Chekhov and `Nothing Else'

With death-like inevitability, bloggers and others drag out “Best of” lists for the dwindling year. Back in June I announced my nominee but I’m flexible and have changed my mind. The best book of 2008 was certainly Sakhalin Island, published by Anton Chekhov in 1895. No other book I’ve read this year stays so vivid in memory and comes to mind so often, as it did again on Thursday when I read an interview with Theodore Dalrymple. Like Chekhov he is both a writer and doctor:

“I am always worried about predicting decline and fall, because men of my age seem constitutionally liable to do so. Nevertheless, there certainly does seem a thinning out of our culture, and a terrible narrowing of horizons. Here is just one very small example: a friend of mine who teaches Cambridge medical students — the elite of the elite — tells me that in many years he has met about three who have heard of Chekhov. The tragedy is that, when he tells them to read some, they love it; in other words, our educational system has deliberately failed to inculcate an interest in literature in them, though they are more than capable of developing one, and indeed are probably avid for something of the kind. This has not come about accidentally; it is the result of an ideology that has insinuated itself into power.”

To be literate and not know Chekhov is willful impoverishment of spirit, like not knowing Shakespeare or Keats. Since reading Sakhalin Island in September, I see and hear him everywhere, whether by name or in situations that strike me as implicitly “Chekhovian” – that is, ones in which sadness and comedy inextricably mingle. I picked up a book last week because it included “Torpid Smoke,” a story Nabokov wrote in 1935, and scored a bonus with Konstantin Korovin (1861-1939), who knew Chekhov as a student in Moscow and became a leading Russian Impressionist painter.

Korovin wrote a brief memoir, “My Encounters with Chekhov,” published in English in 1973 (translated by Tatiana Kusubova) and included in The Bitter Air of Exile: Russian Writers in the West 1922-1972, edited by Simon Karlinsky and Alfred Appel Jr. The scene is a Moscow hotel room in 1883. The players are Korovin, Chekhov (studying for his final exam to become a doctor) and other students. The dialogue could have been transcribed this morning on a college campus in the United States:

“The students were different from Anton Pavlovich. They loved to argue, and they were in some peculiar way opposed to just about everything.

“`If you have no convictions,’ said one student turning to Chekhov, `you can’t be a writer.’
“No one can say, `I have no convictions,’ said another. `I can’t understand how anyone could not have convictions.’

“`I have no convictions,’ replied Chekhov.

“`You claim to be a man without convictions, but how can you write a work of literature without any ideology? Don’t you have an ideology?’

“`I have no ideology and no convictions,’ answered Chekhov.

“These students had an odd way of arguing. They were apparently displeased with Anton Pavlovich. It was clear that they could not fit him into the didactic turn of their outlook or into their moralizing ideology. They wanted to guide, to instruct, to lead, and to influence. They knew everything. They understood everything. And Anton Pavlovich was plainly bored by it all.

“`Who needs your stories? Where do they lead? They don’t oppose anything. They contain no ideas. The Russian Bulletin, say, would have no use for you. Your stories are entertaining and nothing else.’

“`Nothing else,’ answered Anton Pavlovich.”

Already, at age 23, Chekhov evinces a Bartleby-like insouciance: “Nothing else.” I also came across Memories and Portraits by Ivan Bunin (1870-1953), the first Russian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1933. Bunin met Chekhov in Moscow in 1895 and saw him often in the remaining nine years of Chekhov’s life. He describes a charming, funny, hard-working writer who was gentle, proud, lonely, self-deprecating and fond of practical jokes. Bunin writes (as translated by Vera Traill and Robin Chancellor):

“Even in everyday life, he used words with precision and economy. He valued words very highly. He could not bear pompous, false, bookish words. His own speech was beautiful – fresh, clear and to the point. In his way of talking one never heard the writer; he seldom used similes or epithets, and when he did they were usually quite commonplace; he never flaunted or relished a well-chosen word. `Big’ words he loathed. A book of memoirs about him contains a noteworthy passage: `I once complained to Anton Pavlovich: “What am I to do? I am consumed by self-analysis.” And he replied: “You ought to drink less vodka.””

I urge you to read my year’s best book -- Sakhalin Island, translated by Brian Reeve, in the elegant, annotated paperback edition published by Oneworld Classics ($17 US, £9.99 UK).