From "Chekhov's Letters: Biography, Context, Poetics"
by Carol Apollonio (Editor), Radislav Lapushin (Editor) 2018
Chekhov’s Letters: An Integral Body of Work
AN ORGANIC MASTERPIECE
And when we left the carriage and strolled quietly [. . .], we passed the pale blue ruins of a castle lit by the moonlight. Chekhov suddenly said to me: “Do you know for how many years I shall be read? Seven.”
“Why seven?” I asked.
“Well, seven and a half, then.”
[. . .] Lowering his eyes, Chekhov began thoughtfully stirring up some pebbles with the end of his stick. But when I said that he was sad, he cast a humorous sidelong gaze at me. “It’s you who are sad,” he answered. “You are sad because you spent so much on the cab.” Then Chekhov went on to say in earnest: “All the same, I’ll be read for only seven years, and I have less time than that to live—perhaps six. But please don’t go reporting this to the Odessa press.” This time, however, he was wrong: he was to live a much shorter time.1
This conversation with Ivan Bunin took place outside Yalta in the same spot where, not long before, Gurov and Anna Sergeevna, in "The Lady with the Dog,” had sat gazing out onto the sea. When, faced with the prospect of his imminent death—which was to come in just over a year—Chekhov pondered his artistic legacy, he undoubtedly had in mind the stories and plays that had made him famous. But he would also have done well to consider a different body of work, monumental in scope and content, that he had created meticulously, bit by bit, day by day, page by page, throughout his adult life. No one during Chekhov’s lifetime had access to this work in its complete form, and the writer himself had no control over its fate. Instead of publishing it, he entrusted it to others, scattering it in manuscript to multiple individual readers. He was not in a habit of keeping drafts or copies, and could not be sure that all of its different parts would be preserved. Indeed many were lost, leaving behind irreparable lacunae. Did Chekhov have any idea that this body of work, written, as it were, on the margins of his life and literary career, would become both the most authoritative source of evidence about his life and a universally recognized literary monument, itself alone sufficient to guarantee its author a place in the history of world literature? This body of work, of course, is Chekhov’s letters.
Pushkin once wrote regarding the publication of Voltaire’s correspondence:
Every line of a great writer becomes precious for his future readers. We scrutinize whatever has been written in the author’s hand, even if it is no more than an excerpt from an accounts book or a note to the tailor about a delayed payment. We are involuntarily struck by the thought that the hand that traced these humble numbers, these insignificant words, with that same distinctive handwriting and possibly even that same pen, wrote his masterpieces, which we read with such intensity and delight.2
Things are different with Chekhov. His letters are not mere fragments from a greater life, scraps and leftovers from something more important. His most famous aphorisms, which have become part of the language, his inimitable jokes and puns on the one hand, and the majority of his "manifestoes” as a citizen and a writer on the other, are taken from the manuscripts of his personal letters. Furthermore, Chekhov’s epistolary prose features an astonishing variety of styles and themes, equaling or even exceeding in their range those of the stories and plays, addressing, for example, bodily processes and sex, and including the whole spectrum of Russian language, from Church Slavonic to obscenities that could not appear in print during the writer’s lifetime and for many decades after his death. At important periods in his life, such as during his journey to Sakhalin in 1890, Chekhov wrote long and eloquent letters that took the place of fiction writing. Beyond their intrinsic artistic value, the letters provide unique insights into the inner world of this infamously discreet author. Chekhov’s letters also serve as a window onto his times, the fraught political and social environment of Russia on the eve of revolution. Through his letters Chekhov engages eloquently in the major ethical dialogues of his time concerning justice, national identity, Westernization, literacy, famine, social class, anti-Semitism, women’s rights, and many other questions that remain as relevant now as they were in his day. In addition to their intrinsic literary and biographical value, the letters thus represent a potent alternative body of texts to interrogate the writer’s often-proclaimed refusal to engage in public debate through his writing. Most importantly, they are works of art in their own right, offering an idiosyncratic blend of humor and pathos, juxtaposing minute, apparently insignificant trifles with profound philosophical and sociopolitical meditations, and combining the poetry of nature with the prose of everyday life. Representing nearly thirty years of writing and taken as a whole, Chekhov’s letters constitute a unique and organic masterpiece.
EDITIONS AND RECEPTION
The letters’ significance was recognized soon after the writer’s death, when they gradually began to appear in print.3 Bunin, who was himself one of Chekhov’s correspondents, wrote in 1906: “And his letters! Someone—I believe it was Leo Tolstoy—said that well-written letters are the most difficult of all literary genres. Chekhov’s letters were not only well written, but they were also remarkable in their spontaneity, precision, and beauty of style. And how much humor they contained in their quiet form!”4 On 25 March 1913 the poet Alexander Blok writes in his notebook: "The letters Chekhov wrote before his death brought on true night terrors. They had a more powerful effect on me than Tolstoy’s flight from home.”5 A new level of recognition came with the publication of the six-volume collection of Chekhov’s letters by the writer’s sister Maria Pavlovna Chekhova in 1912–1916. A review of the fourth volume of her collection by future Chekhov scholar Yury Sobolev is representative of the general reaction: "It is said that the most widely read books, those that have been most in demand both in libraries and in bookstores, have been the collections of Chekhov’s letters. There’s no need to explain why.”6 This edition was the most authoritative source for many years to come. Some two decades later, as memoirists report, composer and pianist Sergei Rakhmaninov responded to this edition with enthusiasm: "What a man Chekhov was! I am reading his letters. There are six volumes, and I have read four, and I think: ‘How dreadful that there are only two volumes left. When they are done, he will die, and my communion with him will end. What a man!’”7
One of the earliest attempts to analyze Chekhov’s letters as a whole was made by Yuly Aikhenvald, an influential critic of the time, who wrote:
We are interested in his letters because they are also a creative work in their own right, a valuable and beautiful literary monument. They will occupy a central place in our epistolary literature. Literary quality without literary pretension; unconstrained, brimming with wit, humor, and originality, full of critical insights that give the impression of a fine, elusive melody, conveying that distinctive Chekhovian mood—Chekhov’s letters are like his stories: it is hard to tear yourself away.8
The historical events to follow—the Revolution, the Civil War, and the construction of a new social order—drowned out Chekhov’s voice and would seem to have put an end to his entire world. The epoch of Stalinism that followed was equally hostile. The ideological dogmatism of the times ran counter to everything that Chekhov represented. He was either relegated to the background, or—which is no better—simplified and adapted to fit the immediate needs of the day. It is symptomatic that when one of Vasily Grossman’s characters in his novel Life and Fate praised Chekhov as the "bearer of the greatest banner that has been raised in a thousand years of Russian history, the banner of a true, humane, Russian democracy, of Russian freedom, of the dignity of the Russian man,” he noted that the State "simply doesn’t understand Chekhov—that’s why it tolerates him.”9 Readers, however, had good reason to appreciate this misunderstanding when the state literary publishing house Goslitizdat published its twenty-volume edition, the most complete collection of Chekhov’s works to date, in 1944–1951. Eight of the volumes were letters, 4,195 in all, some 700 of which appeared in print for the first time.10
This edition remained the most complete collection up to the 1970s, when the special Chekhov group was formed under the Academy of Sciences. The work of these scholars, including Alexander Chudakov, Irina Gitovich, Vladimir Kataev, Zinovy Paperny, and Emma Polotskaya—represented in this volume—culminated in the thirty-volume complete collected works (1974–1983). This edition, which remains the most authoritative source of Chekhov’s works and letters for scholars, increased the number of letters to 4,468 and provided more extensive commentaries. In addition, the editors were able to draw upon letters of Chekhov’s correspondents, memoirs, and other sources to establish a list of some 1,500 letters that have been lost.
Numbers, however, do not tell the whole story. In one of his letters, Chekhov famously said, "I have faith in individual people” (8: 101), and indeed the history of the letters’ reception is first and foremost that of “individual” readers. Throughout the Soviet era, regardless of the prevailing ideology, each reader traced his or her own path to Chekhov’s letters. Readers’ experiences of the letters could be even more individual and personal—even intimate—than of the literary works. Although Soviet publishers followed standard practice in placing Chekhov’s letters in the last volumes of his collected works, for some readers these final volumes came first. Prominent contemporary Russian writer Dina Rubina, for example, writes in her chapter for our volume:
I was ten years old, and was not yet aware that reading other people’s correspondence was boring, as was looking into commentaries to learn who P. R. or B. O. was, or in what year had this or that production had bombed in some theater. . . . I simply read everything, one letter after another, skipping over things that I didn’t understand, circling languidly over the marvelous images in them, returning over and over to things I found funny—and there were so many ("Well, good-bye, corn stalk of my soul. With brazen respect I kiss your powder box and I envy your old boots, which can see you every day!” [Letter to Lika Mizinova; 5: 87]). Circling like a goat tied to a stake who eats the grass within his reach, gathering sustenance, I entered the world of Chekhov’s friends, relatives, correspondents, and lovers, making it my own. I was intoxicated by the intonation of his voice, which was something unique unto itself, unlike any other person or thing I knew, conveying dignity, irony, warmth, and at the same time a remarkably serious attitude toward life.11
Another contemporary Russian writer and critic, Alexei Varlamov, says that his infatuation with Chekhov led him to gradually read the writer’s entire body of works, including the letters. And indeed, the letters turned an impressionable neophyte into an inveterate Chekhovophile: "Chekhov’s letters, like those of no other writer but Pushkin, were written with such generosity and virtuosity that they seem to be addressed not to any particular reader, but to all progressive humanity.”12
Could the intensity of these people’s reactions to Chekhov’s letters be explained away by the fact that—as in the case of Bunin, Rakhmaninov, and Blok—they are creative artists? But another of our authors, Michael Finke, cites an eloquent example from recent Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich’s book, Voices from Chernobyl. Katya P. says that when her parents had the opportunity to salvage just a few things from their doomed apartment in Pripyat after the catastrophe, they "got a warm blanket, my fall coat, and the collected letters of Chekhov, my mom’s favorite.” Finke notes: "She exposes herself to radiation to grab Chekhov’s letters like you take a suitcase of old family photos when you evacuate in the face of a hurricane or wildfire, leaving other valuables behind.”13
As these examples demonstrate, Chekhov’s letters represent something truly unique. Their appeal is not limited to elite readers; they strike a universal human chord. Despite the specific context in which they were anchored, the topics they addressed, and the individuals to whom they were addressed, as the authors of part V, "My Favorite Chekhov Letter,” prove, they continue to reach new readers and communicate to them in deeply personal ways. Paradoxically, the further in time we are from Chekhov the closer he is to us.
Soon after their publication in Russia, Chekhov’s letters began to enter world literature. Their journey into English began with Constance Garnett’s 1920 collection, part of her seventeen volumes of Chekhov translations completed between 1917 and 1926. In her essay in our collection, Rosamund Bartlett lists and characterizes this and the English translations that followed, leading up to the most reliable collections available to Anglophone readers today, Simon Karlinsky and Michael Heim’s Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought (1973), and Bartlett’s own collection, with Anthony Phillips, A Life in Letters (2004).14 Since Bartlett and Phillips published mostly letters that did not appear in Karlinsky/Heim, the two collections complement each other to present a very comprehensive picture of the corpus of Chekhov’s letters. We quote both editions with great respect throughout our volume, and recommend that our readers keep them by their side as they read our book.
In the twenty-first century, the expansion of the Internet has greatly increased the readership for Chekhov’s letters. The entire body of extant letters in Russian has become available to anyone in the world with access to the Internet,15 making a comprehensive critical treatment like the one we offer in this book particularly timely and relevant.
LETTERS AND BIOGRAPHY. THE LIFE OF AN ORDINARY MAN
Chekhov’s letters open a window into his life. All of the biographical accounts of Chekhov have one thing in common: they rely heavily on quotes from his letters. Equally importantly, the letters establish the landmarks of the inner life of the writer, who famously eschewed public displays of soul-searching and confession. As one of our authors, Vladimir Lakshin, writes, even if we did not have other sources, "the letters would still allow us to reconstruct a living image of the writer.”16 The image of Chekhov that emerges from the letters is indeed a living thing; that is, it changes constantly depending on context and mood and is completely antithetical to any static conception that may be deduced from this or that excerpt. It is the image of an artist, a tireless observer of life, a wit, a philosopher, a doctor, a patient, a traveler, a gardener, a philanthropist, a son, brother, and husband. Whatever facet of Chekhov may dominate at any given moment in any given letter, there is one constant: he always represents a common humanity. In his letter to one of his major correspondents, Alexei Suvorin, of 24 or 25 November 1888, he writes:
You say that writers are God’s chosen people. I cannot argue with that [. . .] I cannot say whether I have suffered more than a cobbler, a mathematician or a railway guard. Neither do I know whether it’s God speaking through my lips or some other lesser being [. . .]. You and I both like ordinary people; but we are liked because people see us as being out of the ordinary. [. . .] No one is prepared to like us as ordinary people. It follows that if one fine day our dear friends were to see us as ordinary mortals, they would no longer like us but start feeling sorry for us instead. And that is horrible. (2: 78; B/P 169–70)
Indeed, Chekhov’s life, seen through the prism of his letters, is that of an ordinary man who never allowed himself to become detached from the mundane cares and responsibilities of everyday life. But that is the point: in Chekhov’s writing, the most ordinary things can become extraordinary and even magical: "Today I went out walking in the snow in the field; there wasn’t a soul around, and it seemed that I was walking on the moon” (5: 117). This was written in Melikhovo [Figure 13], the estate that Chekhov bought in 1892, and where he wrote “Ward No 6,” “The Black Monk,” “Peasants,” The Seagull, and many other works, treated the sick, organized famine relief, entertained guests, shoveled snow into the pond, dug ditches, and engaged in bird-watching using binoculars. All of these activities and impressions are recorded in his letters:
Oh, my dear friend, if only you could take a vacation! It’s inconvenient out here in the country, it’s terribly wet and muddy, but in nature something striking and touching is taking place, something whose novelty and lyricism redeems all the inconveniences of life. Every day brings a new surprise, each one better than the one before. The starlings have arrived, water is gurgling everywhere, you can already see the green grass in the places where the snow has melted. The day lingers on like eternity. It’s as though you’re living in Australia, somewhere at the end of the earth; your mood is peaceful, contemplative, and animal-like, in the sense that you have no regrets about yesterday and no expectations for tomorrow. From here, from afar, people seem so good, and that is only natural, because when we go away into the countryside, we are hiding not from people but from our own pride, which in the city is unjust and excessive. When I look at the spring, I fervently wish that there is a heaven in the next world. (5: 25)
The Melikhovo letters are notable for the way they bring the birds and animals on the estate to life; in just one or two quick strokes of the pen, they become real personalities with lives of their own: the starling, for example, who can "justly say of himself: ‘I will sing praises unto my God, while I have any being’” (5: 46; B/P 304) or the “beautiful, love-struck creature”—the woodcock whom Levitan shot and wounded in the wing (5: 49—an episode Cathy Popkin writes about in her chapter for this volume), or the rooks who “trudge gloomily along the roads like funeral torch bearers” (6: 134). Another letter provides a detailed list of recent losses in the animal world: “Here, a drake, a horse, and the hedgehog who used to catch mice in the barn have died. The ducks are grieving in their widowed state” (5: 64). Chekhov voices mock-complaints about the animals in his care: “A piglet is nibbling and eating corn in the garden. Overnight the dear little horses ate some of the cauliflower. For 6 r[ubles] we bought a heifer who sings from morning to night in a thick baritone” (5: 81). "Widowed” ducks and the heifer with the baritone voice are endowed by Chekhov with individuality and accepted as participants in and contributors to his life. The letter to Nikolai Leikin from 16 April 1893 begins with an extensive paragraph devoted to the two dachshunds that this correspondent had given Chekhov:
The dachshunds finally arrived yesterday, dearest Nikolai Aleksandrovich. They had got cold and hungry and tired on the way from the station, and were fantastically happy to be here. They raced round all the rooms jumping up affectionately on to everyone and barking at the servants. As soon as they had been fed, they felt completely at home. During the night they dug up all the soil from the window boxes, complete with the seeds that had been sown in them, and distributed the galoshes from the front porch through all the rooms in the house. In the morning, when I was taking them for a walk in the garden, they caused panic in the breasts of our [noble] yard dogs, who had never in all their lives seen such monstrous creatures. The bitch is prettier than the dog. There is something not quite right, not only with his face, but also with his hind legs and rump. But both of them have such kind and grateful eyes. (5: 201; B/P 317)
From that moment on the two dogs become regular characters in Chekhov’s letters. It seems downright unfair that their names (Bromide and Quinine) do not appear in the indexes to proper names that appear at the end of each of the twelve volumes of letters in the Academy collection.17
By contrast to the letter to Leikin cited above, Chekhov’s letter to Suvorin from 25 February 1895 opens on a serious note, a discussion of the "Open Letter to Mr. Tsion” that Suvorin had published a few days before in New Time. But in the middle of the paragraph, Chekhov interrupts his writing to describe an event taking place at the moment outside the windows: "I had just written that last word, when my mother ran in with the words: ‘there’s a rabbit outside my window!’ I went to look and indeed, there, a sazhen18 from the window sits a big rabbit, thinking about something; he sat awhile and then hopped around the garden” (6: 28). There ensues a discussion of the headaches that had been plaguing Chekhov, of the reasons why Chekhov remained a bachelor, and of Nikolai Leskov’s death. The letter ends as follows: "I’d like to meet a philosopher like Nietzsche somewhere in a train car or on a ship, and spend the whole night talking with him. Though I consider his philosophy a transient thing. It’s not so much convincing, as it is showy” (6: 29). In this way, the letter is framed by images of two philosophers: the contemplative rabbit and Nietzsche. The real-life encounter with the former and the hypothetical encounter with the latter are also facts of Chekhov’s biography, which we would not have known without his letters.
These quotes from the letters do more than exemplify Chekhov’s observant mind and his special gift for personification. They also offer a glimpse into the uniquely Chekhovian view of the world manifest in his epistolary writing as a whole, a world where the boundaries are blurred between great and small, between human society and the natural world, between the creative and mundane. That is why the landscapes of Chekhov’s letters are no less programmatic than the civic and literary "manifestoes” so often quoted from his letters. That is also why the art of being an artist for Chekhov is inseparable from a complete lack of interest in promoting his own ego and from his ability to remain an ordinary man, one who is capable of experiencing the world through the sensibility not only of other people, but of every living creature.
CHEKHOV’S LETTERS AS A “LITERARY FACT” AND A “LITERARY ACT”
It is not controversial to point out that a personal letter can cross the boundary between life and literature. As Yury Tynyanov showed in his classic essay "Literary Fact,” at certain periods the ordinary (bytovoe) letter becomes a means for reanimating artistic forms that have become outdated; it invades literature and in this way becomes a "literary fact.” This happened, for example, in the Pushkin era, when "writers became aware of this genre as profoundly literary; letters were read and shared widely.”19 In the same article, Tynyanov notes that "in the writing of the younger Karamzinists—Alexander Turgenev and Pyotr Vyazemsky—the familiar (druzheskoe) letter underwent constant evolution. Letters are read not only by their addressees; letters are evaluated and analyzed like literary works in the letters that respond to them.”20
The situation with Chekhov’s letters is different. Chekhov objected to the publication of his letters and disapproved when their recipients shared them with others. When, for example, Suvorin showed a friend, the writer Sofia Smirnova-Sazonova, one of his letters, Chekhov wrote: “Evidently she’s a good person, but still you shouldn’t have shown her my letter. I don’t know her, and it makes me uncomfortable” (5: 138). With rare exceptions (letters addressed to his whole family—"to the Chekhovs”), each letter was addressed to one specific correspondent as its only and ultimate recipient. The critical and literary views that Chekhov expressed in letters to Bunin, Kuprin, Gorky, and other, less known, writers undoubtedly influenced their writing, and consequently, the literary process overall, but the interaction always took the form of a one-on-one conversation, not intended for outsiders. In other words, when Chekhov wrote them, his letters were not intended to be taken as a "literary fact,” nor did they serve as such during his lifetime. But even if these letters were not a "literary fact,” still, as Chudakov correctly observes in his essay in this volume, epistolary writing was for Chekhov "a literary act, analogous to his artistic writing. Furthermore, unlike the latter, there were no interruptions in the process of writing: he wrote letters constantly, practically every day.”21 What was it about epistolary writing that made it so fruitful for Chekhov as an artist? Why, for example, did it serve as the most suitable medium for Chekhov’s philosophical, literary, and social "manifestoes”?
One reason is the distinctive nature of Chekhov’s artistic sensibility, which he formulated in terms of letter writing in a letter to the well-known lawyer and man of letters Sergei Andreevsky: “I can only make intellectual statements (rassuzhdat’) when I am directed to or asked a specific question” (4: 335). In other words, in order to “make intellectual statements” on general topics relating to politics, society, and literature, Chekhov needed to be prompted and to be given a reason in the course of a conversation, and of course letters provide precisely that format and occasion. Indeed, many of Chekhov’s most important and popular statements were not spoken in a vacuum, but occurred naturally in an epistolary dialogue. For example, his famous statement that literature only asks questions, but does not provide answers, came in an ongoing exchange of letters with Suvorin:
You are right when you require that an author be conscious of what he is doing in his work, but you confuse two concepts: answering a question and formulating it correctly. An author is only responsible for the latter. Anna Karenina or Eugene Onegin do not answer a single question, but they fully satisfy you because the questions they raise are all formulated correctly. The court’s duty is to formulate the questions correctly, but let each member of the jury answer them according to his own taste. (3: 46)
Like Suvorin’s other letters, the letter to which Chekhov was responding here was lost, but even without it, Suvorin’s presence can be felt in every line. Chekhov is not simply declaring his position; he is agreeing with his correspondent ("You are right”); arguing with him ("you confuse two concepts”), and appealing to his experience ("they [Anna Karenina and Eugene Onegin] fully satisfy you”).
Generally speaking, such statements are always generated by context; and it often happens that the context is utterly mundane. Just as in his stories and plays, the philosophical and universal elements arise from ordinary, immediate concerns. Chekhov’s comment about Tolstoyanism is often quoted: “Alas, I will never be a follower of Tolstoy! In women I appreciate most of all beauty, and in the history of mankind—culture, which manifests itself in carpets, springed carriages, and wit” (4: 267). But here again, this is not an absolute, abstract statement arising in a void; it emerges from a precise context: "It’s cold in the barn. Now I would love to have some carpets, a fireplace, bronzes, and learned conversations” (ibid.). At the time, Chekhov was renting a summer dacha in Bogimovo, and we sense that if the circumstances had been different, or if the temperature in the barn had been just a bit warmer, we would never have learned what he liked "most of all” about women and the history of mankind.
Still, what must have attracted Chekhov most about the genre was its freedom from convention and lack of constraint. "Do not make it slick, do not polish it; be awkward and bold,” he advised his brother Alexander (3: 188). Chekhov followed his own advice most of all in his letters, where, not fearing "awkwardness” or worrying about literary conventions, he boldly combined stylistically and thematically incompatible elements and deployed sharp, "unplanned” transitions. For this reason, we feel that it is arbitrary to divide Chekhov’s letters into sub-genres, as A. M. Malakhova did in her 1974 article on the poetics of Chekhov’s epistolary prose. The sub-genres she lists include, for example: epistolary conversations, epistolary travel notes, epistolary critical responses, epistolary commentaries, epistolary humoresques and parodies, and business letters.22 While it is true that many letters do tend to a particular generic type, it is no accident that the most interesting of them do not fit into any traditional category. In one of his last works, Chudakov characterized Chekhov’s contribution to the short-story genre: "Chekhov blurred the boundaries between the various types of short story, creating a new syncretic genre. This is not the short story in the old sense, for in it all former limitations have been removed [. . .].” The Chekhov story, according to Chudakov, “breaks down the conventions of all the prose genres.”23 The same can be said about the Chekhov letter: it too is a syncretic genre, in which all limitations have been removed and all generic conventions have been violated. An extended fragment from a letter to Suvorin, which Chekhov wrote on the way home from Sakhalin, can serve as an illustration:
As soon as we left Hong Kong, the ship began to roll heavily. Because it was not laden it pitched as much as 38 degrees, and we were afraid of capsizing, I discovered that I do not suffer from seasickness, which was a pleasant surprise. Two people died as we were on our way to Singapore, and their bodies were thrown overboard. When you see a dead man wrapped in sailcloth somersaulting into the water, it is a shocking realization that the bottom lies several miles below, and you cannot help thinking that you too might die and be tossed into the sea. The horned cattle fell sick, and, by command of Dr. Shcherbak and your humble servant, the herd had to be slaughtered and thrown overboard as well.
I don’t remember much about Singapore, because while driving round the island I became sad for some reason and almost burst into tears. After that came Ceylon, which was paradise. I travelled more than seventy miles by train, and enjoyed my fill of palm groves and bronze-skinned women. [When I have children of my own, I shall be able to boast to them: "Well, you little sons of bitches, once upon a time I had intercourse with a black-eyed Hindu girl, and where do you think it was? In a coconut grove, by the light of the moon!”] From Ceylon we sailed on for another thirteen days and nights without stopping and nearly went out of our minds with boredom. I didn’t mind the heat however. The Red Sea is a depressing place, but I found I was moved by the sight of Mount Sinai.
God’s world is good. Only one thing in it is vile: ourselves. How little justice and humility there is in us, how shabby our idea of patriotism! A drunken, debauched wreck of a man may love his wife and children, but what good is his love? The newspapers all tell us how much we love our great Motherland, but what is our way of expressing this love? In place of knowledge there is limitless impudence and arrogance, in place of work there is idleness and bestiality; there is no justice and the idea of honour goes no further than "pride in one’s uniform”—a uniform which is most usually to be found decorating the docks of our courts. What we must do is work, and let everything else go to the devil. Above all we must be just, and everything else will follow. (4: 139–40; B/P 253–54 [Figure 12]).
This letter has gained a certain notoriety thanks to the often-cited "sensational” passage about "intercourse” with the Hindu girl, which the vigilant Soviet censorship excluded from print.24 Before this fragment became public, Chekhov critics had just as frequently cited the "social” passage from the following paragraph, which opens with a memorable aphorism: “God’s world is good. Only one thing in it is vile: ourselves.”25 But by detaching any individual statement out of its holistic context, we lose something much more precious: the dynamics of Chekhov’s thinking and the complex and multifaceted unity of his personality, which expresses itself freely and without constraint, over and above any limits or barriers, whether thematic, generic, or stylistic. The letter combines travel notes, the familiar letter, and philosophical and social-political statements just as organically as it does the world of nature and of humanity, merging the intimate with the social, the profane ("intercourse”) with the sacred ("God’s world”), and Eros with Thanatos. Indeed, the story of the "black-eyed Hindu girl” arises as a kind of reaction to the fear of death that was expressed in the previous paragraph (“you too might die and be tossed into the sea”26), along with the sadness that comes over him on the trip around Singapore (“almost burst into tears”). In its turn the thought about poorly understood patriotism, taken in its full context, is spoken not by an incorporeal preacher, but by a full-blooded man, full of human passion. The entirety of the letter insists that this thought be interpreted in a new light. In what other genre could Chekhov have allowed himself in one paragraph to speak of a palm grove and "bronze-skinned” women, and in the next, with equal, unfeigned passion, of patriotism, without allowing the juxtaposition to convey an ironic or condescending impression?
LETTERS AS PART OF A DIALOGUE. TO WHOM ARE CHEKHOV’S LETTERS ADDRESSED?
One of the determining features of the epistolary genre is its direct orientation to an interlocutor. A letter is always addressed to another person and, as it were, incorporates that person’s voice into its text. As Mikhail Bakhtin writes, “A characteristic feature of the letter is an acute awareness of the interlocutor, the addressee to whom it is directed. The letter, like a rejoinder in a dialogue, is addressed to a specific person, and it takes into account the other’s possible reply.”27 This general truth relates directly to Chekhov’s letters, in which, as many critics—among them some of our authors—have noted, the writer’s voice sounds different when addressing different correspondents. It is obvious that the letters to Suvorin differ in tone and style from those to the writer’s brother Alexander. Was this the same Chekhov who wrote to Lika Mizinova and Lidia Avilova? In other words, is Chekhov “a fox,” changing his style depending on the addressee? In what does the unity of Chekhov’s letters inhere?
Let us consider five letters that Chekhov wrote on the same date (27 March 1894) during a visit to Yalta.28 In the Academy edition these letters are given in alphabetical order based on the addressees’ names; we will read them in this order. The first letter is addressed to Yakov Korneev, a physician and the owner of the house on Sadovaya-Kudrinskaya in Moscow rented by the Chekhovs in 1886–1890; in it, among other things, Chekhov writes in detail, citing numbers and costs about his recent purchase of the Melikhovo estate. The businesslike report soon gives way to a genre picture tinted with gentle humor: “There’s plenty of space in the country; life is unconstrained; you can sit on a bench at the gate, or lie on the grass, or walk down the street in your robe. Your own horses, your own dogs. You go for drive somewhere with your own horses, and the dogs run along behind with their tongues hanging out. In a word, bliss” (5: 279). The next letter, to Chekhov’s French translator Jules Legras, discusses a serious literary problem: the editors of Russian Gazette (Russkie vedomosti) "out of cowardice and prudishness made a number of cuts” in the story "Big Volodya and Small Volodya,” and Chekhov asks Legras to delay publication of the story in French until he can send him the complete version.29 This short text can be categorized generically as a business letter, but there’s an unexpected shift at the end, mentioning his dachshunds, who are already familiar to our reader, and in this way violating the rules of the genre: "It’s been a month since I’ve seen Bromide and Quinine” (5: 281). The next letter is to Lika Mizinova, who at the time was in Paris. The letter was written in that special tone that Chekhov used exclusively in letters to this addressee, a tone that could be characterized as both playfully grotesque and genuinely intimate:
Dear Lika, thank you for the letter. Although in your letter you’re trying to scare me, saying that you’re going to die soon, though you tease me, saying that you’ve been rejected by me, still, thank you. I know perfectly well that you will not die and that no one has rejected you.
I’m in Yalta, and I’m bored, even extremely bored. The local, so to speak, aristocracy is staging Faust, and I go to their rehearsals and savor contemplating an entire flower-bed of black, auburn, flaxen and chestnut heads; I listen to singing, I eat; at the home of the headmistress of the girls’ school I eat chebureki and side of mutton with kasha; in the homes of noble families I eat green shchi; in the confectionary shop I eat; I eat in my hotel as well. I go to bed at 10 o’clock; I get up at 10, and after lunch I rest, but still, I’m bored, dear Lika. Not bored because I don’t have "my ladies” by my side, but because the northern spring is better than the one here, and not for a single minute am I free of the thought that I must write, I’m obligated. To write, write, and write. I am of the opinion that true happiness is impossible without idleness. My ideal is to be idle and love a plump girl. For me the height of pleasure is just to walk or sit and do nothing; my favorite pastime is to collect things that I don’t need (leaves, straw, etc.), and do useless things. Meanwhile I’m a man of literature and I must write even here, in Yalta. Dear Lika, when you become a great singer and they give you a good salary, then do a charitable act for me: marry me to yourself and feed me at your own expense, so that I can sit and do nothing. (5: 281)
In the letter to Suvorin written on that same day, as often happens in letters to this correspondent, Chekhov offers one of his famous programmatic statements, once again on Tolstoy. Like other examples in Chekhov’s letters, this one arises, seemingly in passing, from a specific tangible sensation:
Possibly because I no longer smoke, Tolstoyan morality has ceased to influence me; deep in my soul I feel a hostility toward it, and this is, of course, unfair. There is peasant blood flowing in my veins, and I am not to be impressed with peasant virtues. Since my childhood, I have been a firm believer in progress, and could not have been otherwise, since the difference between the time when they used to flog me and the time they ceased to flog me was enormous. I have always loved intelligent people, sensitivity, courtesy and wit, but I treated such things as people’s picking at their corns, and their foot bindings emitting a foul smell, with the same indifference that I have for some young ladies who have a habit of walking about in the morning with curlers in their hair. But there was a time when Tolstoy’s philosophy strongly affected me; it possessed me for six or seven years and I was affected not so much by his fundamental ideas—which I already knew—as by the manner in which he expressed them, his very reasonableness, and no doubt a species of hypnotism peculiar to him. But now something inside me protests against it: rationality and justice tell me that there is more love for humankind in electricity and steam than there is in chastity and abstaining from meat. (5: 283)
And finally, Chekhov also wrote to his sister Maria (Masha) on that day. In this letter, short and, like the letter to Legras, somewhat businesslike in tone, Chekhov informs his sister about his plans, and notes the possible days of his return, so that horses could be sent to the station for him. And unexpectedly (or rather, because this is a Chekhov letter, completely expectedly) in the paragraph that follows the businesslike tone becomes poetic, but in such a way that it is almost impossible to determine where precisely the transition took place: "I’ve sold my fur coat. So, if there’s a frost, send my robe to the station. I wanted to bring some ‘Brymza’ cheese, but there’s none for sale. I saw the starlings who flew to us in Melikhovo” (5: 285). This completely neutral combination of the fur coat he had sold, the “Brymza” cheese that he had not been able to buy, and the starlings, exemplifies a distinctive feature of Chekhov’s attitude toward life, as expressed in his epistolary writing, by which it can be distinguished from that of any other writer. Take, for comparison, Leo Tolstoy’s letter to Afanasy Fet from 6–7 December 1876, in which the writer praises his addressee for a poem he had sent him ("Among the Stars”), in part because "the same piece of paper on which the poem is written also contains an outpouring of grief about the fact that kerosene has gone up to 12 kopecks.” According to Tolstoy, this is a "tangential, but true sign of a poet.”30 In Chekhov’s letters, poetry and the prose of everyday life do not simply appear on the same page, but constantly show through and interrelate with each other.
This paragraph is also an eloquent example of a Chekhovian subtext conveying the writer’s unvoiced homesickness (in the letter to Legras, as we recall, it was felt in the reference to the dogs: "It’s been a month since I’ve seen Bromide and Quinine”). But in the letter to Mizinova, Chekhov directly names this feeling: "In June it won’t be me travelling to Paris, but you to Melikhovo. Your longing for home will drive you there” (5: 282). It is characteristic that six years before this, the expression "longing for home” (toska po rodine) appeared together with a reference to birds of passage: “It’s devilishly cold, but the poor birds are already flying to Russia! They are driven by their longing for home and their love for their fatherland; if poets only knew how many millions of birds fall victim to homesickness and love for their homes, how many of them freeze to death along the way, how many torments they suffer in March and the beginning of April when they arrive home, they would long ago have sung their praises” (2: 211).
Five letters—five voices, or rather, five intonations, each incorporating in itself what Bakhtin called “an acute awareness of the interlocutor, the addressee to whom it is directed.” And at the same time this is unmistakably one single voice, which, to find its full expression, requires a number of completely heterogeneous interlocutors.
The correspondence from December of that year offers another example. Writing to Elena Shavrova on 11 December 1894, Chekhov complains about the monotony of his literary labor: “I’m so fed up with doing the same old thing; I want to write about devils, about terrible ‘volcanic’ women, about sorcerers—but alas!—they demand genteel novellas and stories from the lives of Ivan Gavrilyches and their wives” (5: 344). On the next day, answering a question that Suvorin had asked, Chekhov writes: “In your last letter you ask: ‘What should a Russian man do now?’ Here’s my answer: desire. Most of all he needs desire, temperament. I’m so fed up with people’s whining and complaining” (5: 345). Taking these letters together, it is not difficult to catch their thematic and intonational unity, relating to the idea and feeling of boredom and annoyance (the motif of being “fed up” [nadoelo]) which shows through in spite of the diversity of addressees). Furthermore, these two fragments complement and deepen each other in a new way: the first one conveys, behind the author’s own feeling of dissatisfaction, a state common to society as a whole; in the second, by contrast, the distinctive silhouette of the letter’s author shows through what is a rather general categorization of "Russian man.” To a degree, we have to feel sorry for Shavrova and Suvorin: each received their Chekhov letter, but neither could read them both. This is what differentiates Chekhov’s contemporaneous correspondents from us. As Katherine Tiernan O’Connor points out in her chapter in this volume, “Although Chekhov’s individual addressees were privy only to that part of the discourse directed at them, we are vicariously privileged, as it were, and can read over their shoulders. [. . .] We see, in short, that Chekhov is revealing far more to us, his future readers, than he is to his then current addressees.”31
This is one of the most distinctive features of the epistolary genre. Each separate letter, if it is indeed a personal letter, is addressed to one specific person. Taken all together, letters are only available to a "collective addressee”—posterity. Aikhenvald, whom we cited above, noted with undisguised envy toward those who had the good fortune to be Chekhov’s correspondents, "To unseal a letter from Chekhov, to read his elegant lines must have been an incredible pleasure; it was as though he had sealed precious kernels of his talent into the envelopes.”32 Today anyone, however, can experience a no less "incredible pleasure,” one which was out of reach even for the writer’s most intimate and trustworthy correspondents: to sense that any of us is Chekhov’s addressee and the recipient of his epistolary heritage, to read thousands of his letters as, in the words of Vladimir Lakshin, “one great aggregate letter, addressed to the future.”33 In this sense, to quote Osip Mandelshtam’s article “On the Addressee” (“O sobesednike”), Chekhov’s letters could be called “a letter in a bottle,” addressed to a “providential” reader:
At a critical moment, a seafarer tosses a sealed bottle into the ocean waves, containing his name and a message detailing his fate. Wandering along the dunes many years later, I happen upon it in the sand. I read the message, note the date, the last will and testament of one who passed on. I have the right to do so. I haven’t opened someone else’s mail. The message in the bottle was addressed to his finder. I found it. That means, I have become its secret addressee.34
The aims of this volume’s contributors are ambitious and universal—to reach such a providential addressee in every reader, whether scholar, biographer, historian, writer, theater professional, student, family member, or lover, revealing in everyone the humanistic core that was Chekhov’s central concern.
THIS BOOK
The first such collection in English or Russian, our book introduces this substantial but neglected part of Chekhov’s creative legacy to scholars, writers, and theater professionals, as well as to a general audience. Part I, “ Publication History, Reception, and Textual Issues,” addresses the publication of Chekhov’s letters, and textual issues that emerged in various editions and translations. Liya Bushkanets presents the early history of publication of the letters in Russia, noting the trends at work in their reception immediately following the writer’s death in 1904. As her analysis demonstrates, his letters became an important source for contemporaries seeking to understand the writer’s psychology, his literary legacy, and what was called his “spiritual” (dukhovnaia) biography. Vladimir Kataev then offers an insider’s look into the fraught issues related to censorship during the publication of the Academy edition of Chekhov’s complete collected works in the 1970s and 1980s. Chekhov biographer and scholar Rosamund Bartlett describes the process of collecting and editing the letters for the most complete English-language edition to date, A Life in Letters, published by Penguin in the 2004 centennial year. Chekhov’s letters pose a set of challenging riddles for our authors; in his chapter, Igor Sukhikh investigates an intriguing episode at the opposite end of the spectrum and proves that a letter traditionally attributed to Chekhov is a fake.
In the second part, “Approaches to a Body of Work,” Vladimir Lakshin, Michael Finke, A. P. Kuzicheva, and Irina Gitovich offer models for reading Chekhov’s letters as a whole, addressing psychology, biography, and poetics. Each author uncovers previously unnoticed, uniquely Chekhovian features of the letters, showing the relationship between the writer’s epistolary writing and his best-known literary works. In studying letters, the question of genre naturally arises. In part III, “Genre,” three authors offer complementary, but different generic models, focusing in turns on Chekhov the dramatist, poet, and storyteller. Alexander Chudakov analyzes the style of the letters in detail, showing their many commonalities with the writer’s prose fiction. Radislav Lapushin reveals the poetic undercurrent of Chekhov’s epistolary prose, arguing that Chekhov’s letters should be read with the same attention to the context and detail as poetry. For her part, Emma Polotskaya shows the ways the artistic structure of the letters reflects the specifics of Chekhov’s dramatic talent.
The largest and most diverse section of the book, part IV, is dedicated to individual analyses of letters in dialogue with their context and examining the ways letters illuminate Chekhov’s relationships with specific individuals. Details of these interactions often entered his stories and plays, blurring the distinction between life and art. The chapters proceed chronologically, based on the period of the writer’s life that they address. Analyzing how Chekhov’s character-building efforts were recorded in his letters related to the Sakhalin journey in 1890, Galina Rylkova offers a fresh explanation of some of the drivenness of Chekhov’s behavior during this period, linking it to his relationship with his family. Svetlana Evdokimova’s essay places Chekhov’s ideas on education and culture, which constitute a significant part of his epistolary oeuvre, in the context of the late-nineteenth-century type of the “intelligent.” Studying lacunae is particularly rewarding; Serge Gregory faces the challenge of reconstructing the relationship between Chekhov and Levitan in the absence of all of Chekhov’s letters to Levitan, which were burned at the artist’s request by his brother after his death. Then, focusing on the forms of address in Chekhov’s letters to Olga Knipper, John Douglas Clayton demonstrates that these letters, while intimate and personal, reflect some of the main motifs of his stories and plays—adultery, animals, and ethnicity. Zinovy Paperny considers the close relationship between the letters Chekhov wrote from Yalta in 1900 and the theme of yearning for Moscow that dominates The Three Sisters, which he was writing during that time. Finally, Katherine Tiernan O’Connor explores striking parallels between Chekhov’s letters written toward the end of his life and those of D. H. Lawrence. Both writers died abroad at the age of forty-four and were indefatigable letter writers who addressed the experience of mortality in their own idiosyncratic idiom. Our book culminates in a section entitled “My Favorite Chekhov Letter,” in which scholars and writers offer a short reflection on a letter that is particularly meaningful and memorable for them.
Above all, like everything else Chekhov wrote, the letters deserve primarily to be read for the sheer joy of it. Chekhov writes about what we care about most, about what we may not have the courage to ponder on our own: relationships, love, fate, death. Our authors, major Chekhov scholars from both sides of the ocean, offer a broad and authoritative guide to this remarkable epistolary legacy. The book represents our own letter to Chekhov—not merely a thank-you note, but a multifaceted contribution to an ongoing dialogue.
Radislav Lapushin, Chapel Hill
Carol Apollonio, Durham
August 2018
