Reading Chekhov

 And Astrov in Uncle Vanya: 

Those who will live a hundred or two hundred years after us, and who will despise us for having lived our lives so stupidly and tastelessly—they will, perhaps, find a means of being happy. .. . 

Astrov is also—and chiefly—known for his concern about the destruction of the Russian forests and for his remarkable grasp of the principles of ecology, decades before the term came into use as we now know it. A. P. Chudakov and Simon Karlinsky have both written of Chekhov as a kind of protoenvironmentalist. “In the twentieth century the preservation of nature has long been and will be more and more the measure by which the moral potential of each person is tested,” Chudakov writes in Chekhov’s Poetics (1971; published in English in 1983). “[Chekhov] was the first in literature who included the relationship of man to nature in his sphere of ethics.” Karlinsky, in the introduction to his invaluable Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary (1973), and in an essay entitled “Huntsmen, Birds, Forests and Three Sisters” (1981), writes of Chekhov’s prescient uneasiness about the destruction of ecosystems. In the essay, Karlinsky speculates about the literary and scientific sources of Chekhov’s environmentalism, citing Thoreau, James Fenimore Cooper, the French geogra. pher Elisée Reclus, and the Russian climatologist Alexande, Voyeykov. But writing of the nature symbolism in Three Sisters, he makes a telling error: 

At the end of the play, Natasha intends to consolidate her victory by chopping down the beautiful trees. . .. 

“I will order them first of all to chop down this avenue of firs, and then this maple tree here. . . . It is so ugly in the evening.” After destroying the magnificent trees that meant so much to the departing Vershinin and the exterminated Tuzenbach, Natasha plans to replace free nature with a tame variant of it that is acceptable to her: “And here I will order them to plant little flowers, lots of little flowers, and they’ll smell... .” 

Avenues of firs and specimen maples are, of course, no more a part of “free nature” than are beds of tacky little flowers. They belong to what Michael Pollan has wonderfully called “second nature”—the sphere of horticulture. In his writings, as in his life, Chekhov was a good deal less involved with trees growing in the forest than with those planted in an orchard. He was a poet of the domesticated landscape rather than of the Sublime, drawn more to the charm of a shady old garden than to the grandiloquence of untouched wilderness. In the story “Ariadne” (1895), a character named Lubkov “would sometimes stand still before some magnificent landscape and say: ‘It would be nice to have tea here.’ ” 

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In his stories and plays, Chekhov is afraid for all men. He was Only in his twenties and thirties when he wrote most of them, but like other geniuses—especially those who die prematurely—he wrote as if he were old. Toward the end of “Ward No. 6,” he veers off—as he does in other dark and terrible works, such as “Peasants” and “In the Ravine”—to rejoice for all men in the beauty of the world. There is always this amazing movement in Chekhov from the difficult and fearful to the simple and beautiful. As Ragin lies dying, Chekhov tells us, he sees “a greenness before his eyes”; then “a herd of deer, extraordinarily beautiful and graceful, of which he had been reading the day before, ran by him.” 

“Life is given to us only once.” The line (or a variant) appears in story after story and is delivered so quietly and 

offhandedly that we almost miss its terror. Chekhov was never one to insist on anything. He didn’t preach, or even teach. He is our poet of the provisional and fragmentary. When a story or play ends, nothing seems to be settled. “Ward No. 6,” for instance, does not end with the image of the beautiful deer. Before Ragin dies another thought passes through his mind: “A peasant woman stretched out her hand to him with a registered letter... . Mihail Averyanitch said something, then it all vanished, and Andrey Yefimitch sank into oblivion forever.” The registered letter—there is a bit of theatricality in its not being an ordinary letter—glints with meaning. What does it say? Who sent it? The ending of “Ward No. 6” inevitably evokes (and was surely influenced by) the ending of “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” but Chekhov declines to report the mystical experience that Tolstoy confidently reports his hero to have had. Chekhov enters the dying Ragin’s mind, but emerges with the most laconic and incomplete of reports. Tolstoy’s audacious authorial omniscience gives him his position as the greatest of the’ nineteenth-century Russian realists. Chekhov’s experiments with authorial reticence—equally audacious in their waypoint toward twentieth-century modernism.