Chekhov's Humanity... City and Country

Chekhov generally refrained from passing judgment on his characters, playing more the role of objective "witness." Well, sort of. "Man will become better when you show him what he is like," he wrote in one of his notebooks. Often his moral pronouncements are put into the mouths of characters with a deceptive simplicity; as readers, we recognize that the speaker is often both impassioned and hypocritical, sincere and ignorant. And because Chekhov always approached and drew his characters humanely, we can never look at a character and say, "What a hypocrite" or "How ignorant" - because they are too recognizable, too much like ourselves.

Anyway. A couple of stories I recently read with bits of this layered commentary, on city and country life. In Russia, of course, city and country have always been code words for social class - peasants, landed gentry, sophisticated intelligentsia, etc. Many of Chekhov's characters, however, are often in fluid social positions, which allows him to comment on class positions in a more dynamic way.

From "Gooseberries": The narrator is speaking about his brother. Their father was a military man who rose to the rank of officer and came to own a small country estate. As children the two brothers thus lived in the country; after their father's death, all property was lost to creditors, and so they became white-collar professionals.

He was a kind and gentle soul and I loved him, but I never sympathized with his desire to shut himself up for the rest of his life on a little property of his own. It is a common saying that a man needs only six feet of earth. But six feet is what a corpse needs, not a man. It is also asserted that if our educated class is drawn to the land and seeks to settle on farms, that's a good thing. But these farms amount to the same six feet of earth. To retire from the city, from the struggle, from the hubbub, to go off and hide on one's own farm - that's not life, it is selfishness, sloth, it is a kind of monasticism, but monasticism without works. Man needs not six feet of earth, not a farm, but the whole globe, all of Nature, where unhindered he can display all the capacities and peculiarities of his free spirit.

From "On Official Business": The main character here is a magistrate, young and ambitious for a career and lifestyle in Moscow but paying his dues in the provinces.

The fatherland, the real Russia, was Moscow, Petersburg; but these were the provinces, the colonies. When you dream of playing a part, of becoming known, of being, for instance, examining magistrate in important cases or prosecutor in a circuit court, of being a social lion, you inevitably think of Moscow. If you are to live, then it must be in Moscow; here, nothing matters to you; you get reconciled readily to your insignificant role, and only look for one thing in life - to get away, to get away as quickly as possible... and he kept thinking that all about him was not life but scraps of life, fragments, that everything here was accidental, that one could draw no conclusion from it... It occurred to him that since the life about him here in the wilds was unintelligible to him, and since he did not see it, it meant that it was nonexistent.

Both passages express the superiority of city life; and yet both characters are limited in their experiences and understanding. Each bring their prejudices. Chekhov himself summered in the country and eventually settled down on a rural estate; but seemed throughout his life to be dogged by a consciousness of the poor upon whose backs the wealthy and comfortable lived. "As though someone were knocking with a little hammer on his temples," he writes of the young magistrate, who ultimately has nightmares about how the poor "shouldered all that was darkest and most burdensome in life" and how "to wish for oneself a bright and active life among happy, contented people, and constantly to dream of such a life, that meant dreaming of new suicides of men crushed by toil and care..."

As for the man who criticizes his brother for "escaping" to the country, he has similar thoughts as the magistrate after seeing the life of comfort and satiation his brother made for himself (Chekhov even repeats the use of the phrase "a little hammer" in reference to one's conscience), that "obviously the happy man is at ease only because the unhappy ones bear their burdens in silence." But in this story, Chekhov bears "witness" to something perhaps even more implicating: the man's audience, the two other men who listen to him speak of his brother and the revelations he had with regard to happiness and the poor, don't care to hear him speak of it. "...it was tedious to listen to the story of the poor devil of a clerk who ate gooseberries. One felt like talking about elegant people, about women."