In a 1981 essay, Raymond Carver described some of the quotations taped to the wall around his desk. One had “this fragment of a story by Chekhov: ‘… and suddenly everything became clear to him’”. For Carver, these words are “filled with wonder and possibility. I love their simple clarity, and the hint of revelation that’s implied. There is mystery, too. What has been unclear before? Why is it just now becoming clear? What’s happened? Most of all – what now?” The quote might not belong to Anton Chekhov at all (no one has ever found the story it’s from), but Carver’s description of its effect, its ability to stage a revelation and in the same moment open a field of greater mystery, absolutely does.
Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s new translation of 52 Chekhov stories doesn’t include many of his most famous works (their versions of those can be found in a collection from 2000, only available in the UK as an e-book). But walking the overgrown pathways of his less familiar stories can help give a fresh sense of why his storytelling has been so influential, and remains compelling in its own right.
Consider the last page of “Neighbours”, from 1892, in which Pyotr Mikhailych, a young man who “already had all the makings of an old bachelor landowner”, sits miserably beside a pond as the moon rises. He thinks he sees a man across the water, standing motionless. Remembering a story about a seminarian who was beaten to death nearby, he wonders if this is his ghost. But when he rides around the pond the figure turns out to be no more than a rotten post, the remnant of some old shed.
Pyotr’s uncertainty is quickly resolved. But for us, reading Chekhov’s often indeterminate, emotionally puzzling stories, the solution is not so simple. In the closing lines Pyotr reflects that he has never said or done what he really wanted to, “and therefore the whole of life now looked to him as dark as this water in which the night sky was reflected and waterweeds were entangled. And it seemed to him that it could not be set right.”
The extremity of Pyotr’s realisation is a shock, a surprise ending of sorts, yet while these are usually enlisted to tie things up, here very little feels settled. Earlier in the story Pyotr visits the estate of his neighbour Vlasich, the divorcé his younger sister Zina is now living with. “Neighbours” might be relatively minor Chekhov (written just a couple of months after “Ward No 6”, one of his most famous stories), but Pyotr’s visit to Vlasich shows him at his most skilful, conjuring a full spectrum of emotion from a stream of conversation that’s now sludgy and mannered, now running fast with emotion and revelation, now drying up completely (“The two were silent for a time and pretended to be listening to the rain”).
The longer the characters talk, or don’t talk, the more can be interpreted and the less clear everything becomes. Pyotr cannot talk to Zina the way he used to, perhaps because her liaison with Vlasich has sexualised her in his eyes. But is he jealous of Zina for finding love, which has eluded him, or jealous of Vlasich and in love with his sister? “I don’t even know for certain what I actually think,” he despairs beside the pond.
Read Full Article »