Now perhaps the further development and direction of Tchekhov's
creation will be intelligible, and that peculiar and unique blend
in him of sober materialism and fanatical stubbornness in seeking
new paths, always round about and hazardous. Like Hamlet, he would
dig beneath his opponent a mine one yard deeper, so that he may
at one moment blow engineer and engine into the air. His patience
and fortitude in this hard, underground toil are amazing and to
many intolerable. Everywhere is darkness, not a ray, not a spark,
but Tchekhov goes forward, slowly, hardly, hardly moving.... An
inexperienced or impatient eye will perhaps observe no movement at all.
It may be Tchekhov himself does not know for certain whether he is
moving forward or marking time. To calculate beforehand is impossible.
Impossible even to hope. Man has entered that stage of his existence
wherein the cheerful and foreseeing mind refuses its service. It is
impossible for him to present to himself a clear and distinct notion of
what is going on. Everything takes on a tinge of fantastical absurdity.
One believes and disbelieves--everything. In _The Black Monk_ Tchekhov
tells of a new reality, and in a tone which suggests that he is himself
at a loss to say where the reality ends and the phantasmagoria begins.
The black monk leads the young scholar into some mysterious remoteness,
where the best dreams of mankind shall be realised. The people about
call the monk a hallucination and fight him with medicines--drugs,
better foods and milk. Kovrin himself does not know who is right. When
he is speaking to the monk, it seems to him that the monk is right;
when he sees before him his weeping wife and the serious, anxious
faces of the doctors, he confesses that he is under the influence of
fixed ideas, which lead him straight to lunacy. Finally the black
monk is victorious. Kovrin has not the power to support the banality
which surrounds him; he breaks with his wife and her relations, who
appear like inquisitors in his eyes, and goes away somewhere--but in
our sight he arrives nowhere. At the end of the story he dies in order
to give the author the right to make an end. This is always the case:
when the author does not know what to do with his hero he kills him.
Sooner or later in all probability this habit will be abandoned. In
the future, probably, writers will convince themselves and the public
that any kind of artificial completion is absolutely superfluous.
The matter is exhausted--stop the tale short, even though it be on
a half-word. Tchekhov did so sometimes, but only sometimes. In most
cases he preferred to satisfy the traditional demands and to supply his
readers with an end. This habit is not so unimportant as at first sight
it may seem. Consider even _The Black Monk._ The death of the hero is
as it were an indication that abnormality must, in Tchekhov's opinion,
necessarily lead through an absurd life to an absurd death: but this
was hardly Tchekhov's firm conviction. It is clear that he expected
something from abnormality, and therefore gave no deep attention to
men who had left the common track. True, he came to no firm or definite
conclusions, for all the tense effort of his creation. He became so
firmly convinced that there was no issue from the entangled labyrinth,
that the labyrinth with its infinite wanderings, its perpetual
hesitations and strayings, its uncaused griefs and joys uncaused--in
brief, all things which normal men so fear and shun--became the very
essence of his life. Of this and this alone must a man tell. Not of our
invention is normal life, nor abnormal. Why then should the first alone
be considered as the real reality?
_The Sea-Gull_ must be considered one of the most characteristic, and
therefore one of the most remarkable of Tchekhov's works. Therein the
artist's true attitude to life received its most complete expression.
Here all the characters are either blind, and afraid to move from
their seats in case they lose the way home, or half-mad, struggling
and tossing about to no end nor purpose. Arkadzina the famous actress
clings with her teeth to her seventy thousand roubles, her fame, and
her last lover. Tregovin the famous writer writes day in, day out;
he writes and writes, knowing neither end nor aim. People read his
works and praise them, but he is not his own master; like Marko, the
ferryman in the tale, he labours on without taking his hand from the
oar, carrying passengers from one bank to the other. The boat, the
passengers, and the river too, bore him to death. But how can he get
rid of them? He might give the oars over to the first-comer: the
solution is simple, but after it, as in the tale, he must go to heaven.
Not Tregovin alone, but all the people in Tchekhov's books who are
no longer young remind one of Marko the ferryman. It is plain that
they dislike their work, but, exactly as though they were hypnotised,
they cannot break away from the influence of the alien power. The
monotonous, even dismal, rhythm of life has lulled their consciousness
and will to sleep. Everywhere Tchekhov underlines this strange and
mysterious trait of human life. His people always speak, always think,
always do one and the same thing. One builds houses according to a plan
made once for all (_My Life_); another goes on his round of visits
from morn to night, collecting roubles (_Yonitch_); a third is always
buying up houses (_Three Years_). Even the language of his characters
is deliberately monotonous. They are all monotonous, to the point of
stupidity, and they are all afraid to break the monotony, as though it
were the source of extraordinary joys. Read Tregovin's monologue:
'... Let us talk.... Let us talk of my beautiful life.... What shall
I begin with? [Musing a little.] ... There are such things as fixed
ideas, when a person thinks day and night, for instance, of the moon,
always of the moon. I too have my moon. Day and night I am at the
mercy of one besetting idea: "I must write, I must write, I must." I
have hardly finished one story than, for some reason or other, I must
write a second, then a third, and after the third, a fourth. I write
incessantly, post-haste. I cannot do otherwise. Where then, I ask you,
is beauty and serenity? What a monstrous life it is! I am sitting with
you now, I am excited, but meanwhile every second I remember that
an unfinished story is waiting for me. I see a cloud, like a grand
piano. It smells of heliotrope. I say to myself: a sickly smell, a
half-mourning colour.... I must not forget to use these words when
describing a summer evening. I catch up myself and you on every phrase,
on every word, and hurry to lock all these words and phrases into my
literary storehouse. Perhaps they will be useful. When I finish work
I run to the theatre, or go off fishing: at last I shall rest, forget
myself. But no! a heavy ball of iron is dragging on my fetters,--a new
subject, which draws me to the desk, and I must make haste to write and
write again. And so on for ever, for ever. I have no rest from myself,
and I feel that I am eating away my own life. I feel that the honey
which I give to others has been made of the pollen of my most precious
flowers, that I have plucked the flowers themselves and trampled them
down to the roots. Surely, I am mad. Do my neighbours and friends treat
me as a sane person? "What are you writing? What have you got ready
for us?" The same thing, the same thing eternally, and it seems to me
that the attention, the praise, the enthusiasm of my friends is all
a fraud. I am being robbed like a sick man, and sometimes I am afraid
that they will creep up to me and seize me, and put me away in an
asylum.'
But why these torments? Throw up the oars and begin a new life.
_Impossible._ While no answer comes down from heaven, Tregovin will
not throw up the oars, will not begin a new life. In Tchekhov's work,
only young, very young and inexperienced people speak of a new life.
They are always dreaming of happiness, regeneration, light, joy. They
fly head-long into the flame, and are burned like silly butterflies.
In _The Sea-Gull,_ Nina Zaryechnaya and Trepliev, in other works other
heroes, men and women alike--all are seeking for something, yearning
for something, but not one of them does that which he desires. Each
one lives in isolation; each is wholly absorbed in his life, and is
indifferent to the lives of others. And the strange fate of Tchekhov's
heroes is that they strain to the last limit of their inward powers,
but there are no visible results at all. They are all pitiable.
The woman takes snuff, dresses slovenly, wears her hair loose, is
uninteresting. The man is irritable, grumbling, takes to drink, bores
every one about him. They act, they speak--always out of season.
They cannot, I would even say they do not want to, adapt the outer
world to themselves. Matter and energy unite according to their own
laws;--people live according to their own, as though matter and energy
had no existence at all. In this Tchekhov's intellectuals do not differ
from illiterate peasants and the half-educated bourgeois. Life in the
manor is the same as in the valley farm, the same as in the village.
Not one believes that by changing his outward conditions he would
change his fate as well. Everywhere reigns an unconscious but deep and
ineradicable conviction that our will must be directed towards ends
which have nothing in common with the organised life of mankind. Worse
still, the organisation appears to be the enemy of the will and of man.
One must spoil, devour, destroy, ruin. To think out things quietly, to
anticipate the future--that is impossible. One must beat one's head,
beat one's head eternally against the wall. And to what purpose? Is
there any purpose at all? Is it a beginning or an end? Is it possible
to see in it the warrant of a new and inhuman creation, a creation out
of the void? 'I do not know' was the old professor's answer to Katy.
'I do not know' was Tchekhov's answer to the sobs of those tormented
unto death. With these words, and only these, can an essay upon
Tchekhov end. _Résigne-toi, mon cœur, dors ton sommeil de brute._