Chekhov's Dog

Chekhov’s Dog

Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, they usually get top billing when people are asked to name Russian writers. They were, after all The Great Russian Novelists who wrote about Important Things.

It reminds me of a conversation I once had with a music teacher, about violas versus violins. Violin players, he said, are usually high strung attention-seekers out for glory: i.e. the solo or the melody. Violas, on the other hand, are the steady counterpoint, the orchestra’s balanced middle child that keeps the tempo and refrains from bold outbursts. Both instruments certainly have their place, but they are very different.

Perhaps Chekhov is like the viola. No histrionics, no headlines or top billing. Just simple stories stripped of padding yet full of life and truth.

The writer Richard Ford, in his essay, “Why We Love Chekhov,” said that, for writers, Chekhov “has affected all of our assumptions about what’s a fit subject for imaginative writing; about which moments in life are too crucial or precious to relegate to conventional language; about how stories should begin, and the variety of ways a writer may choose to end them; and importantly about how final life is, and therefore how tenacious must be our representations of it.” In short, Chekhov profoundly altered modern fiction.

As to readers, Ford continued, we recognize, as we read Anton Pavlovich’s works, that “story to story, degree by degree around the sphere of observable human existence, Chekhov’s measure is perfect.” Pitch perfect, like a solid, reliable viola, albeit one often playing in a minor key.

For, as Lev Sobolev writes in our lead story for this issue, Chekhov never sought to instill a “message” in his stories. It was enough to make people think, to make them take notice of the world around them and the people in it, to feel others’ pain and suffering, joy and mystery. Or, as Ford has it, Chekhov (unlike Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky), is “never difficult but often demanding; always dense but never turgid; sometimes dour, but rarely hopeless.”

Perhaps all of this explains why, 150 years on, Chekhov remains so popular, why, after Shakespeare, his plays are reputedly the most widely staged in the English-speaking world.

It certainly explains why Chekhov is far and away my favorite classic Russian author. I used to think it was because of his enviable brevity (learned as a young writer, with stingy editors counting his fees by the word), his astounding eye for detail, or his willingness to leave a tale perilously hanging. But now I realize it is more because of his profound humanism, his expression of the truth that significance should be sought not in life’s blazing, defining moments, but in the countless, ineffable details of everyday, bytovoy existence. It is a mien wonderfully captured in the photo we have run on page 35 (and page 2). The “elder” Chekhov (just 41) stands in frock coat and hat, bemusedly taking in the curiosity of a dog, a dog who clearly does not understand that it is Chekhov, and not he, who is the center of the photographer’s attention.

You can almost see Chekhov capturing the details and filing them away in his prodigious memory.

Enjoy the issue.