`Sad Books for Humorous People'

I reread “The Lady with the Dog,” one of Chekhov’s triumphs, with the words of Vladimir Nabokov, in Lectures on Russian Literature, in mind:

“Chekhov’s books are sad books for humorous people; that is, only a reader with a sense of humor can really appreciate their sadness. There exist writers that sound like something between a titter and a yawn – many of these are professional humorists, for instance. There are others that are something between a chuckle and a sob – Dickens was one of these. There is also that dreadful kind of humor that is consciously introduced by an author in order to give a purely technical relief after a good tragic scene – but this is a trick remote from true literature. Chekhov’s humor belonged to none of these types; it was purely Chekhovian. Things for him were funny and sad at the same time, but you would not see their sadness if you did not see their fun, because both were linked up.”

Chekhov’s story begins with Gurov, a chronically unfaithful married man with children in Moscow, approaching yet another conquest in Yalta, the Crimean resort on the Black Sea. Anna Sergeievna, too, is married and bored. They become lovers and the unexpected happens – they fall, impossibly, in love. By the final scene, he notices his hair is turning gray. Here’s the conclusion, in Constance Garnett’s translation:

“And it seemed as though in a little while the solution would be found, and then a new and splendid life would begin; and it was clear to both of them that they had still a long, long road before them, and that the most complicated and difficult part of it was only just beginning.”

Their hopes mingle ridiculousness and pathos. The tone, even the vocabulary, is plain, without flourishes. One false move and the story would spill into burlesque or maudlin cliché. Here’s Nabokov again:

“…Chekhov managed to convey an impression of artistic beauty far surpassing that of many writers who thought they knew what rich beautiful prose was. He did it by keeping all his words in the same dim light and of the same exact tint of gray, as tint between the color of an old fence and that of a low cloud.”

Chekhov’s effects are heightened by what Nabokov calls “a faintly iridescent verbal haziness.” Nabokov, the plumiest of prose stylists, lauds Chekhov for the precision of his drabness. Where else in literature do we find a comparable coexistence, in Nabokov’s words, of “funny and sad at the same time?” Occasionally in Nabokov himself – think of the final reunion between Humbert and Lolita, the Hazel Shade scenes in Pale Fire and the story “Signs and Symbols.” So, too, in Beckett, who kept “all his words in the same dim light and of the same exact tint of gray.” Sorrow and comedy merge in the halting eloquence of “First Love,” written in French in 1946, translated into English in 1970:

“Love brings out the worst in man and no error. But what kind of love was this, exactly? Love-passion? Somehow I think not. That’s the priapic one, is it not? Or is this a different variety? There are so many, are there not? All equally if not more delicious, are they not? Platonic love, for example, there’s another just occurs to me. It’s disinterested. Perhaps I loved her with a platonic love? But somehow I think not. Would I have been tracing her name in old cow-shit if my love had been pure and disinterested?”