Chekhov Passage from "ABOUT LOVE," Read in the Korean Film, "ON THE BEACH AT NIGHT ALONE"

The above scene from the Korean film, "On the Beach at Night Alone" (2017), shows the character of the married film director, reading a passage from a book to his former lover, the girl with eyes downcast sitting opposite from him. This girl, played by Min-hee Kim,  is the central character in the movie.

Obviously he himself, the actor playing the director, as well as his lover and all the others sitting at the table are deeply moved by this passage about love. They, as well as the spectators, those watching the film, are left in the dark about the provenance of the passage, but I, having taught Chekhov in my classes at Miami University recognized it at once--even though it was read in Korean, with English subtitles.

In an interview that he gave later, the director of the film, who also wrote the screenplay, Sang-soo Hong, admits that the passage is from Chekhov's third story in his "Little Trilogy," the story titled "About Love." He mentions that the passage had moved him. Then again, that's what the movie is about: about love.

I have written at some length on this blog about "The Little Trilogy" ("Man in a Case," "Gooseberries," and "About Love") It is probably the best little trilogy of short stories ever written in world literature.

But Chekhov can be a devious trickster of a writer. Below I repeat what I said when discussing "About Love" previously, which calls into question the reaction of the Koreans to the passage quoted.

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, the narrator and main character, sums things up. This is the passage read in the movie.

“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.” 

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. The fact is that he has fallen in love with his best friend's wife. There are children involved. Of the choices he has, none is good. He chooses not to disrupt his best friend's family. As a result the woman he loves, who also loves him, descends, by the end of the story, into neurasthenia. Sometimes there are simply no good choices, and I do not believe that Chekhov is saying in the cited passage, as some readers believe, that love should transcend other matters, such as virtue, sin, the very fact of happiness or unhappiness. 

Earlier in the story Alyokhin 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. That line, I can believe, came right out of the mouth of the author directly to the reader. But not Alyokhin's emotional ramblings in the quoted passage. No.

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.

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.