On the cusp of his great artistic flowering in 1888, immediately after writing “The Steppe,” Anton Chekhov published his long story “Lights” (trans. Constance Garnett) in the Saint Petersburg magazine Northern Herald. In a May 3 letter to the promising young writer Ivan Leontyev (pseudonym: Ivan Shcheglov), Chekhov confesses he is “a little ashamed of it. It’s awfully boring and cloyingly full of philowisdomizing. I feel bad about it, but there’s nothing I can do: I need money as much as air.”
Readers are cautioned when weighing Chekhov’s assessments of his work. He is allergic to hints of
pretentiousness and presumption, often deflects both praise and criticism, and
defends his writing as a way to earn a living and support his family. He was
still only twenty-eight years old. On May 29, Shcheglov writes in a letter to
Chekhov:
“I was not
entirely satisfied with your latest story ‘Lights.’ Of course I swallowed it in
one gulp, there is no question about that, because everything you write is so
appetizing and real that it can be easily and pleasantly swallowed. But that
finale ‘You can’t figure out anything in this world . . .’ is abrupt; it is
certainly the writer’s job to figure what goes on in the heart of his hero,
otherwise his psychology will remain unclear.”
A typical
complaint about Chekhov’s stories, then and now. He was a doctor but refused to
write as though fiction were science. His characters, like us, remain mysteries
to themselves and others. He is no practitioner of “depth psychology” – that silly
oxymoron. On June 9, less than two weeks later, Chekhov replies to Shcheglov:
“I permit
myself not to agree with you about my ‘Lights.’ It is not the psychologist’s
job to understand things that he in fact does not understand. Let us not be charlatans and let us state openly that
you can’t figure out anything in this world. Only fools and charlatans know and
understand everything.”
The great
Chekhov scholar Vladimir Kataev devotes an entire chapter to “Lights” in If Only We Could Know! (trans. Harvey
Pitcher, Ivan R. Dee, 2002). He carefully delineates the roles of Ananyev, von
Shtenberg and the unnamed narrator. Kataev writes: “Chekhov’s intention was not
to confirm an ‘elementary moral truth’; on the contrary, he rejected elementary
moral truths in order to reveal the complexity of what to everyone else seemed
simple and self-evident.” Chekhov’s story is clear and accessible. What it
reveals is muddily complicated.
I often thought
of “Lights” and other middle-period Chekhov stories while reading Isaac
Bashevis Singer’s just-published Old
Truths and New Clichés: Essays (ed. David Stromberg, Princeton University
Press, 2022). Singer’s understanding of fiction combines the role of a traditional
storyteller with what Stromberg calls “a modernist writer with intellectual
leanings like Albert Camus and Vladimir Nabokov.” When citing examples of great
fiction, Singer invariably mentions Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Maupassant –
and Chekhov. In the title essay Singer writes:
“Writers who
believe that literature is a branch of psychology often remain psychologists in
literature and litterateurs in psychology. Good novels contain a lot of facts
about human behavior, but when literature builds its structure on Freud or any
psychological master, it must fail. A great number of modern novels are sadly
similar to the tales of those who are psychoanalyzed. This type of novel is a
mixture of a confession and a boast. On the whole, ‘case histories’ cannot be
substitutes for artful stories.”
[The
passages from the Shcheglov and Chekhov letters are translated by Michael Henry
Heim and Simon Karlinsky in Letters of
Anton Chekhov (1973).]
2 comments:
Freud as a psychological "master." That's rich. The old fraud. . .
How can you turn out columns that meet your usual standard of excellence while enduring Covid is beyond me. But don't let me stop you....
Andrew Reinbach
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