64 The New York Review
clever. They think I am a genius be-
cause I wrote ‘Kashtanka.’”
But what must have appealed most
to Chekhov was the experiment in per-
spective: How to describe the world
as it might appear to a dog, freed
from human preconceptions? His an-
swer is funny in its simplicity—when
Kashtanka dreams, she dreams about
meeting other dogs—but a similar idea
yields a more complex kind of comedy
in “Grisha,” which narrates an after-
noon stroll through the eyes of a curi-
ous two- year- old. Chekhov writes near
the beginning of the story:
Up to now Grisha has known only
a rectangular world, where his bed
stands in one corner, his nanny’s
trunk in another, a chair in a third,
and in the fourth an icon lamp
burns. If you peek under the bed,
you see a doll with a broken- off
arm and a drum.The eruption of the outside world into
this orderly universe is fascinating but
painful, and the story ends with Grisha
in tears, overcome by the volume of his
new impressions.
In these high- concept tales, Chekhov
was discovering the theme of his great-
est work: the line between what makes
us laugh and what makes us cry is a
matter of perspective. A man at a party
is accidentally kissed by a woman who
mistakes him for someone else: that
could be the setup for another comic
sketch, and when the officer Ryabo-
vich in “The Kiss” tells his comrades
that it happened to him, that’s exactly
how they receive it. One reciprocates
by boasting about his own anonymous
conquest on a train: “I open my eyes
and, can you imagine—a woman! Dark
eyes, red lips like fine salmon....”
“But how could you see the lips if it
was dark?” another responds; and so
the whole thing is reduced to barracks
banter.
Five years earlier, Chekhov might
have written “The Kiss” in a hundred
lines, focused on the moment of the
kiss itself. Now what interests him is
its aftermath, the way it initiates Ry-
abovich into a wholly internal drama
of elation, fantasy, and eventual disil-
lusionment. Like Grisha, his naiveté
allows him to experience things with
an extraordinary simplicity and inten-
sity: “His cheek, by the left moustache,
where the unknown woman had kissed
him, trembled with a light, pleasant
coolness, as if from menthol drops,”
Chekhov writes, in a simile whose ba-
nality tells us everything we need to
know about the scope of Ryabovich’s
sensory experience.
Yet by the end of the story, even
though almost nothing else happens to
Ryabovich, he has grown from inno-
cence into knowledge. “It had flowed
the same way in May,” he reflects when
he returns to the site of the kiss in
August:
From the small river in the month
of May it had poured into a big
river, from the river into the sea,
then it evaporated, turned into
rain, and maybe that same water
was now flowing again before Ry-
abovich’s eyes.. .What for? Why?“The Kiss” was written in 1887, the
year after Chekhov received Grigor-
ovich’s admonishing letter, and it shows
how he would fulfill his promise “to
achieve something” in fiction: not by
rejecting his early work and becoming
self- consciously serious, but by turning
his comic stories inside out. Many of
his masterpieces could be summarized
in a way that makes them sound like
comedies. “Ward No. 6,” like “Cor-
poral Whompov,” is about turning the
tables: the doctor in charge of an in-
sane asylum neglects his patients, and
in the end he becomes an inmate. Even
The Cherry Orchard follows the same
broad outline: Lopakhin, the grandson
of a serf, ends up as the owner of the
estate where his grandfather toiled. If
Beaumarchais had written it, it would
have been a comedy with Lopakhin as
the resourceful, Figaro- like hero.Of course, the actual effect of
“Ward No. 6” is terrifying, in a way
that foreshadows The Trial (a book
that made Kafka break down laugh-
ing when he read it aloud to friends).
It doesn’t appear in Fifty- Two Stories,
but in other, shorter pieces we can see
Chekhov experimenting with comic
forms. The 1894 story “In a Country
House” revolves around a stock type,
the reactionary blowhard. Here, he is
named Rashevich, and we meet him in
mid- rant:From the point of view of broth-
erhood, equality, and all that, the
swineherd Mitka may be as much of
a human being as Goethe or Fred-
erick the Great; but put yourself on
a scientific footing, have the cour-
age to look facts straight in the face,
and it will be obvious to you that
blue blood is not a prejudice.... I’m
an incorrigible Darwinist....His audience is Meier, a young mag-
istrate who is the only person in town
still willing to visit him—but only on
account of Rashevich’s two daughters,
whom he is tentatively courting. This
time, however, it turns out Rashevich
has misjudged his theme, since Meier,
as he stammeringly admits, is “a com-
moner myself,” part of the herd whom
Rashevich has just been dismissing as
unfit to survive. If the story ended with
Meier storming out, it would be a sat-
isfying comic twist—the aristocratic
bully getting his just deserts.
But what does it actually feel like to
be that blowhard? A joke is funny when
we hear it, but is it funny to be trappedinside of it? After Meier leaves, Che-
khov’s focus shifts from Rashevich’s
outer monologue to his inner one, al-
lowing the reader to perceive his baf-
flement at his own actions—the way he
keeps saying things that will alienate
people, even though he’s ashamed that
his neighbors shun him and call him
“the toad.” When it comes to express-
ing his true feelings, his oratorical gifts
desert him and all he can do is mutter,
“‘Not nice... ,’ he sighed, lying under
the blanket. ‘Not nice!’” The story
ends with Rashevich overhearing his
daughters, who are furious that he has
driven off their only suitor, referring to
him as “the toad.” Outsiders, includ-
ing the reader at first, may deride this
man’s belligerence and complacency,but Chekhov shows that from the in-
side these feel more like helpless com-
pulsion and self- loathing.This movement from mockery to
sympathy marks the point where Che-
khov’s comedy passes into humanism.
Several of the tales in Fifty- Two Stories
feel like self- conscious trials of empa-
thy, in which Chekhov the doctor tries
to imagine his way into the minds of
textbook “cases”: a woman in labor in
“The Name- Day Party” or a paranoid
obsessive in “A Breakdown,” which
actually ends with a doctor taking his
medical history. In later stories, Che-
khov applies himself to characters who
are more challenging because they are
less lurid and “interesting”: a poor pro-
vincial schoolmistress in “In the Cart,”
a sexless middle- aged bachelor in “Ion-
ych.” Traveling down this imaginative
road, he arrived at the late plays in
which, famously, “nothing happens,”
yet which seem to convey so much of
what it is like to be human.
But the most powerful tales in Fifty-
Two Stories are the ones that revolve
around laughter and being laughed at.
Nothing is more tormenting, Chekhov
repeatedly suggests, than to be treated
as a joke when one isn’t in on the joke.
In “Enemies,” Kirilov, a country doctor
whose son has just died, is torn from the
side of his grieving wife by a stranger,
Abogin, who insists that Kirilov come
immediately to tend to his own mortally
ill wife. When they arrive at Abogin’s,
it turns out that his wife isn’t there: she
was feigning illness to get him out of
the house so that she could elope withher lover. Kirilov’s reaction isn’t simply
anger, but something more complex: he
insists that he has been personally in-
sulted, dragged out of his own tragedy
into Abogin’s farce. “I’ve been forced
to play in some sort of banal comedy, to
play the role of a stage prop!” he shouts.
This is how Chekhov formulates the
theme of humiliation, which is so per-
vasive in nineteenth- century Russian
fiction: as a problem of being trapped
in the wrong genre. In the 1887 story
“Volodya,” the “unattractive, sickly,
and timid” seventeen- year- old protag-
onist is determined to recast himself as
a forceful romantic hero by seducing
Nyuta, an older married woman who is
a friend of his mother’s. But Chekhov
allows the reader to see that it is really
Nyuta who is doing the seducing, and
that even sleeping with Volodya doesn’t
stop her from thinking of him as a silly
adolescent. He is horrified to overhear
Nyuta joking about his passionate
overtures to his mother: “And maman
laughed!” he says to himself, realizing
that nothing he does will make adults
take him seriously. The story ends
abruptly with Volodya shooting him-
self in the head—the most earnest ges-
ture he can think of, which is also the
most typically adolescent overreaction
possible. The story is a tragedy about a
hero who is unable to be tragic.
This makes “Volodya” a kind of first
draft of The Seagull, which Chekhov
wrote almost a decade later, and which
also turns on the humiliation of a young
man by his mother. Konstantin tries to
break out of the shadow of his famous
actress mother, Arkadina, by literally
creating a new genre for himself, stag-
ing a play in the avant- garde Symbolist
style. But his mother just laughs at the
performance: “He told me himself that
it was all in fun, so I treated his play as
if it were comedy,” she says. In the end,
being treated as a comic figure, instead
of as the serious person he feels himself
to be, drives Konstantin to suicide—
less because he wants to die, perhaps,
than because he finally wants to con-
vince his mother that he is serious.
The premiere of The Seagull in Oc-
tober 1896 was a notorious disaster, in
part because it was staged as the first
half of a benefit evening for a popular
actress, who was to appear in a light
comedy on the second half of the bill.
Audience members who showed up
expecting to be made to laugh by Che-
khov’s “comedy in four acts” got their
revenge by laughing at it when they
weren’t supposed to—thus inflicting a
version of Konstantin’s humiliation on
the playwright himself.
In a letter to Suvorin a few days later,
the bitterness of that humiliation can
be gauged by the effort Chekhov makes
to shrug it off:After the performance I dined
fittingly at Romanov’s, then went
to bed where I slept soundly.... I
acted with the cold reasonableness
of a man whose proposal has been
rejected, and for whom the only
thing remaining is to go away.But after that first night audiences
warmed to The Seagull, and a few days
later the actress playing Nina wrote
to the playwright, “Victory is ours....
How I’d like to see you now, but what
I’d like even more is for you to be pres-
ent and hear the unanimous cry of ‘Au-
thor.’” In the end, Chekhov had the last
laugh. QAnton Chekhov reading his play The Seagull to members of the
Moscow Art Theater company, 1898State Literary Museum, Moscow