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How Chekhov Shaped my Love Life

When the stories we love change our lives

By Rebecca Ruth GouldPublished 3 years ago 13 min read
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Screen capture from a Soviet remake of Chekhov’s “Lady with a Lapdog,” via YouTube

Chekhov was not my first love. More obviously delectable to a college freshman just returned from her first visit to St. Petersburg and discovering Russian literature for the first time were the thick novels of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Those “great, baggy monsters” (as Henry James called them) buoyed me up through my first marriage, my frantic conversion to Christianity, and my equally hasty divorce. I imbibed Dostoevsky’s entire oeuvre on a reading binge, hoping to drown my tumultuous marriage in his tales of white nights, conniving detectives, and holy fools. Dostoevsky’s tortured heroines perfectly matched my overstrung mind. His philosophical dialogues about the existence (or not) of God were the perfect object of reflection for my theologically conflicted soul. “I return my ticket,” Ivan Karamazov said directly to God (in the person of Alyosha). I won’t pause to consider it, but D.H. Lawrence’s interpretation of this scene (in a new translation of the “Grand Inquisitor” chapter published by the Hogarth Press in 1929) struck me as the silliest piece of literary criticism I had ever read. I was certain I could do better.

Tolstoy struck a different chord. His ability to cut through racism and prejudice, in particular of the home-grown Russian variety, set him apart from any other Russian novelist I had read. Certainly, it placed him light-years ahead of Dostoevsky, whose novels swarm with hunchbacked Poles and snivelling Jews. Tolstoy did not pull at my heartstrings as powerfully as did Dostoevsky, but he awakened my social conscience. He instilled in me a desire to make a difference in the world. In the early years of the twenty-first century, amid the Russian air strikes on Grozny, Hadji Murad and the other Tolstoyan fictions set in the Caucasus read like political prophecies from a writer intimately familiar with the hatreds fostered by colonial violence. I created a special shelf in my student apartment for Tolstoy, a writer I came to adore not for what he had to say about love, but for his vision of the social good. Thus did the pair whom Nabokov christened Tolstoyevsky enter my life: through my personal travails (in the case of Dostoevsky) and my aspirations to change the world (in the case of Tolstoy).

Chekhov offered a different kind of pleasure. I only encountered him during my final semester at UC Berkeley, after a whirlwind tour of the Russian canon. I was in a class on the Russian short story. We had been assigned to read six carefully selected tales in the original, and to collectively scrutinize their lexis, morphology, and syntax twice a week. For our first story, my professor had chosen Chekhov’s “The Lady with a Lapdog” as the object for analysis. “Chekhov’s story is possibly the best short story in all of Russian,” she said, “some would say in all of world literature.”

There was indeed something magical about the short story “The Lady with a Lapdog” (1899). Unlike Tolstoyevsky’s baggy monsters, the story seemed to thrive on silences. What actually transpired in the story wasn’t in any way remarkable, at least not according to my memory from my reading as an undergraduate. What stayed in my mind was the author’s habit of not commenting on the events he disclosed. Showing not telling. Like Hemingway, Chekhov did not report anything that could not be verified first hand.

The narration was laconic, dry, and terse. It was also incredibly moving; it relied on the reader to project onto the text almost all the emotions simmering within and between the characters. Gurov sees Anna’s eyes and thinks “there’s something pathetic about her,” and Anna tells Gurov “You will be the first to despise me now,” but in Chekhov’s world no omniscient author tells us what to think. Interpretation is left to the reader. Chekhov’s method was demanding, yet devastatingly close to the complexity and uncertainty of life.

The most enduring impression I took away from that story, and which I carried with me in the decade that followed my graduation from college, was that, compared to the Tolstoyevskian idealists, Chekhov was a cynic. After depicting the blossoming of love between a younger woman and her older lover, I recalled from my undergraduate reading, Chekhov showed that love is fated not to last. This is how I remembered an unforgettable detail in the Yalta hotel room, after Gurov and Anna have sex for the first time: Anna laments her lost virginity while Gurov is overcome with boredom. He then glances around the room and spies a ripe, bright pink watermelon not far from their bed. Gurov promptly proceeds to devour the watermelon until only the rind is visible. He then licks his voluptuous lips.

This memory, of a man who has grown disgusted with the woman he has just penetrated and who is already on the lookout for new pleasures, remained with me for many years after my first reading of “The Lady with a Lapdog,” when all other aspects of the story had become dim.

Almost twenty years later, the Russian literary pantheon had lost some but by no means all of its glory to me. A long succession of other loves had intervened between me and Chekhov: Arabic, Persian, Georgian, not to mention my abiding passions for French, German, Italian, and Spanish literature. All of these literatures I have tried to know with some degree of intimacy. But, in spite of my promiscuous disloyalty to other literatures and languages, Russian kept cropping up in unexpected ways. Chekhov in particular, whom I never knew intimately during my undergraduate years, appeared without warning in places where I least expected to find him.

One of the most unexpected places in which Chekhov cropped up was on an online dating profile. To do justice to this memory I’ll use the historical present: A Brussels-based scientist lists Dostoevsky among his favourite authors. I, the author of a senior thesis on Dostoevsky, immediately “like” this scientist. An hour later, he “likes” me. I write back. It is 3:30AM, but since when was love measured in hours? My first question pertains to Dostoevsky. Which novel does he like the most? I then tell him about my late adolescent discovery of the Russian master, and how it changed my life.

He replies: the same thing happened to him around the age of sixteen. We are synchronized! In our next exchange, we agree to spend the Christmas and New Year’s holiday together in Paris.

Paris is like a dream. We spend our first full day together strolling through the Jardin du Luxembourg, trading memories of the authors who impacted our lives: Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig, Thomas Bernard, Nathanial West, Richard Yates, John Cheever, and the neglected John Williams. It does not take long before we come around to The Brothers Karamazov and the mysterious Alyosha.

My companion from Brussels has an impressive knack for remembering details of plat and character. He delineates the ups and downs of the trial scene, recounts Alyosha’s wanderings throughout the town of Skotoprigonyevsk, and speculates on the reasons for Old Karamazov’s murder. I am impressed.

In contrast to the analytical approach of my undergraduate years, we do not linger over Dostoevsky’s philosophy. We do not the ponder the existence (or not) of God. (As confirmed atheists, we know how such debates will end.) We do not agonize over the problem of evil or commiserate with the sufferings of the children whose stories Ivan Karamazov had cut from a recent newspaper. Instead, we walk, hand in hand, over the pebbled pathways of the Jardin du Luxembourg, past its duck-filled ponds and the villa that crowns it at the end, towards a sun casting its golden halo along the Seine. We have not yet kissed.

Have you guessed, dear reader, that this was the beginning of love? And you will not have been wrong. We were like Gurov and Anna in Yalta. I visited him twice in Brussels. We then convened in London and drove each other crazy. Our love was of a strangely short duration that evaporated soon after it was born. Chekhov, I had thought, was the prophet of this evanescence. He foretold the entire story of our relationship in his “The Lady with a Lapdog.”

Or so I thought until I read the story again, after the breakup with my Brussels lover, almost twenty years after I read it as an undergraduate, hungry for a story that could explain to me how what had blossomed so beautifully between us in the Jardin du Luxembourg could have become so toxic. I opened up my college textbook and flipped to the familiar Chekhov story. I soon discovered that I had misremembered Chekhov. Although the cynicism was indeed the story’s opening gambit, Gurov’s indifference to Anna soon yielded to an entirely different emotional horizon. “The Lady with a Lapdog” ends with the two lovers unable to extricate themselves from their love. They feel alive only when they are together. Each experiences true love for the first time in their otherwise monotonous lives, a love that must be kept secret because both of them are married.

I had misremembered Chekhov. I then read the story again, in search of more illumination in the aftermath of my recent romantic fiasco, and I discovered that I had not only misremembered Chekhov’s plot, but also misremembered his tone. As an undergraduate I had taken Chekhov for an unadulterated cynic, when in fact his story depicts the genesis of a love so intense that the world cannot contain it. The narrative’s apparent ruthlessness results not from love’s inconstancy, or his hero’s womanizing mentality, as my memory had told me. Rather, the story’s tragedy consisted in the suppression of love by the marriage bond. Chekhov was not merely parodying Anna Karenina’s adultery plot, as critics have often commented; he was introducing a new understanding of love, which rejection social convention. The story ends with Anna crying and Gurov “clutching his head,” both of them trying to devise a solution that would allow them to live a “new and splendid life” that was not secret, “and it was clear to both of them that they had still a long, long road before them, and that the most complicated and difficult part of it was only just beginning.”

In misremembering Chekhov, I had simplified my task, but also falsified it. I had turned this Russian writer into a simple-minded cynic, and thereby shielded myself from Chekhov’s most important lesson for my own life. I had missed the connection between Gurov’s passion for Anna, the way his erotic desires morphed into something more profound. My endless quest for love that seemed to wither as soon as it blossomed.

I had missed Chekhov’s point: eros is actually the foundation of an authentic existence, even when its true meaning is perverted by social convention. When I discovered my misremembering of Chekhov, I discovered also that I had suppressed the emotions that had just imploded in my personal life. With its open-ended conclusion and its denial of closure, the Chekhov story as I reread it for a second time corresponded more closely to the actual trajectory of my life. My circuitous path towards love was more like the “new beginning” that pierced me upon my second re-reading than it was anything like the Don Juan parable I mistakenly conjured in my undergraduate imagination when I first encountered the story during my college years.

“The Lady with a Lapdog” is about how the longing for an authentic existence, motivated by love and desire, casts a shadow over our everyday, conventional lives. Both Gurov and Anna travel to Yalta independently in search of adventure. Both are unhappy.

After their first rapturous taste of each other, Anna says: “It’s wrong…You will be the first to despise me now.” She has not lost her virginity, as I misremembered, but her virtue.

Chekhov links adventure to the loss of virtue, and monotony to the chains of the convention that binds them into further unhappiness. As Gurov and Anna sit listening to

the monotonous hollow sound of the sea rising” in Yalta, both understand that it “will sound indifferently and monotonously when we are all no more. And in this constancy, in this complete indifference to the life and death of each of us, there lies, hidden, perhaps, a pledge of our eternal salvation, of the unceasing movement of life upon earth, of unceasing progress towards perfection.

This a moment in which a third-person narrator, who, uncharacteristically for Chekhov, is the omniscient, fuses the perception of the two lovers. The “us” in the above quotation is Gurov and Anna. “Us” is also every lover, and every reader as well. Chekhov, I came to realize, was every bit as profound, and every bit as tragic, as Tolstoyevsky. The major difference between Chekhov and the Russian novelists is that Chekhov’s stories end before they project a veneer of certainty onto the uncertainty of life.

During my undergraduate years, I met many people who fell in love with Russian literature through the novels of Dostoevsky. Within a few years of graduating, they had all forgotten those novels and moved onto areas of study far removed from Russian literature: politics, linguistics, and history were all favoured by these apostates of the Russian canon. Unlike Dostoevsky, Chekhov is rarely a first love. Perhaps few decide to become Russianists, or literature specialists, based on their reading of his stories. But also unlike Dostoevsky, Chekhov tends to keep the devotion of those who have fallen in love with him for the rest of their lives. Perhaps the reason for this lies in Chekhov’s peculiar way of representing the world, or specifically the way he documents how our experience of love determines what we will remember and what we will forget.

“The Lady with a Lapdog” renders the impossibility of forgetting a memory that has etched itself on the flesh and entered the body. Both Gurov and Anna flee Yalta to their cities, St. Petersburg and Moscow, aiming to forget each other and confident that they can.

They are wrong. Time passes, and Gurov’s “memories glowed more and more vividly.” Gurov becomes “tormented by an intense desire to confide his memories to someone.”

Anyone who has experienced Chekhov’s revelation of the antagonism between memory and forgetting will find it difficult ever to forget reading “The Lady with a Lapdog.” Upon his arrival at Anna’s house in St. Petersburg, Gurov cannot remember the name of her dog. He worries that Anna has forgotten about his existence. He had no need to fear her forgetting him; when she sees him she turns pale, because she could never forget.

I turned pale because I forgot Chekhov’s story. Even though I misremembered Chekhov, I was drawn back to him, much as Gurov is drawn back to Anna and Anna to Gurov, for a new chance on the road of life that is long because, as Chekhov writes towards the end of the story, “the most complicated and difficult part…has only just begun.”

***********************************************************

All quotations from Chekhov are from “The Lady with a Lapdog” in my translation.

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About the Creator

Rebecca Ruth Gould

I am author of the award-winning book Writers and Rebels: The Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus (Yale University Press, 2016). My Wikipedia page.

Subscribe to my YouTube Channel Poetry & Protest. ⬆️

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