I Read It in the Paper

On June 19, 1988, deep in the Reagan-Gorbachev Era that now seems nearly as remote as the Roosevelt-Stalin Era, Murray Kempton published a column in New York Newsday that reads like a prescient vision of the demise of the Soviet Union, though that epochal event did not occur until more than three years later. For me, however, the column is most interesting for literary reasons. Kempton – he writes of himself in the third person, as “the visitor” to Moscow – recounts a conversation with a Soviet journalist, Alexi Adzhubei, who was also Nikita Khrushchev’s son-in-law. Adzhubei asked Kempton if he is a Sovietologist, and he answers, to Adzhubei’s delight, “To me, the only Sovietologist who is always up to date is Anton Chekhov.”

Part of the joke, of course, is that the great storywriter and playwright died 13 years before the bloody birth of the Soviet Union. The rest of the joke is that few Westerners have understood Chekhov well enough, as Kempton did, to appreciate his grasp of what used to be called the “Russian Soul,” not to mention the human soul. Those who reduce Chekhov to a few bittersweet satires of bourgeois life fail to understand him.

(Parenthetically, do American readers still fall in love with Mother Russia, by way of its great writers, especially those of the 19th century? It was for me a passionate, stormy affair that started with Dostoevsky and Tolstoy ((I remain faithful to the latter)), and it developed into dalliances of various degrees of devotedness with Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov, Babel, Nabokov and Mandelstam, among others. Within the last several weeks, my 18-year-old son read his first Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, in just a couple of super-heated days, the way I did, then interrupted his Russian interlude with The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow ((whose parents emigrated from Russia in 1913)), and resumed his Russian idyll with Anna Karenina. Like father, like fortunate son.)

Kempton continues:

“None of us could be so bold as to advance a particular Chekhov story as the greatest of all but `My Life’ would be a splendid candidate. At one juncture, its hero marries a young woman of wealth, who is transiently possessed by an itch to go back to the land. They go off to convert her estate into a working farm and spend a horrid few months until, disgusted by the crafts and coarseness of the peasants, she abandons all lofty notions and flees to London to study singing.

“From there, she writes to ask for a divorce and to report that she has bought herself a ring engraved in Hebrew, `All things pass away,’ and that it would be her talisman against future infatuations. And he reflects: `If I wanted to order a ring for myself, the inscription I should choose would be, “Nothing passes away.”’

“And nothing seems ever to pass away in Moscow. Russian history asserts itself there as all but immutable and immovable, and so it asserted itself for Chekhov in 1900. The on-again, off-again harryings of Andrei Sakharov and Boris Pasternak would have been for him the oldest of tales.”

For the rest of the column – I nearly called it an essay – Kempton plays and plays again with the ironies of Russian history, the ironies he borrows from Chekhov. Near the end, he even turns Karl Marx on his head – not an easy feat, for Marx knew irony when he saw it, except in the particulars of his own life. I remember reading Kempton’s piece as it appeared in New York Newsday, a tabloid. It was thrilling – a journalist citing Chekhov but not as an excuse for showing off his erudition. The column works because for Kempton, who died in 1997, literature is a part of life and life, in turn, permeates literature. What we observe and learn in each realm helps us get along in the other – a grand symbiosis.

For the record, I had read “My Life” just a couple of years before I read Kempton’s column. In the 1980s, when the Ecco Press incrementally published the Constance Garnett translations of Chekhov’s stories, I bought all 13 volumes as they appeared plus, in uniform editions, Notebooks of Anton Chekhov and The Unknown Chekhov. “My Life” appears in volume eight, The Chorus Girl and Other Stories. Garnett’s translations of Chekhov and other Russian writers have been criticized as too stiff, too “literary,” too Victorian. But her labors during the teens of the last century were immense and hugely influential. Chekhov’s entry into English powerfully touched and stirred such writers as Virginia Woolf, Henry Green and V.S. Pritchett. One can hardly imagine the short story in English without the potent example of Chekhov.

Kempton’s column, titled “Hostage to History,” was later reprinted in his 1994 omnibus Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events. In that volume, you can find a similar Kempton effort, published six months after the Chekhov piece, titled “As the World Turns.” I’ll say nothing else, but here’s a one-sentence tease:

“The most enlightening guide I have found to Central America is not the product of a social scientist’s research but Nostromo, the novel Joseph Conrad published in 1904 when his direct experience with the neighborhood was nearly thirty years past and had never extended beyond a tarrying or so in ports when he had sailed as a schooner deck officer in the Gulf of Mexico.”