'Old Age Had Been Foreseen'

Deciding which of Chekhov’s more than five-hundred stories is the finest is a happily futile task. He is a reader’s pipe dream: a great writer who was prolific (though he died at age forty-four). My sentimental favorite is “My Life” (1896), a novella written during his Melikhovo period. Misail Poloznev is a young nobleman who resolves to become a member of the proletariat, though not out of revolutionary zeal. He rejects the life he inherited but without self-dramatization. His motives are private, not histrionic, and everyone, even his father, mocks him and fails to understand Misail’s choice. By the end he has lost the woman he loves and made his sister’s life difficult, but we admire him. His life has been lonely and difficult but he has achieved integrity and a certain moral eminence. I remembered Chekhov’s story when reading Len Krisak’s similarly titled “A Life,” published in Pulse Beat Poetry Journal: 

“The streets, albeit not with gold, were paved,

The path both broad and even; wide the way

And easy, with no uniform to don.

By almost nothing was he put upon.

Old age had been foreseen, and so he saved,

The modicum matched with its rainy day.

The sheets were clean, as were the neat clothes worn

From bawling babe, to teen, to man, and on.

Few were the oaths required to be sworn,

And almost nothing had been sacrificed,

Or found worthwhile, or worth the dying for.

As to the depredations brought by war,

None had been undergone. All things sufficed,

Since almost nothing crucial had been needed.

Yes, easy, broad, and even, he conceded,

Though through it all, what all of it had meant

He couldn’t say. No, not in any event.”

 

In seventeen lines, Krisak encapsulates a life, as Chekhov does in “My Life” (and many other stories). That life is conventional, unremarkable, perhaps blameless. But the character described suspects he has missed something: “almost nothing had been sacrificed.” There’s no mention of youthful dreams, whether accomplished or lost. By the end he has not understood what it was all about. An unhappier character than Misail, his life was not hurtful or destructive but disappointing. We find similar narratives in Tolstoy, Edwin Arlington Robinson and Richard Yates. Chekhov wrote in another story, “The Lady with the Little Dog”:

 

“And he judged of others by himself, not believing in what he saw, and always believing that every man had his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy and under the cover of night. All personal life rested on secrecy, and possibly it was partly on that account that civilised man was so nervously anxious that personal privacy should be respected.”