`The Dustbin of History'

Had Anton Chekhov not succumbed to tuberculosis in 1904, and had he lived on until 1928, he would have been 68 years old, a retired physician and grand old man of world literature, when Josef Stalin solidified his murderous grip on the Soviet Union. Would he still have lived in Russia? For how long would this most principled of writers have stifled his outrage? And for how long would Stalin have tolerated him? Theodore Dalrymple inspired these uncharacteristic considerations of alternate history in an essay savaging a theater reviewer for The Guardian. Of a production of The Cherry Orchard, Lyn Gardner wrote:

“Perhaps more than any other production I’ve seen, it suggests that the first thud of axe against tree trunk is a blow for a revolution that will eventually sweep Madame Ranevskaya and her family into the oblivion they deserve. It’s a case of good riddance to bad rubbish.”

That final phrase chillingly recalls the taunt Trotsky threw at the doomed Mensheviks: “You are pitiful isolated individuals; you are bankrupts; your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on — into the dustbin of history!” Dalrymple is rightly appalled by the casual, dismissive violence of Gardner’s conclusion, though her case is hardly idiopathic. A tolerance amounting to tacit approval for the crimes of Stalin, Mao, even Hitler, is hardly unknown among the educated classes.

Dalrymple cites the familiar litany of Soviet literary martyrs: “Gumilev was shot on Lenin’s orders, Bunin went into exile and never returned, Gorky went into exile and was killed on his return, Mayakovsky killed himself in order to escape from his inevitable arrest, Mandelstam died in the Gulag, Tsvetayeva committed suicide, Yesenin cut his wrists and then hanged himself.”

He forgets Isaac Babel and one of Stalin’s indirect victims -- Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, father of the novelist, assassinated in Berlin in 1922 by Russian monarchists. The elder Nabokov was mistakenly murdered as he tried to shelter the real target, Pavel Milyukov, an exiled leader of the Constitutional Democratic Party. His son offers an excellent corrective to Gardner’s vulgar misunderstanding of Chekhov:

“What really attracted the Russian reader was that in Chekhov's heroes he recognized the Russian idealist. . . a man who combined the deepest human decency of which man is capable with an almost ridiculous inability to put his ideals and principles into action; a man devoted to moral beauty, the welfare of his people, the welfare of the universe, but unable in his private life to do anything useful; frittering away his provincial existence in a haze of utopian dreams; knowing exactly what is good, what is worth while living for, but at the same time sinking lower and lower in the mud of a humdrum existence, unhappy in love, hopelessly inefficient in everything--a good man who cannot make good. This is the character that passes--in the guise of a doctor, a student, a village teacher, many other professional people--all through Chekhov's stories.”

Either Gardner is historically illiterate – meaning she ought to be fired as incompetent --or, as Dalrymple suggests, she is a dilettante of nihilism, happy to let others do the killing for her. He writes:

“I think it is very unlikely that the theatre critic was so ignorant that she had no idea of what went on while the winds of change blew. No one is that ignorant. This being the case, we must conclude that she actually approved of what the winds of change wrought. This is a most uncomfortable thought, for it means that the impulses of nihilistic hatred that brought about the catastrophes of the 20th century are with us still, particularly among the intelligentsia.”

Gardner’s moral and historical ignorance is compounded by aesthetic catatonia. She has no understanding of Chekhov, who, on Oct. 4, 1888, wrote to his friend Alexy Pleshcheyev:

“The people I am afraid of are those who continually sniff between the lines seeking out tendencies, and who try to put me down as a definitive liberal or conservative. I am neither a liberal nor a conservative, I’m not a gradualist, nor a monk, nor am I indifferent. My sole desire is to be a free artist, nothing more, and I regret that God has denied me the strength to be one. I detest lies and violence in all their forms…I regard all trademarks and labels as badges of prejudice. My holy of holies is the human body, good health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love and complete freedom -- freedom from violence and lies, no matter what form these last two may take.”

Some 40 years later, in Stalin’s Russia, such a letter, a declaration of human freedom and aspiration, would have amounted to a death sentence. In 1955, in another act of moral blindness, Lillian Hellman edited a volume of Chekhov’s letters, including the letter just cited. Hellman was a hack, a chronic liar and unreconstructed Stalinist who had the nerve, in her introduction, to praise Chekhov as “a man of balance, a man of sense,” and deliver a crackpot summary of 19th-century Russian history and culture. Of the play Gardner reviewed Hellman writes:

“The Cherry Orchard is sharp comedy. Nowhere else does Chekhov say so clearly that the world these people made for themselves would have to end in a whimper.”