`A Parable About Imagination'

Dave Lull has discovered one of Chekhov’s gems, “The Student,” the author’s favorite among his stories. Less than four pages long, it dates from April 1894. With only 10 years left to live, Chekhov had entered his mature phase as a writer. He visited the penal colony on Sakhalin Island in 1890, and late in 1892 wrote two masterpieces, “Ward No. 6” and “An Anonymous Story.” Already in 1894 he had produced “The Black Monk” and “Rothschild’s Fiddle,” and was beginning work on The Seagull.

That Chekhov should write a story as seemingly simple and straightforward as “The Student,” so reminiscent of Tolstoy’s religious parables, seems remarkable. It’s as though he, a non-believer, needed to project himself imaginatively into a character he could never be – a devout and rather innocent seminary student – yet who in some ways resembled him. Ivan Velikopolsky and his creator share gentleness, compassion and a fondness for people and conversation.

It’s Good Friday and Ivan is fasting. He has been hunting woodcock and is walking home: “Needles of ice reached over the puddles, and the forest became inhospitable, forsaken, desolate. It felt like winter.” Growing up, we were almost the only non-Catholics in the neighborhood, and were not allowed to play outside between noon and 3 p.m. on Good Friday. My mother worried about offending the neighbors, and each year it felt like a grim three hours. Chekhov writes: “It seemed to him that this sudden onset of cold violated the order and harmony of everything, that nature herself felt dismayed…” That is, it’s the day of the Passion.

Ivan meets two widowed peasants, mother and daughter, and warms himself by their fire. The mother says they have attended the “Twelve Gospels.” In a note appended to the Richard Pevear/Larissa Volokhonsky translation (the link above is to the Constance Garnett translation), we learn the Twelve Gospels is part of the matins on Holy Friday, “a composite reading of twelve passages from the four Gospels describing the Crucifixion.” Out of enthusiasm, not a wish to proselytize, Ivan retells the stories of Peter denying Jesus three times and Judas’ betrayal. After nearly a page of Ivan’s story-within-a-story, the narrator resumes:

“The student sighed and fell to thinking. Still smiling, Vasilisa [the mother] suddenly choked, and big, abundant tears rolled down her cheeks. She shielded her face from the fire with her sleeve, as if ashamed of her tears, and Lukerya [her daughter], gazing fixedly at the student, flushed, and her expression became heavy, strained, as in someone who is trying to suppress intense pain.”

In Chekhov: A Spirit Set Free, V.S. Pritchett says of “The Student”: “It is certainly one of his most tender, subtle and poetic allegories,” and I quibble only with Pritchett’s final word. Chekhov’s story characteristically suggests significance without preaching or teaching. It is free of didacticism. Pritchett says as much when he writes:

“Chekhov’s story takes a step far beyond trite religious insinuation, and if it is a parable, it is a parable about imagination.”

This is shrewd, but we might go farther and say “The Student” is a story about the power of stories, and thus about the possibility of hope. Leaving the women and their bonfire, Ivan turns to look at them again:

“The student thought again that if Vasilisa wept and her daughter was troubled, then obviously what he had just told them, something that had taken place nineteen centuries ago, had a relation to the present – to both women, and probably to this desolate village, to himself, to all people. If the old woman wept, it was not because he was able to tell it movingly, but because Peter was close to her and she was interested with her whole being in what had happened in Peter’s soul.”

We’re happy for Ivan. He has found his vocation and proved empirically what he already knew by faith. This is intensely beautiful, and one need not be a Christian or any sort of believer to be moved by the story and frame-story. One need only emulate Chekhov’s moral imagination, his gift for projecting into others unlike himself:

“And joy suddenly stirred in [Ivan’s] soul, and he even stopped for a moment to catch his breath. The past, he thought, is connected with the present in an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of the other. And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of the chain: he touched one end, and the other moved.”

By retelling the familiar story and observing its effect on Vasilsa, Ivan has watched his faith move from theory to practice. Now it’s real. He’s only 22 years old and “an unknown, mysterious happiness, gradually came over him, and life seemed to him delightful, wondrous, and filled with meaning.” Such undiluted states are as rare in Chekhov as they are in life.