Notes on Chekhov's "Little Trilogy" NATURE DESCRIPTIONS

NATURE DESCRIPTIONS

Modern readers tend to skip nature descriptions and get back to the action of the story. But if you are a good reader, one who knows how to read genuine literary fiction—there are, admittedly, few of us left—you don’t do that. The nature description is not there just so the author can escape from his narrative, take a break from characters he may not like to breathe in the fragrance of the night-blooming jasmine that he so lyrically describes.

Take the description at the end of “Man in A Case.” His story of Belikov told, the high school teacher Burkin walks out of the shed to where we the readers can see him for the first time. He is not an imposing figure: “He was short in stature, stout, absolutely bald, with a long black beard reaching nearly to his waist; two dogs came out with him.

‘Look at that moon!’ he said, gazing up overhead.

“It was already midnight. The whole of the village was visible on the right, the long street extending for a good five versts. Everything was plunged into a deep, quiet sleep; not a sound, not a stir, incredible how nature could be so silent. When on a moonlit night you gaze upon a village street, with its peasant huts, and hayricks and sleeping willow trees, a quietude descends on your soul. Steeped in serenity, sheltered by the shadows of the night from all toil, cares and grief, the village seems meek, melancholy and beautiful, the very stars seem to look down upon it caressingly, with deep feeling, and there seems to be no more evil in the world and all is well. To the left, where the village ended, the fields began, visible far, far away, to the very horizon, and throughout the whole broad expanse of those fields, flooded with moonlight, once more nothing stirred, and all was silent.”

Immediately following this description Ivan Ivanovich begins nattering on about how sad life is, how people lie and scheme, how we simply have to stop living the way we do. This will carry on from the end of this story into the following story, “Gooseberries.” So an obvious function of the nature description here is for contrast: life is beautiful, but we don’t know how to live. A typical attitude of the narrator in a great many Chekhov stories is to stand observing human nature while pondering human evil and stagnation.

But here the nature description has another function: it prepares us for the next story, “Gooseberries,” which describes a true lover of nature, a man who strives to escape city life and find joy in country living, communing with nature. And who ends up, nonetheless, living like a pig and reveling in tasteless gooseberries. Nature, it seems, cannot protect humanity from encasement.

Near the beginning of “Gooseberries” the melancholic Ivan Ivanovich, brother of the gooseberry man, splashes about merrily, reveling in the very thing (lovely nature) that has brought his brother to ruin:

“Ivan Ivanovich emerged from the shed, splashed noisily into the water, and began swimming beneath the rain, taking broad swim strokes with his arms, making waves all around him, and the white water lilies rocked on the waves he made. He swam into the very middle of the river and then dived, a moment later came up at another place and swam further, diving constantly, trying to touch the bottom. ‘Ah, my God,’ he kept exclaiming joyfully, ‘Ah, my God.’ He swam up to the mill, had a talk with some peasants there and turned back, but when he reached the middle of the river he floated on his back, holding his face up to the rain. Burkin and Alyokhin were dressed and ready to go, but he went on swimming and diving.

‘God, God!’ he kept saying. ‘Lord have mercy!’

‘Enough, then!’ shouted Burkin.”

In his communion with nature this is the only time in “The Little Trilogy” that Ivan Ivanovich—who often plagues the reader and his companions with long melancholy moaning about how people live—is shown to be enjoying himself. Nature is different things for different people; some want to grow gooseberries, some want to swim.

Chekhov's "Little Trilogy" STRUCTURE (FRAMING THE NARRATIVES), THE ENCASEMENT OF LOVE

                        FRAMING THE NARRATIVE, THE ENCASEMENT OF LOVE

One thing that makes Chekhov a great writer is his intuitive feel for how to structure a story. In writing “The Man in a Case” why did he choose to begin the story and conclude it with descriptions of apparently incidental characters, the veterinarian Ivan Ivanovich Chimsha-Himalaisky and the teacher Burkin, who are out hunting together? Since the story features mainly Belikov, the teacher of Greek, why not just tell the Belikov tale?

There are several reasons why, some of them complex. The first and obvious reason is that in framing the story about a man in a case—putting it in a frame—you, in a sense, demonstrate the main theme: encasement. Another reason is that the story within (or framed around) the main story has relevance to the primary theme. For example, the incidental character Mavra, who wanders the night in the frame story, at the very end, is another example of a person encased.

It seems logical that Chekhov already had three stories in mind when he began writing the first. Later on we discover that the behavior of the two hunters and their reaction to the tale of Belikov are not incidental at all, since they become important characters in the trilogy as a whole. As the stories progress we can see more and more clearly the relationship of Ivan Ivanovich and Burkin to the major issue of encasement.

The structural principle underlying the stories is as follows. With each succeeding story in the trilogy Chekhov chooses to bring the frame narrative (the story within a story) closer and closer to the action of the framed (main) story. In “Man in a Case” Belikov is a colleague of Burkin the narrator, but in “Gooseberries” the main character Nikolay is the narrator’s brother, and in “About Love” the main character is the narrator himself, Alyokhin.

As he brings the frame story closer and closer to the main story, Chekhov may be suggesting that life’s problems get more and more complex the more you are personally involved in them. Belikov is an character extreme in all respects, practically a paranoiac, utterly obsessed with order in life. Chekhov condemns his countrymen’s tendency to be passive, to allow such a man to dictate their behavior, but the reader, perhaps, can laugh at Belikov and condemn him out of hand. “I’m not like that.” The same can be said for Nikolay Ivanovich the gooseberry lover, who spends his life chasing an idle dream and ends up a living pig. “No way I’d live my life like that.”

But when we get to Alyokhin’s encasement in love, we realize that breaking out of shells and finding freedom is a difficult matter indeed. Here we have a decent man, no paranoiac, no gooseberry-loving pig. What does a decent man do when he falls in love with his best friend’s wife? Whatever he does he will be wrong. At the end of the story, after the woman he loves has left his life forever, after he has just admitted to her for the first time that he loves her, here is how Alyokhin sums things up.

“I confessed my love for her, and with a searing pain in my heart I understood  how unnecessary, how petty, and how deceitful was everything that had hindered our love. I understood that when you love, then in your reasoning about that love you need to proceed from the highest principles, from something more important than happiness or unhappiness, sin, or virtue in their usual sense, or there’s no need to reason at all.”

Readers sometimes take such summary statements on the part of Chekhov’s characters as Chekhov’s ways of getting important truths into the story. Most frequently that is a mistake. Chekhov seldom speaks directly through his characters, and when a character expatiates at length on life’s truths you can almost always take it for granted that the character is a blowhard. Such is Ivan Ivanovich in “The Little Trilogy” (more on him later).

Alyokhin is not a blowhard, but if you take a good look at the passage quoted above, you can’t help thinking that he is saying not much of anything coherent. Earlier in the story he says that the only thing you can really say about human love is that love is a great mystery. That is more to the point.

And in taking off on Chekhov’s “About Love”—in his wonderful story titled “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”—the American writer Raymond Carver ends up at the same place Chekhov did: with characters encased in love and wondering what love is. We’re talking really out our backsides when we talk like we know what we’re talking about when we talk about love.

"Steal Like an Artist" TOLSTOY TO CHEKHOV TO BUNIN TO NABOKOV

In his Youtube video (see below for link)  Austin Kleon tells us something all artists have known since time out of mind: that art is not totally original, that it comes out of previous art.

"Nothing is original," says Kleon, and all artists are "creative kleptomaniacs."

If you want to become a creative writer, read creative literature. If you want to become a great creative writer read GREAT writers. Then write. Some twenty years later, if you are still reading great writers and still practicing your craft every day, you will become, maybe not a great, but probably at least a GOOD writer. This does not mean that you have plagiarized from the great artists. No, you have taken the creative coals from their fires and you have blown on those coals, and you have built your own fires upon those coals and your own breath.

Then again, if you are a feminist you may not want to read the great male writers, many of whom are, let's face it, quite often misogynists. So no problem: read Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, Flannery O'Connor. But don't make the mistake of thinking that, e.g., To Kill a Mockingbird, is a great novel. As Flannery once said, "this is a children's book."


As for Russian literature, examples of creative artists as thieves are easy to find. Tolstoy wrote Anna Karenina. Chekhov read and loved AK, and he wrote lots and lots of stories with heroines named Anna. Those stories were, while original, the creative offspring of Tolsoy's AK. One of them, "The Lady with the Dog," is one of Chekhov's most well-known stories. Bunin also loved AK, but he also read "The Lady with the Dog." His story "Sunstroke" comes, largely but not entirely, out of his reading of AK and "The Lady with the Dog." Nabokov read AK, loved it, but he also read Chekhov and Bunin. His story "Khvat," (in English translation, "A Dashing Fellow") is a brutal parody on Bunin's "Sunstroke." But this Nabokov story would also not have been written without the tacit participation of Tolstoy and Chekhov.

So it goes. At least so it goes in part. Given that any writer has read many many different things and has had a whole plethora of personal experiences to draw on, what finally comes out on the page cannot be ascribed totally to that writer's reading of only Tolstoy, or only Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Bunin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oww7oB9rjgw

"Anna Karenina" LOVE AND MUSHROOMS

(14) Love and Mushrooms

Anton Chekhov is often considered the first great short story writer in the modern vein. He is known for the story of mood, of minor but significant detail, the story in which psychological atmosphere is all-important. But it is sometimes amazing how much Chekhov owes to Tolstoy. A perfect example of this is Part 6, Ch. 5 (p. 590-92), which could be read entirely apart from the action of "Anna Karenina" as a whole, as a short story titled something like "Love Amidst the Mushrooms," of "Why Mushrooms and Love are Incompatible." Here is that "story" in its entirety:


"Varvara Andreevna, when I was young I set before myself the ideal of the woman I loved and would be happy to call my wife. I have lived through a long life, and now, for the first time, I have met the one I sought--in you. I love you, and offer you my hand."

Sergey Ivanovich was saying this to himself while he was ten paces from Varenka. Kneeling down, with her hands over the mushrooms to guard them from Grisha, she was calling little Masha.

"Come here, little ones! There are so many!" she was saying in her sweet, deep voice.

Seeing Sergey Ivanovich approaching, she did not get up and did not change her position, but everything told him that she felt his presence and was glad of it.

"Well, did you find some?" she asked from under the white kerchief, turning her beautiful, gently smiling face to him.

"Not one," said Sergey Ivanovich. "Did you?"

She did not answer, busy with the children who thronged about her.

"That one too, near the twig." She pointed out to little Masha a mushroom, split in half across its rosy cap by the dry grass from under which it had thrust itself. Varenka got up while Masha picked the mushroom, breaking it into two white halves. "This brings back my childhood," she added, moving apart from the children by Sergey Ivanovich.

They walked on for some steps in silence. Varenka saw that he wanted to speak; she guessed of what, and felt faint with joy and panic. They had walked so far away that no one could hear them now, but still he did not begin to speak. It would have been better for Varenka to be silent. After a silence it would have been easier for them to say what they wanted to say than after talking about mushrooms. But against her own will, as it were accidentally, Varenka said:

"So you found nothing? In the middle of the wood there are always fewer, though." Sergey Ivanovich sighed and made no answer. He was annoyed that she had spoken about the mushrooms. He wanted to bring her back to the first words she had uttered about her childhood; but after a pause of some length, as though against his own will, he made an observation in response to her last words.

"I have heard that the white edible mushrooms are found principally at the edge of the wood, though I can't tell them apart."

Some minutes more passed, they moved still farther away from the children, and were quite alone. Varenka's heart throbbed so that she heard it beating, and felt that she was turning red and pale and red again.

To be the wife of a man like Koznyshev, after her position with Madame Stahl, was to her imagination the height of happiness. Besides, she was almost certain that she was in love with him. And this moment it would have to be decided. She felt frightened. She dreaded both his speaking and his not speaking.

Now or never it must be said--that Sergey Ivanovich felt too. Everything in the expression, the flushed cheeks and the downcast eyes of Varenka betrayed a painful suspense. Sergey Ivanovich saw it and felt sorry for her. He felt even that to say nothing now would be a slight to her. Rapidly in his own mind he ran over all the arguments in support of his decision. He even said over to himself the words in which he meant to propose, but instead of those words, some utterly unexpected refection that occurred to him made him ask:

"What is the difference between the birch mushroom and the white mushroom?"

Varenka's lips quivered with emotion as she answered:

"In the top part there is scarcely any difference; it's in the stalk."

And as soon as these words were uttered, both he and she felt that it was over, that what was to have been said would not be said; and their, emotion, which had up to then been continually growing more intense, began to subside.

"The birch mushroom's stalk suggests a dark man's chin after two days without shaving," said Sergey Ivanovich, speaking quite calmly now.

"Yes, that's true," answered Varenka, smiling, and unconsciously the direction of their walk changed. They began to turn toward the children. Varenka felt both hurt and ashamed; at the same time she had a sense of relief.

When he had returned home and went over the whole subject, Sergey Ivanovich thought that his previous decision had been a mistake. He could not be false to the memory of Marie.

"Gently, children, gently!" Lyovin shouted quite angrily to the children, standing in front of his wife to protect her when the crowd of children flew with shrieks of delight to meet them.

Behind the children Sergey Ivanovich and Varenka walked out of the wood. Kitty had no need to ask Varenka; she saw from the calm and somewhat crestfallen faces of both that her plans had not come off.

"Well?" her husband questioned her as they were going home again.

"It didn't bite," said Kitty, her smile and manner of speaking recalling her father, a likeness Lyovin often noticed with pleasure.

"How didn't bite?"

"I'll show you," she said, taking her husband's hand, lifting it to her mouth, and just faintly brushing it with closed lips. "Like a kiss on a bishop's hand."

"Which didn't bite?" he said, laughing.

"Both. But it should have been like this. . ."

"There are some peasants coming. . ."

"Oh, they didn't see."

END (from Modern Library Paperback, 1965, Constance Garnett translation, as revised by Leonard J. Kent and Nina Berberova)

Of course, even though this chapter is self-sufficient as a work of art, it helps to know something about the back-grounding for the two characters, Sergey Ivanovich Koznyshev and Varenka. Neither of them is sure that he/she is in love and neither is sure that marriage is the best thing. Both have long lived alone and are somewhat frightened by the prospect of marriage.

These feelings come out in the constraint of their conversation, in the conventional phrases that pop out of their mouths at the very moment when they should be saying entirely different things. There is a vein of irrationality running throughout all of "Anna Karenina," constant reaffirmation of the fact that moods, subtle subconscious feelings are often more responsible for motivating human behavior than any carefully reasoned facts.

This story of the non-proposal seems to indicate that had the characters been in the right psychological frame of mind, the proposal would have been made and accepted. Then the whole future of the two would have been different. Since neither of them is really sure about marriage the psychological restraints subconsciously motivate their words. Note that both are secretly relieved when the moment passes.

On the other hand, only a few moments before this fruitless conversation it appeared that both characters were in the right frame of mind. Sergey Ivanovich watches Varenka as she stands "in the glowing light of the slanting sunbeams" (589) and has the impression that she blends harmoniously with "the yellow oatfield lying bathed in the slanting sunshine, and beyond it, the distant ancient forest flecked with yellow and melting into the blue of the distance" (590).

So it is as if Nature itself is conspiring to make the match; the beauty of nature sets things up ideally for the coming proposal. You get the impression that the main culprits are the mushrooms. Mushrooms and romantic love are, so to speak, incompatible. Sergey Ivanovich should have approached Varenka, say, when she was picking roses, and all would have been well.

Or would it have? Maybe they would have begun speaking of the relative sharpness of the thorns in different varieties of roses. Who knows? After all, no one can account for the myriads of subconscious and conscious feelings that account for any human action. Tolstoy would have been fascinated by recent discoveries in modern brain science, which suggest that there are eons of neurons in the brain, all competing with one another to influence any human action. He did not know anything about neurons, but he had the intuitive sense of an artist, and this is demonstrated by the mushroom story.

It is interesting to compare this scene of the non-proposal to Lyovin's second, wordless proposal to Kitty (p. 417-19). This proposal scene takes place in direct proximity to a discussion of the "woman question" by other characters who are present. Lyovin and Kitty stand apart from all this, ignoring the discussion and speaking to each other with their eyes--as if to demonstrate that abstract theoretical discussions are insignificant in comparison to the real thing: genuine loving feelings between a man and woman. The other characters indulge themselves in words; Lyovin and Kitty are in an elevated state, where words are irrelevant.

Note that nothing such as a mere mushroom is going to get in their way. One of them tries to cause a bit of psychological mischief, but Kitty completely ignores it:

"You've killed a bear, I've been told!" said Kitty, vainly trying to catch with her fork a perverse mushroom [in the Russian, "nepokornyj, otskal'zyvajushchij grib"--literally "an un-submissive, slithering away mushroom"] that was trying to slip away. . . . "Are there bears on your place?" she added, turning her lovely head toward him and smiling."

Of course, she as well is talking around the subject of love (she is off on bears), but the feelings between the two characters as this point are so right that it makes no difference what they are talking about. She could even talk about mushrooms!

"There was apparently nothing extraordinary in what she said, but what unutterable meaning there was for him in every sound, in every turn of her lips, her eyes, her hands as she said it! There was entreaty for forgiveness, and trust in him and tenderness--soft, timid tenderness--and promise and hope and love for him, which he could not but believe in and which choked him with happiness" (405).

What a writer Tolstoy is. WHAT A WRITER.

FAMOUS WRITERS SPEAK OF "ANNA KARENINA" (Chekhov, Faulkner)

"Dear Sweet Anna"

In March, 1887, Anton Chekhov's brother Aleksandr fell ill with typhus. Anton Pavlovich immediately set off to see him, taking the train from Moscow to St. Petersburg. His only consolation on the trip there was "dear sweet Anna" ( the novel Anna Karenina), which he read all the way to Moscow.

ILLUSTRATIONS TO "ANNA KARENINA," BY OREST VEREJSKY

Chekhov was not impressed by Turgenev's female characters:

"When you think of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, all of Turgenev's gentlewomen with their seductive shoulders vanish into thin air" (letter to Suvorin, cited in Troyat biography of Chekhov, p. 162).

WHAT THREE NOVELS SHOULD A YOUNG WRITER READ?

Asked once what three novels he would most recommend to a student in creative writing, Faulkner said, "Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina" (Tom Wolfe in Harper's, Nov, 1989, p.51).