of a state of mind, usually of the relation of one person to another and the gradual trans formation of that state of mind under the action of the incessant infinitesimal and unforeseen pinpricks of life. Sensitiveness to these pinpricks is the main feature of Chekhov's people, of those at least who are made to kindle the reader's sympathy, and the standard by which Chekhov gauges the worth of a human being. Those who suffer and succumb are the higher race, those who do not are unfeeling brutes. Hence a deep-rooted aversion (present in pre-Chekhov Russian literature, especially in Turgenev, but enormously magnified by Chekhov) for the strong and efficient man. None but "Hamlets" may receive sympathy.

The construction of Chekhov's stories may be described as musical or infinitesimal. It is at once fluid and precise. They are built along exactly calculated curves, of which only certain points are marked in the story, but each two points are sufficient to calculate the whole curve. The curve is the mood which begins as almost a straight line, then under the influence of "pinpricks" begins to deviate and at last shoots out in an entirely opposite direction. By far the greater number of Chekhov's stories end on a minor note, "not with a bang but a whimper." A story where the direction is in the opposite way, as in The Lady with the Dog (where the hero begins by regarding his love for the lady as a mere insignificant intrigue and ends in self-forgetful passion), is an exception. The "pessimistic," destructive, descendant tend ency of the Russian novelists of the mid and later 19th century reaches its extreme expression in Chekhov, all the more extreme as it is so consistently muffled and "understated." To him, better than to anyone, the words of Albert Thibaudet apply, that a Rus sian story is always the story of the undoing of a life.

Somewhat apart from the other stories of Chekhov stand, what are perhaps his two masterpieces, My Life (1895) and In the Ravine (1900). They have a clearer and harder outline ; they are free from the atmospheric, autumnal haze that pervades the others, and animated by a more active sense of moral and human values. My Life, especially, is a creation of vast and pregnant significance, with a symbolical grasp that gives it an almost reli gious character.

Chekhov's dramatic work consists of the same element as his narrative work. It includes numerous one-act plays which were extremely popular in Russia. Belonging to a later period than the comic stories, they are also on a higher artistic level. The se rious plays are five in number—Ivanov, The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard. They have many points in common with his stories; one main difference is that while the stories invariably centre round a single person from whose stand point the situation is developed, the dramas have no such central figure, and all the characters have more or less equal rights on the stage. The clays are, as it were, symphonies for an orchestra of parts, and the resultant is arrived at by the complex interaction of the various voices. They are plays of "atmosphere," the English word that comes nearest to the Russian nastroenie (Stimmung). The principal thing in them is not the action but the emotional accompaniment of the action. In the "de-theatricalisation" of the theatre, in the complete avoidance of all traditional stage effects (though he introduced a new kind of "atmospheric" effect, as the famous string bursting at the end of The Cherry Orchard), Chekhov is the logical limit of the preceding development of the Russian drama. He did not go much further in this respect than Turgenev or Ostrovsky, but he built a more consistent dramatic system with a completely adequate technique.

The Novelist's Influence.

The influence of Chekhov on Rus sian literature has not been extensive. The last realists (Andreyev, Gorky, Bunin, etc.) learned little from him, and soon after his death the rise of an entirely new movement put an end to all possibility of continuing in his tradition. His plays were imitated by Gorky, Andreyev and others, but they invariably missed the constructive principle without which the whole system is stulti fied. To the Russia of to-day Chekhov is perhaps more alien than any other Russian writer of his rank.

On the other hand, his vogue and his influence outside Russia have of recent years grown immensely and were in 1927 probably near their zenith. England has proved particularly sensitive to his charm. He is almost universally regarded as the greatest Rus sian writer and as the greatest story-teller and dramatist of mod em times. (D. S. M.) BIBLIOGRAPHY.-.-The Tales of Tchehov (13 vols., trans. C. Garnett, Bibliography.-.-The Tales of Tchehov (13 vols., trans. C. Garnett, 1916-22) ; Letters of A. Tchehov (trans. C. Garnett, 192o) ; The Notebooks of A. Tchehov, together with Reminiscences of Tchehov by Maxim Gorky (trans. S. S. Koteliansky and L. Woolf, 1921) ; The Plays of Tchehov (2 vols. trans. C. Garnett, 1923, etc.) ; Letters on Literary Topics (trans. Louis Friedland, 1924) ; The Life and Letters of A. Tchehov (trans. S. S. Koteliansky and P. Tomlinson, 1925) ; Letters of A. P. Tchehov to 0. L. Knipper (trans. C. Garnett, 1926) ; some hitherto unpublished letters have been edited by N. K. Piksanov at Moscow under the title of Nesobrannye Pisma (1928) . See also L. Shestov, Anton Tchehov (1916) ; W. Gerhardi, Anton Chehov (1923) ; S. S. Koteliansky, Anton Tchekhov, Literary and Theatrical Reminiscences (1927).