ANTON CHEKHOV: HOW TO WRITE FOR ETERNITY, KNOWING YOU
ARE TOO YOUNG TO DIE.
There used to be a café in the 6ème
arrondissement of Paris, not far away from the junction between the Rue
Vavin and the Rue Nôtre Dame des Champs, visited quite often by the author
of this blog, above all between July-September 1998. I use the
“past-tense”, as thanks to the “Corona” virus, there is no certainty of whether
that, or any known, café in Paris is still there, or will
ever re-open.
“The Lady with a Dog”, Anna, Elena Sofonova, in the last seconds of the film-version “Black Eyes” (Oci Ciorne) directed by Nikita Michalkov, 1987.
Quite near 101 Boulevard Raspail,
still a building of the Alliance Française,
where the author of this blog was a regular attendant, for some weeks, in the
year 1981, to reinforce his French, while residing for more than two months in
a small flat in the Rue du Cherche-Midi, 5ème arrondissement.
Only at the end of the 1990s did I
learn that one of my
favourite German writers almost
always stayed at a flat in the same rue, when he happened to visit Paris.
I doubt whether any of the waiters
who knew me then is still around – some must have retired. Yet they took more
than polite notice of this humble scribbler, as I was known to select the same
table, asked for an espresso (ristretto),spent a long time (the ristretto
was asked twice) reading booklets on how to learn Russian and a bilingual
(French-Russian) anthology of short-stories. They did show an unexpected
indulgence, taking into account that they were Parisians, when this author,
after getting to the devastatingly hilarious ending of a nouvelle
entitled Nuite d’angoisse (Страшная Ночь),
1884, burst into loud laughter, lost his equilibrium, hit the table, and fell
onto the floor – the cup of coffee (empty) also followed him – and crashed.
There were no further additions to the bill.
It was one of the short-stories
contained in Nouvelles. Frissons et crimes, (Содрогания И Преступленя)[1] of Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (Антон Павлович Чехов) (*1860-†1904). I was on my way to discover that there were in fact “two” Chekhovs, the
one of the short-stories, and the dramaturg.
The former for me, until then, unknown, the latter of course someone whom
I met in television and in theatre, in London, somewhere in the 1980s. Altogether this was one of my “late literary-encounters” in life, as I had not
found hitherto the key to unlock his writing. Nor did I look for it. A “chance
encounter” thus, one which was going to change my life.
First page of the Nouvelles
of Anton Chekhov, bilingual French-Russian, on the left the professional
visiting-card of the author between 1998-2001.
©
Then followed L’allumete suedoise,
(Шведсая Спичка), 1883. I had the good idea of coming to the end of the short-story while at
home, so that I could laugh my heart out with no major damage to the
environment. It did not take long for me to argue, at least intimately, that Anton
Chekhov not only did anticipate Franz Kafka (*1883-†1924) at almost all levels (absurdity, moody and
ominous bureaucracy, fantasy and reality as two tangible, brother-like
parameters), plus a Slavish pre-announcement of surrealism.
He did it with an original and
sublime humour, portraying his compatriots with lovely irony, at times teasing
satire, yet never detached from a sincere humanness. It is a remarkable
achievement for a writer who knew, as he was a trained medical doctor, already
by the end of the 19th century, in his late thirties, and perhaps
even earlier, that he had only a few years to live.
The cafe in the Rue Vavin was
chosen for my daily self-training in Russian, as during those months it was
fairly quiet in the morning, the long promenade from my flat in the Rue
Daguerre, through the Boulevard Raspail, becoming a soothing entry
into the day. I was due to go Kiev, Ukraine, in October of the same
year, for a first academic stay, lecturing in English. I was to come back for
the whole year of 2000, and again for many months in 2001. My Russian did
improve considerably, but so did my basic Ukrainian.
Much later came The Lady with a
Dog, Дама с собачкой (should actually be “The Lady with the Little Dog”),
1899, where poetry and tenderness go together with a raw-nerve portrayal of
female and male crossroads at midlife. Vladimir Nabokov, Владимир Владимирович Набокоб (*1899-†1977) was another relevant
contribution of Russia to world-literature, albeit his well-known novels were
all written in English. As an academic lecturer and literary critic, he
combined the roles of an iconoclast and a provocateur, whimsically rearranging
the chess-board of world literature at outrageous will He did not fail to utter
despairing, unfair comments upon Chekhov (on Shakespeare as
well...), yet he acknowledged The Lady with a Dog as “one of the
greatest stories ever written”[2]. It begins with a fortuitous
encounter along the sea-side promenade in Yalta, Crimea, between a married
woman and a married man, both seeking solace for body and mind – as well as
distance from their respective families. Then it moves to Saint-Petersburg, Moscow, Chekhov overseeing the entanglements and the disentanglements of
emotions like a surgeon with an ultra-fine scalpel, decorticating the souls of
two human beings who try to re-construct their lives – facing adverse odds.
I could not possibly imagine in 1998
that I was to enjoy the same sea-side promenade in Yalta, populated by Chekhov’s
figures, and by himself in the years of his refuge in Crimea, the last option
to fight against an uncontrollable illness. It took place in the year 2000,
when I was living in Kiev. Accompanied by a good English friend of mine, we
decided to go first to Odessa, and then to Yalta, wanting to experience, on the
one hand, the often vaunted healing properties of the sun and the salted-water
of the Black Sea. Yet my priority was to visit the places where Chekhov sought
to appease his body, and those spots shared as well with Leo Tolstoy (*1828- †1910) Лев
Николаевич Толстой and
Maxim Gorki, Максим
Горький (*1868- †1936). I bumped onto the last two by
sheer lottery in the late 1960s, while in South America, yet a rewarding
acquaintance began to take place early 1980s, while in London. The three
Russian writers, in spite of their different backgrounds and leanings,
constituted one of the truest and mutually synergetic friendships ever
registered in world-literature.
As soon as debarked off the train
from Odessa at Simferopol, I began to realise that Crimea was “frozen” in the
air, an air-conditioned piece of history, back-boiling fumes from a population
which in its great majority felt very much Russian, and had decided never to
surrender such an identity. A sunny early autumn bathed in sunshine the hills
and the vineyards, as we approached Yalta by car, exhilarated by the sight of
the Black Sea, for the first time. The seeds of the events which were to unfold
in the second-decade of the 21st century were already there, germinating at an increasing speed.
Already between 1884-1885 Chekhov found himself coughing blood, and in 1886 the
attacks worsened, there was no doubt… “tuberculosis”. A major haemorrhage of
the lungs, while sojourning in Moscow in 1898 prompted him to buy a villa in
the outskirts of Yalta, at the Black Sea, hoping that the climate would at
least slow down his illness.
We arrived there on the 30th
of September, 2000, to the “white doma”, a two-stores villa, solid and
welcoming, surrounded by gardens full of trees and, above all, bamboo canes, as Chekhov “loved to go
fishing...”, we learned. There was a group of Austrians visiting the place,
guided by one lady who gave the explanations in Russian, translated into German
by a splendid woman dressed all black. An austere elegance seemed to impregnate
the interiors, including a piano, which, according to the guide, had been
tested by Sergei Rachmaninov, Сергей Васильевич Рахманинов, (*1873- †1943). He did indeed dedicate his symphonic poem,
opus 7, The Cliff (or The Rock), to the writer,
and both spent a lot of time together, while in and around Yalta.
Too many tourists, too many visitors, forced Chekhov to buy a smaller, more anonymous refuge, a dacha in Gurzuf (or Hurzuf), where we went next, not before visiting an exposition on Pushkin, Александир Сергевич пушкин (*1799- †1837) in Crimea, who fell under the spell of the stony cliffs on the coast, as Chekhov would.
The next surprise was the
lady-in-charge, a delightful mature lady who greeted us with such tender affability, that we felt immediately at home. We were no longer tourists;
we were part of the family. As in the villa in Yalta, the same unaggressive,
unplanned austerity, a furniture conceived for intimate, relevant usage,
every corner warm and unpretentious. We
were then invited to visit the garden, the lady-in-charge selecting wine-grapes, figs, into a paper bag, a present for us, “you shall always be welcome...”
“...privileged should he consider himself, whom the Greek Gods granted one of the happiest days of his life, twilight at the dacha of Chekhov, embraced by soul-blessed females, picking grapes and figs in the garden looking onto the Black Sea...”
“I
brought them (the wine grapes and the figs) back to Kiev, and while eating them
in the kitchen of my flat, I remembered that paradise twilight, in the ancient
dacha of Chekhov, someone who by his literature, and his garden, had managed to
overcome his own fatality.”
A further stimulus came with an
exquisite present by a French lady in Paris, in 2006, a careful French edition
of the letters concerning his voyage to the island of Sakhalin, to visit a then
feared and infamous penal colony, Voyage à Sakhaline, 1890-1891, Lettres
d’hier et lettres d’aujordhui[4]
Very much worth-reading, first of all, to get astonished as to the endurance of
Chekhov, embarked onto a weeks-long trip by train, land and sea under
often appalling conditions. Secondly to get a sense of his unshakeable
attachment to family and friends, sending best wishes, doctor’s advice, prescriptions, asking to be kept informed of all minutiae unfolding around the
closest-ones.
A splendid performance of The Cherry Orchard, Вишнёвый сад, 1904, in Paris, at the end of 2007, reunited the author of this blog with his theatre. But it was only in 2015, in Berlin, that I was made aware of the 1987 film Black Eyes (Oci Ciorne), directed by Nikita Michalkov, “based on some of Anton Chekhov’s stories”. The axis of the film is a re-interpretation of The Lady with a Dog, somewhat retouched, and with a different ending, retaining, nevertheless, the substance of the original. An Italian-Russian production, where Marcello Mastroianni was to put on scene one of his best performances. Partly conceived also as an homage to Federico Fellini, in particular his Otto et Mezzo (Eight and a Half), the film does not fail to convey a charming recreation of epoch and places, through outstanding photography, fitting wardrobes, well-timed music.
“The Lady with a Dog”, Anna, her dog, her hat, just rescued
from a pool full of black mud by Romano,
Marcello Mastroianni, 1987 film version.
Chekhov did not share the political ideals of Maxim
Gorki, on his way to unconditional Bolshevism, yet he resigned from the
Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg in 1902, when Gorki election was
annulled, and remained close friends for ever. Neither did he embrace the whole
of Tolstoy’s encyclopaedic array of proposals to reform Russia,
religion, society, nature, the world (plus life as well). “Admiring the artist,
he refused to follow the thinker...”[5],
in private issuing thunderous criticism of Tolstoy's short-novel Sonata Kreutzer,
1891, both from the point of view of a writer and of a scientist.
Yet in 1891 Tolstoy was leading a national campaign to rescue parts of the
Russian population from famine, due to a succession of poor harvests, despite
censorship and repression. Chekhov, very much moved, did not fail to
acknowledge his admiration, devotion for that “Jupiter-like figure”[6], the only whom one could describe as the
modern heir to Homer.
He was a liberal, in the good
old-sense of the word (though he might have refused even that modest
categorization), a sceptical humanist who abhorred violence, and mistrusted any ideology (or religion)
proposing a radical uprooting of current society, to be replaced by feverish, untested sand-castles. He remained weary and mistrustful of cold, pretentious intelligentsia, if not empty and irrelevant, at times also
dangerous. To be read thus: The Duel (1891), a short-novel in fact, plus The
House with a Mezzanine (1896).
His last search for some kind of medical help took him
to Badenweiler, in Germany. The German doctor, having verified that there was
nothing else to be done, ordered a bottle of champagne. Chekhov said, “it’s
been long time since I last drank champagne...”, slowly emptied his glass,
turned sidewise on his bed – and died. It was the 2nd (15th)
of July 0f 1904. The burial took place on the 9th (22nd)
of July in Moscow, his wife and friends astonished to see that his coffin came
in a wagon certified as a “transportation of oysters”. The military music
sounding on the platforms was very much unexpected, in fact totally unsuitable.
It was intended for a high-level military officer, whose coffin came in the same
train. Chekhov would have loved the whole impromptu and surrealist scenery, echoing many of his own stories.
Chekhov is ‒ almost without
opposition – categorised as one of the greatest writers of short-stories in the
whole history of world literature. Much more relevant: Perhaps one of the most
lovable writers ever.
[1]Bilingue Russe / Francais, Nouvelles, Anton Tchekhov, Langues pour tous,
Paris, 1997.
[2] Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian
Literature, quoted by Francine Prose in Learning from Chekhov, 1991,
p. 231.
[3] Tchekhov, Henri
Troyat, de l’Académie Française, Flammarion, 1984.
[4] EDITIONS Le Capucin, Lectoure, 2005.
[5]Troyat, p. 133.
[6]Troyat, p. 167.
