`His Dictionary is Poor'

“His dictionary is poor, his combination of words almost trivial – the purple patch, the juicy verb, the hothouse adjective, the crème-de-menthe epithet, brought in on a silver tray, these were foreign to him. He was not a verbal innovator in the sense that Gogol was; his literary style goes to parties clad in its everyday suit. Thus Chekhov is a good example to give when one tries to explain that a writer may be a perfect artist without being exceptionally vivid in his verbal technique or exceptionally preoccupied with the way his sentences curve.”

That’s Nabokov explaining why Chekhov is not Nabokov and yet somehow remains a genius. A few sentences later in Lectures on Russian Literature, Nabokov says the great story writer “managed to convey an impression of artistic beauty far surpassing that of many writers who thought they knew what rich beautiful prose was.”

Style is not filigree stitched from the outside, a superfluous afterthought like sequins on a sweater. The best styles, gaudy or stringent, are those that express the matter at hand most effectively. Reading Sakhalin Island, I’m struck by the deftness and economy of Chekhov’s prose, which permits him to remain straight-faced while quietly satirical, as he often is in his stories. These qualities are evident even through the scrim of translation (by Brian Reeve, in the edition I’m reading).

The subject, a Russian penal colony in Siberia late in the 19th century, is grim but Chekhov, because of his complex vision and the elasticity of his prose, can be variously angry, compassionate, clinical and funny in a hellish world. He’s never binary in his judgments, do-gooder or reactionary. Imagine a book written today about American prisons – hectoring, self-righteous, without nuance or literary worth; in short, without style. Here’s a passage describing a driver he meets during his 11-week journey across northern Russia:

“Out of boredom I strike up a conversation with my elderly driver, and learn that he has been married sixteen years, that he has had eighteen children, of whom only three have died, and that his father and mother are still alive; that his father and mother are kirzhaks, that is to say, religious dissenters, that they do not smoke and have never seen a single town in their lives except for Ishim, but that he, the old driver, as a young man, allowed himself to mess around a bit, and smoked.”

If Chekhov were writing sociology, this incident would never be included, but our author/doctor can’t resist his fellow humans. He looks at a peasant or noble and sees a story. His storytelling compulsion reveals Chekhov as a democrat. He recognizes distinctions in social class but they mean nothing. His gift is for empathy and understanding. Remember, too, he was sick with the tuberculosis that would kill him at age 44. In his beautifully digressive essay “Chekhov in Sondrio” (included in Journey to the Land of The Flies), Aldo Buzzi places Sakhalin Island in the Russian context (lice, roaches, ice, vodka), along with Chekhov’s great stories, and reminds us of his heroism:

“Chekhov made this journey in 1890, over a hundred years ago, at the age of thirty. Already ill since ’84, he must have dealt with discomforts and fatigues of every kind.”

Even if you’re an old Chekhov hand, I suggest you read Sakhalin Island. It’s a beautiful book, a portrait of pre-Revolutionary Russia and in some ways a precursor of the so-called New Journalism. I’ll leave you with another bit of Chekhov:

“On pulling into the bank, the first thing the oarsmen do is to set abusing each other. They swear with malevolence, for no reason at all, and obviously in a half-asleep state. Listening to their choice vituperation, you might think that not only my driver, the horses and they themselves, but even the water, the ferry and the oars, have mothers.”

In his note to the passage Reeve tells us:

“Most Russian terms of abuse either relate to parts of one’s mother’s anatomy, or else take the form of injunctions to depart and perform intimate acts with one’s mother or the mother of the Devil.”