Marginalia, no.170

63. Death of Chekhov: The touching description of Chekhov’s end – reported by two of his biographers, Natalia Ginzburg (Vita Attraverso le Lettere, Torino, 1989) and Troyat (Chekhov), neither of whom provides notes on its origin – should surely be attributed to Olga Knipper, the beloved cockroach, who was the only witness, aside from Dr. Schworer, of that death.

~ Aldo Buzzi, note to ‘Chekhov in Sondrio’

Chekhov’s final words were, ‘It’s been such a long time since I drank champagne.’ He drank it, laid himself down, and died. Every death, I suppose, is witnessed by multitudes if we consider the insects and microscopic creatures in attendance. But Olga Knipper was Chekhov’s wife. According to Buzzi, terms of endearment employed by Anton in letters to Olga include: my little cockroach, my little mosquito, my little turkey, my little bug, my dear little dog, my lovely dachshund.

Showing a Little Plumage

James Wood is still raising hackles.  Back in 2000, before he ascended the throne at The New Yorker, Wood published The Broken Estate, a tour by essay of various nineteenth and twentieth century literary greats.  In a piece on Virginia Woolf, Wood speaks fondly of her critical work, which he calls  “a writer’s criticism, written in the language of art, which is the language of metaphor.”  A “writer-critic” like Woolf, he says,

has a competitive proximity to the writers she discusses.  That competition is registered verbally.  The writer-critic is always showing a little plumage to the writer under discussion.

Reading this, one has the strong sense that Wood is talking as much about himself as about Woolf.  Wood published a novel in 2004, and whether or not one agrees with his methods or judgments, Wood’s prose is full of glittering precision and dreamy metaphorical effects that often top the novelists he’s examining.  Wood is forever showing plumage.  A few examples: 

Of Melville: “No other nineteenth-century novelist writing in English lived in the city of words that that Melville lived in; they were suburbanites by comparison.”

Of Chekhov: “He found the world to be as deeply evasive as he himself was – life as a tree of separate hanging stories, of dangling privacies.”

Of George Steiner: “[His] prose is a remarkable substance; it is the sweat of a monument.”

His metaphors do sometimes fail.  Take this, for example, from Wood’s summary of Anthony Julius’s screed against Eliot: “The idea seems to be that the three demons are separate but pull together, like hardworking chefs, to prepare the feast of prejudice.”

No one hits the bull’s eye every time.

It’s a tired old saying that ‘those who can’t, teach,’ and something similar is said of critics: that they make their way by praising or deploring the works of others because they themselves are unable to create anything original.  Like Flaubert’s Pellerin who “held the old masters in such veneration that it almost raised him to their status,” the critic schemes to win status by counterfeit means: If he can’t join the club by the front door, he climbs the trellis to break a window.  The assumption here is that it’s easier to be a critic.  Everyone is, so they say.  But being critical is not at all the same thing as being a critic.  I congratulate myself that Montaigne agrees:

Here is a wonder: we have many more poets than judges and interpreters of poetry.  It is easier to create it than to understand it.  On a certain low level it can be judged by precepts and by art.  But the good, supreme, divine poetry is above rules and reason… It does not persuade our judgment, it ravishes and overwhelms it. (Essays I, 37)

I wonder if we aren’t after all better served by “writer-critics” like Wood who possess some sort of artistic capacity, who because they share in the writer’s perspective are perhaps less confounded by the ravishment of words.  Or does that make them more susceptible?  But Wood at least is a pleasure to read, which is more than can be said for certain of his fellows.  (Sam Anderson considers reading Wood “practically a form of intellectual erotica.”)  I’ve personally benefited by Wood’s discussion -in the middling How Fiction Works- of the novel’s free indirect style, by which “we inhabit omniscience and partiality at once.”  I’ve also gleaned a few satori moments meditating on Wood’s philosophy of metaphor (“the whole of the imaginative fictional process in one move”) and its function within narrative:

Narrative sequence, at bottom, is nothing other than the materiality of words, which forces us to place one word after the next, rather than on top of each other…  Metaphor is the way to explode sequence.

Despite the occasional “feast of prejudice” flop, this kind of stuff is, I think, reason enough to hope that Wood keeps peacocking around for some time to come.

Chekhov and the Weight of Beauty

After a personal meeting with Leo Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana, Constance Garnett resolved that translating the great works of Russian literature into English would be her life’s labor. The year was 1893. Today, the fruit of that labor is found on bookshelves throughout the English-speaking world. But while Garnett’s translations of Dostoyevsky and others are sometimes maligned as paraphrastic Victorian ‘retellings,’ her detractors often concede that Garnett’s translations of Chekhov, at least, are pitch-perfect. Not that I’m in a position to tell, being ignorant of Russian. But much as I prefer the Pevear/Volokhonsky translations of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, I can imagine no greater pleasure reading Chekhov than when Garnett delivers him to me.

Some time ago I bought an old Chatto & Windus hardcover edition of Garnett’s ‘Tchehov’ (as the publishers rendered his name) and found inside a story titled ‘The Beauties.’  The narrator of the story describes a summer journey he made through the countryside as an adolescent with his grandfather. The two stop for a rest from the midday heat at the home of an Armenian. The Armenian and the grandfather talk while the young narrator sits and waits, impatient to continue the journey. But the dull, stifled atmosphere of the room is suddenly electrified by the entrance of the Armenian’s beautiful young daughter.  The older men fall silent as she serves them tea. The young man is transfixed; the perfection of the girl’s face is all that he sees. He tries to explain:

I am ready to swear that Masha –or, as her father called her, Mashya- was a real beauty, but I don’t know how to prove it. It sometimes happens that clouds are huddled together in disorder on the horizon, and the sun hiding behind them colours them and the sky with tints of every possible shade – crimson, orange, lilac, muddy pink; one cloud is like a monk, another like a fish, a third like a Turk in a turban. The glow of sunset enveloping a third of the sky gleams on the cross on the church, flashes on the windows of the manor house, is reflected in the river and the puddles, quivers on the trees; far, far away against the background of the sunset, a flock of wild ducks is flying homewards… And the boy herding the cows, and the surveyor driving in his chaise over the dam, and the gentleman out for a walk, all gaze at the sunset, and every one of them thinks it terribly beautiful, but no one knows or can say in what its beauty lies.

In typical fashion, Chekhov refuses us what we might sentimentally prefer.  There is no timid exchange of glances, no breathless meeting behind the stable, no words passed between the young narrator and the Armenian girl at all.  In fact, Chekhov gives us no narrative resolution of any kind whatsoever. In place of the shy or impassioned encounter of a young man and a young woman, we are presented instead with the encounter of Man and Beauty, and a subtle meditation on their relation to one another.

Note how in the quote above Chekhov shifts us immediately from the loveliness of Masha to the sublime illumined grandeur of the skies at sunset and the infinitely diversified world below that glows and blooms in the caress of that celestial light. There is a kinship, Chekhov suggests, between the beauty of the girl and the beauty of the skies. They are one and the same.  The light that shines through the clouds is the light that shines through Masha’s face. The beauty that manifests itself in Masha is the same beauty that arises everywhere, unexpectedly, gratuitously, now here and now there, through all of nature. The heavenly and the terrestrial, incomprehensible to each other, are invisibly knit together in a single symphonic moment – a moment neither transcendent nor alien to us but near us, involving us, and which, when it finds us, requires something in return:

You gaze, and little by little the desire comes over you to say to Masha something extraordinary, pleasant, sincere, beautiful, as beautiful as she herself was.

And yet, what beauty evokes in us in elusive; whatever it requires we seem incapable of giving. Like the cowherd, the surveyor and the gentleman, the young narrator stands in the presence of beauty and is dumb: he says nothing to Masha. And if properly responding to beauty is difficult, simply to beholding it is a struggle and a strange sort of burden:

[L]ittle by little I forgot myself and gave myself up entirely to the consciousness of beauty… I felt this beauty rather strangely. It was not desire, nor ecstasy, nor enjoyment that Masha excited in me, but a painful though pleasant sadness. It was a sadness vague and undefined as a dream. For some reason I felt sorry for myself, for my grandfather and for the Armenian, even for the girl herself, and I had a feeling as though we all four had lost something important and essential to life which we should never find again.

Here is Chekhov’s cosmic tragedy, the imprint, if you will, of an irrevocable primordial loss: this “painful though pleasant sadness” in the presence of the Beautiful. Though she is its own manifestation in that moment, Masha too suffers under the weight of beauty.  No one escapes the nameless universal longing. Precisely what is this “something important and essential to life” which we have lost? As a physician (which he was) Chekhov may owe us a diagnosis, but he is too good a writer to give us one.