'Sacrifice and Doom'

Scholars of Russian literature tell us the edition of Anton Chekhov’s letters published between 1944 and 1951 was heavily censored by Soviet editors, filled with ellipses that signify an excised word, phrase or sentence. Nothing surprising here. Censorship is an obligatory tool of every totalitarian regime, even when applied to their greatest writers. As Simon Karlinsky puts it: 

“There are cuts made for political and nationalistic considerations, as when Chekhov makes too much of life in Western Europe or fails to sound patriotic enough to suit the Stalinist censor.” Karlinsky goes on to identify another category of deletions: “There are cuts of passages that mention Jews, because the word he uses for ‘Jew’ is zhid. Though ugly and highly pejorative when used by a present-day anti-Semite, this happened to be the normal word for Jew in the South Russian dialect Chekhov grew up speaking. (When Chekhov does in fact wish  to use an anti-Jewish epithet, he chooses a different word, shmul, which was also carefully deleted.) Even a passage that compares newly hatched nightingale fledglings to naked Jewish children was not allowed to appear in print.”

 

In the Winter 1973-74 issue of European Judaism: A Journal for the New Europe, Chekhov’s future biographer Donald Rayfield reminds us in “What Did Jews Mean to Chekhov?” that the writer was born in Taganrog on the Sea of Azov, more than seven-hundred miles south of Moscow. The city had “a cosmopolitan population of Greeks, Italians, Armenians, Ukrainians, Jews, Tatars and Moldavians” – and Russians. Rayfield writes: “The Jew was for Chekhov not an anthropological subject in himself or herself: he or she represented a more extreme example of human anguish, rootlessness or subjugation, which could provide the material for many more imaginary characters.”

 

Rayfield reviews Chekhov’s dealings with Jews in his writings and life, and tells us he “associated Jewishness in his work with sacrifice and doom.” Chekhov’s friendship with his editor Alexi Suvorin cooled and largely ended over the Dreyfus case and Suvorin’s growing anti-Semitism. In 1903, a year before Chekhov’s death, Solomon Rabinovich – better known as Sholom Aleichem – asked him to contribute a story to a collection he was editing to benefit victims of the pogrom in Kishinev. “Since Chekhov was not able to supply a new story,” Karlinsky writes, “Sholom Aleichem selected his earlier piece, ‘Difficult People,’ which was translated into Yiddish and included in the collection.”   

 

Jump forward almost almost seventy-five years. “Strangers” is a brief autobiographical piece by Irving Howe written in 1977 and included in his Selected Writings 1950-1990. Howe writes:

 

“I remember Isaac Rosenfeld, the most winning of all American Jewish writers, once explaining to me with comic solemnity that Chekhov had really written in Yiddish but Constance Garnett, trying to render him respectable, had falsified the record. Anyone with half an ear, said Rosenfeld, could catch the tunes of Yiddish sadness, absurdity, and humanism in Chekhov’s prose – and for a happy moment it almost seemed true.” 

 

[Karlinsky’s quotes are taken from Anton Chekhov's Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary (trans. Karlinsky and Michael Henry Heim, 1973).]