essay
"chekhov in and out
of his time"
by
brook stowe
"To live in order to die is not very amusing," Russian writer Maxim Gorky quotes Anton Chekhov in his reminiscence, "A.P. Chekhov." "But to live knowing that you will die before your time is completely ridiculous" (Carlile, et al, 165).
Whether or not Chekhov was speaking of a personal regret or simply making a general observation upon the inequities of life, Gorky does not elaborate. The quote does, however, highlight two key points of this essay. Chekhov's "time" (1860-1904) almost exactly parallels a key passage in Russian social history: the period between the emancipation of the serfs (1861), and the first effectively organized and nearly successful workers' revolt (1905).
Czar Alexander II's emancipation of the serfs in 1861 set in motion an unforeseen and irreversible chain of events that forever altered the landscape of Russian life, dragging it reluctantly into the Industrial Age and precipitating the Revolution of 1917. The chain of events along the way forms an irony that can only be fully appreciated in historical retrospect.
Jeffrey Burds, in his surprisingly readable (for what appears to be a published doctoral thesis from an academic press) analysis of the roots and rise of Russian migrant labor, Peasant Dreams and Market Politics, describes this period as "the metamorphosis of peasant labor and products into commodities" (5). The freeing of the serfs sparked an economic backlash amongst landowners, which in turn initiated an unprecedented migration of labor to the cities.
This action, in a very ironic turn, produced Russia's first consumer society. Burds quotes social historian George Lukacs as he speculates "'how far is commodity exchange together with its structural consequences able to influence the total outer and inner life of society?'" (5). The answer is, as we shall see, considerably farther than imperial Russia could foresee or was prepared to adequately manage, despite a rising and increasingly strident attempt at official repression and control.
Burks specifies three primary village institutions in force at the time of the serf's emancipation: the tiaglo, or married couple as the base productive unit; the dvor or peasant household as the base labor unit; and the obshchina, or peasant commune as the base unit of social interaction and control (17). The structure of perpetuating village life was almost demonically simple: labor was produced primarily by the young and controlled by the old.
The pressure on village inhabitants was to maintain the status quo. A village of serf labor functioned as a kind of social security administration, with the controlling elders sustained by the labor of the young. The incentive for the young to work was to achieve control of and support by the younger generation when they in fact became old. The emancipation of 1861 changed this neatly symbiotic social structure forever, but not for the reasons one might suppose. Serfs did not achieve their freedom and immediately flee the rural land they worked for the cities.
In fact, this major social migration was necessitated by the bald greed and repercussive disdain of the petty bourgeoisie landowner class. The land the serfs had worked as slaves they now became tenants of, and at exorbitant rental charges of up to 300% of the income they managed to derive from the land (19). Such a gouging by landowners created a migrant class of laborers compelled to seek work in the cities to make up the gap in income their land simply could not provide.
Daniel R. Brower, in his earnest if challengingly arcane thesis work, The Russian City Between Tradition and Modernity points out that the shape of urban growth in late 19th-Century Russia was "less a product of state activity and increasingly a social creation, the work of an industrious, mobile population that was adapting economic and social practices to their needs" (40). In other words, people came to where the work was, and the work came to where the people were, and from this came the urban centers of modern Russia.
Moreover, the railroads came to where the industry was, and the railways brought...more people. The coming of the railroads, Brower notes, "placed some towns at the center of national and international markets, while others with little access to markets became 'backwaters' in the overall pattern of economic exchange in the late (19th) century..." (41).
Railroad lines made the aesthetic/cultural lines of demarcation between city and village literal ones. "In the literary imagery of Anton Chekhov" Brower astutely observes, "the railroad passing near the cherry orchard was an inevitable victor...it turned the orchard into a suburban housing development" (47). Migrant-mandated economic growth wasn't the only force driving a wedge between the burgeoning city and the "backwater" hamlets.
In what could only be a surprise to rural clerics and urban bureaucrats, the forced migration of young workers into the city produced a new and disconcerting side-effect: a consumer society. "While it is clear that need drove peasants away from their villages in search of alternative sources of income...it is just as clear that once the fruits of the outside world were tasted, the 'needs' issue became inextricably linked with new consumer preferences and a host of rising expectations spawned by urban culture" (Burds, 143).
What's more, consumer desires also spawned a kind of success/consumption continuum that fed upon itself. "The surest path to upward mobility was to consume," Burds continues in an admirably researched and delineated section on the mutant birth of Russian consumer society, "...and...conspicuous consumption was the best way to display your success" (150). Thus was the vicious circle of consumer society ironically born.
The backlash from this exuberant proliferation of the new consumer class was double-barreled: one from the city the migrants had come to and one from the village they had left. Those remaining behind suffered the most. A village priest from the rural Vladimir Province complained that:
"Migration to the factory exerts a corrupting influence on the workers and their families. A departing youth, lacking any of the supervision of family elders and having for himself a steady flow of money and free time, does not concern himself with the household, gets into the habit of undesirable vices, debauchery, a loss or morality, indifference to religion and to the rites of the Church. On Good Friday, a worker thinks nothing about duty until [he is] disgracefully drunk, gorging himself with sausage, playing the accordion, dancing and singing songs. It's a fact!" (Burds, 32).
Similarly, a report from the rustic Klin District in the late 1880s noted that "the majority of men and adolescents live in Moscow at the factories. At home are found only women and elders and therefore the land is worked in such a way that agriculture is in a most lamentable condition" (Burds, 34).
Lamentable, perhaps, but with the rent still due. Largely abandoned by their labor force, many village elders simply died of starvation while village women drifted too to the cities, where often their only form of survival was prostitution. "Villagers offered a number of explanations for this abandonment" Burds concludes, "but almost all of these came down to the temptations associated with industrial and urban life and the corruption of traditional values" (33).
The wages of this "corruption" were met with disdain and revulsion among the merchants and petty bourgeoisie of the cities as well. Noting that the tramway chugging visitors to the 1882 Moscow Exposition passed through the "notorious" Moscow slum neighborhood of Khitrovka, Daniel Brower observes that "the contrast between the fair's images of urban modernity and the misery of the Khitrovka dwellers illustrates another duality embedded in Russian urbanism in those decades: the slum had no place in the dreams of civic leaders, public-spirited intellectuals, and progressive entrepreneurs" (Brower, 76).
No place to be, perhaps, yet there it was, much like the laborers who were driven into the cities by the greed of the petty bourgeoisie landowners. Citing the 27 May, 1887 edition of the journal Russkoe slovo, Brower quotes a Moscow journalist as complaining that "'they (migrant laborers) fill Khitrov square to overflowing....and drink, eat, and even sleep right on the pavement'" (76).
One rising movement in the late 19th-Century that agreed slums such as Khitrovka had "no place" in Russian society but at the same time didn't blame the inhabitants was the Russian Populists. In their extraordinary anthology of Russian nationals in America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, American Through Russian Eyes, 1874-1926, Olga Peters Hasty and Susanne Fusso trace the rise of the Russian Populist movement in Russia beginning in the mid-1860s.
One of the "major ideologues" of the movement, Alexander Herzen, believed that Russia could "skip the stage of bourgeois capitalism and enter directly into socialism. He idealized the peasant commune as the model for a new society" (9). Hampered by increasingly repressive government crackdowns on "subversive" action and thought at home, Herzen and other Populists turned their gaze upon America, especially mid-America, as a kind of laboratory for their social experimentation.
One of the more committed Populists and social dissidents, Grigorij Machtet, traveled to Kansas to spend time observing the machinations of a commune founded by Russian émigré William Frey (née Vladimir Gejns). Machtet's account, "The Prairie and the Pioneers" was published in 1874 and offers a fascinating insight into both communal prairie life and evolving American culture, highlighted by his account of the brutal slaughter of a German prairie family and the near lynching of a neighbor -- also German -- by the enraged mob.
Concluding with a sketchy logic not uncommon to mobs that a single young farmer must be the murderer of German settlers simply because he is also German, the irate throng repeatedly strings him up by the neck hoping to squeeze a confession out of him:
"Something crunched. The rope, slipping along the rough bough, rubbed off some of the bark, which fell in a fine dust. Now it was finally stretched like a string: one could see the noose getting tighter and tighter. The wretch's face turned blue, his mouth opened, his eyes looked ahead of him dully, as if made of glass, and grew larger..." (44)
Unable to choke a confession out of him, the mob concludes he must be innocent, and give him a ride back to his farm, where "the people who had accompanied (him) began to disperse, constantly looking back at the young German, who continued to sit in the same position in which he sat down" (45).
Even more compelling is Vladimir Korolenko's 1896 essay, "Factory of Death: A Sketch." In Chicago to observe capitalist America's take on the dawning 20th Century at the World's Fair, Korolenko is instead irresistibly drawn to an overpowering stench wafting over the Windy City and through his hotel room windows. He hops aboard a streetcar which takes him to the source of the foul odors: the Armour, Swift & Co. slaughterhouse and meat-packing plant.
Korolenko's recounting of his tour of the slaughterhouse was the single most compelling segment of all four books discussed here. Written with a cool, highly-observant objectivity, "Factory of Death" reads more like a short story than a journalistic essay. The images Korolenko leaves his reader are indelible: the woman with her small child, gazing with detached, amusement-ride interest as part of a guided-tour group watching cattle sledgehammered to death below; the blood and brains mixing into the filthy mud the workers wallow in; everywhere, the permeating stench.
The tour gradually descends down slippery stairs where "the walls are sticky, and something remains on the floor as viscous mud drips from the ceiling" (89). Korolenko continues downward, past a grinning, glistening, half-naked man whose job it is to slit the throats of squealing pigs that pass by dangling from ropes, down into a rank, humid pit where "billows of hot steam burst out of the boilers, and the [pig] carcasses are lowered into them one by one along the rails. As they descend to the story below...eviscerated carcasses speed along the corridor, like so many ghosts" (90). His is an unforgettable portrait of an industry that probably hasn't changed that much.
The flip side of Korlenko's razor-sharp objectivity may be found in the bloated histrionics of Maxim Gorky's "City of the Yellow Devil". A hugely overrated writer (read, if you can, the ponderously overwrought "Lower Depths" as one example), Gorky's entry here certainly does not surprise nor will it disappoint fans of his relentlessly tiresome rhetoric.
As is noted in America's typically concise and informative introduction to this piece, "a major aim" of Gorky's 1906 trip to the United States was to expose Western democracy as "a nightmare of poverty and squalor" (128). This aim was at least in partial response to American support of Czar Nicholas II's quelling of the uprisings the previous year.
That premise established, Gorky certainly does not betray his reputation of ludicrously overwrought oratory. Beginning with his dismissal of the Statue of Liberty ("The cold face looks blindly through the fog into the ocean wasteland...") (132), Gorky takes on the Big Apple itself, observing that the city "seems like a huge jaw with uneven black teeth. It breathes clouds of smoke into the sky and wheezes like a glutton suffering from obesity" (133).
Gorky's account goes on, and on, and on ("the street is a slippery, greedy throat; along it, dark chunks of the city's food -- living people -- float somewhere into its depths..." etc., etc.) (133). If only Gorky had come along a little later, these florid ditties probably could have landed him a lucrative gig penning an original Lifetime movie. Talk of being born before one's time. And, it should be noted, the title here does not refer to some diatribe against the Chinese as may be expected, but rather the root of all evil incarnate: gold.
It is difficult to reconcile a friendship between this slogan-spouting pit bull and the apparent reserved subtlety of Anton Chekhov until one reads Gorky's recollection of Chekhov in Cynthia Carlile, et al's Anton Chekhov and His Times. Setting aside his wild-eyed invective for a moment, Gorky observed that "it seems to me that all those who found themselves in Anton Pavlovich's company inevitably found the desire to be simpler, more honest, more themselves" (154). One hopes this salve proved true with Gorky himself, however fleetingly.
Anton Chekhov and His Times is a burnished gem of a book, half letters from Chekhov, half reminiscences of those who knew and worked with him. From a personal standpoint, one of the most intriguing pieces was M.M. Chitau's recollection of the calamitous debut of "The Seagull".
Everything about the play's initial St. Petersburg performance was a disaster, and Chitau -- cast in several roles during in some frenetic, quicksand casting and who ultimately played Nina -- recounts this passionate catastrophe in an engaging log-roll of a memoir in which she is constantly trying to keep her balance and somehow manages never to tumble. She was apparently the exception: "the performers sank into the blackness of failure" she rather plaintively summarizes the production at one point.
The root of this failure, as it turned out, was not with the play, but rather with a 19th-Century theatrical sensibility not yet able to grasp a 20th-Century work. It would take Konstantin Stanislavsky to understand that and to bring the play to its resounding success a year later at his Moscow Arts Theater.
In his long and affectionate recollection in Chekhov And His Times, Stanislavsky offers his own account of taking "The Seagull" out on tour in 1903, here in Sebastopol: "The wind howled so that a stagehand stood by each stage set in the wings to make sure that a gust of wind did not bring it down on the audience. All the time we could hear the troubled calls of ships' horns and sirens coming from the sea. Our costumes fluttered in the wind blowing across the stage. It was raining" (103).
It was also, under Stanislavsky's guidance, a success, even on the road. His recounting of the genesis of Chekhov's final play "The Cherry Orchard" is especially absorbing. The play was written, after all, as "a comedy in four acts", and Stanislavsky's depiction bolsters this. Chekhov was apparently a big fan of vaudeville, and his initial inspiration for the "Orchard"'s Gayev/Firs dynamic evolved from his observations of a pair of Arts Theater actors out shooting pool.
Charlotta, the juggling nanny, was inspired by an eccentric, androgynous housekeeper down the road from Stanislavsky's house who amused Chekhov with her magic tricks, sometimes leaping upon his shoulders to wave at passersby. Stanislavsky's entry closes with a telling counterpoint to Chitau's earlier citing of the young, hissing St. Petersburg audience deriding "The Seagull" and the playwright for its "apolitical" nature.
"Then," Stanislavsky remembers of the coming upheaval, "...there was no source of revolutionary upsurge. Only somewhere, underground, forces were accumulating and making ready to deliver dreadful blows. The work of progressive people could consist only in developing a public mood, inspiring new ideas by explaining the futility of the old way of life. Chekhov was among those who carried out this preparatory work" (131).
Indeed, in a February, 1903 letter to critic and journalist Alexander I. Sumbatov-Yuzhin defending the work of Maxim Gorky, Chekhov observed that "...the petty bourgeoisie is a great evil; it, like a dam on a river, has always served to hold things in check, while the down and out, though inelegant, though drunk, are nevertheless a reliable implement, at least they have proved to be; and the dam, if not broken, has sprung a large and dangerous leak" (316).
This social hemorrhaging is what "The Cherry Orchard" came to be about, and which finally flooded all of Russia 13 years after Chekhov's death. We can never really know, of course, if Chekhov did indeed "die before his time" as he lamented to Gorky late in life, but we do know he saw the changes coming as clearly as if he had lived to watch them happening around him.
Copyright © 2000 The Write Word, Inc. All rights reserved.