Man in a Case, Gooseberries and About Love are known collectively as ‘The Little Trilogy’ and are unique in Chekhov’s oeuvre of short stories in that the storyline and characters carry over from one short story to the next. Chekhov is also experimenting with the nature of storytelling itself. What carries over through the three stories is the frame narrative about Burkin and Ivan Ivanych and two of their hunting expeditions. Towards the end of their first hunt they shelter for a night in the village elder’s barn and at the end of their second hunt they shelter on the estate of a friend, Alyokhin. Within each of the three short stories a story is told by each of the men. The men’s stories are broadly linked by images of entrapment within the confines of stifling social conventions and the failure of individuals to act to assert themselves against those conventions. As we would expect from Chekhov, what at first appear to be incidental details contain the kernels of yet other stories. Within the frame story of Man in a Case and About Love, for example, we have the additional tragic narratives of the elder’s wife, Mavra, and Alyokhin’s servant, Pelageya, both of which conform to the overall preoccupation with curtailed and unfulfilling lives. In addition, Burkin’s story about The Lovesick Anthropos in Man n a Case raises unanswered questions about Burkin’s life as a solitary school teacher in a remote provincial town. Both Man in a Case and Gooseberries raise questions about Ivan Ivanych’s solitary despair as a country vet. The presence of Pelageya in Gooseberries and About Love is clearly misinterpreted by the two visitors who assume that she is Alyokhin’s lover when, in fact, the one love story of his life has demoralised and immobilised him and the one love story of her life has subjected her to brutality. It can be said, then, that ‘The Little Trilogy’ contains stories within stories within stories (the unifying frame narrative, the individual story narratives and the incidental and implied stories).
Man in a Case
It is imperative that we understand the title of this story. Our English-language ears might attune us to expect a story about a criminal case. No, the story is figuratively about a man encased, a character who becomes a kind of living-dead figure, who strips his life of all human attachment and emotion, of all spontaneity and curiosity in favour of his own profoundly narrow understanding of socially correct behaviour. At the end of the story Belikov is also literally a man in a box as he is viewed and then buried in his coffin.
But first to our frame narrative. Burkin and Ivan Ivanych have been hunting somewhere in the forests well outside their unnamed provincial town. Failing to get back before dark they spend the night in the village elder’s barn. The school teacher Burkin ‘regularly stayed every summer with a local count’ suggesting his social background to be something like the social activist Lida’s in The House with the Mezzanine. We can assume that he comes from a privileged background and that he is working as a lowly middle class teacher either out of family indebtedness or a sense of populist social commitment (narodnik). Also, how many characters in Chekhov’s fiction are guests? It is the ideal position for that Chekhovian notion that – even though they may be unable to make progress or connections, to move on from one point to the next – people are passing through and life is transient. As if illustrating the Russian doll story-within-a-story nature of ‘The Little Trilogy’, Burkin lies on the hay inside, ‘invisible in the dark’, whilst Ivan smokes his pipe outside, ‘in the full light of the moon’. I would also recommend a psychological reading here, as Burkin’s story about Belikov seems to stir dark thoughts deep in the recesses of Ivan’s mind. Burkin happens to mention the elder’s wife, Mavra, as an atavistic, solitary hermit crab. Like Marya in Peasants, Mavra ‘had never left her native village’. Burkin says ‘that people like Mavra are not unusual’. Indeed, peasants in the latter part of the nineteenth century were only a generation away from serfdom. We know from Peasants and In the Ravine the problems of poverty, illiteracy and abuse they faced. There is nothing unusual about a rural peasant never having seen a city or the sea. However, what Chekhov seems to be implying through these three stories and especially through the anguish of Ivan Ivanych in Man in a Case and Gooseberries, is that this immobility, this paralysis has afflicted the whole society including the privileged classes. Burkin has worked for more than fifteen years in the same provincial school, Ivan detests the life he leads in a provincial town and both men realise at the end of About Love that their friend, Alyokhin, is ‘turning round and round in his huge estate like a squirrel in a cage’. To underline the sense of entrapment, we are told that Mavra has become such a recluse that she now only leaves her home at night. Through these stories Chekhov examines the stifling role of social convention in human relationships and the kind of stasis in which his compatriots seem to be trapped between emancipation and repression, the past and the future.
Belikov’s life illustrates ‘a compulsive, persistent longing for self-encapsulation, to create a protective cocoon to isolate himself from all external influences’. This is evident in his clothing and accessories, his behaviour and his attitudes. He is a stickler for rules and prohibitions because they are ‘unambiguous and authoritative’. Burkin refers in passing to rules about sexual intercourse, reminding us that both Man in a Case and About Love contain love stories that are stifled by individual repression and social convention. Belikov cannot help seeing ‘something dubious, vague and equivocal’ in whatever is permitted. Burkin emphasises the deadening impact such an individual can have on the workplace and community, even amongst intelligent, cultured, educated teachers: ‘the people in this town have lived in fear of everything for the last ten or fifteen years’ because they believed Belikov was spying on them, disapproved of them and would denounce them to the authorities.
Burkin really wants to tell the story of how Belikov was almost redeemed by love. An exotic, attractive and sensual woman, the sister of a new teacher, comes to the town. Because of her age, ‘She couldn’t pick or choose any more, so anyone would do, even a Greek teacher’. Here Burkin emphasises the stupidity and triviality of provincial life as all the wives and female teachers become involved in a possible love story. Burkin and all the other hangers-on wonder about Belikov, ‘What did he think of women . . . could [he] be capable of loving’. The outcome either way, though, is less than promising. Burkin’s cynicism inclines him to believe that if Barbara and Belikov did marry ‘we would have had another of those unnecessary, stupid marriages’ which perhaps says as much about Burkin as it does about them.
Barbara’s brother nicknames Belikov Mr Creepy-Crawly and an anonymous practical joker distributes a cartoon of The Lovesick Anthropos. Belikov is jettisoned back into the confines of his personal entrapment, latching onto notions of social decorum – should women ride bicycles? – to extricate himself from the relationship. Humiliated by her brother in front of Barbara, Belikov takes to his bed and dies a month later. This is the life and the death of a superfluous man.
Burkin’s language about Belikov’s death is positively celebratory. In his coffin Belikov looked:
‘. . . cheerful – just as if he were rejoicing that at last he had found a container from which he would never emerge. Yes, he had achieved his ideal! . . . burying a man like Belikov was a great pleasure . . . Freedom, oh freedom! Doesn’t the slightest hint, the faintest hope of its possibility lend wings to the soul?’
However, the real sting in the story is that both Burkin and Ivan Ivanych realise that Belikov’s story is not an anomaly or aberration. Quite the opposite, it is an extreme and garish symptom of the stifling social conditions and conventions under which they all live. After the burial, life returns to its usual monotony and pointlessness, the feeling that life itself was ‘not exactly prohibited . . . but not really allowed either.’ While Burkin wonders how many Belikovs there are in Russia, Ivan Ivanych seems to be struggling closer and closer towards the realisation that the truth of Belikov’s story is much closer to their own lives than they would be willing to admit. Working from the general to the specific, Ivan at first responds with, ‘People are such liars’ but then concludes, ‘No, I can’t live this life any more.’
Towards the end of the story Chekhov makes one of his most paradoxical authorial intrusions:
‘When you see a broad village street on a moonlit night, its huts, hayricks and sleeping willows, your heart is filled with tranquillity and finds sanctuary from its toil, worries and sorrows in this calm and in the shadows of night. It becomes gentle, sad and beautiful, and it seems that the very stars are looking down on it with love and tenderness, that all evil has vanished from the world and that happiness is everywhere.’
Between Burkin wondering aloud about ‘these encapsulated men’ and Ivan’s assertion that he and his contemporaries suffer insults and humiliation and lack ‘the courage to declare that you’re on the side of honest, free people’, Chekhov removes us momentarily from the human to the universal where we can enjoy the ‘peaceful slumber’ of a summer’s night, the silence of nature. His intervention here acts in part as solace – at its best the silence and eternity of nature is comforting – and irony – beware the false sense of security; under no circumstances is happiness everywhere. On the one hand this seems to affirm Burkin and Ivan by suggesting that their fears of being boxed in are valid. On the other, it seems to condemn them for what Ivan recognises as their failure to act, to decide, to live.
Gooseberries
Towards the end of another expedition Burkin and Ivan find themselves again in need of shelter. They are wet through by the rain and bogged down in mud. Ahead of them is ‘yet another vast expanse of fields, telegraph wires and a train resembling a caterpillar in the distance’, in other words, all of Russia’s feudal past and industrial future. They head for their friend Alyokhin’s estate. Unwashed, he is dressed and working like a peasant and he occupies two rooms that ‘smelled of rye bread, cheap vodka and harness’, ‘where his estate managers used to live’. The three men bathe together, providing Ivan with the opportunity to enjoy the simple ecstasy of swimming in the millpond between the foreboding that closed Man in a Case and the melancholy despair of his story about his brother Nikolay.
Ivan and Nikolay’s grandfather was a serf. Their father was promoted as an officer in the army and they became hereditary gentlemen as a consequence. Both of them have had to work to repay their father’ debts – the impoverishment of the gentry is a much more persistent motif in Chekhov’s work than the poverty of the peasants – Nikolay in the taxation office and Ivan as a vet.
Like Belikov’s story, Nikolay’s is one of obsession, his ‘longing to lock himself away in a country house for the rest of his life’, in other words, in a case or box of his own. To achieve his goal of saving enough money to buy his own estate, Nikolay becomes a miser, a misanthrope and a misogynist. Ivan describes his brother’s ambition as ‘a peculiar brand of monasticism that achieves nothing’. He likens Nikolay to the man who loses his leg but only wants the money hidden in his boot.
The fulfilment of Nikolay’s dream is realised. When Ivan visits him he sees his brother, the cook and his dog and they all look like pigs. Nikolay has become the most reactionary of squires with opinions about the pernicious effects of education and the benefits of corporal punishment for the peasants. Even more so than Burkin, Ivan recognises that the subject of his story reflects badly on all of them, on their class and their country: ‘Better standards of living, plenty to eat, idleness – all of this makes us Russians terribly smug’. Part of Nikolay’s obsession has been to cultivate his own gooseberries. The brothers share ‘the first fruits of the bushes he’d planted’ and they are ‘hard and sour’. Ivan can hear Nikolay consuming more and more of them through the night in the neighbouring room, ‘And I thought how many satisfied, happy people really do exist in this world!’ In Chekhov’s late stories there are none unless we consider Lida to be happy within the confines of her ideology in The House with the Mezzanine or the adulterous lovers in The Lady with the Little Dog because they have chosen to act rather than to retreat, or Nadya in The Bride who has pursued her freedom and education.
Ivan’s questioning is followed by the invective of regret so often felt by provincial gentlemen and –women in Chekhov’s stories and plays: ‘I’d like to know what is it we’re waiting for? . . . I’m depressed by peace and quiet . . . Happiness doesn’t exist, we don’t need any such thing.’ The most revealing aspect of Ivan’s story about Nikolay is the effect it has on Ivan so that Gooseberries becomes Ivan’s story not simply because he narrates it but because it exposes so much about him. Refusing to acknowledge the relevance of Ivan’s story to their own lives, Burkin and Alyokhin think, ‘It was boring listening to that story about some poor devil of a clerk who ate gooseberries . . .’ However, as they all retire to bed, Chekhov closes the story with the one-line paragraph, ‘All night long the rain beat against the windows.’ All three men are enclosed, boxed in against the elements.
About Love
About Love, deals with adultery, a topic that dominated nineteenth-century Russian literature in the form of Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina (1878). Both About Love and The Lady with the Little Dog deal very frankly with the topic. In About Love the adultery is never consummated despite the mutual attraction between the two people and the storyteller, Alyokhin, spends the rest of his life regretting his failure to act. In The Lady with the Little Dog the adulterous relationship is consummated and despite the expectations established by Chekhov’s negative characterisation of the male partner, Gurov, their willingness to face the fact of their relationship does hold out some hope for the future. Chekhov’s acknowledgement of Tolstoy’s novel is suggested by the fact that the main female character in each story is named Anna.
Burkin had raised the question about one’s ability to love in Man in a Case and Ivan raised the spectre of indebtedness in Gooseberries. Alyokhin raises both these motifs in his own autobiographical story. An armchair intellectual ‘by inclination’, he was forced to work on the family estate ‘until the debts were paid off’. His initial confidence that he can combine both lives is broken by the all-consuming nature of farm work; ‘especially when we were harvesting . . . what time was there for reading?’
Alyokhin’s ties with the provincial town are minimal until he is appointed a justice of the peace and he befriends the judge Luganovich. Alyokhin’s first suggestion of any reservation about Luganovich’s character is made in relation to some trumped up charges of arson against four innocent Jews. His strongest denunciation of his friend and colleague’s boorishness, though, is bound up with the realisation that he has fallen in love with Luganovich’s wife, Anna:
And I tried to solve the enigma of that boring, good-natured, simple-minded fellow, with his insufferable common sense, always crawling up to the local stuffed shirts at balls and soirees, a lifeless, useless man whose submissive, indifferent expression made you think he’d been brought along as an object for sale, a man who believed, however, that he had the right to be happy and to be the father of her children . . .
Anna’s feelings towards Alyokhin are suggested by the affectionate concerns she shows for his wellbeing on his infrequent visits to their home where he is received ‘like one of the family’. Recognising her at first as ‘a kindred spirit’, Alyokhin comes to realise ‘that something new, out of the ordinary and important had happened in my life’. In other words, he is experiencing what so many of Chekhov’s stranded characters are craving; a sense of possibility, opportunity, change. However, he never acts on his feelings and never speaks of them with Anna.
Along with the name ‘Anna’, other storyline similarities shared between About Love and The Lady with the Little Dog indicate that Chekhov was deeply interested in the sort of moral and emotional crisis represented by adultery as his characters test out different responses in the two different stories. The Anna in About Love is sent at the end of the story to the Crimea while The Lady with the Little Dog is initially set in the Crimean city of Yalta. Both stories refer to the theatre. As a trusted member of the family, Alyokhin goes to the theatre with Anna Alekseyevna:
‘. . . we always used to walk. We would sit side by side in the stalls, shoulders touching, and as I took the opera glasses from her I felt that she was near and dear to me, that she belonged to me, that we couldn’t live without each other. But through some strange lack of mutual understanding we would always say goodbye and part like strangers when we left the theatre.’
In The Lady with the Little Dog Gurov is unable to treat Anna Sergeyevna with the same disregard he has meted out to his other mistresses. Instead, he seeks her out in her provincial backwater of S. At the theatre he eventually sees her and speaks with her and they agree to resume their relationship.
Both stories also have railway station farewell scenes, a direct and probably deliberate borrowing from Anna Karenina in which the heroine meets her lover at the station and later commits suicide by throwing herself under a train. During the farewell scene in About Love Alyokhin and Anna reveal their feelings for each other for the first and only time. As he is declaring his love and the train is pulling away, Alyokhin realises ‘how unnecessary, trivial and illusory everything that had stood in the way of our love had been’. What stood in their way socially was social propriety and decorum and what stood in their way individually was the lack of willpower and courage to challenge such social conventions. Alyokhin also acknowledges that he is the victim of his own tendency to think – he calls it ‘theorizing’ – rather than to act, an affliction so common to Chekhov’s characters.
About Love also contains one of Chekhov’s most puzzling narrative interventions. The frame story of ‘The Little Trilogy’ is told in the omniscient third person whilst the individual stories contained within each instalment are told by Burkin, then Ivan, then Alyokhin. As he warms to his theme in the company of his two guests at the beginning of About Love, Alyokhin tells two incidental love stories. The first is about his drunken, violent Christian cook and the beautiful Pelageya. As if circling around the central story of his passionate love for the married Anna, Alyokhin then briefly reminisces about an earlier relationship from his student days. This incidental Moscow student story and the central Anna story are separated by one paragraph in which Chekhov intrudes upon the narrative form of both the omniscient frame and the individually narrated stories:
‘It looked as if he wanted to tell us a story. It’s always the same with people on their own . . . Out in the country they normally pour out their hearts to their guests. Through the windows we could only see grey skies now and trees dripping with rain – in this kind of weather there was really nowhere to go and nothing else to do except listen to stories.’
Chekhov’s use of the plural inclusive pronouns ‘us’ and ‘we’ is difficult to interpret. Does it imply that Chekhov is present at the telling of Alyokhin’s tale? Does it imply that ‘The Little Trilogy’ is intended to be seen as the reminiscences of either Burkin or Ivan, despite the fact that Burkin and Ivan only function in the first person in quotation marks and when they are telling their own tales in Man in a Case and Gooseberries? Or, does it instead imply that Chekhov’s readers – the members of his own class, his contemporaries – have all been in similar situations where a lonely, estate-bound friend has wanted to unburden his heart? Chekhov was quite possibly experimenting with something similar in Gooseberries when he invoked the generals and ladies in the gilt-framed portraits on Alyokhin’s walls as fellow-witnesses to Ivan’s story about his brother. They, and perhaps by extension, Chekhov’s contemporaries, have all heard and seen these stories for themselves and should not be surprised by them.
The Lady with the Little Dog
Chekhov very carefully contextualises his exploration of adultery in The Lady with the Little Dog. Nearing forty, married father of three Gurov, was originally ‘married off while still quite young’. Anna Sergeyevna is in her very early twenties and, like Gurov, is unhappily married. Neither of them have chosen their partners for themselves on the basis of romantic attachment and personal happiness. Gurov finds his wife frightening. Whilst she may be ‘respectable’, she is also ‘pretentious’. Whilst she might consider herself progressive, Gurov finds her ‘narrow-minded and unrefined’. The differences are reminiscent of those between Lida and the artist in The House with the Mezzanine. Anna Sergeyevna describes her husband in one sentence as both ‘a fine honest man’ and as ‘no more than a lackey’. This latter negative view of her husband is confirmed by Chekhov’s characterisation of him – ‘perpetually bowing . . . there was something of a flunkey’s subservience’ – when Gurov sees Anna at the theatre in S.
It is not that Anna and Gurov are simply unhappy, dissatisfied or bored by marriage. Marriage itself is portrayed as an institution which in late-nineteenth-century Russia was simply not intended to offer happiness, satisfaction or personal fulfilment. Instead, for members of the aspiring and the upper classes, it was an institution based on the reinforcement of class and social status. At a deeper level, the institution of marriage is also portrayed by Chekhov as hypocritical. Its shortcomings are widely recognised. The smart set at Yalta watch out eagerly for new arrivals and new attachments. Anna’s husband ‘neither believed nor disbelieved’ her medical excuses for visiting Moscow, implying that he may well be aware that she is visiting someone there. The template of this societal hypocrisy had been well-established by Tolstoy in Anna Karenina. His heroine’s crime against society, family and class is not that she has an affair with Vronsky but that she falls in love with and will not relinquish him. Purely sexual affairs were tolerated from the Czarist court down. Direct assaults on the social legitimacy of marriage were not.
Anna and Gurov know they are unhappy. What they do not realise until they meet is that they are both in need of what Anna describes as ‘a different kind of life’ and what Gurov comes to realise as the real value of life where he can pursue ‘everything that was important, interesting and necessary for him’. Chekhov’s unmasking of social hypocrisy is not limited to his characterisation of Anna’s husband or his portrayal of the implied consent granted to adultery so long as it does not threaten social order. It is explored much more deeply in Gurov’s reflection late in the story about the difference between the neurotic and civilised lives we lead in public and the vitally honest lives ‘conducted in complete secrecy’. Indeed, Chekhov achieves a great deal in this short story through his developing characterisation of Gurov. At the beginning of the story Gurov is vain, misogynistic and selfish. He is filled with the ‘coarse arrogance of a victorious male who, besides anything else, was twice her age’. By the end of the story he is considerate, empathetic and reflective. The key to his transformation is that, despite being a married family man who has had many mistresses, only with Anna ‘had he genuinely, truly fallen in love – for the first time in his life’.
Having achieved the courage required of their feelings towards each other – the exact opposite of Alyokhin and Anna in About Love – the story concludes in a moderately optimistic tone. Together, it is suggested, they may very well be capable of finding a ‘solution’. Even though ‘the most complicated and difficult part was only just beginning’ they may yet be able to begin together ‘a new and beautiful life’. In terms of the usual Chekhovian pessimism of the late stories and plays, what have Anna and Gurov done to warrant this optimism? For her part, Anna has recognised the need for a new and different life and she has allowed herself the opportunity to pursue it. An important aspect of their story is that the affair is resumed on the strength not only of Gurov seeking out Anna in S but of Anna declaring her intention to visit Gurov in Moscow. For his part, Gurov has recognised and rectified his flaws – his vanity, idleness and triviality – and he has chosen to act rather than to acquiesce. Their stories can be likened then to Nadya’s in The Bride as she breaks off the engagement, abandons her provincial family and town and pursues her education in St Petersburg.
The trajectory of Gurov’s transformation follows an ever-increasing unwillingness to hide his emotions in public. When he first holds and kisses Anna on the pier at Yalta ‘at once he looked around in fright: had anyone seen them?’ When he tracks her down months later in the theatre at S he no longer cares about people witnessing his public display of passionate affection towards Anna. As noted earlier, this increasing desire to bring his innermost feelings into the public light of day is accompanied by an emerging awareness of the vast gulf between the private and public realms and an incipient desire on is part to bridge that gulf.
The settings and details of The Lady with the Little Dog are surprisingly frank. Yalta is a seaside holiday town in which casual liaisons are expected to occur amongst people who in Moscow, St Petersburg or the more regional towns would frown upon other people’s weaknesses. It is a place resorted to by unaccompanied spouses and invalids (such as Anna in About Love who is sent there to rest her nerves and Chekhov who went there because of his tuberculosis). It is a place where the social proprieties can be observed in public by the usually ‘so hesitant, so inhibited’ Muscovites and transgressed in private. In other words, a place of open hypocrisy. Gurov acknowledges this. In his opinion ‘There was a great deal of untruth in all those stories about the laxity of morals in that town and he despised them, knowing that such fictions are invented by people who would willingly have erred – if they’d had the chance’. Gurov sees the newly-arrived lady with the Pomeranian dog and the beret and decides to embark upon ‘a swift, fleeting affair’ which he initiates by first teasing the dog and then engaging Anna in conversation. Realising that she is not much older than his own daughter and that this ‘must have been the very first time in her life that she had been on her own’, Gurov’s initial attitude is to examine her as a specimen of the ‘inferior breed’. At this predatory distance he discerns ‘something pathetic about her’.
A week later they are standing with the smart set on the pier one evening. When the crowd thins out he first kisses and then propositions her. In her hotel room Gurov realises that Anna’s initial reaction to their sexual relationship is clouded by the embarrassment and ‘gaucheness of inexperienced youth’. At this point she is merely one of his conquests but very young and very ashamed of ‘her downfall . . . like the woman taken in adultery in an old-fashioned painting’. Gurov believes that he will end up feeling the same contempt for Anna that he has felt for all his previous mistresses when eventually ‘the lace on their underclothes seemed like fish scales’.
Chekhov returns to this ugly and vulgar imagery when, a few months later, Gurov tries to confide in a Moscow friend about what transpired with Anna at Yalta. In a classic moment of Chekhovian misunderstood communication Gurov’s friend mistakes his comment about Anna for a comment about the fish being off at a restaurant where they ate:
‘This trite remark for some reason nettled Gurov, striking him as degrading and dirty. What barbarous manners, what faces! What meaningless nights, what dismal, unmemorable days! . . . in the end there remained only a limited, humdrum life, just trivial nonsense. And it was impossible to run away, to escape – one might as well be in a lunatic asylum or a convict squad!’
Gurov’s understanding of the extent of his genuine feelings for Anna goes hand in hand with the revelation of the trivial, lunatic, humdrum life to which he and his contemporaries have committed themselves. The very beginnings of Gurov’s growth can be traced back to the Crimean scene at Oreanda. Gurov takes Anna to this picturesque vantage point to calm her apprehensions on the night they become lovers. It is an exceptional example of Chekhov’s evocation of nature and its redemptive potential for those who can attune themselves to its impassive omniscience:
‘In Oreanda they sat on a bench near the church and looked down at the sea without saying a word. Yalta was barely visible through the morning mist; white clouds lay motionless on the mountain tops. Not one leaf stirred on the trees, cicadas chirped, and the monotonous, hollow roar of the sea that reached them from below spoke of peace, of that eternal slumber that awaits us. And so it roared down below when neither Yalta nor Oreanda existed. It was roaring now and would continue its hollow, indifferent booming when we are no more. And in this permanency, in this utter indifference to the life and death of every one of us there perhaps lies hidden a pledge of our eternal salvation, of never-ceasing progress of life upon earth, of the never-ceasing march towards perfection. As he sat there beside that young woman who seemed so beautiful at daybreak, soothed and enchanted at the sight of those magical surroundings – sea, mountains, clouds, wide skies – Gurov reflected that, if one thought hard about it, everything on earth was truly beautiful except those things we ourselves think of and do when we forget the higher aims of existence and our human dignity.’
In terms of his own personal development and of his growing understanding of the tension between social propriety and individual happiness, perhaps the most important aspect of the passage is that Gurov allows himself to reflect, to think hard about ‘the higher aims of existence and our human dignity’. He is, no doubt, surprised that once the summer affair with Anna at Yalta is over he keeps on thinking and as he thinks harder his feelings for Anna deepen and strengthen.
In the depths of winter he goes unannounced to S to see if he can find her. Chekhov’s description of the town as Gurov finds it affirms the stifling backwater life to which Anna has been condemned. The hotel is grey, its carpet and bedcover are grey, the fence topped with nails outside her house is grey. An inkstand on the table in his hotel room is grey with dust and broken. This is a bleak world of bleak lives. At the very bottom of society a beggar entering Anna’s husband’s property is set upon by dogs. At the top ‘the local dandies were standing with their arms crossed behind their backs’ in perfect deference to the governor at the theatre. When he sees Anna in all this grey dullness accompanied by ‘the sounds of that atrocious orchestra, of those wretched fiddlers’ Gurov’s only truth is reaffirmed to him:
‘. . . no one in the world was closer, dearer and more important to him than she was. That little woman, not remarkable in any way, lost in that provincial crowd . . . now filled his whole life, was his sorrow, his joy, the only happiness that he now wished for himself.’
Towards the end of The Lady with the Little Dog Gurov is walking his daughter to school in Moscow one morning after which he intends to visit Anna in the hotel where they meet during her visits to the city. On his way to meet his lover he contemplates his double life as a kind of revelation. Once arrogant, vain and dismissive, he now judges others by himself:
‘. . . disbelieving what he saw, invariably assuming that everyone’s true, most interesting life was carried on under the cloak of secrecy . . . The private, personal life of everyone is grounded in secrecy and this perhaps partly explains why civilised man fusses so neurotically over having this personal secrecy respected.’
Once the two lovers are together, Chekhov poses them momentarily in front of a mirror. In a very painterly moment the reader is able to watch Gurov watching the two of them in reflection. And he reflects on two things; his mortality – he is going grey – and the central importance of their relationship to his life. They love one another ‘as close intimates, as man and wife, as very dear friends . . . it was a mystery why he should have a wife and she a husband’. Indeed, an essential part of Chekhov’s optimistic and positive portrait of this adulterous relationship has been to expose the social falsehood of institutional marriage as practised in his society. One can sense Chekhov’s approval of the couple’s courage and love as they contemplate the question, ‘How could they break free from these intolerable chains?’
And in fact they were like two birds of passage, male and female, caught and forced to live in separate cages. They forgave one another all they had been ashamed of in the past, forgave everything in the present, and they felt that this love of theirs had transformed them both.
The imagery of the caged birds brings us back to that Chekhovian pessimism, that sense of entrapment and enforced idleness that so many of his characters complain about. However, in the case of Anna Sergeyevna and Gurov, their acceptance, acknowledgement and support of each other is presented as a transformative power that provides them with an optimistic outlook. They may be caged by the now-incomprehensible marriages in which they find themselves and the social hypocrisy required to maintain the external appearances of those relationships but they are by their natures ‘birds of passage’ and they are ‘male and female’ and Chekhov’s writing here implies that they may well be able to achieve what they aspire to. It has often been said over the last century that Chekhov writes with considerable humanity and compassion. I think it is also fair to say that in The Lady with the Little Dog, once Gurov and Anna recognise and are brought together by the truth of their situation and their emotions, he writes about them with considerable sympathy and approval.
Chekhov was threatened with imprisonment over the censorship of this story which was considered too damning a depiction of the lives of the peasantry to be published as it was originally written. One chapter in which the peasants discuss God and the authorities has been permanently lost. Nikolay, Olga and Sasha Chikildeyev must leave Moscow and travel to the peasant village where Nikolay was born when he is no longer able to work as a waiter in the city. Having fallen ill and suffered a workplace accident, Nikolay seeks refuge for himself and his small family in his home village of Zhukovo. Having entered the village with them and shared the point of view of people who do not live there, we can momentarily share Nikolay and Olga’s naive appreciation of the well-treed, fertile ‘pleasant look’ of the ‘peaceful, sleepy little village’ with its clean air and country vistas. Beyond the picturesque river and the agricultural valley lies the manor house and the church are located.
Zhukovo, then, is isolated, impoverished and divided. The forty poverty-stricken peasant households are on one side of the river while the church and the squire’s manor are on the other. Having entered the story through Nikolay’s hopeful anticipation of his hometown, we quickly realise that he has succumbed to a false sense of security based on long absence and nostalgia. What in memory is ‘cheerful, bright, cosy’ is revealed immediately to be ‘dark, crowded and filthy’. Every detail of the peasant family’s hut speaks of poverty. Surprised by the conditions prevailing in his own family home, Nikolay seems to think to himself – who thinks and narrates, the character or the implied author, is often contested space in the Chekhov short story – that this is ‘real poverty’. The presence of the ‘fair-haired, dirty-faced girl’ suggests neglect whilst the deafened cat introduces the motif of peasant brutality. Newly arrived, Nikolay and Olga look initially upon this misery and deprivation, on ‘the kind of lives they lived there’, with the unaccustomed eyes of Moscow outsiders. Indeed, they are referred to a number of times that evening a ‘guests’.
Hearing the distant church bells from the manor house village across the river, Nikolay imagines the work he would be doing at that time of evening in the Moscow restaurant. Whilst they are alone, able to appreciate the view and the clean country air, they can naively enjoy their new location. Early evening brings with it a rural and natural idyll which is quickly extinguished with the onset of darkness. Watching his parents eat black bread dipped in water, Nikolay realises that he has made ‘a real blunder!’
When the samovar is lit the tea is as revolting as the conversation and the conditions prevailing in the hut. When ‘strong, broad-shouldered’ Marya and one of her daughters sob at the prospect of Kiryak entering the hut both Nikolay and the reader learn from the old man, Osip, what is already patently obvious; that Kiryak is a violently abusive drunkard of a husband and a father. Just what are we to make of Chekhov’s observations? Are they portraiture, caricature or commentary?
Indeed, the first chapter of ‘Peasants’ does challenge the commonly held view that Chekhov observes but does not comment. When Olga offers Marya the Bible reading about turning the other cheek we cannot help but ask if this is an appropriate response to wife beating. Surely Chekhov is testing Tolstoy’s philosophy of quietism, ‘Resist not evil with force’? Even more explicitly, Chekhov has Marya reveal to Olga and through her to the implied reader that ‘she had never been further than the county town, let alone Moscow. She was illiterate, did not know any prayers . . .’ Chekhov also tells us that both sisters-in-law, Marya and Fyokla, ‘were extremely backward and understood nothing. Neither loved her husband.’ When the bereaved Olga and Sasha leave Zhukovo in Chapter Nine, Marya weeps not only at the loss of a newly-made and much-cherished friendship; in her mind it is as though Olga is falling off the face of the earth by leaving the immediate environs of the village and returning to Moscow.
Notice Chekhov’s narrative method; setting up a series of questions and signposts – often in the form of apparently incidental detail – that will later be elaborated upon or clarified in the storyline, a technique we will see again with Samorodov’s handwriting in ‘In the Ravine’. By the end of Chapter One, for example, we cannot help but wonder how Nikolay Chikildeyev ever managed to escape the poverty and bestiality of his peasant family to work in Moscow. This will be picked up in Chapter Three where the longstanding, indeed, legendary tradition of Zhukovo boys being employed in the hospitality industry in Moscow is explained. The literate boys are sent off as was Nikolay at the age of eleven to commence his transformation into ‘a good man’. Of what this goodness consists beyond the immediately obvious facts of having regular, paid employment and thus being able to keep his family above the levels of impoverishment experienced in the provinces is not explained. How he managed to become literate in the first place is also never explained in the story. We will have to assume that he attended a zemstvo school for peasants such as the one at which the ideologically driven narodnik Lida teaches in The House with the Mezzanine. Of course, this also means that the illiterate boys are left behind which accounts for why Zhukovo is known as ‘Lout-‘ or ‘Lackeyville’. At the end of Chapter One we also wonder where Fyokla is running off to. This is answered fairly quickly and disapprovingly by Marya within a page. However, Fyokla’s adulterous sexual encounters with the men across the river are returned to in the narrative in Chapter Six. In a similar manner, details sometimes occur well before we have been given the framework or background within which to understand or appreciate them. During the fire in Chapter Five, for example, we observe the village elder, Antip Sedelnikov, using a peculiar turn of phrase but we are only told in Chapter Seven that he loved using ‘clever-sounding words’ despite his provincial ignorance.
Chekhov is also constantly using descriptive passages to simultaneously raise and undermine the implied reader’s expectations. In Chapter Two the church shines brightly on the other side of the river where crows also caw furiously around the manor house, whose occupants will attend the church, noted for their pink, clean skin and expensive clothing. The church priest will come around at Easter and fine the villagers for not being prepared for communion while the occupants of the squire’s manor house will prevent the village from burning down. As Olga and Marya cross the river to attend church ‘the pure, clear water’, glistening dew and ‘warm breeze’ of that morning are juxtaposed with ‘yesterday’s memories’ of inescapable poverty. Chekhov builds upon this contrast by having Marya not dare to enter the church while the squire’s family sail in with ease and confidence and by having her tremble as the priest’s deep, thundering voice reminds her of her husband Kiryak’s animalistic calls.
Given her characterisation as something of a scatterbrain, Chekhov unexpectedly gives us Olga’s beliefs. Beyond the obvious Russian Orthodox faith in God and the saints, her beliefs also take on a social aspect which would have distinguished her from a great many of her Russian contemporaries of all classes; ‘it was wrong to harm anyone in the wide world – whether they were simple people, Germans, gipsies or Jews’. Indeed, Chekhov goes on to give her the characteristics of a Russian literary archetype, the holy fool; ‘her face became compassionate, radiant and full of tenderness’. Having granted her this unexpected spiritual regard for humankind, Chekhov allows Olga’s beliefs to become one of the stronger motifs in the story. We will witness this, for example, when she dresses the humiliated and raped Fyokla in her own clothing in Chapter Six. Despite Olga’s suffering and loss in the village of Zhukovo, when she comes to leave it in Chapter Nine she is able to acknowledge simultaneously that, ‘They were coarse, dishonest, filthy, drunk . . . it was terrible living with these people’ and that, ‘they were still human beings, suffering and weeping like other people and there was nothing in their lives which did not provide some excuse: killing work . . . harsh winters, poor harvests, overcrowding, without any help . . .’ In other words, unlike so many of Chekhov’s better educated idealists and intellectuals, Olga is able to bring his principles into practice in the conduct of her life and in her interactions with the people around her. To Marya, for example, Olga is anything but ineffectual or superfluous like so many of those other character types inhabiting the wasted provincial manor houses of his other stories.
Chapter Three recounts the feast day holiday known in the Russian Orthodox Church as Clean Monday, the Monday before the fasting of Lent commences. The peasant neighbours visit the Chikildeyev hut to see the visitors and hear news of the other Zhukovo men working in Moscow. Twice before, Olga has used biblical references to recommend passive submission to Marya in the face of violent abuse from her husband. In Chapter Three the biblical reference belongs to Sasha, Nikolay and Olga’s pale, frail ten-year-old daughter who is – like her parents – literate. She reads to the visitors about the flight of Joseph, Mary and Jesus into Egypt to avoid King Herod’s massacre of the innocents. This passage will take on considerable irony in relation to the latter chapters of the story when Sasha comes perilously close to losing her own innocence in Moscow. It is also ironic in relation to the immediate context of her family having come back to the village seeking refuge only to be resented for the food they eat. Chapter Eight will go into greater detail about the religious beliefs and ignorance of the Zhukovo villagers. Mostly illiterate, they still revere the Bible and love to hear it read aloud. Listening to Sasha read they burst into tears just as Pyotr’s parishioners will do in The Bishop.
Chekhov has Osip tell his sober son, Nikolay, about his grievance with the village elder, Antip Sedelnikov, about the sale of some hay. This will take on much greater significance for the reader when the police inspector cum tax collector comes to town in Chapter Seven. As the holiday in Chapter Three comes to an end Chekhov makes a very clear descriptive distinction between the rural idyll of the festivities taking place in the meadow where girls are singing and dancing to an accordion and the ‘discordant’, noisy, vulgar festivities at the inn. Unexpectedly, though, the old man makes a compassionate intercession with Kiryak on behalf of his daughter-in-law, Marya. Both men, though, are very drunk.
Chapter Four takes place during Lent when Grannie is fasting by abstaining from meat and dairy products during the forty days leading up to Easter. Her religious observances do not include kindness or compassion as she terrorises both the geese and the girls, Sasha and Motka. Both girls derive some comfort from the belief that Grannie will burn in Hell as a sinner. The more educated of the girls, Sasha, reassures Motka that this is so in the patronising tone of her mother’s discourse with Marya. Indeed, Sasha is also capable of mimicking her mother’s religious piety for humorous effect. Wanting to make sure that Grannie gets her just desserts, Motka dips her grandmother’s bread in milk behind her back so ‘that now she had eaten forbidden food during Lent’. Sasha’s dream image of Hell is a replication of a fiery image now familiar to her; the potters’ kilns near the riverbank. She imagines Grannie being prodded into one with a stick ‘as she had driven the geese not so long ago’.
Nikolay is already descending into Hell. Exhausted by the bestiality and ashamed of the poverty of is family, he begs his wife to raise the money to get them out of Zhukovo. He yearns for a glimpse, even a dream of Moscow ‘my dear Moscow’ (a provincial longing immortalised in Chekhov’s play Three Sisters).
Notice the momentary shift in Chekhov’s mode of narration from generally omniscient narrator of storyline detail to the more intrusive narrative voice of the implied author directly engaging with the implied reader. Here Chekhov deduces a general rule of the human condition from Nikolay’s specific situation and the children’s fears:
‘When someone in a family has been terribly ill for a long time, when all hope has been given up, there are horrible moments when those hear and dear to him harbour a timid, secret longing, deep down inside, for him to die. Only children fear the death of a loved one and the very thought of it fills them with terror. And now the little girls held their breath and looked at Nikolay with mournful expressions on their faces, thinking that he would soon be dead. They felt like crying and telling him something tender and comforting.’
As we begin Chapter Five, note how the passage of time is marked by the liturgical year as we move from Lent which is usually around March/April to the Feast of the Assumption (properly ‘Dormition’ in the Eastern Orthodox Church) which is celebrated on August 15. From the fiery visions of Hell in Chapter Four we move to the climactic event of the fire in Chapter Five in which the local villagers are either too drunk or too pessimistic to maintain a concerted effort to extinguish the flames. Some women carry buckets, others carry icons. Even Olga slumps into a submissive acceptance of what appears to be inevitable, the incineration of the whole village. In ‘In the Ravine’ such notions of submission and passivity will be drawn to even harsher extremes through the experiences of Lipa. The village elder does organise the women and children to bring water and the drunks from the inn to bring the fire engine but his efforts are insignificant besides those of the squire’s son and his labourers from across the river. Whilst some villagers do nothing, the owner of the burning hut tries to blame General Zhukov’s cook who was staying with him even though the fire was actually started by his wife and the samovar.
The next morning the villagers are already turning the fire into a joke. When Olga congratulates the student it is evident that her Moscow life has enabled her to speak across the social divide of class between herself and the aristocracy compared with Osip who can only beg for money for vodka.
Parallel debates seem to be taking place across Chapter Six before the story thread of life in the village is resumed in Chapter Seven. The chapter opens and closes with the question of liberty, specifically, liberty in the context of the Emancipation of the Serfs in 1861. Marya, barely literate, inarticulate, abused and humiliated, closes the chapter with her affirmation that ‘freedom is best’. The family elders, Osip and Grannie, look back nostalgically at the pre-emancipation days. ‘”We were better off as serfs”’ asserts the old man. He remembers the benefits of imposed order and hierarchy, punishment and reward as meted out by the land- and serf-owning gentry. The irony here is that so much of the story appears to represent the peasants as incapable of regulating their lives either personally or communally. At the end of the old people’s reminiscences the more intrusive Chekhovian narrator addresses the implied reader, reminding them that ‘the beauty of youth’ is remembered that way ‘no matter what it had really been like’. We are reminded too of Nikolay’s initial nostalgia for his hometown, how the past has a habit of appearing ‘cheerful, bright, cosy’ (Nikolay 22) or ‘bright, joyful, moving’ (pre-emancipation 43). As the lamp goes out and darkness settles the implied author further intrudes:
‘Sometimes one becomes drowsy and dozes off, and suddenly someone touches you on the shoulder, breathes on your cheek and you can sleep no longer, your whole body goes numb, and you can think of nothing but death. You turn over and death is forgotten; but then the same old depressing, tedious thoughts keep wandering around your head – thoughts of poverty, cattle fodder, about the higher price of flour and a little later you remember once again that your life has gone, that you can never relive it.’
A second contest of ideas seems to revolve around the behaviour of and attitudes towards women, in particular, female sexuality. We have Marya’s unhappiness and brutalisation, Fyokla’s violence towards Olga and Olga’s humiliation at the hands of one of her husband’s sisters-in-law, but most particularly we have Fyokla’s sexual promiscuity with the men across the river. Her husband Denis, one of Nikolay’s brothers, is away on military service. After 1873 uneducated village men could be conscripted for six years of service – usually in military encampments rather than on active military duty – during which time the man could be kept permanently away from home and family with the state retaining the right to hold him for a further nine years if required. Fyokla is not restraining herself within the confines of marital fidelity and humility. Instead, she goes to the men, ‘them beasts on the other side of the river.’ In Chapter Six she returns from one such excursion stripped naked and possibly gang-raped. Olga, sometimes a figure of fun in the early chapters of ‘Peasants’, covers Fyokla with her own smock and skirt and comforts the woman who had earlier insulted and hit her, an excellent example of the law of reciprocity in action and an illustration of the value of actions over words which we will see again in Lipa’s final act of charity towards her father-in-law in ‘In the Ravine’. Fyokla eventually sobs herself to sleep. Nikolay, ever weakening in the constant chaos of his parents’ home, tries on his tailcoat and longs nostalgically for Moscow.
In Chapter Seven the local police inspector cum tax and rates collector visits the village of Zhukovo. Osip Chikildeyev is so far in arrears that his family is depressed, humiliated, degraded, deprived and disgraced – all of these emotions appear as adjectives or abstract nouns in the passage – by the confiscation of the family samovar by the village elder who has collected four more from other indigents. Beyond simple characterisation, Antip Sedelnikov’s use of peculiar phrases takes on another aspect when Osip begs him for the return of the samovar. Through the village elder Chekhov portrays and caricatures Russian provincial administration at the zemstvo level. Note the permeation of mind-deadening bureaucratic jargon even down to this level. The complete failure of this system of administration which dates back to the 1860s is further illustrated in Chekhov’s omniscient reportage of a conversation between Osip and some of his neighbours: ‘The council was blamed for everything . . . although none of them had any idea what the function of the council was.’ The peasants’ discontent is consigned as with so much more in this story to the useless and misleading haze of nostalgia: ‘Fifteen or twenty years ago . . .’ Osip’s only defence in front of the police inspector is his grievance against Antip for preventing him from selling the hay. Perhaps contrary to our expectations, Antip’s family appear to be as hungry and poor as the other villagers but their hut is distinguished by its evident cleanliness and decor.
A kind of census of local ideas continues throughout Chapter Eight which is preoccupied with religion, with attitudes towards God, illness and death. Osip does not believe in God but is incapable of expressing his ideas. Grannie does believe in God but seems incapable of compassion or charity. Marya and Fyokla prepare for communion – by fasting and abstention – once a year without understanding what it means. Like all of the village mothers, they have only their ignorance and lack of understanding to pass on to their children. Because ‘moral principles’ are beyond comprehension, religious observance is reduced in the huts to a number of rules about ‘forbidden food during fast days’. Olga is the most religious character in the story; her piety extends from scatterbrained biblical quotations to genuine spiritual awareness and forgiveness and acts of charity and kindliness. Much of the narrative voice of the chapter seems oriented towards her point of view as she notes with disapproval the drunkenness with which the villagers celebrate all bar one of the annual holy days. When, in August, the icon of the Life-Giving Virgin is carried through each village:
‘It was as though everyone suddenly realised that there wasn’t just a void between heaven and earth, that the rich and the strong had not grabbed everything yet, that there was still someone to protect them from slavery, crushing, unbearable poverty – and that infernal vodka.’
Of course, Olga, Chekhov and the implied reader all observe that life returns to normal immediately after. Rather than simply a point of etiquette, Olga’s disapproval of the peasants’ perpetual inebriation becomes for her a social critique through which she comes to understand that to some extent their poverty and emiseration is self-imposed and self-perpetuating.
Even more revealing are the peasants’ attitudes towards death. Feared more by the rich, it is feared least by the poor. Marya’s only regret is ‘that it was such a long time coming’ and she is glad when her children die. Should Nikolay die, his brother Denis, Fyokla’s husband, would be released from military service, thus replacing a parasite with a pair of working hands. Grannie is more concerned with illness than with death and inadvertently hastens Nikolay’s demise by recruiting the services of a former medical orderly, ‘a bearded Jewish convert to Christianity’ who cups and bleeds his patient and leaves him to die that evening.
Olga and Sasha will spend one year in total in Zhukovo, including ‘a long harsh winter’ from Christmas to Easter. Aware of natural beauty – ‘the fiery spring sunset and rich luxuriant clouds’ – but immersed in human misery, Olga is filled with ‘a passionate longing to go somewhere far, far away’. This Chekhovian longing is evident in many of his stories and plays. It is often used to highlight the impotence or ineffectuality of the character involved or to intensify their sense of entrapment in a present they cannot control or their nostalgia for a past to which they cannot return. Having lost her husband, her looks and her happiness, Olga does not make a decision but passively allows herself to be sent back to Moscow by her dead husband’s family; but this will not be the Moscow of the past, this will be a Moscow without Nikolay’s income to supplement her own, a Moscow of poverty and humiliation and separation.
Leaving the village of Zhukovo, Olga experiences an extraordinarily double-sided epiphany. On the one hand she sees how morally reprehensible the villagers are while on the other she can see the reasons beyond their control that also cause them to live as they do. Olga’s interior monologue of rhetorical questions is framed in an elegant simplicity, most probably beyond her scatterbrained and bereaved capacity for thought. Once again, Chekhov’s narrative mode becomes more intrusive as he directly addresses the implied reader:
‘Who maintains the pubs and makes the peasants drunk? The peasant. Who embezzles the village, school and parish funds and spends it all on drink? The peasant. Who robs his neighbour, sets fire to his house and perjures himself in court for a bottle of vodka? Who is the first to revile the peasant at district council and similar meetings? The peasant.’
As Olga and Sasha leave the village, they leave behind a prostrate, wailing, kneeling bowing Marya but their spirits lift as they take to the road, their interest drawn here by ‘an old burial mound’ and there by ‘a row of telegraph poles trailing away’. Once again we are in that familiar Chekhovian terrain, a place between two places, in this case between the past and the future, between the provinces and the city. The original published story concluded at the end of Chapter Nine with mother and daughter begging for charity in a large village en route to Moscow.
Chekhov was both a playwright and a master of the short story form but, despite some manuscripts and attempts, he was not a novelist. ‘Peasants’ properly belongs in Zhukovo but we do have two brief Moscow chapters in which Olga works full time but is homeless, relying on tips from the ‘gentlemen’ occupants of the furnished rooms at the Lisbon where she is paid no actual income and sleeps on some chairs in the hall. Sasha, now thirteen, resides with her aunt Klavdiya Abramovna, an aging prostitute who keeps her ‘boudoir’ ‘neat and tidy’ and spends most of her earnings on the luxuries ‘that she considered an essential accessory of her profession’. Her room is decorated with photographs of herself as a sailor and pageboy and of her male ‘visitors’, or clients, including Kiryak. He also terrorises Olga for drinking money. Chekhov’s comments on Klavdiya Abramovna that ‘she felt no vocation for family life’ and that she displayed photographs of herself ‘like most women of her sort’ are difficult to interpret. Are they supposed to be read by the implied reader as observational images drawn as if from real life, as expressions of misogyny or as expressions of sympathy on the part of the implied writer? A fellow tenant at Patriarch’s Ponds is Ivan Makarych, ‘a native of Zhukovo who had found Nikolay a job’. Sasha enjoys visiting him at work and ‘watching the dancing from the kitchen’. He is a waiter just like her father used to be but, rather than being supported by a waiter’s wage, she is now reduced to relying on Ivan to feed her leftovers from the plates and dishes.
The illiterate Marya has been able to send Olga a letter of greetings and complaints. How she has learned to write – did Olga teach her during her year in Zhukovo? – is not revealed. Neither are her thoughts about being separated from her violently abusive husband who now spends his money not only on vodka but on prostitution. What we do have is the double-edged irony of ‘the special, hidden charm’ of Olga’s nostalgia as she allows her imagination to read between the ‘crooked lines, where every letter resembled a cripple’ in Marya’s letter. Despite her bereavement and the bitterly long winter she spent in the village, Olga reminisces about ‘the warm, clear days’ and ‘quiet fragrant evenings’:
‘And the strange thing was, when they had lived in the country she had dearly wished to go to Moscow, but now it was the opposite and she longed for the country.’
How can we be happy when we do not wish to be where we are and we do not know where we belong? We can well imagine provincial Nadya in The Bride and her artist friend, Sasha, asking themselves precisely these questions as we can so many of Chekhov’s characters, regardless of their socio-economic status. After all, it is inevitable to ask such things if we are always caught between one place and another, between one way of life and another, between one time and another.
In the Ravine
Three-quarters of the way through ‘In the Ravine’ an action of unimaginable cruelty is performed. The jealous and powerful Tsybukin daughter-in-law, Aksinya, murders the baby child of the younger, simpler and more vulnerable daughter-in-law, Lipa. ‘. . . she grabbed the ladle with the boiling water and poured it over Nikofor’. Leaving the ‘frail little creature’ to suffer and eventually to die and the mother to give out a scream ‘the like of which had never been heard in Ukleyevo’, Aksinya returns to the main house ‘with that same naive smile on her face’.
Throughout the story Aksinya’s appearance is characterised by both that naive smile and her snake-like eyes. She will never be denounced to the police, she will never be arrested and tried for murder, because Lipa will never tell anyone what happened, not her parents-in-law or the police or the staff at the distant hospital where Nikofor dies. Numbed and immobilised by Aksinya’s ongoing power and her immediate rage in the moments preceding the crime, Lipa will remain passive and submissive. She will grieve but she will not act, not even when her parents-in-law accuse her of stupidity and neglect, blaming her for what they believe to be the accidental scalding to death of their grandson by his mother. In what context can we understand Lipa’s passivity and submissiveness?
There are perhaps four contexts. One is the narrative storyline of Aksinya’s and Lipa’s relationship with the Tsybukins. One is the background of poverty and deprivation into which Lipa was born. Another is the context of vast Mother Russia and a possible fourth is that strange Chekhovian eternity of nature.
To deal with these contexts in reverse order. When Lipa leaves the hospital carrying her dead baby, the building is ‘flooded in the light of the setting sun’. The bereaved mother walks first down the hill and then rests by a pond. ‘The sun lay down to rest under a blanket of purple and gold brocade and long red and lilac clouds stretching right across the sky were watching over it.’ The personification of the setting sun implies a realm of nature that is not impassive, impersonal, implacable, but that has a comforting and human dimension as if Lipa herself in her grief and powerlessness is being watched over. Then there are the birds, the mournful bittern, the numerous nightingales and the warning cuckoo which Lipa is convinced she can still hear several hours later and eight miles away when she arrives back home. The raucous chorus is joined by angry frogs. Chekhov implies some perception on the part either of himself or of Lipa – narrative perspective is often contested ground in his stories – that there is purpose in this crying and singing ‘so that everything . . . should treasure and savour every minute of it. After all, we only live once!’ Here is nature or the solace taken from it by Lipa as a life-affirming force. To Lipa’s imagination the cuckoo’s cry is warning her not to lose her way. The night sky is then dominated by ‘A silver moon’ and ‘innumerable stars’:
‘She looked at the sky and wondered where her child’s soul might be at that moment: was it following her or was it floating high up in the heavens . . .’
Chekhov is functioning here as both landscape and portrait writer and the point-of-view seems to be a combination of both the author’s perspective and the character’s imagination. We also have the sense that we are observing both an impassive, permanent nature that persists against the transience of human joy and misery and a representation of nature from which Lipa derives comfort. Both points of view are implied and neither one is positioned above the other, a Chekhovian form of debate that becomes more obvious in his stories dealing with the ideals of the intelligentsia. The narrative voice then shifts momentarily to Chekhov’s direct address to the implied reader:
‘How lonely it is at night out in the open fields, with all that singing, when you cannot sing yourself, amidst all those never-ending cries of joy when you can feel no joy yourself . . . when the moon, as lonely as you are, looks down from on high, indifferent to everything, whether it is spring or winter, whether people live or die . . . when the heart is heavy with grief and it is hard to be alone.’
As well as the eternity of nature, Chekhov also invokes Mother Russia as one of the contexts within which to understand Lipa’s passivity. Some time after sunset Lipa meets an old man in the darkness near the pond. His first reaction to Lipa’s announcement of her baby’s death, that it is God’s will, is neither surprising nor inspiring. However, when he holds up a burning ember and they discern each other in the darkness, he is unable to remain so dispassionate. ‘His face was full of compassion and tenderness’ and Lipa wonders if he and the young man accompanying him are holy men. Having cleared this up, the old man offers Lipa a lift in his cart. She recounts the suffering of Nikofor that day and asks him ‘why little children have to suffer so much before dying . . . why should a little child who’s never sinned suffer so?’ Again, the old man’s initial response – ‘”Who knows!? . . . man isn’t meant to know everything . . . He just knows enough to get him through life.”’ – is hardly promising. However, warming to his role as interlocutor and comforter, he shares with Lipa an important part of his life story and what he has learned from it about Mother Russia. He has ‘travelled all over it’, he has seen good and bad and he knows that there is more of each yet to come. Like Chekhov, he has been in Siberia. The old man went there first as a foot messenger and then stayed as a starving, wretched peasant. Chekhov travelled through Siberia during his journey to the prison island of Sakhalin. The old man remembers meeting a gentleman on a remote ferry once. Nabokov speculates that a gentleman that far from the western Russia of Moscow and St Petersburg would most likely have been a political exile. It is also tempting to wonder if the old man’s story contains any form of reflection from Chekhov’s own journey:
‘I remember, I was on a ferry once, not an ounce of flesh on me, all in rags, no shoes on me feet, frozen stiff, sucking away at a crust, when a gent what was crossing on the same ferry – if he’s passed on, then God rest his soul – looks at me with pity in his eyes, and the tears just flowed. Then he says, “Your beard is black, and your life’ll be the same too . . .”’
Russia, apparently, is vast enough to encompass both well-dressed sentimental gentlemen and threadbare philosophical peasants; it is vast enough to encompass all the possibilities of human experience, of human joy and suffering, all goodness and all evil. For example, in Lipa’s life it can contain the inexplicable joy she felt whilst playing with Nikofor and the unbearable loss of his death. Mother Russia, the old man seems to imply, is an enormous nation and a vast teacher and if you can understand the depth and breadth of the life she has to offer then, on balance, life and hope will prevail over death and despair. ‘”And now I don’t want to die,”’ he concludes, ‘”That means I must ‘ave ‘ad more good times than bad! Oh Mother Russia is so big!”’ Lipa will suffer but she can also endure. Indeed, endurance will be the only kind of victory available to her; there will be no justice, no recompense, no recognition of the terrible injustice done to her and her child. Even at the end of the story, when she and her mother have become labourers in Aksinya’s brick works, endurance will be Lipa’s only victory.
With the old man Chekhov has also adopted with some evident affection a literary character type associated with Tolstoy’s philosophical novels; the noble peasant, a wise and compassionate character who – whether despite or because of his poverty and lack of education, status and sophistication – is able to speak the truth of the human condition.
Lipa’s companionship with the old man is only brief but they do share a lot in common. Both of them are from very poor backgrounds, neither of them wishes to be defeated by the weight of evil and suffering in the world and both of them seem to accept the world as they find it rather than giving any thought or energy to the struggle to change it. Lipa’s passivity can also be explained by her background. When she is chosen by Varvara Nikolayevna to marry her stepson Anisim, she is distinguished by three qualities: her beauty, her young age – ‘still a little girl in fact’ – and ‘her terrible poverty’. Locals talk of her availability as either a bride or a concubine. She is field worker and her mother is a charwoman. The Tsybukins have no interest in a dowry. They are wealthy enough and take what they want. Lipa will have no say in what is done with her life or her body. Denied the right to give either assent or disagreement, she is virtually speechless for much of the story. She never speaks with her husband, rarely with her parents-in-law and she is most comfortable in the company of fellow workers like the carpenter Yelizarov, the old man at the pond and later her fellow workers at the brickyard. Like her mother, she seems to be in a perpetual state of anxiety. On her own wedding day ‘she looked around without understanding anything’ and on her wedding night she is undressed by her aunt and locked in the bedroom with her unhappy husband by the inebriated guests. The consummation, then, is a hideous ritual to which Lipa is sacrificed and Anisim is hauled, drunk and angry. Anisim is supposed to be a police inspector but he will soon be arrested as a counterfeiter and condemned to six years’ hard labour in Siberia. In an attempt to secure the family’s future Varvara will convince her husband to put aside part of his property for Nikofor, the same clay fields where Aksinya is planning to establish the brickworks. Aksinya will not only kill Nikofor, she will have the ‘convict bird’ Lipa put out of the house and eventually put to work in her factory.
‘In the Ravine’ depicts the corruption of a remote provincial village. By the end of Chapter One we realise that for most of the people living there Ukleyevo is ‘a miserable hole’ most of the time. Physically it is hidden away from the rest of the world. Its tannery pollutes the river, the local cattle have anthrax and the local people suffer from swamp fever. Local council officials do nothing but take bribes and refuse to implement any sanctions against the local factories. The local priest is an insensitive boor. One of the few solid buildings in the village itself is the Tsybukin grocery store and home. They are renowned for selling rotten salt beef, rancid butter and cheap illegal vodka. Grigory Petrov Tsybukin and his daughter-in-law Aksinya are portrayed as unrestrained commercial swindlers who hate and are hated in return by the peasants. Varvara is Grigory’s second wife and a relatively new member of the family. Early in the story we learn of her mutinous ‘displays of charity’ which are tolerated by her husband because they ‘had the effect of a safety valve’. Later in the story she complains to Anisim that ‘we do nothing but cheat . . . cheat . . .cheat’.
Aksinya was brought into the family in much the same way as Lipa but unlike her she is determined to do well. Both daughters-in-law perform their domestic chores but Aksinya takes over the running of the store, becomes the custodian of the keys and takes on a lover from one of the local manufacturing families. She and her father-in-law are rapacious profiteers and her brother-in-law is an inspector cum criminal. Where she thrives, Lipa wilts. When Anisim is not visiting from Moscow his wife sleeps in the corridor or the barn. When Aksinya asks for the Butyokhino clay fields to be handed over to her, though, Grigory Tsybukin refuses. ‘”While I’m alive, I’m not going to start dividing everything up, we must do everything together.”’ Unhinged by his son’s exile to Siberia, though, he responds differently to Varvara’s proposal on behalf of Nikofor, an action that precipitates the infant’s murder.
Chekhov’s short story is really a multitude of stories brought together: the daughters’-in-law, Varvara’s, the deaf and ineffectual brother Stepan’s, the counterfeiter, the family business, the stories of the wedding and the coins, the old man and the carpenter. What is disclosed and what is withheld – or, perhaps a better way of putting it in this case is the way things are disclosed – in Anisim’s story is very interesting. When his letters arrive from Moscow they are in two hands; the text is in ‘a beautiful hand’ while the signature is a scribble. Anisim’s one letter from Siberia will contain a poem written in the same beautiful hand – not his own – and a desperate plea in his. The man with the beautiful handwriting is Samorodov, a friend with whom Anisim is ‘”as thick as thieves”’ and who has got him ‘”mixed up in some deal: it’ll make or break me”’. At the church on his wedding day Anisim has a sudden unexplained pang of remorse:
‘He prayed and implored God to make those unavoidable misfortunes that were threatening to shower down on him any day now pass him by somehow, just as storm clouds pass over a village during a drought, without shedding a single drop of rain.’
This sense of foreboding is linked a few days later with the undisclosed scheme being hatched between Anisim and Samorodov. ‘”If the worst should happen,”’ Anisim says to his stepmother, ‘”please comfort my Papa.”’ When the worst does happen the two friends are sent to the same prison, Nikofor is born and then murdered, Lipa is turned out of the house, the father loses control of the business and Aksinya rises above all of them.
The story closes with two powerful symbolic acts. Grigory Tsybukin, a man reduced to stumbling inarticulacy and irrelevance in the village he once ruthlessly swindled, sees Lipa returning from work covered in red brick dust. Looking at and approaching her, ‘His lips were trembling and his eyes full of tears.’ Has he not realised the unsayable, that his youngest daughter-in-law and his only grandchild have been the victims of a terrible injustice at the hands of the same woman who now controls his household and his business? ‘Lipa took a piece of buckwheat pie out of her mother’s bundle and handed it to him.’ This act of selfless charity reveals a great deal about the hidden inner strength of such a character and reminds us of Olga’s endurance and compassion in ‘In the Ravine’.
Indeed, earlier in the story the virtually incidental character, the carpenter Yelizarov, says to Lipa and her mother, ‘”it’s those what work and doesn’t give in what’s superior.”’ This provides us with yet another textual means by which to understand the characterisation of Lipa and the storyline through which she moves so passively and submissively. There is no superiority to be had by someone born into such a life but there is survival and there may be the potential to retain one’s dignity. Maybe we are intended to see Lipa as a peasant woman who works and refuses to give in.
Reminiscent of the moment in ‘Peasants’ when the icon of the Life-Giving Virgin momentarily reassures the villagers that they are not alone, not abandoned in their suffering, Chekhov intrudes once more into the narrative of ‘In the Ravine’:
‘Lipa and her mother, who were born beggars and were resigned to staying beggars for the rest of their lives, surrendering everything except their own frightened souls to others – perhaps even they imagined, for one fleeting moment, that they mattered in that vast mysterious universe, where countless lives were being lived out, and that they had a certain strength and were better than someone else. They felt good sitting up there, high above the village and they smiled happily, forgetting eventually that they would have to go back down again.’
A number of Chekhov’s short stories focus on the stifling nature of life in the provinces for members of the aspiring middles class and the declining gentry. Burkin, Ivan and Alyokhin of ‘The Little Trilogy’ have all succumbed to the sense of futility and frustration of rural life. The Bride and The Lady with the Little Dog, on the other hand, seem to applaud the decisions of Nadya and Anna to escape their entrapment, Nadya to pursue her education, Anna to pursue love. The daughter Yekaterina Turkin’s escape to study music at the conservatoire in Ionych seems at first to be a similar victory but Yekaterina’s greatest achievement is the realisation of the truth about herself and her level of talent.
Ionych
Indeed, Ionych depicts the bleakness of provincial life more forcefully than Chekhov’s other late stories through two interlined narrative devices. One is the characterisation of Yekaterina’s presumably well-meaning but utterly tiresome, predictable and absurd parents, Ivan Petrovich and Vera Iosofovna Turkin. The other is the central story of Dr Dmitry Ionych Startsev’s descent into a kind of living hell. As he becomes more financially successful and socially more prominent Ionych becomes increasingly bloated and loathsome.
The Turkins are regularly recommended to newcomers to their provincial town as ‘the most cultivated and gifted family’, a kind of antidote to ‘the monotony and boredom of life there’. Ivan organises amateur theatricals and when entertaining guests or talking with his family behaves like a comical, theatrical caricature of himself. He has become so accustomed to doing this that he no longer seems to behave or to communicate like a normal person. In company he refers to his wife as ‘my sweet’ and ‘chick-chick’, feigning a kind of affection completely devoid of intimacy or depth. Similarly, he calls his daughter Yekaterina ‘Peacock’ and ‘Pussycat’. In response to her desire to go to the city to study music her father sweeps aside any controversy, argument or discussion and dismisses her as a child. Chekhov has created Ivan Turkin as a character so defined and limited by his mannerisms that he has become meaningless, insincere and completely affected.
The entertainments organised by the Turkins for the genteel society of their town are intended by them to be seen as cultural salons based on the model offered by the aristocratic and cultural elites of metropolitan Europe. However, unlike those salons there is no social, political or intellectual discussion or dissent, there is no art and there are no artists. Instead, there are only amateurs and dilettantes: Ivan’s tiresome affectations, Vera’s romantic novels and Yekaterina’s unpolished piano playing. Like Ionych the reader becomes a disbelieving and strangely unamused observer. We witness the ‘hammering . . . thunder . . . those deafening, tiresome, yet civilised sounds’ of Yekaterina’s piano recitals; ‘all that claptrap about . . . things that never happen in real life’ in Vera’s dreadful novels and the ‘weird lingo’ of Ivan’s jokes and riddles.
Turkin’s wife is also good at tiresome jokes and affected manners. On first welcoming Ionych into her household she says, “You are permitted to flirt with me. My husband’s as jealous as Othello, but we’ll try and behave so he doesn’t notice a thing.” The cultural reference to Shakespeare is only momentarily interesting as Ionych is ushered in to the utterly tedious evening and we begin to realise that no one present could be capable of the grand passion that drives Othello to murder the one thing he loves. Five years later Vera Turkin’s flirtatious greetings are no longer so witty or so light, indeed, taking on a more sinister and demanding tone reminiscent of the kind of pressure placed on Podgorin in A Visit to Friends: “You don’t want to flirt with me, you never call on us, so I must be too old for you. But my young daughter’s arrived, perhaps she’ll have more luck.” In other words, the mother sees Ionych as an eligible bachelor to whom she is offering her daughter; all he needs to do is ask for her.
The love story in Ionych is a story about lost opportunity and missed communication, about Ionych’s initial enthusiasm and eventual unwillingness and Yekaterina’s initial immaturity and too-long delayed readiness. A year after first meeting the family Ionych comes to believe that, ‘With someone like her he could discuss literature, art – anything he liked in fact; he could complain to her about life, about people . . .’ There is, however, a reservation; ‘during serious conversations she would sometimes suddenly start laughing quite inappropriately.’ The turning point in their story is divided between the cemetery scene where she stands him up and Ionych’s subsequent proposal in the Turkin lounge room. The cemetery scene centres around the Demetti tomb where a visiting Italian opera singer was once buried, symbolic, perhaps, of the death of culture in this provincial backwater. It provides Chekhov with the opportunity for one of those lyrical passages – of which the best example is Gurov above the sea at Oreanda in The Lady with the Little Dog – in which a character meditates upon the duality of nature; its sympathetic proximity and its distant impassivity. The moonlight first evokes for Ionych ‘the presence of some secret that promised peaceful, beautiful, eternal life’ but then it kindles his desires and plunges him into anxiety. Imaging himself dead, Ionych contemplates ‘the mute anguish of non-existence, of stifled despair . . .’ Waiting for the girl he loves and desires in a place where he is surrounded by the graves of the dead, Ionych is struck by the futility of passion and desire for flesh that will in its turn die. ‘[W]hat a terrible joke Nature plays on man – and how galling to be conscious of it!’ Here is the paradox and predicament of the human condition, our consciousness of mortality and our uncertainty as to how this should shape our lives. Chekhov often poses the question but leaves it open. His compatriot, Russian Slavophile author Dostoyevsky, posed the same question in the firing squad paradox. A man is blindfolded and led out to the place where he is to be executed when he is reprieved at the final moment before the soldiers take their aim to fire. The man vows to himself and to his creator never to waste a single moment of the life that has been miraculously restored to him only to find that with the passage of a little time he has reverted to all the worst of his conceits and habits.
The proposal scene which takes place in the Turkin lounge room begins with Ionych expressing his fervent desire and is brought to a close by Yekaterina’s profession of love for art, her desire to become a concert pianist and her recognition that ‘family life would tie me down for ever’. In other stories Chekhov applauds such commitment – think of Nadya in The Bride and Anna in The Lady with the Little Dog – but in this story he seems to be dealing with Yekaterina as yet another idealist whose dreams are unrealistic and impractical. Yekaterina’s journey of self-discovery will only be revealed four years later when she acknowledges that, “I played like everyone else and there was nothing special about me. I’m as much a concert pianist as Mama’s a writer.” By this time Yekaterina is attempting to place Ionych in such a position that he will be able to propose to her a second time. Her victory, though, will be hers alone. “I’ve no illusions about myself.” Ionych will never visit the Turkins again.
The most disturbing aspect of this story, though, is Ionych’s descent into his own personal Hell-on-Earth. Chekhov seems to link this with the vulgar materialism of his financial success. Immediately prior to his first visit to the Turkins Ionych is ‘on foot’ and in town doing ‘a spot of shopping’. A year later he has ‘his own carriage and pair – and a coachman . . . who wore a velvet waistcoat’. After having been jilted in the cemetery he is ‘once again condemned to a tea-drinking ceremony’ during which he ‘absent-mindedly’ contemplates the size of the dowry he would receive from the Turkins if he marries their daughter.
Four years later Ionych no longer goes anywhere on foot. He has become overweight and short-winded and now drives, ‘three horses abreast – and with bells!’ An educated man, he is now established and successful in a town where he can speak intelligently with no one. Hardworking, he is surrounded by townspeople who ‘did nothing, absolutely nothing, and they were interested in nothing’. Ionych’s professional success is measured solely in monetary terms in ‘yellow or green notes that reeked of perfume, vinegar, incense and train oil’ and all he can do is deposit them in ‘his current account’. In some respects these details about shopping and saving represent Chekhov’s understanding of modernity and his prescience about our increasing obsession with material objects in consumer culture. He recognises well the future in which material comfort will be pursued through financial security. The details of Ionych’s banknotes allude to the advent of the cash economy (remember, in feudal society wealth had been measured in acres and serfs): perfume for the women of the gentry; vinegar for working class women; incense for the clergy and train oil for the working class men.
So, Ionych’s decline is linked with his increasing isolation in a provincial backwater and his continued pursuit of financial success. Several years later in the immediate present of the omniscient narrator Ionych has an ‘enormous’ medical practice and two houses in town, he owns an estate and he has put on so much weight that he ‘has difficulty breathing . . . he’s heavy-going now, irritable’. He yells at his patients, is the terror of his club footmen and servants and his recollection of the Turkins suggests almost no recollection at all.
Disturbing the Balance
This fragmentary and unfinished story was published posthumously. Like Ionych and The Bishop it revolves around a declining character and like Ionych it also contains a love story. Despite its fragmentary nature and omniscient narration Chekhov deftly manoeuvres his narrative point-of-view between Yanshin, the brother-in-law of the dying Bondarev, and Yanshin’s sister Vera. Both of them are impatiently waiting for Bondarev to die. Yanshin and his wife have been in attendance on the dying man for two months and he finds his brother-in-law to be pretentious and egotistical to the point where he feels ‘intense hatred . . . for the first time in his life’. Yanshin wishes ‘his sister’s fate hadn’t been so permanently, so hopelessly bound up with that hateful man’. In secret, Vera wishes so as well for she is embroiled in an adulterous relationship and her lover is waiting for her to join him abroad.
Within this unfinished story Chekhov achieves three extraordinary character studies. Bondarev is a demanding invalid, an impossible patient who complains about the quality of the service being delivered at his bedside by a priest. He is irritable and unreasonable. Yanshin wants nothing more than to return home with his newly-pregnant wife but, trapped in his sister’s house, he feels his own life ebbing away. Now thirty-one, ‘from the age of twenty-four, when he graduated, not one day of his life had ever given him the slightest pleasure’. His present situation exacerbates his displeasure. His occupations and responsibilities in his sister’s home are ‘trivial, insignificant and boring’ to him. His one daily respite is the evening visit to the railway station ‘to fetch newspapers and letters’. As with Ionych’s shopping, Chekhov is clearly aware of both the lure of consumerism and the newly-discovered modern problem of boredom. Escaping the ‘unbearable boredom of evening’ back at the house, ‘One could have a bite to eat, drink beer, look at some books’.
Chekhov uses Yanshin’s visit to the station one evening as the point at which he transitions from Yanshin’s to Vera’s point-of-view. She watches her brother leave and then reads the latest letter from her lover. Because the story is unfinished we do not have as much about Vera as we do about her husband Bondarev and her brother Yanshin. But we do have a motif familiar to us from Gurov in The Lady with the Little Dog and Podgorin in A Visit to Friends, the idea of a dualised character. Her lover writes that ‘there are two Veras: one is timid, faint-hearted, indecisive; and there’s an indifferent Vera, who’s cold and proud . . .’ As with Podgorin we are unsure which one is her authentic self but the lover knows he wants the cold, proud, indifferent ‘and beautiful one – to love me’.
The Bishop
The Bishop is much admired amongst Chekhov’s later short stories for its accuracy of observation and detail. In addition, it is significant for the way in which Chekhov maintains a balance between detachment and compassion. Again, the central focus is on a character in decline. We trace the last week of Bishop Pyotr’s life from the eve of Palm Sunday through Holy Week to the eve of Easter Sunday. We experience his fever, delirium and pain as he succumbs to typhoid. As well, we have the Chekhovian hallmarks of nostalgia and regret, that sense of life so crushed by routine as to have become pointless. Chekhov’s observation of manners and etiquette is most meticulous as we watch the bishop’s mother, the widow of a poor village deacon with nine adult children, as she becomes ‘quite embarrassed, wondering whether she should address him formally or as a close relative, whether she could laugh or not’ in his presence. In the company of her son she is ‘timid and inarticulate’ whilst Bishop Pyotr can overhear through the wall that she behaves ‘naturally and normally with strangers’.
And there is that incidental detail alluded to a few times throughout the story but of uncertain significance. On the Tuesday ‘a young merchant called Yerakin, a most charitable man, had come on a most urgent mater’ about which he harangues Bishop Pyotr for an hour. It is not the first time we have come across the name. Chekhov first mentions the ‘merchant millionaire’ as the bishop’s carriage is travelling down the dark deserted main street. At Yerakin’s shop ‘electric light was being tested, violently flashing on and off while a crowd of people looked on’. Much later on that same sleepless night the bishop calls Father Sisoy to his room and the father speaks critically of the Yerakins’ electric lights. As with Ionych and Disturbing the Balance Chekhov seems to be displaying an awareness of and interest in the nature of the modern world with its consumerism, shops and electricity. Perhaps the inordinate wealth of the Yerakins and their electricity represent the encroachment of materialism and modernity upon the kinder, happier world of the past that Bishop Pyotr remembers constantly throughout the story. Perhaps what they represent will become the dominant values in a future world where Bishop Pyotr’s humility and sincerity will no longer have a place. His thoughts that night are accompanied, in contrast, by the ‘tranquil, pensive moon’, quite the opposite of Yerakin’s violently flashing electric lights.
At the same time that he is immersed in it, Bishop Pyotr is also aware of the limitations of nostalgia, its inaccuracy and potential for self-delusion. Looking back, the past seems ‘alive, beautiful, joyful, such as it most probably had never been’, perhaps much like Podgorin’s memories of the student summer he spent in the country recalled in the story A Visit to Friends. ‘Perhaps,’ thinks Bishop Pyotr, ‘. . . in the life to come, we will remember that distant past and our life on earth below with just the same feelings.’ Here is that capacity we witnessed with Gurov at Oreanda in The Lady with the Little Dog for the contemplation of the human condition within the context of eternity, the difference being that Gurov’s invocation of the concept of eternity is bound up with nature whereas Bishop Pyotr’s is bound up with religious faith.
Some of the most powerful characterisation of Bishop Pyotr centres on his loss of faith not in God but in himself and the purpose or meaning of his life. “Why am I a bishop?” he asks Father Sisoy at one stage very late in his illness, “. . . All of this crushes the life out of me . . .” What crushes him are the burdens of responsibility pertaining to high office, the social proprieties expected of someone in his position and the monotonous repetition and routine of his bureaucratic and liturgical life. Whilst the reader and the character know that it is the typhoid that is making him ‘thinner and weaker’, there is also the motif of him sensing that he is having the life crushed out of him by his position as bishop from which ‘he yearned to escape’. In this instance Chekhov confirms the negative point of view of his central character by the end of which – a month after his death – he and all of his goodness, his qualities and deeds, are unremembered.
Wearing the ‘dark blue uniform dress of a teacher’ [203], and 28 years old at the beginning of the play, Olga is the oldest of the three sisters; ‘…during these four years I’ve been teaching at the Gymnasium, I’ve felt my strength and my youth draining from me every day… I’ve become old, I’ve got very thin.’ [204-205] Her middle sister, Masha, has been married for the last four years to the school teacher Kulygin and does not work. Her youngest sister, Irina, is unmarried, does not work and is infinitely more idealistic.
Olga acts as a narrator for the audience, backgrounding us with necessary information. We learn from her that it is May 5th, the first anniversary of their father’s death and also Irina’s name-day[1]. As the oldest sister – both their parents are dead and Andrey seems disinterested in what’s going on around him – Olga acts as the hostess for Irina’s name-day luncheon. At the beginning of Act One she recounts details of their father’s cold winter funeral one year ago – ‘Heavy rain and snow.’ [203] – his status and what appears to have been a decline on the family’s part into rural obscurity; ‘He was a general, in command of a brigade, but there weren’t many people there [at the funeral]… Father got his brigade and we left Moscow eleven years ago…’ [203-204] For Olga, Moscow is most definitely still ‘home’ [204], the city, the greater world for which the three sisters yearn. Olga also tells us that Andrey has ‘filled out a lot and it doesn’t suit him,’ [205] and she plays the role of censorious, disapproving older sister towards Andrey’s fiancée, Natasha; ‘You’re wearing a green belt… it simply doesn’t go…’ [220]
Masha
Wearing a black dress – probably still in mourning for her father but also clearly unhappy with her life – 22 year old Masha is the middle sister. At the beginning of Act One she is reading and doesn’t participate in the early dialogue. When she does enter the dialogue she’s gently reciting some lines from a Russian schoolroom classic, an action that Solyony imitates as if making fun of her. Masha announces that she’s not staying to celebrate Irina’s name-day, telling the audience that she’s ‘melancholy’ and ‘depressed’. She also makes a clear reference to the family’s declining status and increasing isolation; ‘In the old days, when Father was alive, thirty or forty officers used to come on each of our name-days, it was really noisy, but today there are only one and a half people and it’s quiet as the desert…’ [208]
She eventually decides to stay and tells Olga to ‘stop blubbing’ [208] despite the fact that she cries throughout the act herself. Masha’s tears throughout Act One seem to be partly in response to her memories of the past, to her yearning for Moscow, to the present and the narrow provincial life in which she feels she’s been confined, but also to frustration at her husband, the insufferably priggish Kulygin, and the boredom of their marriage. Irina tells the audience, ‘Masha is out of sorts today. She got married at eighteen when he seemed to her a very intelligent man. And now it’s different. He’s the kindest of men but not the most intelligent.’ [219] Masha lunches angrily with her family, particularly her husband who follows her banging her plate with her fork and declaring, ‘Well, come what may life is still a bowl of cherries!’ with his pompous, patronising, ‘Bad marks to you for behaviour.’ [220]
Masha is strongly disapproving. She dislikes the Council Chairman Protopopov and thinks ironically – think of the adultery that develops between them – that he would make a suitable husband for Andrey’s Natasha. Like Olga she disapproves of Natasha but with a more venomous refusal to accept her as Andrey’s partner; ‘Oh dear, her clothes! It’s not that they’re ugly or unfashionable, they’re simply pathetic… Andrey isn’t in love – I won’t admit that, he still has some taste… [213] Masha also disapproves of Chebutykin’s shamefully expensive present, the silver samovar.
Reflecting on the dead and on the fact that we are all destined for the grave Masha says, ‘They won’t remember us either. We’ll be forgotten.’ [212] She detests the provincial isolation into which her life has fallen; ‘In this town to know three languages is an unnecessary luxury. Not even a luxury but some kind of unnecessary appendage, like a sixth finger. We have a lot of superfluous knowledge.’ [215] These sentiments are echoed in Tuzenbakh’s admiration for her accomplishments as a pianist in Act Three; ‘In this town absolutely no one understands music… She’s almost got a real gift… To be able to play so superbly and at the same time to know that no one, no one appreciates you!’ [249] For now she’s condemned by her husband’s mediocrity to another ‘boring evening at the Principal’s!… What a cursed, intolerable life…’ [218]
Masha recognises Vershinin, the only newcomer to the name-day luncheon, as ‘the lovesick major’, a military colleague of their father’s from their Moscow days who remembers the three sisters as three little girls. ‘How you’ve aged!’ she tells him. [211]
Irina
Twenty years old and the youngest of the sisters, Irina makes it clear from the beginning that she doesn’t want to be burdened by the past. ‘Why bring it all back!’ [203] she says in response to Olga’s talk about their father’s death and funeral. Exactly one year since his death she is out of mourning and dressed in white for her name-day. Like her sisters she yearns for Moscow, for escape from the remote province in which they’ve lived for eleven years. She tells the audience that her brother Andrey is in line for a professorship which, we infer, will take him and possibly herself and Olga away from their isolated home and back to the city. Irina is inquisitive, sceptical in the face of Tuzenbakh’s professions of love but intrigued by the prospect of a male newcomer, Vershinin; ‘Is he an interesting man?’ [205] Irina is also idealistic; ‘When I woke today… I suddenly started to think that everything in this world is clear to me, and that I know the way to live… A man, whoever he may be, must work, must toil by the sweat of his brow, and in that alone lie the sense and the goal of our life, its happiness, its joys. How good to be a labourer… My God, better even not to be a man, better to be an ox, a simple horse, if only to work, than a young woman who gets up at midday…’ [206] Needless to say, at the beginning of the play Irina is just such a young woman and her idealism is only matched by her lack of experience. ‘We must work, work,’ she reiterates none-the-less later in Act One. ‘We’re gloomy and look at life so darkly because we don’t know work. We were born to people who despised work…’ [219-220]
Irina is rapturous about the fact that Vershinin comes to them from Moscow; ‘We think we’ll be there by the autumn. It’s our home town, we were born there…’ [211] Attracted by the new and the ideal, she rejects Tuzenbakh’s talk to her about love, a theme he has no doubt pursued with her before; ‘…don’t talk to me about love.’ [211] In response to his passionate ‘thirst for life, for the struggle, for work’ and swaying hopelessly between idealism and melancholy she responds; ‘You say life is beautiful… For us three sisters life has not yet been beautiful, it has choked us like a weed…’ [219]
Andrey
The younger brother of the three sisters, ‘could be good-looking, only he’s filled out a lot and it doesn’t suit him.’ [Olga, 205] ‘He’s our scholar… Father was a soldier but his son chose an academic career.’ [Irena, 213] Pompous and perhaps even ridiculous, Andrey plays the violin offstage while his sisters entertain their guests. Overweight and perspiring he is drawn unwillingly into the conversation. ‘My father, God rest his soul, piled education onto us… after his death I began to fill out and in a year I’ve become fat, as if my body had been liberated.’ [215] Andrey is educated and wants to work on a translation but his own words and behaviour as well as Masha’s comments about the superfluous luxury of their education cast doubts on the value of his learning.
At the end of Act One Andrey rescues Natasha from Olga’s comments about her clothes and Kulygin and Chebutykin’s crude jokes by declaring his love and asking her to marry him even though he clearly tells both Natasha and the audience that he has no idea why he’s fallen in love with her.
Concerns and Ideas
By the end of Act One a number of Chekhov’s concerns and ideas are becoming apparent to us, things such as:
The dead weight of the past
The disappointment of romantic love
Boredom and inactivity
The future:
Whether or not our lives will amount to anything
How we can prepare ourselves, ‘work’ for the future
Change:
The desire for change
The inevitability of change
The fear of change
Time and aging
Work; action and inaction
These ideas and concerns are elaborated on from different points of view by many of the minor characters in Act One. The three military characters for example take up Irina’s theme of the nobility of work. Lieutenant Tuzenbakh responds by linking it very clearly with the primitive social conditions and divisions in Russia and with the idea of inevitable change; ‘God, how I understand the longing for work! I’ve never worked in my life, not once… I remember, when I came home from cadet school, a footman used to pull off my boots… This time has come, a great mass is moving towards all of us, a mighty, healthy storm is rising, it’s coming, it’s already near, and soon it will blow sloth, indifference, contempt for work, this festering boredom right out of our society. I will work and in some twenty-five or thirty years’ time everyone will work. Everyone!’ [207] ‘…life on earth will be beautiful and amazing… But in order to take part in that life now, even if at a remove, one must prepare for it, one must work…’ [216] Army doctor Chebutykin responds to the same ideas with self-deprecating honesty; ‘Since I finished university I haven’t lifted a finger, I haven’t even read a single book…’ [207] Staff Captain Solyony playfully but ironically – think of the duel in Act Four – redoubles Chebutykin’s self-deprecation; ‘In two or three years you’ll die of a stroke, or else I shall lose my temper, dear boy, and put a bullet through your forehead.’ [207]
Tuzenbakh warns us early on that the only newcomer to the name-day luncheon will talk a lot about philosophy and the disaster of his second marriage and Vershinin the forty-two year old battery commander duly obliges; ‘How time passes! Oh yes, how time passes!’ [210] He responds to Masha’s melancholy with agreement; ‘Yes. We’ll be forgotten. That’s our destiny, we can’t do anything about it. What seems to us serious and significant and really important – a time will come when it’ll be forgotten… And it’s interesting that we absolutely can’t know what exactly will be regarded as sublime and important and what will be thought pathetic and ridiculous…’ [212] Recognising at this first meeting how miserable the lives of the Prozorov sisters are, Vershinin tries to rationalise their position and finds himself weaving between Masha’s melancholy and Irina’s idealism; ‘Let us suppose that among the hundred thousand inhabitants of this town… there are only three like you… life will stifle you, but you still won’t disappear, you won’t remain without influence; after you will come maybe six people like you, then twelve, and so on… In two or three hundred years life on earth will be inexpressibly beautiful and amazing.’ [215] ‘I often think, what if one were to begin life afresh but consciously?’ [216] Four years later in Act Four their consolations will be by and large no greater.
If Vershinin would have the three sisters believe his life is on the shelf – ‘…my wife is a sick lady and so on and so forth…’ [216] – Kulygin is even worse. He’s a classic Chekhovian character, the superfluous man, someone whose attitudes, behaviour and words seem to be almost entirely surplus-to-requirements. He describes his own history book about the school as, ‘A worthless little book, written out of idleness… You’ll read it one day out of boredom.’ [217] His Latin quotations from the Romans lose any of their apparent value becoming cheap props, hollow, meaningless clichés indicative of his education and profession. The real authority in his life is not Juvenal but the school principal.
‘I shall soon be sixty, I am an old man, a lonely, worthless old man…’ [209] With his notes about baldness and his newspapers, his excessive sentimentality and his laziness, Chebutykin is a similar kind of superfluous man character but in a much more humorous vein.
Also typical of Chekhov’s drama is the strange mixture of or balance between tragedy and humour. The tragedy of course is not classical or Shakespearean. There are no great leaders brought down by their own tragic flaws. Instead, there are these ordinary men and women who seem – at least some of them certainly will in Act Two – to be fully aware of their own weaknesses and limitations but – as if character is indeed destiny – they seem unable to do anything about them. The humour lies partly in their completely ineffectual self-awareness and in their silliness.
ACT TWO, The tired workers and the talking dreamers [almost 2 years after Act One]
The set is unchanged from Act One. Once again, an interior setting, the Prozorov drawing room but whereas in Act One we could see that it was sunny and cheerful outside, in Act Two it is evening and there is no light. We expect an even more stifling atmosphere than that already generated in the first act. In the gloom of Act Two a number of characters talk about their dreams and aspirations, their hopes and confessions.
In the two years since Act One Andrey and Natasha have married and given birth to their ‘exceptional’ [234] first child, Bobik. Natasha has clearly established herself as the matriarch of the Prozorov household, determining her sister-in-laws’ sleeping arrangements for the benefit of her child; ‘…for the time being she [Irina] can share a room with Olga…’ [224] Natasha’s life is dominated by practicalities and manoeuvres, not dreams and philosophies, hopes and ideas. If, as she says, ‘Babies understand everything,’ [234] then the business of life can hardly be terribly complicated. All you have to do is set about getting whatever you want or whatever you can, which is precisely what she is determined to do for herself and her children. Ideas are pointless says the wife of a man who once dreamed of being a professor at the Moscow University. ‘You would simply be charming in good society,’ she advises Masha, ‘if it weren’t for those words of yours.’ [236] ‘It isn’t Bobik whose sick,’ Masha says in front of Andrey and Irina, Tuzenbakh and Chebutykin, ‘but she herself! [Taps her forehead with her finger.]’ [239] By the end of Act Two this ‘Common little woman!’ [Masha, 239] is embarking on the first steps of an adulterous affair with her husband’s superior on the Council, Protopopov; ‘How strange these men are… Tell him I’m coming.’ [242]
The first steps of another adulterous affair are also being embarked upon by Masha and Vershinin. Given his discourses in Act One, it’s no surprise that Masha uses words as the way to this man’s heart. She speaks at length about ‘the most decent, the finest, the most educated people’ in the town [they’re in the army], about the man she married because she thought he was ‘terribly learned, clever and important’, about her suffering [read unhappiness] and about the coarseness of her husband’s colleagues. Vershinin responds first of all with an indictment of his fellow countrymen; ‘It’s very typical of the Russian to have elevated thoughts, but tell me why he aims so low in life?’ [227] Then, having established amazingly that Masha is superstitious, he confesses his love for her; ‘…I see you in my dreams… Splendid, wonderful woman!’ [228] Masha is infuriated by the news received later in Act Two that Vershinin’s wife has swallowed poison.
Late in Act Two an attempt is made to initiate another relationship, this time Solyony declaring in violent and ominous terms his love for Irina whom Tuzenbakh has been in love with for at least two years; ‘I’m speaking of my love for you for the first time… Of course one can’t make oneself loved… But I cannot have a successful rival… I will kill any rival…’ [241]
Act Two is saturated with references to dreams. There’s Irina’s disappointment with her job at the Telegraph Office that does not match the dreams she spoke of in Act One and her continuing dreams about moving to Moscow. There are Vershinin and Tuzenbakh’s dreams about the future of mankind [the former utopian, the latter practical]. There is Andrey’s recurring dream about the academic post he will never have in Moscow, Vershinin’s dreams of Masha and Solyony’s fantasy that he’s the reincarnation of Russia’s romantic poet Lermontov. ‘Forget, forget your dreams…’ [237]
Olga is virtually unseen through Act Two. She and Kulygin are at a teachers’ meeting where it has been announced that Olga will stand in for the headmistress. She suffers the exhaustion of an overworked school teacher and looks forward to the only reprieve available to working people in the modern world, the freedom of the weekend; ‘Tomorrow I’m free… Heavens, how good that is! Tomorrow I’m free, the day after tomorrow I’m free… My head aches, my head…’ [243]
Irina has fulfilled the undertaking she gave in Act One to work but, returning home from the Telegraph Office [accompanied by the patient and stubborn Tuzenbakh whose love she cannot return] she is as exhausted and depleted as Olga will be when she gets in from the teachers’ meeting. She is tired and thin and her hair is cut shorter. She is the first but not the last character in Act Two to tell us that Andrey is now gambling heavily and has recently lost another two hundred roubles; in a year’s time his debts will amount to a staggering 35,000. ‘I wish he’d be quick and lose everything,’ says Irina, ‘perhaps we’d leave this town.’ [230] No longer idealistic but still hopelessly hopeful, she even imagines that a successful game of patience might presage a move to Moscow. Act Two concludes with her painful and pathetic lamentation; ‘Moscow! Moscow! Moscow!’ [243]
Andrey remains fairly static through Act Two. He echoes the kinds of sentiments we heard expressed by several of the characters in Act One about the disappointments of life, his Moscow dreams and the uninspiring reality of his junior position on the Council. His desire to live in a large city is counterbalanced by Ferapont’s ridiculous second-hand story about a businessman in Moscow who ate himself to death on pancakes. Love also has had its inevitable disappointments for Andrey; ‘…my wife doesn’t understand me.’ [225] ‘We shouldn’t get married,’ he tells Chebutykin as they’re getting ready to go out gambling and drinking, ‘…because it’s boring.’ [239]
ACT THREE, The ‘nightmarish night’ of the fire [another year later]
In Act Two Andrey told us that he was a little afraid of his sisters. A year later in Act Three the reason is clear, his acutely uncomfortable situation between them and his wife. When the three sisters are together he determines to ‘really have it out, once and for all. What have you got against me? What is it?’ [258] Of course, he must know the answer and he does a good job of listing what he imagines their grievances to be; Natasha, his squandered career and his gambling debts, each of which he attempts unconvincingly to rationalise; ‘Natasha is a fine, honest human being, noble and direct…’ [Wrong] ‘I consider that job of mine just as hallowed and elevated as an academic one.’ [Untrue] ‘I’ve stopped playing cards… but the chief thing I can say in my own defence is that you girls, you’ve been getting paid while I didn’t have any, as it were, earnings…’ [Untrue and unfair, 258-259] ‘Really,’ says Irina, summing up his sisters’ disappointment with him, ‘what a trivial man our Andrey has become, he has lost his way and become really old in the company of that woman…’ [254]
Natasha continues her relentless intrusion into her sister-in-laws’ lives. No longer content simply determining their sleeping arrangements, she is effectively attempting to convert them into tenants in their own home by having them move to the rented rooms downstairs; ‘Really, if you don’t move downstairs we’re always going to be quarrelling.’ [247] Her treatment of their nanny, Anfisa, is cold and cruel, a wonderful portrait by Chekhov of the bourgeois nouveau riche. Her affair with Protopopov is now common knowledge and has reduced her husband to a laughing stock in the town.
The atmosphere of Act Three is brittle and psychologically intense. ‘I’m fed up, fed up, fed up…’ [Masha, 253] ‘I can’t, I can’t stand any more!… I can’t, I can’t!’ [Irina, 254] ‘What an agony this night has been… What a nightmarish night!’ [Olga, 258 & Irina, 259] The sisters are physically exhausted by the fire and emotionally distraught because they have now acknowledged that they will never escape their prison-like lives in this remote province. With the fire raging outside and Chebutykin smashing the clock inside, things are at breaking point, crisis. Act Three can be seen as a kind of life and death struggle between idealism and despair. On the one hand, ideals, hopes and dreams are dead for the three sisters. Olga not only advises Irina to marry Tuzenbakh whom she does not love but states emphatically, ‘I would marry without being in love.’ Irina acknowledges that her former idealism and hope are not enough to sustain her; ‘I forget everything, every day I forget something, and life slips away and will never come back, we will never, never go to Moscow… We were going to move to Moscow and there I would meet my true love, I dreamed of him, I loved him… But all that’s turned out to be nonsense, all nonsense…’ [255] Act Three concludes with Irina accepting Olga’s advice, the optimistic dreamer of Act One will now marry for convenience alone. Maybe Tuzenbakh will be her means of returning eventually to Moscow! Masha confesses to her sisters her love for Vershinin which is also an admission of failure and defeat in her marriage.
On the other hand Tuzenbakh’s decisions to retire from the army and to work at the brick works, his continued professions of love and desire for sacrifice for Irina and Vershinin’s faith in the future of mankind dominate the middle of the act:
VERSHININ: …In this town now there are only three people like you, but in the generations to come there will be more, more and more, and a time will come when it’ll all change your way… I have a passionate longing to live… [251-252]
TUZENBAKH: …[To Irina, tenderly] You’re so pale, so lovely, so entrancing… You are sad, you’re dissatisfied with life… Oh come with me, come away and let’s work together!… I look at you now and remember how, long ago, on your name-day, you were talking of the joys of work… And what a vision I had then of a happy life!… If only I were allowed to give up my life for you! [253]
However, there’s also Natasha’s resentment of the charity being offered to the fire victims by her three sisters-in-law; ‘There’s a lot of influenza now in town, I’m frightened the children will catch it.’ [246], Chebutykin’s confession that he killed a patient with his own incompetence; ‘she died and it’s my fault that she died.’ [248], and Kulygin’s complete lack of appreciation of his wife; ‘But is it appropriate for her to play at a public concert?’ [249]. The act ends with Irina and Olga talking about the news or rumour that the Brigade will be leaving town, the only reason they came there with their father in the first place fourteen years earlier. Their isolation from the rest of the world will now be complete.
ACT FOUR, The army departs [another year later, summer]
The only act of the play that is not set in the stifling interior of the Prozorov household, Act Four is set outdoors in the family’s garden in the full light of midday with a river and forest in the background. The Prozorovs and their friends have been drinking champagne but they have not been celebrating so much as commiserating with each other about the imminent and permanent departure of the troops from the town. Kulygin is the only character pleased to see them leaving because he knows that his wife Masha has been having an affair with the battery commander Vershinin. Everyone else recognises that an essential part of the lifeblood of the town is departing and that in its place ‘a terrible boredom’ [262] will descend on all who remain, all of course except for Natasha who faces the prospect of becoming the only adult female resident of the Prozorov household. Masha now refuses to enter the house, Olga has moved out and Irina is planning to leave with Baron Tuzenbakh. Natasha’s domestic power will now be complete; ‘I’m telling them to move Andrey and his violin into your [Irina’s] room – let him scrape away in there! – and we’ll put Sofochka in his room… So tomorrow I’ll be on my own here. [Sighs.] First I’ll tell them to cut down that avenue of fir trees, and then that maple… [To Irina.] Dearest, that belt doesn’t suit you at all… It’s really tasteless…’ [278] Her power is complete.
On the matter of his marriage, Andrey is now beyond the unconvincing rationalisations of the previous act. In the same sentence that he begins again to praise his abrasive, avaricious wife he goes on to tell Chebutykin that ‘all the same there’s something in her which brings her down to the level of a small, blind, horny-skinned animal. At all events, she isn’t human.’ [269] However, Andrey does not simply blame Natasha or his sisters or the loss of his youth for his grief. He recognises that he himself has ‘become boring, grey, uninteresting, lazy, indifferent, useless, unhappy…’ [272] He acknowledges that he and his children have been reduced to the ‘repulsive… ignoble life of a parasite.’ [273]
‘The town will be emptied. Like someone snuffing out a candle.’ [267] Equally shocking to Andrey is the prospect of remaining in their small provincial town once the military garrison has been redeployed towards Poland; ‘Our town has existed now for two hundred years, it has a hundred thousand inhabitants… not one hero, not one scholar, not one artist… They just eat, drink, sleep, then they die… and in order not to be dulled by boredom, they diversify their life with vile gossip, vodka, cards, law suits, and the wives deceive their husbands and the husbands lie…’ [272]
Strangely, alongside his recognition of the disaster that his life, marriage and career have become, Andrey is also able to give expression to the kind of idealistic optimism, the kind of utopianism we have come to expect from Vershinin and Tuzenbakh; ‘The present is repulsive, but when I think of the future how wonderful things become!… I see freedom, I see myself and my children freed from idleness…’ [273] A lot of the dialogue in Act Four moves between these two extremes. On the one hand we have Chebutykin’s, ‘There is nothing in the world, there is no ‘we’, we don’t exist, it just seems we do… And what can it matter!’ [268] On the other hand we have Vershinin’s, ‘Life is a heavy load. Many of us find it blank, hopeless, but still one has to admit it is becoming brighter and easier every day, and one can see the time is not far off when it will be filled with light!… If only we could just combine education with hard work, and hard work with education.’ [275-276] Of course, we also have to admit that this is an awkward and unsatisfying way to say goodbye to a lover! ‘Life is good, my little girl, life is good!’ [274] shouts Anfisa whose been rescued from the clutches of Natasha by Olga, both of them living now at the Gymnasium. ‘My life is a failure’, [277] laments Masha. Whilst the last significant action of the play is the offstage death of Tuzenbakh in the duel – very little of any significance happens onstage in any case – the last significant exchange is between Irina and Olga and in it we can strongly sense Chekhov’s moral sensibilities. Irina has lost the opportunity to senselessly sacrifice her life in loveless marriage to Tuzenbakh but she has recognised a better possibility, to sacrifice herself as a teacher; ‘…I will give away my life to those who perhaps need it… I will work…’ [279] ‘Dear sisters,’ Olga asserts, ‘our life is not yet over. We shall live!… and I think in a little while we too will know why we live, why we suffer…’ [280]
And what can we make of Tuzenbakh’s death in the duel? First of all, the cause of the duel is completely pointless. Solyony and Tuzenbakh are essentially fighting over Irina. She loves neither of them. Secondly, Tuzenbakh’s death is completely meaningless. Irina has agreed to leave the family home with him and to marry him so that they can live and work independently. He need pay no attention to Solyony. Then there is that classic Chekhovian paradox that at the very moment when Tuzenbakh professes to have found a purpose and meaning for his life, he throws it away. He will die, none-the-less, without hearing the words Irina is unable to say to him. The irony of Tuzenbakh’s pointless death is intensified by the fact that Tuzenbakh’s second, Chebutykin, wouldn’t mind being shot to death by a friend. Indeed, Solyony had suggested just this back in Act One. ‘The Baron is a good man,’ says Chebutykin, ‘but one baron more or less – what can it matter?… I’ve had enough of all of you.’ [268-269] What can it matter? Obviously not enough to Tuzenbakh to enable him to take charge of his own life. In terms of Chekhov’s style, in terms of the way in which he wanted drama to hold the mirror up to the reality of our fairly undramatic and irresponsible, our predictable and ineffectual lives, let’s also remember again that this most important piece of action happens offstage. We hear the single muffled shot in the distance. Tuzenbakh either didn’t have the opportunity to fire at his opponent or he chose not to, but we see neither the victor nor the victim.
Chekhovian Drama
What kind of character does Chekhov seem to be most interested in? Is it someone who suffers because of unrequited love, someone who can’t cope with the dead weight of the past or the dreadful conditions of the present or the hopeless prospects of the future, someone who doesn’t know what to do with their life or what to do about their boredom? We know from his stories and plays and letters that Chekhov was interested in his contemporaries and peers, that is middle class Russians living at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, that he was concerned with their apparent inability to move forward with their lives either as a people or as individuals. As a people they were burdened by their history which had created a terribly authoritarian and strictly hierarchical society in which the vast majority of the population were still illiterate peasants and servants, like Anfisa the Prozorovs’ nanny. At the same time the aristocracy were increasingly afflicted by a kind of genteel poverty brought about by their inability to transform their estates into profit-making farms after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 meant that they could no longer exploit their peasant labourers without paying them and another minority group, the middle class merchants and professionals, found their aspirations thwarted by outdated social mores and values. The Prozorov siblings are not aristocrats but we can certainly sense their genteel poverty. Their downstairs rooms are rented out to officers from the local military garrison, including the dipsomaniacal army doctor Chebutykin who is constantly rapping on his ceiling. Philosophise as they might about the virtues of work, the unmarried sisters have no option but to have jobs. As if he were the son of an aristocrat, Andrey thinks he can fiddle while the town burns and that he will somehow win his way into the academic career of his dreams without visibly doing anything to achieve it.
Many of Chekhov’s contemporaries shared his sense that life could not continue in the same way that it had for countless generations before. This is clearly expressed by a number of his characters in his two best-known plays, The Cherry Orchard and Three Sisters. There is a sense that some great wind of change is on the way, that it is going to force people to be more practical, to make a greater contribution to their society and to the greater human good. Irina’s idealism and the philosophical speculations she shares with Tuzenbakh and Vershinin about the virtue of labour and the inevitability of change and progress point to this. Indeed, many of Chekhov’s characters are aware that change is happening all around them; it is evident in the changing attitudes of various characters towards social status [look, for example, at the way Natasha bulldozes her way into the Prozorov household and starts ordering around not just the servants but her own sisters-in-law]; it is evident in Tuzenbakh’s decision to resign from his position in the Tsar’s army and seek employment in industry and in Olga and Irina’s qualifications as teachers; it is perhaps also evident in the infidelities of Natasha, Masha and Vershinin. The old hierarchical view of society is turned into a laughing stock by Kulygin’s slavish acceptance of the school principal’s authority down to his decision to shave off his moustache. The absurdity of the old ways of doing things is possibly also being alluded to in Solyony and Tuzenbakh’s decision in Act Four to fight a duel.
But none of this quite answers our question about what kind of character Chekhov seems to be most interested in. Answering this question might also help us understand why it is that modern readers and audiences are still interested in his plays and short stories. Chekhov and his characters know that they are standing on the cusp of something, that they are, if you like, standing at the very beginning of the modern age. More of his characters seem to be united by one characteristic above any other: they simply do not know what to do with themselves in this brave new world, they do not know how to live their lives. One of the features which makes them essentially modern and one of the conditions of modern life that they have the most difficulty coping with is boredom, boredom which allows them the time to be painfully aware of the failures in their lives, the inadequacies of their relationships, their shortcomings and weaknesses. Chebutykin knows he’s an old drunk and a hopeless and dangerous doctor, ‘morally deformed, vile, loathsome’ [248]. Andrey knows he’s a failure and a ‘parasite’ [273], Kulygin knows he’s a bore and both of them know they are cuckolds. Masha and Vershinin both know that their marriages are failures and that their adultery will only bring them ‘happiness in snatches, in small pieces and… then little by little you become coarse and ill-tempered.’ [266] Natasha knows that she is cold, tasteless, awkward and unattractive and that the key to her future lies in evicting the majority of the Prozorovs from their rooms and their house. Tuzenbakh has an idea that he can better secure his own and Irina’s future by working at the brick factory and then he goes and throws his life away in a duel. Irina need only look around her at Olga and Kulygin to realise that no job and especially not teaching is ever going to have the poetry and intelligence she dreams of. Not only will none of the sisters be likely to ever see Moscow again, we in the auditorium of the theatre know that they no longer belong there, just as we suspect from the first moment we see him hesitantly drawn into the name-day celebrations of Act One that Andrey is never going to become the academic and intellectual he aspires to be. None of these characters, Chekhov seems to be suggesting even in many cases through their own observations about themselves, know how best to live their lives and certainly how to best live their lives with or by others.
They also suffer from that other modern burden, alienation. ‘How strangely life changes, how it deceives us,’ says Andrey in Act Two. He imagines ‘sitting in Moscow, in a big restaurant, you don’t know anybody and nobody knows you, and at the same time you don’t feel a stranger. Whereas here you know everybody and everybody knows you, but you’re a stranger… A stranger and lonely…’ [225-226] Of course, the tragedy of the Prozorov siblings is that they don’t really belong anywhere any more but Andrey’s words capture that very modern yearning for the anonymity of the metropolis where people can go about living their lives without answering to anyone at the same time as he’s expressing the anguish of feeling like a complete stranger in his own surroundings. ‘When I’m alone with someone, then it’s fine, I’m like everyone else,’ Solyony tells Tuzenbakh, expressing an existential anguish about his own authenticity ‘but in company I’m depressed, shy and… I talk all sorts of nonsense.’ [236] How ironic that he should most open his heart to the man he will eventually kill. Reflecting on her dissatisfaction with job number two – in the Town Council – Irina laments in Act Three that ‘I’ve been working for a long time, and my brain is dried up… I keep on thinking I’m moving away from any genuine, free life, moving further and further away, into some abyss, I’m in despair, and I can’t understand how I’m alive, how I haven’t yet killed myself…’ [255] Andrey’s sense of not belonging anywhere, Solyony’s depression and Irina’s despair at losing control of her authenticity and autonomy are expressions of existential anguish. They are asking the big philosophical questions about modern life that remain with us to this day; how can I construct a meaningful explanation for my life, how can I make sense of it?
This, I contend, is why Chekhov’s play still matters to modern readers and audiences. Its emphases on existential anguish, on the problems of authenticity and alienation, on boredom and the question of how to live and work in the modern world are as deeply meaningful and important and essentially unanswered for most of us today as they were a century ago. These emphases also explain something very perplexing about Chekhovian drama; how can a play work when nothing happens in it? The shape and content of the play – the same applies to The Cherry Orchard – reflects the shapeless and formless nature of modern lives in which everything is determined by time and productivity. Its lack of action and events reflects the boredom and frustration of the characters’ lives.
This lack of action does not mean that there is no structure to a Chekhov play. Structure is suggested instead by a kind of framing mechanism, which looks at first like simple repetition. Notice for example how Vershinin’s, ‘… And it’s interesting that we absolutely can’t know what exactly will be regarded as sublime and important and what will be thought pathetic and ridiculous…’ [212] from Act One is echoed by Tuzenbakh’s, ‘Sometimes in life trifles, silly little things, all of a sudden acquire significance, and for no good reason’, in Act Four. Notice how part of Act One revolves around an arrival – Vershinin’s – and Act Four revolves around a departure – the army’s; how in Act One there is a joke about Solyony killing one of his companions and in Act Four he does so despite saying, ‘I’ll just wing him like a woodcock.’ [269]; how Irina’s untested idealism of Act One is reflected and extended in her more practical resolve in Act Four; how Vershinin’s ‘We have no happiness and it doesn’t exist,’ [235] from Act Two is echoed by Chebutykin’s ‘…we don’t exist, it just seems we do…’ [268] from Act Four; how Natasha’s ‘that belt doesn’t suit you at all’ [278] in Act Four echoes, answers and avenges Olga’s ‘it simply doesn’t go…’ and Masha’s ‘her clothes!’ in Act One [220 & 213]. One purpose served by these repetitions is, of course, to highlight the tedium and boredom of the Prozorov lives; little changes, the same things keep on being said. But I would also argue that they act as a kind of framing mechanism so that the sorts of thoughts and exchanges we hear towards the end of the play remind us of the sorts of thoughts and exchanges we heard towards the beginning of the play. As in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, handled well this repetition can also aspire to the level of lyricism. Clearly Chekhov wants to present us with the dramatic representation of a slice of life in the lives of a group of people to whom little happens and for whom change is both enormously threatening and enormously difficult to achieve. He wants to convey the tedium of their lives and he removes what could be principal plot points – the Act Four duel, for example, or the Act One death and funeral of Prozorov senior – and severely constrains the range of settings – we see just a few rooms and the garden of the Prozorov house – in order to achieve this sense of lives without direction or climax, without change or development. But he also employs this subtle method of framing the action of his play, giving us at least the sense of a beginning and an end, an opening and a closing.
[1] Chekhov’s characters are Christians of the Russian Orthodox faith. In the Orthodox Christian tradition, a person’s name-day is the day on which the Saint after whom they were baptised is remembered. With visitors, feasts and gifts, name-days are much more important celebrations than birthdays.
One of the first things readers and audiences will notice about the play is the way that Chekhov presents and develops his characters. In terms of character development, we might divide the characters into two groups. There are those who, in the course of their dialogues and confessions, are rounded out, given backgrounds and motivations, emotions and aspirations. This group includes the essential quartet of Lyubov Andreyevna Ranevskaya, her 17 year old daughter Anya, her 24 year old adopted daughter Varya and the merchant Lopakhin. This group could also include minor characters such as the governess Charlotta Ivanovna and the maid Dunyasha, about whom we learn enough to understand them and their predicaments. The second group tends to be much more one-dimensional: Ranevskaya’s brother Leonid Andreyevich Gayev, the ‘perpetual student’ [298] Trofimov, the penurious landowner Pishchik, the Walking Accident Yepikhodov, plus the older and younger menservants Firs and Yasha.
Chekhov described his last play as, ‘A Comedy in Four Acts’ [281]. The humour comes mainly from the second group. They are one-dimensional because most of them are reduced to an often-repeated catchphrase or gesture. Gayey, for example, occasionally rambles on about his once progressive but now outdated political views. ‘I’m a man of the Eighties… People don’t speak well of that period, but all the same I can say that in my time I’ve had a lot of attacks for my convictions.’ [301] Humored by his sister, he’s a windbag whose nieces beg him to keep his mouth shut. His catchphrases about billiards are attempts at witty responses to current situations. Early in the play he speaks like a man of action – a rare thing in Chekhov – about not allowing the estate to be auctioned off. ‘I swear by my whole being!’ In his next breath he dismisses Firs. ‘If I have to I’ll undress myself.’ [301]
Once Grisha’s tutor, what has Trofimov been doing during the six years since the boy’s death? Reading and studying, he is a digest of the most progressive political and social ideas, but without any experience or practical application to life – his own or anyone else’s. ‘Man goes forward, perfecting his skills. Everything that is beyond his reach will one day become near and comprehensible, only we must work… there’s only dirt, smallness of spirit, just Asia [in Russia]…’ [312] ‘We are going irresistably towards a bright star burning there in the distance!’ [315] Not yet thirty, his looks and his youth are gone. ‘A woman on the train called me a moth-eaten gentleman.’ [297] He is in love with Anya – ‘My sun! My springtime! [302] – but disparages love as something beneath him in the progress of humanity. Lyubov insults him and his untested idealism, ‘you’re a ridiculous character, a freak…’ [324] As an ardent but inexperienced idealist he is a figure of some fun, but he is also quite possibly an echo of the revolutionary voices in Russian society at the beginning of the twentieth century. ‘Mankind is moving towards the greatest truth, towards the greatest happiness possible on earth, and I am in the front ranks!’ [336] What will this voice be like after another decade or so of disillusionment, disappointment and repression? Trofimov’s greatest moment in the play is his speech, as much addressed to the audience as it is to Anya about the legacy of serfdom. ‘…all your ancestors were serf-owners who owned living souls, and those human beings must surely be looking at you from every cherry-tree in the orchard… don’t you hear their voices… The ownership of living souls has formed all of you, those who lived before and those who are living now, so that your mother, you, your uncle, no longer notice that you are living in debt, at others’ expense… We’ve got at least two hundred years behind… to begin to live in the present we must first redeem our past, finish with it, and we can redeem it only by suffering, only by exceptional, ceaseless labour…’ [316]
‘…the figure of the impoverished noble landowner was a perennial of nineteenth-century Russian literature. He was a cultural obsession. Chekhov’s play The Cherry Orchard was particularly, and subtly, resonant with the themes of a decaying gentry: the elegant but loss-making estate is sold off to a self-made businessman, the son of a serf on the very same estate, who chops down the orchard to build houses. Most of the squires, like the Ranevskys in Chekhov’s play, proved incapable of transforming their landed estates into viable commercial farms once the Emancipation had deprived them of the prop of free serf labour and forced them into the capitalist world.’ [Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy, Pimlico, pp 47-48] This, of course, is the source of the terrible sadness of the Ranevskaya-Gayev clan in the play, but in the figure of Pishchik, it is also a cause for some considerable humour. His meaningless catchphrase is, ‘Imagine that!’ Sadly, he is incapable of imagining anything other than debt and money. He spends one act trying to borrow two hundred and forty roubles from Lyubov and another act borrowing another one hundred and eighty. ‘But here’s the problem: we’ve no money! I… can only talk about money…’ [318]
The Walking Accident Yepikhodov is a clerk who should be responsible for managing the accounts of the estate. As the cherry orchard is no longer productive and there is no longer any money, he has nothing to do. At the beginning of the play he fetches flowers for Lyubov, at the end he fetches Lopakhin’s coat. A classic Chekhov character, he is the superfluous man with nothing to do and nothing to sustain him. He drinks, he sees spiders in his bed and cockroaches in his kvass. He is also hopelessly and very unconvincingly in love with Dunyasha for whom he plays the guitar and sings like a fool. He does sense that part of what’s wrong with him has something to do with what’s wrong with Russia’s backwardness. ‘Abroad everything has been fully developed for a long time.’ [304] But most of all, his life is pointless. ‘I have an accident every day and if I may say so, I only smile, I even laugh… Whether I work or go about or eat or play billiards are matters to be discussed only by persons of understanding and seniority.’ [328]
Yepikhodov’s attempts to win Dunyasha are not defeated by her good sense so much as they are by what she sees as the intelligence and dashing seductiveness of the young manservant Yasha who we understand is probably going to both seduce and abandon her. He also constantly mocks the backwardness of life in the Russian countryside and is particularly scornful of the old manservant Firs. Firs is as unreformed by history as are his masters. He has legally been released from the enslavement of serfdom for forty years but, ‘when Emancipation came, I was already first valet. I didn’t accept full freedom then, I stayed with the family…’ [310] He is a mixture of great loyalty – ‘My lady has come! I’ve waited a long time! Now I can die…’ [290] – and a terrible ignorance that is taken advantage of by his superiors. The play ends with Firs lying down, exhausted, forgotten and abandoned. Firs has been seeing the beginning of the end for four decades. He calls Emancipation, ‘the troubles… when we were freed.’ [313-314] He also describes the deteriorating circumstances of the family that we are seeing enacted in front of us on the day of the auction. ‘In the old days we had generals, barons, admirals dancing at our balls, but now we send out for a Post Office clerk and the station master…’ [325]
The quartet of characters at the heart of this play are sometimes used as figures of fun. Yet, they seem to me to be anything but funny in an entertaining sense. Sad and ridiculous perhaps, but funny no. Lyubov Andreyevna Ranevskaya is arriving home after five years abroad. ‘Oh my sins… I always threw money around like a madwoman and I married a man who only ran up debts. My husband died of champagne… I was unlucky enough to fall in love with another man, I went off to live with him, and just at that time… my little boy drowned, and I went abroad, went away for good… I fled, out of my mind, and he followed me… I bought a villa at Mentone because he fell ill there and for three years I had no rest day or night… the villa was sold to pay my debts. I went off to Paris and there he robbed me, he abandoned me, lived with another woman, I tried to poison myself…’ [308-309] Anya also explains but with some variations on her mother’s timing. ‘Six years ago father died, a month later my brother Grisha drowned in the river, a lovely boy of seven. Mama couldn’t take it, she went off…’ [289] ‘We arrive in Paris… She’s already sold her villa near Mentone, she had nothing left… And Mama didn’t understand!’ [288] Her brother Gayev disapproves not only of the immorality of her recent life but with her original choice of a husband. ‘My sister still hasn’t lost the habit of being extravagant… my sister married a lawyer, not a nobleman… She married a commoner and it can’t be said her behaviour has been very virtuous… she’s still an immoral woman. You can feel it in her slightest movement.’ [298-299]
Lyubov is a bundle of powerful emotions. Like all of the characters in this group she is strongly influenced and bound by her past. Her arrival home invokes powerful nostalgia. ‘The nursery… I slept here when I was a little girl… And now I feel like a little girl again…’ [286] Her nostalgia turns from sentimentality to bitterness as she fails to take Lopakhin’s advice, loses the estate and is forced to leave. ‘Oh my childhood, my innocence! I used to sleep in this nursery, I used to look at the orchard from here, happiness woke up with me every morning… nothing has changed… If only I could take this heavy stone from my breast and shoulders, if I could forget my past!’ [296] ‘Goodbye, dear house, old grandfather… How much these walls have seen!…’ [338] ‘Oh my darling, my sweet, beautiful orchard!… My life, my youth, my happiness, farewell!.. To look at these walls, these windows one last time… Our mother used to love walking about this room…’ [345] Throughout the play Lubya receives and tears up telegrams from her sick lover in Paris. ‘I’ve finished with Paris.’ [293] Having done nothing to save the estate, to safeguard her family or to curb her overpowering emotions, she eventually decides to return there.
Anya understands from her first exchange with her half-sister that the orchard and the house are lost. She is still capable of girlish indulgence, showing off her brooch and remembering the hot air balloon ride in Paris. Unavoidably youthful and invariably optimistic, throughout Act One she is the sleepy child. In Act Two she seems innocently in love with and highly enthusiastic about Trofimov’s idealistic philosophy. ‘What have you done to me, Petya, why don’t I love the cherry orchard as I used to? I loved it so dearly, I thought there was no better place on earth… The house in which we live hasn’t been our house for a long time, and I will leave, I give you my word.’ [315-316] Like Trofimov and in stark contrast to her mother she imagines a positive future. Unlike Trofimov, though, she also has some actual goals in mind. ‘A new life is beginning, Mama!… I’m going to study, I’ll pass the Gymnasium examination and then I will work… a new, wonderful world will open up before us… Mama, come back…’ [339]
Varya’s first words as she enters in headscarf and coat – ‘It’s so cold, my hands have gone numb.’ [286] – establish an impression of someone austere and restrained. Her adoptive mother tells us, ‘Varya is just the same as before, she looks like a nun.’ [286] Under her coat she has a bunch of keys on her belt, further strengthening our impressions of her. She is, however, very protective of Anya. When Gayev is describing Lubya’s immorality Vary whispers a warning that, ‘Anya is standing at the door.’ [299] Varya tries to keep Trofimov away from her. She wants to see Anya married, ‘to a rich man and then I’d be at peace, I’d go to a convent… and so I’d go off round the holy places… From place to place. Bliss!’ [288-289] The irony here is just about as suffocating as Varya’s life. Her half-sister has just returned from five years of travelling on anything but a holy pilgrimage during which time she’s been responsible for managing the estate without any money. For the last two years she has been waiting for Lopakhin to propose. Varya weeps often over the loss of the estate and the inability of the man she loves to propose to her. ‘For two years now everyone has been talking to me about him, everyone talks, but he’s either silent or he makes jokes… If I had money… I’d go into a convent.’ [321]
Varya is very religious. ‘What can we do Mama? It [Grisha’s drowning] was God’s will.’ [297] ‘If God would come to our help!’ [299] But most of all, the impression of restraint and austerity remains. ‘We had a problem here when you were away,’ [301] she explains about the vagrants sleeping in the old quarters and the rumours of her lack of charity. Lyubov does acknowledge her efforts. ‘To economise my poor Varya feeds all of us on milk soup, she gives the old men in the kitchen nothing but dried peas…’ [306] As Anya stands up to her mother’s histrionics by asserting an optimistic view of the future, Varya argues that we have to, ‘have something to do. I have to be doing something every minute.’ [322] At the end Lopakhin is willing but unable to propose and Varya accepts a menial position at the Ragulins’. ‘I’ve agreed to look after his estate… as a kind of housekeeper… Yes, life in this house is over… there won’t be any more.’ [342]
From the first line Lopakhin is associated with the theme of time. ‘What time is it?’ [283] Chekhov’s stage directions have him constantly checking his watch. He seems to be the only character capable of acknowledging that ‘time passes’ [290] and that change is inevitable. As such, Lopakhin is a man of his times dealing with people who have outlived their era and become redundant, superfluous, accidental. The inexperienced idealist Trofimov and the very young Anya may praise activity but Lopakhin has actually worked himself up by his bootstraps. ‘I work from morning to evening… You just have to start doing something to understand how few honest, decent people there are…’ [312] In line with Chekhov’s themes of inactivity and activity, Lopakhin clearly recognises the weaknesses of the people around him. ‘I’m sorry, I’ve never yet come across such frivolous people as you, my friends, so unbusinesslike, so peculiar. You’re told in plain Russian, your estate is being sold, and you just don’t seem to understand.’ [307] ‘I’ve wasted time with you, I’m fed up with having no work. I can’t manage without work…’ [335]
It is easy to read him as a rapacious money-hungry capitalist with neither manners nor respect but such a reading of his character is far too reductive. Look how sincerely he tries to prevent Lyubov from losing the estate altogether by proposing a genuine plan to keep it in her ownership. His plan to cut down the cherry trees for building sites might not be aesthetically pleasing but it would guarantee the spendthrift and otherwise unproductive Ranevskaya a large annual income and it would maintain her ownership of the land. ‘Here is my plan… Your property is only twenty versts from the town, the railway has come near, and if you break up the cherry orchard and the land along the river into building plots and then lease them out for dachas, you’ll have at least twenty-five thousand a year income… Only of course it needs tidying and cleaning up… say, for example, pull down all the old buildings like this house, which isn’t good for anything now, cut down the old cherry orchard…’ [292] Even after being accidentally beaten over the head by Varya he is still capable of admitting that he has feelings for her and that he is thinking about marrying her. ‘If there’s still time, then I’m ready now…’ [341]
However, he is also dominated by his past. ‘Yes, my father was a muzhik and here I am in white gloves and yellow shoes. A pig in a baker’s shop… I’m a muzhik through and through… One should remember one’s place… [to Dunyasha] And you’ll bring me some kvass.’ [284] ‘Your brother… there, says I’m a lout, a kulak, but I really don’t care… My father was a serf of your grandfather’s and father’s, but you, yes you, once did so much for me that I’ve forgotten everything and love you like one of my own family… more than one of my own family.’ [291] ‘My dad was a muzhik, an idiot, he didn’t understand anything… he only hit me when he was drunk… In fact I’m just as much a dolt and an idiot…’ [309]
Charlotta is in some ways most memorable for her props: her dog on a lead at the beginning and end of the play and her lorgnette in Act One, much more the affectations of noblewoman than a governess. Also, her cards with which she plays tricks to entertain her frivolous superiors and her rifle at the beginning of Act Two. She too, is a lost character haunted by her past. ‘I have no proper passport, I don’t know how old I am, so I always think I’m young. When I was a little girl my mother and father travelled round fairs and gave performances… But where I’m from and who I am – I don’t know… Who were my parents, were they married… I don’t know… I don’t know anything.’ [303] Dunyasha is similarly lost and confused. ‘They took me into service when I was still a little girl, I’m now out of the habit of the simple life, and I’ve got white, white hands, like a young lady’s…’ [305] This is the same scene in which Yepikhodov explains how difficult it is to make up his mind about living or dying and why he carries a revolver. Chekhov’s point, I think, is clear. This lack of direction and purpose is not reserved for the idle and unproductive rich, it is a symptom of a society that is out of order and out of time. Whilst it is wrong to suggest that The Cherry Orchard in any way predicts the Russian Revolution, the play does warn its audience that the old regime and the old system of wealth and status inherited with land is coming to an end. At the same time, Chekhov’s society was, like his characters, haunted by its past.
WHAT IS THIS PLAY ABOUT?
In Chekhov theme and style are seamlessly intertwined and they are encapsulated in an overwhelming feeling of ennui and suffocation. Watching these characters is like looking at photographs – not movies – of people stuck in quicksand. We know they’re doomed, they look as though they know they’re doomed, but nobody can do anything about it. These people meeting and talking in the nursery – a symbol of their infantile behaviour – are like pieces of furniture gathering dust. And yet, we are supposed not only to enjoy the play but to have a good laugh during it as well. We know all too well from Lopakhin that time is passing, but the original audience must have known that the same hours and minutes had been ticking away for four decades. Ranevskaya and Gayev have been frivolous with their own lives and the lives of those who depend upon them for long enough to be at times figures of tragedy and at others figures of fun. But for me, the overwhelming impression I take away is one of a society stifled by its past and by its incapacity to evolve with the times.
The ideological mantras of our own time tell us that change is inevitable and good, that resistance is futile and that redundancy is just around the corner for individuals and products. Given that we live in a kind of opposite world, how can we understand The Cherry Orchard? Like Chekhov’s characters we are trapped in the quicksand of our own times. Like theirs, the prevailing values of our time are telling us to hold on to nothing from the past. Like them, we are becoming provisional, superfluous, accidental. Little wonder that Chekhov’s plays are so prominent in the history of the modern theatre. Look at how master and servant both recognise the futility of their lives, how Charlotta and Yepikhodov fail to recognise and understand themselves, how even Lopakhin can see through the promise of progress that life is incoherent and unhappy and especially how Lyubov’s words castigate the audience. Chekhov’s mixture of humour and sadness is the flavour of modernity itself.
CHARLOTTA: But where I’m from and who I am – I don’t know… [303]
YEPIKHODOV: I am a man of culture, I read a number of remarkable books, but I just can’t understand the direction in which I actually want to go, whether I should live or shoot myself… [304]
LYUBOV: What are we to do? Tell us, what?… I’m waiting for something to happen all the time… You shouldn’t go to plays but look more often at yourselves. Your lives are all so grey, you say such a lot of unnecessary things. [308-309]
GAYEV: The sun has set my friends… We’ve suddenly become unnecessary. [313, 339]
LOPAKHIN: If only our incoherent, unhappy life could somehow be transformed. [331]
TROFIMOV: It doesn’t matter… Everything on this earth comes to an end. [340]
FIRS: Life has gone by, as if I hadn’t lived. [346]
I come away from these stories with an overwhelming impression of lives in transition (peasants’ lives, middle class people’s lives, women’s and men’s lives, the lives of those who are idealists and those who are not). We are surrounded by characters caught between one place and another or between one way of life and another. In this way, the quietly and meticulously observant Chekhov cannot help but have reflected in the body of his work the history of Russia during his lifetime. It was a history that seemed peculiarly lacking in any particular sense of direction, characterised more by stasis, even regression, than progress. In the second half of the nineteenth-century Russia is emerging from feudalism and yet it is failing to reform and modernize. The serfs were emancipated in 1861 but the society is failing to adapt and make progress. Chekhov’s characters are caught variously between town and country, between the provinces and the metropolitan centres of Moscow and St Petersburg, between the need for action and the ennui of idleness, between commitment and scepticism.
A Visit to Friends, The House with the Mezzanine and The Bride all revolve to a greater or lesser extent around city visitors to country estates. The unnamed artist narrating The House with the Mezzanine recalls an incident from ‘six or seven years ago’ when he lived for the summer in the vast and virtually empty ‘colonnaded ballroom’ of an ‘old manor house’ while the young landowner lived with his de facto wife in ‘a cottage in the garden’. Belokurov’s abandonment of the manor house for the cottage and his preference for peasant dress recall Alyokhin’s appearance and his occupation of the manager’s rooms on his own estate in About Love. In the ironically titled A Visit to Friends Podgorin is called upon by friends in the country to rescue their family and their estate which has been reduced to bankruptcy and auction. Sasha in The Bride is a regular Muscovite summer visitor to Grannie’s estate where for the last few summers he has been encouraging Nadya to abandon the idle and exploitative life of the landed gentry in the country.
All three stories recount the destabilisation of a central figure. In A Visit to Friends Podgorin’s bourgeois sense of decorum is assaulted by the appeals made to him variously for legal advice, to offer a lifeline to the family by marrying Nadezhda and to hand over money. In The Bride and The House with the Mezzanine the visitors – both artists – are the destabilising influences. The narrator of The House with the Mezzanine challenges the populist political and social program advocated by Lida and falls in love with her younger sister Zhenya, thus provoking Lida to send her sister and mother into a kind of exile, away from his influence. Sasha’s destabilising influence in The Bride needs to be read carefully. A cursory reading might misconstrue the evidence and suggest that Sasha encourages Nadya to leave because of her unhappiness and her unpromising engagement to Andrey when, in fact, he has been encouraging her for some time to pursue her education and her independence as a kind of repudiation of the privilege into which she has been born.
A Visit to Friends
A Visit to Friends opens with the obvious nostalgia felt by Podgorin for the ‘poor student’ summer which he spent in the country at Kuzminki with his friend Tatyana Losev, her then very young sister Nadezhda and her friend Varvara Pavlovna. He ‘had given Nadezhda coaching in maths and history in exchange for board and lodging’ and Varvara, then a medical student, lessons in Latin. That summer Tatyana ‘could think of nothing but love’.
In the intervening decade Podgorin has qualified as a lawyer and settled into a solitary career and life. Reminiscent of Gurov in The Lady with the Little Dog, Podgorin believes ‘He was really two different persons’. However, whilst Gurov sees the public self as hypocritical and the private self as authentic, Podgorin sees himself as an arrogant and crude man in the public world of courts and brothels. ‘But in his private, intimate life he displayed uncommon tact with people close to him . . .’ These ‘shy and sensitive’ tendencies do not inoculate him against the ‘distressing’ ‘ordeal’ of having to deal with his old friend’s husband; ‘. . . it was like having a revolver aimed at you’. It is, indeed, difficult with Podgorin to know which is his authentic self. Podgorin’s nostalgia is momentary and very quickly undercut by his dread at returning to ‘such a miserable place’ where he will be importuned for money and advice.
The idyll of a decade ago has not simply been erased by the passage of time. Tatyana has taken possession of the estate as her dowry, only to have it squandered away by the ‘coarse’, ‘pompous’, plump, idle, ineffectual and insufferable husband she has acquired, Sergey Sergeich. Tatyana’s zealous, jealous, protective and illusory thoughts now revolve around her husband, their daughters and the loss of her home.
I’m ready to go anywhere, Siberia even. I’m prepared to live there ten, twenty years, but I must be certain that sooner or later I’ll return to Kuzminki. I can’t live without Kuzminki. I can’t, and I won’t!
The loss of Kuzminki, the loss of her attachment to her family heritage and inheritance, her past, is like a threat to her very identity; ‘. . . it’s humiliating for me and deeply insulting’.
Unlike Gurov, Podgorin has not learned to judge others by himself. We are told within the omniscient narration that in Moscow he ‘liked a drink’ and ‘associated with women indiscriminately’. However, he seems to feel that he is more entitled to his debauchery because of his status as an unmarried man:
He didn’t understand or like men who could feel more free and easy at the Knacker’s Yard than at home with a respectable woman, and he felt that any kind of promiscuity stuck to them like burrs.
Having recently run into Sergey at a Moscow brothel Podgorin ‘now felt awkward in Tatyana’s company, as if he had been the unfaithful one’. In other words, ironically, Sergey’s promiscuity is sticking to Podgorin like a burr.
In a painterly moment reminiscent of Gurov and Anna in front of the mirror in The Lady with the Little Dog, Chekhov has the older women pose Podgorin and Nadezhda in an illusory tableau of paternal affection and feminine contrition. ‘They made Podgorin sit down in an old armchair by the window; Nadezhda sat on a low stool at his feet.’ Chekhov intensifies the angle and the distance between them throughout the evening. Left suspiciously alone with Nadezhda, Podgorin feels that he is being both spied upon and manipulated by Tatyana and Varvara. ‘In Nadezhda’s company he felt as though they had both been put in a cage together.’ The image of caged birds is familiar to us from the depiction of the adulterous lovers late in The Lady with the Little Dog, but its usage here is very different. Chekhov employs it with sympathy and even optimism in The Lady with the Little Dog. In A Visit to Friends it is a reference to entrapment only. It suggests – perhaps reflecting the misogyny of Chekhov or Podgorin or both – the predatory power of women and questions the social conventions of marriage and property. Much later that night the angle and distance between them is at its most intense when Podgorin hides himself high up in ‘a tower that had been built long ago, in the days of serfdom’, refusing to disclose his presence to Nadezhda who is below him:
. . . in a country garden on a moonlit night, close to a beautiful, loving, thoughtful girl, he felt the same apathy as on Little Bronny Street: evidently this type of romantic situation had lost its fascination, like that prosaic depravity.
‘There’s no one there,’ Nadezhda decides. Despite Podgorin’s confusion of conflicting impulses, his ‘indifference . . . irritability . . . inability to adapt . . . his wearisome, obsessive craving’ the reader can certainly take Nadezhda’s words in the other sense. Podgorin may be right to find the situation he has been invited into intolerable, he may be right to tell Sergey that he is ‘a frivolous, indolent man . . . a stupefying old bore’ capable of nothing more than ‘play-acting and affectation’ but Nadezhda is also right. In Podgorin’s space, there is no one there. I am reminded of Burkin’s story about The Lovesick Anthropos in Man in a Case and how, after Belikov’s death life itself felt like it was barely allowed. Podgorin, too, like Burkin, Ivan Ivanych and Alyokhin, seems to be barely alive. He justifies his initial decision to accept the invitation to Kuzminki to himself in terms of conscience compromised by social convention; he must ‘discharge his duty’; he ‘can’t not go, they’d be offended’. His relationship with these people is no longer one of friendship – despite the story’s title – but of ‘duty’. Past joys, ideals and passions have withered. The poetry about social progress that so moved the friends a decade earlier is barely remembered and fails to move them. The aspirations and achievements of this generation are so barren that Sergey can dare to suggest that his greatest weakness is not his idleness or profligacy but his idealism. “. . . we were fine speakers and men of action,” he asserts, “so why don’t you drink to a stupid old idealist . . .” In the same dialogue Sergey asks, “Can the leopard change his spots?” In the vast gallery of characters presented in these stories it would seem that Chekhov’s answer is generally, no, we are doomed to be identified by our flaws and afflictions (with Gurov from The Lady with the Little Dog, Nadya from The Bride and possibly Yekaterina from Ionych as notable exceptions). The irony of Sergey’s question is that both Podgorin and the reader know that Sergey himself can never change his spots; he will continue to be as idle and obsolete as he has always been. In the name of his idealism he claims that he will not go down on his knees “and worship filthy lucre” when in fact what we realise is that he will refuse for as long as possible to earn and pay his way.
Podgorin’s direct repudiation of Sergey contains dialogue very similar to occasional lines in Chekhov’s plays where you can sense the playwright directly addressing his audience. The affront to Sergey can be heard as an address to a generation of superfluous men and women who have constantly wondered about what is to be done without doing anything:
It’s time you stopped to think a bit and took stock of who and what you are. Spending your whole life doing nothing at all, forever indulging in empty, childish chatter, this play-acting and affectation.
Podgorin’s late-night vantage point in the tower ‘built long ago, in the days of serfdom’ as he overlooks the dream-like shadowy display of Nadezhda and her dog below him reminds us just how deeply rooted in the feudal past these people’s lives are. As Nadezhda decides that there’s no one there Podgorin imagines another woman on the threshold of ‘those new, lofty, rational aspects of existence’ that are almost always out of reach for Chekhov’s characters.
The House with the Mezzanine
Initial impressions of The House with the Mezzanine can be puzzling. What is the point of the title for example? Is the mezzanine floor – a level of rooms below the attic – simply an insignificant detail that happens to differentiate the Volchaninov house, Shelkovka, from other manor houses? That would seem to be the case until the very end of the story when we realise that the unnamed narrator who is standing outside very late at night knows which room is Zhenya’s. Looking at the house ‘with its attic windows as if they were all-comprehending eyes . . . where she slept a bright light suddenly shone, turning soft green when the lamp was covered with a shade’. Zhenya has just gone inside after the narrator’s declaration of love and their recognition of mutual attraction. In the dark outside he can now hear people talking in the mezzanine. He will learn the next day that Zhenya has disclosed her romantic situation to her family and that her older sister, Lida, is demanding that Zhenya and her mother leave at the earliest possible opportunity in order to thwart the affair. The apparently incidental architectural detail – the mezzanine – is where Lida and Zhenya sleep. Seeing the green light and hearing the voices, the narrator does not realise the significance of what is being said; Zhenya’s confession and Lida’s instructions. Far from incidental, the mezzanine is where the most significant narrative events of the story take place and they take place offstage unknown to the narrator and the reader, undisclosed until the following morning.
Also concerning the title, the story is subtitled ‘An Artist’s Story’ and the significance of this is also unclear. Are we being positioned by Chekhov to sympathise with the artist’s perspective of events and with his opinions in the ideological battle between himself and Lida? Is there an implicit suggestion here that artists are well-qualified by temperament and experience to give an accurate account of human motives and interactions? I don’t know. It strikes me as strange in the context of these questions that the artist is an unnamed landscape painter. He, therefore, paints neither people nor personalities nor social realities. His work has been successfully exhibited and Yekaterina Pavlovna, the mother, is an admirer. The narrator tells his friend Belokurov about his life as a painter:
My own life is boring, difficult, monotonous, because I’m an artist. I’m an odd kind of chap; since I was young I’ve been plagued by feelings of hatred, by frustration with myself, by lack of belief in my work. I’ve always been poor, I’m a vagrant.
Chekhov will take us further into the life of an impoverished artist when Nadya visits the desperately ill Sasha in The Bride. But he seems far more ambivalent with the artist in The House with the Mezzanine who is ‘Doomed to perpetual idleness’ during his summer in the country and who engages in one of those Chekhovian debates in which neither side is the clear winner. No one can doubt the sincerity and severity of Lida’s commitment to the people through her work as a teacher, medical dispenser and councillor but the artist’s argument that amelioration of poverty does not secure the social change required to eliminate poverty is a powerful one.
The House with the Mezzanine begins in a narrative tone of deep recall reminiscent of Alyokhin’s narrative voice in About Love and, indeed, this too is a love story. The opening ‘About six or seven years ago’ recalls the classic fairytale device ‘Once upon a time’. The artist’s discovery of the Volchaninov estate similarly echoes fairytale conventions as he climbs a fence and breaks into an unexpected, unknown space, a kind of secret garden where, high above him in the towering fir trees of the ‘sombre avenue . . . a vivid golden light quivered here and there and transformed spiders’ webs into shimmering rainbows’. At the end of another ‘long avenue of lime trees’ he first sees the idyllic setting of the white house with its millpond and distant village. ‘. . . I felt the enchantment of something very close and familiar to me, as though I had once seen this landscape as a child’. Besides the fairytale enchantment, the narrator also first describes the principal setting of his memoir as a ‘landscape’. Significantly, he sees but does not communicate with the occupants of the house on this first visit, preserving that sense of visual and emotional charm. ‘I returned home with the feeling that it had all been a lovely dream’. Simultaneously, Chekhov has provided his reader with an idyllic pastoral landscape including manor house and figures.
Subsequent visits will fill the landscape with human contact, difference and conflict, with mutual scepticism and reproach between the artist and the older sister, Lida, and mutual attraction between him and Zhenya who is also known as Missy. These relationships are prefigured by the silent details of their first encounter when the artist observes Lida’s ‘small stubborn mouth’ and dismissive ‘stern expression’ and Zhenya’s astonished and embarrassed ‘large mouth and big eyes’.
The artist can see that at her best Lida is ‘a vivacious, sincere girl with strong views’ but for the most part she is characterised as reproachful, ‘serious and unsmiling’, disapproving and controlling. Her sister’s and mother’s descriptions of her as ‘a remarkable person’ reinforce both their awe of her and their acknowledgment of her dominant position in the family. Throughout the story she collects money for burned out villagers, forms a pressure group to democratise the local council, teaches in a rural school ‘at a monthly salary of twenty-five roubles’, dispenses medicines and books to the poor and teaches the servants to read. Zhenya, on the other hand, reads novels, practices her English and goes out boating and mushrooming with the artist.
Chekhov’s The House with the Mezzanine also provides a frame narrative within which to air the constantly recurring nineteenth-century Russian question; what is to be done? What is to be done about what exactly? The question emanates from clear sites of unease amongst educated, socially motivated and politically activist Russians. Should Russia seek to modernise, industrialise and democratise like the West? (Westerners) Should Russia follow some more innately traditional Russian path of social development? (Slavophiles) Should the privileged return their privilege to the people through education and other populist means? (Populists or narodniki) or, should Russia shake off its autocratic past by revolutionary means? (Socialists, Anarchists and Nihilists) Like Belokurov in The House with the Mezzanine many of Chekhov’s characters such as Sergey Sergeich in A Visit to Friends and Burkin, Ivan and Alyokhin in ‘The Little Trilogy’ identify themselves as idealists who are probably most comfortable with the ideas of the Westernisers. Some of them – Belokurov and Alyokhin – have attempted to follow a program which is both populist and Slavophile in its outlook. Men with property, they dress and work like peasants and eschew the greater comforts their privileged position affords them. Their return to the land to learn the labour of the Russian peasant embodies yet another response to the what-is-to-be-done question; Tolstoyanism.
In The House with the Mezzanine the debate is a pitched battle between the committed populist, Lida, and the artist’s vaguely revolutionary idealism. We are told of Lida’s attitudes towards the artist through the artist’s first person narration. ‘She did not like me because I was a landscape painter who did not portray the hardships of the common people in my canvases and because – so she thought – I was indifferent to all her deepest beliefs.’ In indirect speech we learn that he ‘told her that dishing out treatment to peasants without being a doctor was a fraud’. He attacks as fraudulent and hypocritical the populist program pursued by members of the gentry because, ‘it was easy enough to play the Good Samaritan when one had five thousand acres of one’s own’.
In the directly reported dialogue remembered by the artist he dismisses all of Lida’s political, social, medical and educational activities on behalf of the disadvantaged because they ‘only serve to enslave the people . . . instead of breaking this chain you’re adding new links’. The artist-narrator provides a critique of the position of the urban and rural poor: ‘Famine, irrational fears, unceasing toil’. ‘[U]nremitting labour’ is his first concern. Then follows the ‘filth and stench’ in which ‘untold millions of people live worse than animals’. ‘[W]ith things as they are’ the provision of medicine and education ‘doesn’t free them from their shackles’.
The artist is arguing for a radical transformation of society in which the poor ‘must be freed from heavy physical work’. This can only be achieved if every person takes some of the labour ‘on your own shoulders’. In addition, Russia must modernise by investing in labour-saving devices and privileged Russians must reduce their needs, ‘working as a community’. Chekhov’s representation of some of the arguments of an idealistic revolutionary sound reasonably convincing. Other Russian writers such as Turgenev and Dostoyevsky had also investigated the revolutionary consciousness. However, Lida’s rebuttal that the artist is a lazy landscape painter who would prefer to twiddle his thumbs rather than actually do anything and that he will never personally shoulder the work or suffering himself is supported by his own response. He will do nothing to dissociate himself from ‘the most predatory and filthy of animals’; he will do nothing to treat either the illness nor the cause of Russia’s social problems.
With Lida and the artist we are in the presence of two totally different idealists. Lida sees herself as a radical, engaged populist; the narrator sees her as a meddler. The artist sees himself as someone addressing the bigger picture, the cause of his country’s problems; Lida sees him as a defeatist. Both of them appear to be hypocrites; Lida living in luxury, the artist living in idleness. The debate is unresolved.
The Bride
Sasha’s critique of his country friends’ lifestyle in Chekhov’s last story, The Bride, recalls the artist’s critique of Lida’s ideology and practice in The House with the Mezzanine. ‘[H]ow squalid and immoral this idle existence of yours is’. The idleness is not the sole issue here; ‘. . . others are doing the work for you, you’re ruining the lives of people you’ve never even met’. Indeed, they are also ruining the lives of people under their own roof. Sasha describes the servants sleeping on the bare kitchen floor in the basement. ‘They don’t have beds; instead of bedding all they have is rags, stench, bugs, cockroaches’. Sasha makes the point that, despite Emancipation, Russia has failed to make progress. ‘It’s all exactly the same as twenty years ago – nothing’s changed’. Indeed, forty years ago, or sixty.
Unlike the artist narrator of The House with the Mezzanine, Sasha in The Bride is an unrecognised artist. Both are poor but Sasha’s poverty is extreme. He works in a printing factory and lives in a filthy spartan room covered in ‘dead flies’ and the ‘saliva stains’ of his tubercular coughing. His criticism of Nadya’s family is that they live at the expense of others and that, ‘No one does a damned thing!’
However, we must remember that Chekhov is not primarily a social commentator or political artist. He is an observer and collector of human types and traits and an especially keen observer of his characters’ relationships.
The symmetry, for example, of the three stages of womanhood – virgin, mother, elder – represented by the grandmother, mother and granddaughter living together, is broken by the realisation that Nadya’s mother, Nina Ivanovna, is not the daughter but the bereaved daughter-in-law of Grannie Shumin. Trying to calm her daughter down when they are talking about the approaching wedding, Nina Ivanovna invokes the ‘transmutation of matter’ from girl, to wife and mother, to old woman but she is unable to sustain her attempted consolation when Nadya identifies her mother as an unhappy woman. Indeed, Nina Ivanovna’s unhappiness consists of her complete loss of autonomy. She is utterly dependent on her mother-in-law and feels that freedom, youth and life are being crushed out of her between her mother-in-law and her daughter. “You and your grandmother are torturing me . . . I want some life, but you two have made an old woman out of me.”
Nina Ivanovna maintains the appearance of being independently wealthy. Diamonds sparkle on her fingers, she speaks French and Sasha thinks she behaves like a duchess. However, living in ‘the ignominious position of a hanger-on’, she must turn to her mother-in-law ‘for every twenty-copeck piece’. Her consolations include her tears – she is reported to be crying at least four times in the story – and her novels. Indeed, her most enjoyable reading provides her with the outlet of yet more crying. At moments of despair she imagines walking and talking with Anna Karenina and she advises her daughter to do the same. In addition, symbolic of the idleness and stasis of her life, Nina Ivanovna is also consoled by the self-deluding pleasures of her unscientific and irrational beliefs in hypnotism, spiritualism and homeopathy. In this regard she is truly a product of the fin de siècle.
What Nadya sees when she looks at her fiancée Andrey Andreich is pretty much the same as what Podgorin sees in Sergey Sergeich; ‘vulgarity, stupid, fatuous vulgarity’. This becomes apparent to Nadya as she tours what will soon be their matrimonial home. The decor offends and depresses her. The miracle of flowing water offends the social sensitivities aroused in her by Sasha’s criticism of the primitive and impoverished countryside of Russia. Concerning their ‘long-suffering native land’ Andrey attempts to elevate his condition as a superfluous man to ‘a sign of the times’ – as Chekhov himself has done on numerous occasions – only to undermine his character with cutting irony. “Oh, Russia, Russia! What a lot of useless idlers you carry on your shoulders!”
In The Bride Chekhov makes sustained consistent use of sound imagery to convey the sense of Nadya’s unease. It begins when ‘a violin string suddenly snapped’ bringing to an end a midnight performance by the self-absorbed Andrey. In The Bride this sound of the breaking string leads to immediate laughter and the breaking up of the party for another night. However, it is also a sound of discord, an unsettling disruption that corresponds with Nadya’s unease and Sasha’s disruptive influence. It is tempting to attach such weight to the sound of Andrey’s breaking violin string because it is an image found elsewhere in Chekhov, most famously in his last play The Cherry Orchard. In that play the ineffectual uncle Gayev makes a speech about the beauty and indifference of nature. Suddenly, in the following silence ‘a distant sound is heard, as if from the sky, the sound of a breaking string, dying away, mournful.’ David Magarshack interprets the sound in The Cherry Orchard as follows:
The dying melancholy sound of a broken string . . . is all Chekhov needed to convey his own attitude to the ‘dreary’ lives of his characters . . . It is a sort of requiem for the ‘unhappy and disjointed’ lives of his characters. (Chekhov the Dramatist, New York, 1960)
Chekhov maintains the use of sound imagery in the ghostly sounds that disturb Nadya’s thoughts and sleep: Sasha’s coughing, the watchman knocking in the middle of the night, ‘the hobgoblin in the stove’.
What The Bride provides, though, is also the welcome respite of some optimism. Sasha invokes the greater life of education and culture but he has been a perpetual student and become an unsuccessful artist. However, his call to action does not fall on deaf ears. For Nadya his proposal that she should go away and study ‘was enough to send a cold shiver through her heart and breast, and flood her whole being with joy and rapture’.
Sasha’s optimism and idealism are as overblown as Andrey’s and Sergey’s self-pity; “everything will change as if by magic. And there will be magnificent, huge houses, wonderful gardens, splendid fountains, remarkable people”. Nadya sensibly dispenses with the fountains and gardens but holds on to the education and independence. She will not repeat her mother’s mistake of marrying a man she does not love and condemning herself to perpetual dependence. She will not be persuaded by Andrey’s conspicuous materialism. But neither will she be dazzled by Sasha’s excessive idealism. She will reject what Sasha calls “this vegetating, dull, shameful existence”. Having made her decision to leave her home and fiancée in favour of an education in St Petersburg, ‘she felt that a new, boundless world that she had never known was opening up before her’.
Visiting home after the completion of her first year of studies she accepts ‘that her life had been turned upside down’ but she remains on the path she has chosen so that once again as she is about to leave, ‘before her there opened up a new, full and rich life’. As with Gurov and Anna facing the demon of their adulterous relationship in The Lady with the Little Dog and the artist advocating social change instead of charitable deeds in The House with the Mezzanine, we can sense Chekhov’s approval of Nadya’s definitive and practical break with her past.
On the last day of his life, a Pentecost Sunday some time in the early decades of the twentieth century, the elderly aristocrat Dr Juvenal Urbino wakes early and is assisted with his bathing and dressing by his seventy-two year old wife, Fermina Daza. His plan for the day is to attend Mass followed by a luncheon to celebrate the silver anniversary of an eminent pupil, Dr Lacides Olivella, but he is prevented from going to church by an urgent call to attend to the death of a long time friend and chess rival, Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, who has committed suicide by dissolving gold cyanide in a photographic developing tray. Jeremiah de Saint-Amour’s pet dog, Mister Woodrow Wilson, tied to the bed, is also dead. Dr Juvenal Urbino has known Jeremiah de Saint-Amour since his arrival in this unnamed Caribbean town on the coast of Colombia as a decorated and crippled military refugee from a civil war in Antilles and helped him establish the studio where he eked out a living as a photographer of children. Jeremiah de Saint-Amour has killed himself as the fulfilment of an earlier pledge to take his life at the age of sixty rather than descending into old age. At Jeremiah de Saint-Amour’s humble, cluttered apartment Dr Juvenal Urbino finds an eleven page letter addressed to him from his dead friend. Later in the chapter we will begin to realize the extent of his friend’s confession that was written on the night he took his life. Instead of being a military hero, Jeremiah de Saint-Amour was an escaped criminal and cannibal whose uniform and decorations in which he will be buried, are fake. Early in the chapter we only learn about a single aspect of Jeremiah de Saint-Amour’s confession, that he has been conducting a secret and unconsecrated intimate relationship with a woman of mixed-race heritage, a mulatta, whom Dr Juvenal Urbino decides to visit in the destitute former slave quarter of the city. Despite his numerous civic activities and accolades this is an area almost entirely unfamiliar to him. Dr Juvenal Urbino feels betrayed by his old friend’s silence and by the intimacy of the mulatta woman’s relationship with him. She was aware of her lover’s intended suicide and neither prevented nor reported him, displaying a kind of emotional and empathetic respect for him that the doctor cannot comprehend. Having missed Mass, Dr Juvenal Urbino and his wife are still able to attend the silver anniversary celebrations which are washed out by an unseasonal and violent storm. Upon his return home the doctor’s principal concern is with his most regular interlocutor, his pet royal Paramaribo parrot, who has escaped and gone into hiding. At four o’clock that same afternoon, at about the time when he should be getting himself ready for his friend’s funeral, Dr Juvenal Urbino is lured from his wicker rocking chair to his death by the discovery of the bird in a mango tree in the courtyard where he falls from the ladder. His dying words to Fermina Daza are, ‘Only God knows how much I loved you.’ [43] Following her husband’s death and funeral, Fermina Daza is visited by Florentino Ariza, a man whom she has not had any real contact with since their youth and who announces that he has never stopped loving her. She dismisses him from her sight but is troubled now not only by her husband’s death but by Florentino Ariza’s reappearance in her life. We will not return to this scene until we witness Florentino Ariza’s visit from his perspective towards the end of chapter five.
A chronological narrative retelling of the storyline of chapter one risks reducing the novel to a minor romance, an insignificant saga or a sickly melodrama occasionally relieved by macabre humour. It does not take into account the manner in which the novel is written. From the beginning of the novel certain stylistic features are evident.
We notice the way in which Garcia Marquez elaborates and delivers storyline detail, especially background information. There is a pattern of retention and disclosure. For example, we discover the suicide confession at the same time that Dr Juvenal Urbino discovers it but we do not discover its contents as he reads it. At first we have the information about the mulatta woman in the old slave quarter. [12-16] Then later, as he is telling his wife, we are told that Jeremiah de Saint-Amour was, “nothing more than a fugitive from Cayenne, condemned to life imprisonment for an atrocious crime… he had even eaten human flesh.” [32] It would seem that memory itself – the retention of and attention to detail – is represented by Garcia Marquez as something that operates more like imagination; it is less rational and logical, less chronological than we might expect. Hence, we discover the contents of the suicide confession as Dr Juvenal Urbino acts on them or feels the need to consider and discuss them, not in the order or in the time that he reads them.
We have also the undisclosed position or identity of the narrative voice. It is both outside the events and setting of the novel as we would expect from an omniscient narrator but it is also ‘among us’ [10] and belongs to or speaks from ‘here’ as a fellow resident who does not yet seem to participate in any of the events. [33] We do not know, therefore, the extent to which the narrator is reliable or unreliable, whether he is a contemporary, for example, of Dr Juvenal Urbino and Fermina Daza, a pupil of the doctor’s perhaps or a colleague of Florentino Ariza’s from the telegraph office which we will learn about in the next chapter, a servant in the Urbino household or someone from a younger generation who has been entrusted with these stories or somehow discovered them.
In addition, even though we follow the events of the last day of Dr Juvenal Urbino’s life largely in chronological order from his arrival at the death scene of Jeremiah de Saint-Amour to his own death in the garden that afternoon, we begin to realise that a considerable amount of the novel’s narrative is actually being told in reverse. For example, we move chronologically backwards through the revelations of Jeremiah de Saint-Amour’s confession, from his last night with his mulatta lover back to their first meeting in the convalescent home in Haiti and back beyond that to his revelation of his identity as an escaped criminal. Similarly, with the life of the eighty-one year old Dr Juvenal Urbino and his marriage to Fermina Daza, we move backwards through the details of their recent descent into old age, then back further through the details of their marriage of mutual dependence, back through the achievements of Dr Juvenal Urbino to the earliest details of their married life together. Indeed, the chapter ends with a pointed allusion to a past predating their marriage that involves Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza. Both Dr Juvenal Urbino’s earliest achievements as a doctor and that earlier relationship are linked with the city’s last cholera outbreak half a century before the deaths of Jeremiah de Saint-Amour and Dr Juvenal Urbino. This constant encroachment deeper and deeper into the pasts of the characters is echoed in the numerous references to the slave trading colonial past that predates the liberation and subsequent civil wars of the country and the references to the European heritage of its Hispanic population and the European tastes in furniture and the arts of Dr Juvenal Urbino.
The novel, which appears to be embarking upon an examination of the variety and perfidy of human love, begins with the words, ‘It was inevitable’, a lovers’ formula that we have been entranced by since the suicides of Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet which occurred in English literature in the mid-1590s and before that in Italian folklore. Garcia Marquez appears to be setting up this attitude or point of view to challenge and repudiate it. Life in this provincial backwater is neither fated nor tragic, neither predetermined nor predictable. For example, on a minor scale, the silver anniversary is planned for a time of year when it never rains and is washed out by a storm. An escaped convict is buried as a war hero. On a grander scale, Dr Juvenal Urbino devotes his entire life to the establishment and maintenance of bourgeois order in both his public and private life and yet he manages to die falling from ladder grasping the neck of a parrot. Life is provisional and unpredictable and is much more likely to be a vegetal manifestation of climate and geography than of any higher order or system of values. That provisionality is also suggested by the numerous binary oppositions of the first chapter: colonialism and independence, peace and war, childhood or youth and old age, white and black, wealth and poverty, order and disorder, love and death. Our expectation from the novel’s title is that these last two will figure prominently in the narrative. Indeed, from the first page we have ‘the fate of unrequited love’ and ‘the authority of death’.
Chapter One Tasks
1. Consider the significance of Pentecost in this chapter by researching it in the book of Acts in the King James Bible. How might we link aspects of the Pentecost story with the action and preoccupations of the first chapter – consider, for example, the silver anniversary – and how might we look at details from the Pentecost story as a binary opposition?
2. Consider the significance of climate and geography in this chapter.
3. Look at the list of binary oppositions above and consider how each of them is represented in the first chapter.
1. Consider the significance of Pentecost in this chapter by researching it in the book of Acts in the King James Bible. How might we link aspects of the Pentecost story with the action and preoccupations of the first chapter – consider, for example, the silver anniversary – and how might we look at details from the Pentecost story as a binary opposition?
2. Consider the significance of climate and geography in this chapter.
3. Look at the list of binary oppositions above and consider how each of them is represented in the first chapter.
1. Consider the significance of Pentecost in this chapter by researching it in the book of Acts in the King James Bible. How might we link aspects of the Pentecost story with the action and preoccupations of the first chapter – consider, for example, the silver anniversary – and how might we look at details from the Pentecost story as a binary opposition?
2. Consider the significance of climate and geography in this chapter.
3. Look at the list of binary oppositions above and consider how each of them is represented in the first chapter.
1. Consider the significance of Pentecost in this chapter by researching it in the book of Acts in the King James Bible. How might we link aspects of the Pentecost story with the action and preoccupations of the first chapter – consider, for example, the silver anniversary – and how might we look at details from the Pentecost story as a binary opposition?
2. Consider the significance of climate and geography in this chapter.
3. Look at the list of binary oppositions above and consider how each of them is represented in the first chapter.
1. Consider the significance of Pentecost in this chapter by researching it in the book of Acts in the King James Bible. How might we link aspects of the Pentecost story with the action and preoccupations of the first chapter – consider, for example, the silver anniversary – and how might we look at details from the Pentecost story as a binary opposition?
2. Consider the significance of climate and geography in this chapter.
3. Look at the list of binary oppositions above and consider how each of them is represented in the first chapter.
Chapter Two
Turning back to the latter decades of the nineteenth century, chapter two relates the obsessive love story of Florentino Ariza, an apprentice postal clerk who lives with his mother in rented accommodation on the Street of Windows, and Fermina Daza, the thirteen year old school girl daughter of a wealthy but not illustrious family. On the day that his ‘innocence came to an end’ Florentino Ariza first sees Fermina Daza through a window on a patio as he is about to leave the house after delivering a telegram to her father. [54] She is teaching her Aunt Escolástica to read. The chapter spans a six year period from the moment that Florentino Ariza’s obsession begins to the moment six years later and ‘fifty-one years, nine months, and four days’ before the end of chapter one when she first dismisses him and ends their relationship. [53, 103] Fermina Daza is taken into enforced exile by her father as a means of removing her from the presence of Florentino Ariza. Father and daughter travel by mule, returning to the origins of their poverty and wealth in the interior. When they do eventually make their way back to the unnamed city which is the central location of the novel they reemploy ‘Gala Placidia, the black servant who came back from her old slave quarters as soon as she was told of their return.’ [97]
Again, reducing the narrative to a synopsis diminishes rather than increases our understanding of the text, in this case potentially limiting it to a love story when it is or seems to be so much more. Garcia Marquez employs the image of the labyrinth. Fermina Daza emerges from her own – ‘That was the end of the labyrinth…’ – when she decides to respond to Florentino Ariza’s first letter. [67] Their subsequent obsessive and clandestine correspondence leads Florentino Ariza ever deeper into his own emotional and psychological labyrinth in which he stumbles between the Social Club brothel, the ‘tale of the galleon and the novelty of the lighthouse’. [95] At the end of the chapter Fermina Daza is aware of ‘the abyss of disenchantment’ but she is immediately able to extricate herself from it by permanently dismissing Florentino Ariza from her life. [102]
A potential key to understanding Garcia Marquez’s intentions is the first glimpse we share with Florentino Ariza of Fermina Daza teaching her aunt to read; a thirteen year old is teaching literacy to an adult. Could Garcia Marquez be suggesting to us that we do not read either inertly or objectively? Indeed, just as we are taught how to read in the sense of letter and word recognition, we are also taught how to read in the sense of what we expect from and what we bring to a text. A reader coming to Love in the Time of Cholera with the expectation of a romantic love story may be placing themselves into a trap, just as Aunt Escolástica [the adult schoolgirl] allows herself to misread her role and responsibility in the relationship between her niece and the feverishly obsessive and predatory Florentino Ariza.
Far from a love story, chapter two is an exploration of numerous different kinds of love. It contains a number of warnings about the dangers of infatuation and sexual attraction. Once again the figures of Romeo and Juliet are invoked as the lovers unexpectedly encounter one another on more than one occasion separated by no more than ‘a hand’s breadth’ reminding us of the ‘holy palmers’ dialogue when Shakespeare’s two lovers first meet. [59, 102] The greatest danger is the risk attendant on vicarious love. Unlike Juliet’s Nurse, Fermina Daza’s Aunt Escolástica will pay a very high price for vicarious involvement in the initial exchanges of glances and letters between Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza; she will be expelled from the family home and repatriated to the poverty of her family’s origins where she will eventually die in a leprosarium. Romantic infatuation begins with a ‘casual glance’ that becomes ‘the beginning of a cataclysm’ which is linked suggestively with mention of the recent cholera epidemic. [55] As Florentino Ariza begins ‘his secret life as a solitary hunter’ we recognise the predatory nature of his behaviour, despite the fact that Garcia Marquez refrains from defining it literally for us. [56] Such a commentary is figuratively conveyed in Garcia Marquez’s characterisation of Florentino Ariza. His ‘delirium’ and ‘despair’, his ‘diarrhea and green vomit… fainting spells’, his ‘symptoms of love’, observes Garcia Marquez, ‘were the same as those of cholera.’ [59, 61, 62] Fermina Daza’s letters to him are ‘distracted… intended to keep the coals alive without putting her hand in the fire, while Florentino Ariza burned himself alive in every line. Desperate to infect her with his own madness’, Garcia Marquez employs again the language of infection and disease. [69] Fermina Daza’s initial response to the affair is the visceral blood rush of the ‘irreversible power’ of ‘forbidden love’. [59, 58] She and Florentino Ariza experience attraction across and outside the accepted bounds of social propriety. The dangers of obsessive love are evident in the disease-like experiences of Florentino Ariza as an afflicted lover and in the trials of separation to which they are subjected by her father Lorenzo Daza. Fermina Daza is apparently ‘the only child of a loveless marriage’ and a dead mother after whom she is named. [58]
Whilst the relationship between Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza must remain devoid of physical contact, the working lives of the prostitutes at the Social Club brothel provide an insight into the mechanics and banality of sexual love. “It’s pure love”, claims Lotario Thugut. [63] What we recognise is what sexual intercourse becomes when there is only contact but no communication. This is pure commerce and exploitation driven by poverty and necessity. The meaning and nature of these activities is entirely lost on Florentino Ariza despite ‘his sentimental education’. [63] Fornication is ‘hurried’ and ‘ephemeral’ and deals in ‘the secrets of loveless love’. [63, 64, 75] The prostitutes’ role at the fall of each evening might be to go out and ‘hunt the first prey of the night’ but their lives and their trade are ‘impersonal and dehumanised’ and the scars on their bodies from knives, razors and ‘Caesarean sections sewn up by butchers’ leave us in no doubt about what love has done for them. [76] Consider the list of what their clients leave behind them: ‘condoms… vomit and tears… puddles of blood, patches of excrement, glass eyes, gold watches, false teeth, lockets with golden curls, love letters, business letters, condolence letters – all kinds of letters.’ [77] Notice again Garcia Marquez’s scepticism about the value of words and written communication and the implicit warning to the reader.
Against this backdrop, the paradoxical characterisation of Lotario Thugut is also revealing. Not only does he work in the telegraph office and play the organ ‘for important ceremonies in the Cathedral’, he is also infamous for ‘his talents as a fornicator’ at the Social Club brothel. [54, 64] Corpulent and happy in this place of sexual degradation and exploitation, he acts as a kind of Falstaffian figure of misrule and dissent, the presiding guide and mentor for Florentino Ariza during their nightly sojourns. ‘[A]ll he needed was a string of bells to look like St. Nicholas.’ [63] His nocturnal habitat is described as ‘a colonial palace… with peepholes… as much for watching as for doing… misadventures of observers and observed… watching and letting himself be watched were the refinements of European princes.’ [63] Once again, I suspect that Garcia Marquez is laying a trap for us and asking us to reconsider the nature of reading and the meaning of engagement.
Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza persuade themselves of the ‘fatality’ and destiny of their love, despite the fact that they are unable to communicate directly and unambiguously with each other. Yet again, Garcia Marquez places language under scrutiny. The letters they exchange are frenzied, their volume prodigious, but they are also outside the orbit of their actual daily lives; their emotions, desires and attractions remain untested. Simultaneously, literature becomes an ‘insatiable vice’ for Florentino Ariza, poetry ‘an oasis’. [74-75] Once again, how we read the expectations that we weave into reading and that reading – text – weaves into us is being investigated. ‘[T]he better rhymed and metered they were, and the more heartrending, the more easily he learned them.’ [75] Beware of literature and of the values that we think it reaffirms, Garcia Marquez seems to be warning his readers. It is artifice. When Fermina Daza realises, ‘the abyss of disenchantment… the magnitude of her own mistake’, she is immediately free to erase Florentino Ariza from her life, as if she has awoken from a dream or illusion. [102] In place of fate and tragedy, there is irony. For example, whilst Florentino Ariza wastes his time looking for the San Jose a liner sails into port from France where Dr Juvenal Urbino has been studying in Paris.
We have already noted the windows motif and the image of the labyrinth; we gaze through one and get lost in the other. Throughout chapter two, bird imagery is also frequently evoked. Florentino Ariza appears unexpectedly in the life of Fermina Daza ‘like a winter swallow’ and her father looks at him sideways through a twisted eye ‘like a parrot’. [66, 82] A bird’s droppings fall on the work of ‘the troubled embroiderer’ when Florentino Ariza hands his letter to Fermina Daza. [61] The objectified and dehumanised, abused and exploited prostitutes are often referred to as birds, but they are birds without season, colour or song, little more than vermin, street swallows who have learned to feel and to regret nothing. Unable to swim and detached from the physical world around him, Florentino Ariza believes ‘that God had made the sea to look at through the window’. [92]
The binary oppositions of chapter one continue in chapter two. The legendary galleon which Florentino Ariza is hoping to discover and salvage is supposed to have been filled with gold and jewels expropriated from the Caribbean colonies, ‘treasure intended to save the Kingdom of Spain from poverty’. [91] The colonial era is a period of exploitation during which the local aristocrats built their wealth based on the tobacco concession and slavery. The postcolonial period has been one of civil war, liberty leading to continued impoverishment. The ongoing civil war is described by one incidental character as ‘the struggles of the poor, driven like oxen by the landowners, against barefoot soldiers who were driven in turn by the government.’ [73] When the mule trader and horse thief Lorenzo Daza first arrived in the Caribbean city it had already been reduced to a ‘ruined city and its moth-eaten glories’ in which the ‘ruined owners’ of the tobacco monopoly, ‘the families with seven titles went to bed with the fear that the roofs of their mansions would cave in’. [81, 72] ‘[T]he embarrassed new poor… pawned, between sobs, the last glittering ornaments of their lost paradise’, to Transito Ariza, ‘a freed quadroon whose instinct for happiness had been frustrated y poverty’. [72, 62]
Chapter Two Tasks
1. Garcia Marquez’s most quoted statement regarding this novel is, ‘You have to be careful not to fall into my trap.’ In the light of chapter two explain Garcia Marquez’s warning.
2. How has your reading of chapter two enhanced your understanding of the novel’s title?
3. Very well, I will marry you if you promise not to make me eat eggplant. [71] What does this statement tell us about Fermina Daza and how do you think the reader is supposed to react?
1. Garcia Marquez’s most quoted statement regarding this novel is, ‘You have to be careful not to fall into my trap.’ In the light of chapter two explain Garcia Marquez’s warning.
2. How has your reading of chapter two enhanced your understanding of the novel’s title?
3. Very well, I will marry you if you promise not to make me eat eggplant. [71] What does this statement tell us about Fermina Daza and how do you think the reader is supposed to react?
1. Garcia Marquez’s most quoted statement regarding this novel is, ‘You have to be careful not to fall into my trap.’ In the light of chapter two explain Garcia Marquez’s warning.
2. How has your reading of chapter two enhanced your understanding of the novel’s title?
3. Very well, I will marry you if you promise not to make me eat eggplant. [71] What does this statement tell us about Fermina Daza and how do you think the reader is supposed to react?
1. Garcia Marquez’s most quoted statement regarding this novel is, ‘You have to be careful not to fall into my trap.’ In the light of chapter two explain Garcia Marquez’s warning.
2. How has your reading of chapter two enhanced your understanding of the novel’s title?
3. Very well, I will marry you if you promise not to make me eat eggplant. [71] What does this statement tell us about Fermina Daza and how do you think the reader is supposed to react?
1. Garcia Marquez’s most quoted statement regarding this novel is, ‘You have to be careful not to fall into my trap.’ In the light of chapter two explain Garcia Marquez’s warning.
2. How has your reading of chapter two enhanced your understanding of the novel’s title?
3. Very well, I will marry you if you promise not to make me eat eggplant. [71] What does this statement tell us about Fermina Daza and how do you think the reader is supposed to react?
Chapter Three
Chapter three traces the course of two journeys and two losses of virginity. On learning of Fermina Daza’s impending marriage to Dr Juvenal Urbino, Florentino Ariza travels by riverboat deep into the interior of the country, closer to the most recent outbreak of the civil war. The vision of dead bodies floating downstream ‘with buzzards sitting on them’ reminds us of another famous literary journey by riverboat into the interior, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. [142] During the voyage ‘a hand like the talon of a hawk seized him by the shirt sleeve and pulled him into a cabin… and stripped him, without glory, of his virginity’. [142] This anonymous assault is paired with Fermina Daza’s ‘terror of a virgin bride’ at the prospect of ‘her imminent violation’ which eventually takes place on the fifth night of her sea voyage to France with her husband. “What do you expect, Doctor?” she asks him, “This is the first time I have slept with a stranger.” [156] The newlyweds gradually talk and tease their way towards the consummation of their wedding early in their honeymoon. At the end of their honeymoon they secretly share an awareness that they do not yet love each other, that they most probably will learn to and that they will have ‘to be content with sharing power in bed.’ [160] Despite his anonymous sexual awakening, Florentino Ariza becomes consumed by jealousy and vengeance. He imagines brutal raptures against Fermina Daza in the hope that ‘all her happiness would be destroyed.’ [146] The transformation of his love into hatred precipitates ‘a new crisis of fever’ which is mistaken for a case of cholera. [147] Concluding ‘his inconclusive journey’, Florentino Ariza returns home to ‘the labyrinth of sailing ships… the decaying matter… pestilential stench… the fetid reek of the bay’. [148] Not only has his journey been inconclusive, his return is contradictory, paradoxical. Instead of enacting any fantasy of vengeance, on his return to the unnamed city on the Caribbean coast he seeks some sort of transformation and forgetfulness by embarking on a lifelong career of numerous intimate relationships. Fermina Daza returns from Europe six months pregnant and ready to assume her new role of upper class wife. The married couple have ‘brought back three indelible memories’ from their honeymoon in Europe: the first season of the opera The Tales of Hoffmann, a set of stories about a poet’s love for a mechanical doll, a prostitute and a singer; the burning of one of Europe’s most widely recognised symbols of romantic love, the gondolas of Venice; and a glimpse of Oscar Wilde – victim of ‘The love that dare not speak its name’[1] – in Paris. [161]
Occasionally in the narrative of Love in the Time of Cholera the unidentified narrator intervenes in a more authoritative, authorial, omniscient manner, commenting on the characters in terms of the human condition. For example, on page 106 we are offered this commentary on the young Dr Juvenal Urbino: ‘He was still too young to know that the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.’ A little further on, he describes him as ‘an easy victim to the charitable deceptions of nostalgia.’ These interventions suggest a stoical view of life [showing considerable self-control, restraint, objectivity] as well as a sense of philosophical acceptance or resignation. Consider also this reflection from chapter one: ‘Life would have been quite another matter for them both if they had learned in time that it was easier to avoid great matrimonial catastrophes than trivial everyday miseries. But if they had learned anything together, it was that wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good.’ [26] If at last we learn what we have always longed to know, it is too late. However, the measured tone of such meditations suggests an acceptance of the human condition, the inevitability of life and death, the possibility of wisdom and the probability of futility. Garcia Marquez’s description or definition of nostalgia as a charitable deception reminds us of the truism that time both heals and blinds us to the wounds of the past. This is ‘the perverse lucidity of nostalgia’ mentioned in chapter two. [87] Even if the long view provides us with the perspective that we anticipate, it comes at the cost of a softer focus.
Garcia Marquez maintains the figurative range of the previous chapters. Returning to the Caribbean as a young single doctor, Juvenal Urbino is assaulted by the fetid and impoverished country of his birth, by ‘the unmerciful reality that came pouring in through the window.’ [106] The first night of his return he is kept awake by the hourly screaming of a curlew which is joined at five in the morning by the local roosters. Called by Lorenzo Daza to attend his daughter, the young doctor ‘appear[s] at the window in his spotless white frock coat and his white top hat’. [117] ‘Blind with fury’, at his intrusion into her privacy Fermina Daza, ‘slammed the window shut.’ [118] Florentino Ariza is seized by ‘the talon of a hawk’ and Fermina Daza, who has renovated her family home since returning with her father and breaking with Florentino Ariza, keeps ‘three crows in a very large cage’ on the patio. [141, 116] The narrative now is not linear in any direction. It is neither chronological nor reversed but seems to unfold in a circular, spiral manner, weaving in and out of past, present and future as we follow the three principal journeys of Florentino Ariza, Fermina Daza and the newlyweds, as we reflect back on Fermina Daza’s earlier enforced exile with her father, the interregnum between her two relationships, her honeymoon and her early married life. Different periods of time are written about in a kind of simultaneity maintaining the obscurity of the narrative perspective and suggesting an eternal present.
The early passages of chapter three dealing with the early career of the good doctor also contain flashbacks to the ‘epidemic of Asian cholera that had devastated the population six years earlier’ and killed his father, also a doctor. [107] The epidemic was ‘responsible for the greatest death toll in our history’ claims the unidentified narrator. [111] A certain ironic wit is evident in the occasional detail included in the ongoing accumulation of data. For example, we are told that ‘some clairvoyant mayor’ had a quotation from Dante’s Inferno – ‘All hope abandon ye who enter here.’ – carved at the entrance to the colonial cemetery. [111] As a consequence of his father’s death and his revulsion at the primitive conditions of his compatriots, ‘Cholera had become an obsession for him.’ [114] His obsession is attributed not only to his father’s death in the service of his people but also to his father’s ‘letter of feverish love to his wife and children, a letter of gratitude for his existence in which he revealed how much and with how much fervor he had loved life.’ [112] This is the opposite experience to that of Florentino Ariza. The former Dr Urbino discovers and reveals as he is dying of cholera the depth and extent of his love for his family whereas Florentino Ariza lapses into cholera-like symptoms as the result of an unrequited and impossible love. Despite the ‘atavistic superstitions’ of the local population, the young doctor devotes himself to renovating the colonial sewers and securing clean drinking water for the city. [108]
Cholera is also never far from the story of Florentino Ariza, whose fevers of obsessive and unrequited love continue to resemble the symptoms of the disease. In this vein, the novel continues its analysis of the variety and incongruity of love and its rigorous critique of romantic love. Florentino Ariza suffers in the throes of obsessive love until he becomes an adept in the art of carnal love. He transforms from the ‘almost invisible clerk with his air of a whipped dog’ into a worldly and inspirational lover aware ‘that nothing one does in bed is immoral if it helps to perpetuate love.’ [129, 151] In the process he discovers ‘something that resembled love, but without the problems of love.’ [151] Fermina Daza’s journey takes her through the discoveries of ‘solitary love’ and the wedding which was for her ‘the prelude to horror’ to the fulfilment of desire in marriage. [153, 154] Dr Juvenal Urbino aspires to remain aloof. Whilst his studies in medicine and his commitments to public health are clues to the ‘solid’, ‘fastidious’, ‘rigorous’ and ‘learned’ bourgeois public persona, the painting of ‘the physician arguing with Death for the nude body of a female patient’ is probably a stronger indication of his private persona. [105, 108] He ‘used to say that he experienced no emotion when he met the woman with whom he would live until the day of his death’ ascribing their meeting to ‘a clinical error.’ [117, 115] Aware – despite their happiness, fulfilment and the imminent arrival of their baby – ‘that he did not love her… he was sure there would be no obstacle to their inventing true love.’ [159] Chapter three also provides us with a clear contrast between the socially desirable union between Fermina Daza and Dr Juvenal Urbino and the excesses of obsession in Florentino Ariza’s love for Fermina Daza. Not only is the marriage within the bounds of social propriety it is also the occasion of considerable hypocrisy when Sister Franca do la Luz, the headmistress who earlier expelled Fermina Daza from school because of the discovery of a letter, is used by Lorenzo Daza as ‘the emissary of love’ on behalf of Dr Juvenal Urbino. [126] Her future husband, her father and her church conspire against her to convince her to marry the doctor; ‘She continued to dangle the rosary in front of Fermina Daza’s eyes.’ [127]
Descriptions of the unnamed Caribbean city are always loaded with the detritus of human waste and the detritus of colonial and postcolonial history. From the pauper’s cemetery we can view ‘the entire historic city, the broken roofs and the decaying walls, the rubble of fortresses among the brambles… the hovels of the poor around the swamps’ [132] Looking closer we see the buzzards, rats and dogs of the streets and markets and the rotting waste of the harbour. After the colonial intervention and withdrawal of the Spanish, the physical world of the novel is revealed as a place forgotten by time and history.
Chapter Three Tasks
1. Would you be able to defend Love in the Time of Cholera against the charges that it is pornographic and sexist?
2. Discuss the episode of the black doll on page 125. From what you know of Garcia Marquez’s career as a writer and the critical reception of his writing, what can you say about the genre of this particular episode?
3. With particular reference to this chapter, discuss Love in the Time of Cholera as an anti-romantic novel.
1. Would you be able to defend Love in the Time of Cholera against the charges that it is pornographic and sexist?
2. Discuss the episode of the black doll on page 125. From what you know of Garcia Marquez’s career as a writer and the critical reception of his writing, what can you say about the genre of this particular episode?
3. With particular reference to this chapter, discuss Love in the Time of Cholera as an anti-romantic novel.
1. Would you be able to defend Love in the Time of Cholera against the charges that it is pornographic and sexist?
2. Discuss the episode of the black doll on page 125. From what you know of Garcia Marquez’s career as a writer and the critical reception of his writing, what can you say about the genre of this particular episode?
3. With particular reference to this chapter, discuss Love in the Time of Cholera as an anti-romantic novel.
1. Would you be able to defend Love in the Time of Cholera against the charges that it is pornographic and sexist?
2. Discuss the episode of the black doll on page 125. From what you know of Garcia Marquez’s career as a writer and the critical reception of his writing, what can you say about the genre of this particular episode?
3. With particular reference to this chapter, discuss Love in the Time of Cholera as an anti-romantic novel.
1. Would you be able to defend Love in the Time of Cholera against the charges that it is pornographic and sexist?
2. Discuss the episode of the black doll on page 125. From what you know of Garcia Marquez’s career as a writer and the critical reception of his writing, what can you say about the genre of this particular episode?
3. With particular reference to this chapter, discuss Love in the Time of Cholera as an anti-romantic novel.
Chapter Four
Surprisingly, one of the strongest elements of chapter four is the devotion of this part of Garcia Marquez’s anti-romantic dissertation to an appraisal of marriage very much from the female point of view. The very end of the chapter offers a vision of the marriage between Dr Juvenal Urbino and Fermina Daza as a relationship that has survived and carried them to ‘the other shore.’ Once again Garcia Marquez has laid a trap. A glance at the vocabulary of that paragraph – ‘suffered’, ‘stumbled’, ‘disadvantage’, ‘uncomfortable’, ‘ridiculous’, ‘incomprehension’, ‘nastiness’, ‘conspiracy’, ‘adversity’, ‘trials’ – suggests that an enormous price has been paid in order to become ‘like a single divided being’. [224]
The price is seen predominantly from the points of view of wives and widows. Superficially, ‘Fermina Daza rejected Florentino Ariza in a lightning flash of maturity’ and returned from her honeymoon with Dr Juvenal Urbino ‘in full command of her new condition as a woman of the world’. [203, 165] However, her marriage is placed under considerable scrutiny in this chapter. Her happiness does not outlast the honeymoon and she becomes prey to the truths and illusions of nostalgia. Realising both that she has married a man of ‘suspect resemblance to the ideal man that Lorenzo Daza has so wanted for his daughter’ and that ‘she loved him as little as she had loved the other one’, Fermina Daza also comes to realise that the bourgeois wife is a ‘deluxe servant’ serving a ‘deluxe prison sentence’. [205, 221, 208] The problem in society is conforming to ‘a system of atavistic contracts, banal ceremonies, pre-ordained words’ and “the problem in married life is learning to overcome boredom.” [211] Fermina Daza is ‘a prisoner in the wrong house’, ‘the house of her misfortune’ with its ‘windowless rooms’ where she endures ‘the asphyxiation of the family palace.’ [206, 207, 212] Despite her privileged position in society, she laments ‘the perpetual chain of daily meals’ and she resents being in her husband’s ‘holy service.’ [221] To reinforce this role of matrimonial servitude we have Dr Juvenal Urbino’s complaints and taunts; “This meal has been prepared without love.”; “A man should have two wives: one to love and one to sew on his buttons.” [221, 222] One of Fermina Daza’s trials is that she must pass the initial ‘years of misery’ in her husband’s ancestral home which they share with his widowed mother, Dona Blanca. [211] ‘Widowhood had so embittered her that she did not seem the same person; it had made her flabby and sour and the enemy of the world.’ [206] The most uncomplimentary and unsympathetic view of Fermina Daza’s situation is given by one of Florentino Ariza’s lovers, Sara Noriega, who describes her as a whore, “By virtue of marrying a man she does not love for money.” [200] This is a critique of bourgeois marriage not dissimilar to that of Mary Wollstonecraft and Friedrich Engels. ‘To rise in the world,’ wrote Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman [1792], ‘and have the liberty of running from pleasure to pleasure, they [women] must marry advantageously, and to this object their time is sacrificed, and their persons often legally prostituted.’ ‘[T]he wife’, wrote Engels in The Origins of the Family [1884], ‘differs from the ordinary courtesan only in that she does not hire out her body like a wage worker, on a piece work, but sells it into slavery once and for all.’ Through her marriage Fermina Daza also learns, happily as it turns out, that the so-called maternal instinct is also a construct; ‘she discovered with great delight that one does not love one’s children just because they are one’s children but because of the friendship formed while raising them.’ [207] Fermina Daza believes that her unhappiness derives from her virtual imprisonment as an aristocratic wife whereas Dr Juvenal Urbino sees it as the consequence of ‘the very nature of matrimony: an absurd invention’. [209]
The dissertation on marriage is continued through the experiences and perspectives of a number of Florentino Ariza’s lovers. Sara Noriega, for example, not only rents a flat ‘in the motley Sweethearts’ Mews in the old Gethsemane District’, she occupies ‘the limbo of abandoned brides’ because she has chosen to have lovers rather than fiancées and ‘it was difficult for a man of her time and place to marry a woman he had taken to bed.’ To highlight the hypocrisy of this sexual double standard and her loss of status and citizenship within society, Garcia Marquez provides us with the disturbing and ridiculous detail that ‘she had to suck on an infant’s pacifier while they made love.’ [197] Florentino Ariza slowly comes to the realisation that the happiest of his lovers are widows. Having escaped ‘the indecency of official love… how happy they were after the death of their husbands.’ [203] When he does fall into lust with a married woman, it ends disastrously. When Olimpia Zuleta’s husband sees what Florentino Ariza has written in red on her belly and pubis ‘he went to the bathroom for his razor while she was putting on her nightgown, and in a single slash he cut her throat.’ [217]
Florentino Ariza’s compensation for his failure to love and marry Fermina Daza is a devotion to illicit and secret relationships with numerous women. Garcia Marquez never celebrates his character’s behaviour or his conquests and I would argue that there is a lot less humour in the storytelling than some early critics have suggested. His pursuit of these women is as atavistic as the rules that imprison Fermina Daza in a loveless marriage. Garcia Marquez constantly refers to ‘his work as a furtive hunter’ preying ‘like a chicken hawk’ on ‘abandoned… frightened little birds’, ‘his habit of fornicating without hope’ with ‘those skinny little tadpoles that no one bothered to turn around and look at in the street, who seemed to disappear when they took off their clothes off’. [174, 175] These are not prostitutes but the loneliest of the lonely and the scrawniest of the scrawny. Their condition is pathetic as is his pursuit of them. Beyond the little birds’ imagery, Olimpia Zuleta is associated with homing pigeons and Ausencia Santander with a screeching cockatoo from Malaya.
Through chapter four both Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza lapse into a kind of shadowy approximation of themselves. Fermina Daza’s husband becomes a shadow to her and Florentino Ariza becomes ‘the shadow of someone she had never met.’ [213] Both of them are occupied by boredom, nostalgia and phantoms. Photographs and postcards reveal to Florentino Ariza a ‘ghostly review of the fallacy of his own life.’ [199] Meeting Dr Juvenal Urbino unexpectedly he first experiences ‘the nausea of feeling himself inferior’ and then the realisation that they ‘were victims of the same fate and shared the hazards of a common passion; they were two animals yoked together.’ [190, 191] A successful establishment figure, a bourgeois husband and father, Dr Juvenal Urbino seems the most comfortable in his skin but ‘his profession had accustomed him to the ethical management of forgetfulness.’ [189]
First suggested in the novel by the uncertain relationship of the narrator to the characters and the events taking place, there is also a persistent suggestion of a sinister series of events happening alongside or just beneath the surface of the novel. In this chapter, for example, when Ausencia Santander’s home is stripped of all its furniture and adornments the reader assumes that long time lover Captain Rosendo de la Rosa is responsible for this and for the obscene message painted on the wall: ‘This is what you get for fucking around.’ At the same time, though, we learn that the Captain ‘could never understand why Ausencia Santander did not report the robbery, or try to get in touch with the dealers in stolen goods, or permit her misfortune to be mentioned again.’ [179] The thief could just as well have been her husband or someone unrelated to the narrative. In chapter three there are the anonymous and threatening letters written in a ‘cryptic scrawl’ and the black doll received by Fermina Daza at the same time that Dr Juvenal Urbino is writing love letters to her. [124, 125]
Chapter four provides us with an enhanced characterisation of Florentino Ariza. ‘[C]onceived on a desk in some unlocked office on a hot Sunday afternoon, while from her house his father’s wife heard the farewells of a boat that never sailed’, Florentino Ariza is by his very nature the product of deceit. [169] His adult life is devoted to and torn between the temple and conceit of romantic love and his protracted career as a predator. He keeps ‘the notebook in which his father wrote love poems’ and in which his father, Pius V Loyaza, wrote the following sentiment: ‘The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love.’ [169] Florentino Ariza asserts that, “Love is the only thing that interests me”. [168] Here is yet another Garcia Marquez trap. At first it simply looks like the son has inherited a belief in romanticism above all from his father. However, when we examine their relationships with women closer, we can also see that both of them are predators. Their professions of romantic love are a conceit disguising their sexual exploitation of vulnerable women such as Florentino Ariza’s mother, the quadroon Transito Ariza, and the little birds that her son picks up. Florentino Ariza’s status as an illegitimate son does not seem to hamper his progress. Indeed, he is taken into his father’s and uncles’ family business where he learns to navigate ‘the labyrinth of commerce’ and he ‘escaped military service during the bloodiest period of our wars because he was the only son of an unmarried woman.’ [182, 170]
Florentino Ariza’s uncle recognises his young nephew’s ‘driving need for love’ and secures ‘a writing job’ for him in the River Company of the Caribbean. [167] Even Florentino Ariza’s official documents are ‘rhymed’ and ‘lyrical’ and after hours he works in the Arcade of the Scribes where ‘… he would encourage the hopeless with letters of mad adoration.’ [167, 168, 171] Consistent with the numerous imagistic references to shadows and labyrinths, Florentino Ariza finds himself ‘involved in a feverish correspondence with himself’ on behalf of a man and woman in love with each other. [172] Through all of his self-deluding and predatory behaviour, ‘Winning back Fermina Daza was the sole purpose of his life’. [173] Even this romantic love is a conceit flavoured with jealousy and vengeance as he imagines the death of Dr Juvenal Urbino. As if to belie the insincerity of his conceit Florentino Ariza’s first meaningful words to Leona Cassiani are, “The world is divided into those who screw and those who do not.” [183]
We remain unclear as to the position of the unnamed narrator who appears to be highly privileged to the private details of these three lives. In addition, we have the sense of an omniscient narrator who occasionally passes considered judgements on the lives he is retelling. He refers, for example, to Uncle Leo XII’s ‘conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the very day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.’ [165] Despite his illegitimacy Florentino Ariza’s father becomes a clue to his own mortality; ‘… only then did he understand that a man knows when he is growing old because he begins to look like his father.’ [170] Florentino Ariza’s relationship with Asencia Santander ‘taught him the only thing he had to learn about love: that nobody teaches life anything.’ [176]
Throughout the novel history remains a battleground between classes and peoples: ‘… the Europeans themselves were once again setting the bad example of a barbaric war when we had begun to live in peace after nine civil wars in half a century… always the same war.’ [191] Progress at the arrival of the twentieth century is presented in tawdry association with Florentino Ariza’s predatory behaviour: ‘… the novelty of a mule-drawn trolley at the turn of the new century, which proved to be a prodigious and original nest of free-flying little birds.’ [180] The inhabitants of the unnamed Caribbean city ‘still dreamed of the return of the Viceroys.’ [209] They look back nostalgically on the era of ‘river navigation and trade, the same factors that had maintained the city’s greatness during colonial times… the gateway to America.’ [174]
Chapter Four Tasks
1. Chart the development of the story about Leona Cassiani, her relationship with Florentino Ariza and her rise to prominence in the General Section of the R.C.C.
2. Produce a passage analysis based on the passage beginning ‘No sooner had the conversation begun’ and ending with ‘a matter that did not concern her.’ [191-192]
3. Discuss the depiction throughout chapter four of Florentino Ariza’s ‘work as a furtive hunter’. [174]
1. Chart the development of the story about Leona Cassiani, her relationship with Florentino Ariza and her rise to prominence in the General Section of the R.C.C.
2. Produce a passage analysis based on the passage beginning ‘No sooner had the conversation begun’ and ending with ‘a matter that did not concern her.’ [191-192]
3. Discuss the depiction throughout chapter four of Florentino Ariza’s ‘work as a furtive hunter’. [174]
1. Chart the development of the story about Leona Cassiani, her relationship with Florentino Ariza and her rise to prominence in the General Section of the R.C.C.
2. Produce a passage analysis based on the passage beginning ‘No sooner had the conversation begun’ and ending with ‘a matter that did not concern her.’ [191-192]
3. Discuss the depiction throughout chapter four of Florentino Ariza’s ‘work as a furtive hunter’. [174]
1. Chart the development of the story about Leona Cassiani, her relationship with Florentino Ariza and her rise to prominence in the General Section of the R.C.C.
2. Produce a passage analysis based on the passage beginning ‘No sooner had the conversation begun’ and ending with ‘a matter that did not concern her.’ [191-192]
3. Discuss the depiction throughout chapter four of Florentino Ariza’s ‘work as a furtive hunter’. [174]
1. Chart the development of the story about Leona Cassiani, her relationship with Florentino Ariza and her rise to prominence in the General Section of the R.C.C.
2. Produce a passage analysis based on the passage beginning ‘No sooner had the conversation begun’ and ending with ‘a matter that did not concern her.’ [191-192]
3. Discuss the depiction throughout chapter four of Florentino Ariza’s ‘work as a furtive hunter’. [174]
Chapter Five
The opening pages of chapter five contain references to events that represent the onset of modernity associated with the advent of the twentieth century. Progress, for example, is represented by ‘the christening of the first freshwater vessel built in the local shipyards’. At the ceremony Florentino Ariza represents his Uncle Leo XII as the recently appointed First Vice President of the R.C.C. [229] He will later sail in the New Fidelity with Fermina Daza in the final chapter of their lives and of the book. The novelty of new technology appeals to Dr Juvenal Urbino and Fermina Daza who take their first journey by hot air balloon, introducing the technology to their country for enhanced postal delivery. However, even the novel’s most strident moderniser laments that, “the nineteenth century is passing for everyone except us.” [225] This belief that time, history and progress have left them behind is not merely an admission that their people or culture are backward but that they have been abandoned by history in a third world postcolonial limbo. The terrible irony of the history of empires is that the empire power colonises and expropriates the wealth of the colonised nations and peoples and then leaves them in states of destitution and under-development. The hot air balloon trip is something like a journey across geography and history. They travel over ‘the very old and heroic city of Cartagena de Indias’ which is abandoned because of cholera but had previously resisted ‘the sieges of the English and the atrocities of the buccaneers’; ‘over the lake dwellings of the Trojas in Cataca’; ‘over the dark ocean of the banana plantations… wherever he looked he saw human bodies.’ [226] We have no account for the corpses yet [we will learn more about the massacre of the banana workers in chapter six] except that it is clear that they are not cholera victims because each of them has been executed. Once again, we are being reminded that the history of colonised peoples is to transition from violent exploitation at the hands of the colonial oppressor to violent unrest, civil war and exploitation at the hands of newly enriched local elites. Consider for example Uncle Leo XII’s long view of the history of his country: “I am almost one hundred years old, and I have seen everything change, even the position of the stars in the universe, but I have not seen anything change yet in this country… Here they make new constitutions, new laws, new wars every three months, but we are still in colonial times.” [266] Garcia Marquez suggests that the history of the country is a cycle of never-ending violence and exploitation. In such circumstances the past belongs to everybody just as equally as does the present because nothing ever really changes. In a moment of magic fabulation we are told that Fermina Daza has a lifelong memory of a childhood muleback journey with her father Lorenzo Daza who always said to her, “I remember the trip very well, and what you say is accurate… but it happened at least five years before you were born.” [227]
The central action of chapter five is the marital dispute between Fermina Daza and Dr Juvenal Urbino and the consequent two-year disappearance of Fermina Daza during which time the obsessive Florentino Ariza is unable to ascertain whether she is alive, dying of consumption in a Panama sanatorium or dead. ‘[T]he only serious crisis they had suffered during so many years of stable matrimony’ is rendered in postcolonial terms that are familiar to us from every chapter in the novel; ‘they wanted to resolve it not with shouts, tears, and intermediaries, as was the custom in the Caribbean, but with the wisdom of the nations of Europe.’ [234, 235] At the time of their separation her dominant emotion is ‘fury’, his is ‘guilt’ [235] Dr Juvenal Urbino blames it on ‘his wife’s bad habit of smelling the clothes… so that she could tell by the odor if they needed to be laundered even though they might appear to be clean.’ [236] This is pure rationalisation on his part. Notice how Garcia Marquez expatiates on ‘her sense of smell’; how, ‘it oriented her in all areas of her life, above all in her social life… when she was the parvenue in a milieu that had been prejudiced against her for three hundred years’ [237] However, even Garcia Marquez doesn’t seem to be able to flesh out exactly how she navigated her way into aristocratic society by using her nose. The effect, though, is twofold. First of all, it initially makes the story of the two-year separation seem absurd and inexplicable. Secondly, it enables the reader to follow the process of discovery and disillusionment at the same painstaking pace as it is experienced by Fermina Daza herself. We are first alerted by her sense of smell that something is wrong when she smells her husband’s clothing ‘and experienced the disturbing sensation that she had been in bed with another man… she now sniffed at her husband’s clothing not to decide if it was ready to launder but with an unbearable anxiety that gnawed at her innermost being.’ [237] Both the wife and the reader experience the escalating discomfort of ‘the contamination of his clothing’ with its possibilities of ‘infidelity’ that propel her into ‘an agony that bewitched her.’ [238, 239] ‘Fermina Daza could not tell for certain where reality ended and where illusion began, she had the overwhelming revelation that she was losing her mind.’ [239] When Dr Juvenal Urbino is confronted by his wife, ‘the ghost of Miss Barbara Lynch had entered his house at last.’ [240] Only then do we get the story of his infidelity which is, after all, the actual cause of their separation. When the adultery begins he knows that ‘something irreparable had just occurred in his destiny.’ [240] Overlooking the doctor’s numerous inexplicable visits to this Protestant Doctor of Theology and daughter of a minister, ‘A troupial sang in the cage that hung from the eaves.’ [241] ‘Once, soon after he had married, a friend told him, with his wife present, that sooner or later he would have to confront a mad passion that could endanger the stability of his marriage.’ [241] This extramarital relationship with Miss Barbara Lynch is it. Their lovemaking is a non-penetrative ‘ceremony of palpation and auscultation’ [243] ‘This was his limit.’ [244] ‘The world became a hell for him…. he found himself lost in the labyrinth of Miss Lynch’ [245, 247] Fermina Daza prevaricates between ‘the torment of her jealousy’ and ‘the fear of losing him.’ [249] Her decision to leave and to visit her cousin Hildebranda ‘was not so much the fruit of resentment as of nostalgia.’ [251] As well as a torrid journey between nostalgia and disillusionment, Fermina Daza’s separation is also a journey into the labyrinth of history; she visits the place where The Liberator [Simon Bolivar] died in 1830 and the place where Alvaro would be born many years later when she no longer had the memory to remember it.’ [252] This may be a reference to the Colombian poet, Alvaro Miranda, who was born on the Caribbean coast in 1945.[2] On the first leg of her sojourn she sees the dead bodies of cholera victims everywhere, ‘from the railroad station to the cemetery’. [252] Their separation comes to an end nearly two years later when Dr Juvenal Urbino goes to retrieve her, proclaiming, “It is better to arrive in time than to be invited.” [254]
Aging and nostalgia are major preoccupations in chapter five. The main characters are aging and as they do so they succumb to nostalgia. Dr Juvenal Urbino ‘had become conscious of the burden of his own body.’ [246] At the age of fifty-eight he fears ‘the rubbish heap of old age.’ [247] By 1914 Fermina Daza is suffering the irrevocable evidence of ‘the faltering steps of age.’ [256] Even in this process of aging decrepitude the sexual double standard is applied. ‘For women there were only two ages: the age for marrying, which did not go past twenty-two, and the age of being eternal spinsters: the ones left behind.’ [260] Things don’t at first sound a lot better for men: ‘[B]y the standards of his time, Florentino Ariza had crossed the line into old age. He was fifty-six well-preserved years old… It was a bad time for being old… the style of old age began soon after adolescence, and lasted until the grave.’ [259] Some of the only uncompromised humour in the novel derives from Florentino Ariza’s struggles with baldness and the loss of his teeth. However, he is still in full possession of his sexual liberty to transgress any legal or moral boundaries in the name of ‘love’. At the end of chapter five we are returned to the closing moments of chapter one and the death of Dr Juvenal Urbino. ‘Nothing resembles a person as much as the way he dies, and no death could resemble the man he was thinking about less than this one.’ [276]
Aware of the passage of time separating him from his early correspondence with Fermina Daza, Florentino Ariza finds himself remembering his past loves: Rosalba, the Widow Nazaret and numerous other widows, Angeles Alfaro with whom he learned ‘that one can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the same sorrow with each, and not betray them’, Andrea Varon, also known as Our Lady of Everybody, ‘the sinuous Sara Noriega’ [270, 271]. At the end of this nostalgia the elderly Florentino Ariza embarks upon the ‘restorative perversion’ of a sexual relationship with a fourteen year old girl, America Vicuna. [272] ‘She had arrived two years before from the fishing village of Puerto Padre, entrusted by her family to Florentino Ariza as her guardian and recognised blood relative… he cultivated her during a slow year of Saturdays at the circus, Sundays in the park with ice cream, childish late afternoons, and he won her confidence, he won her affection, he led her by the hand, with the gentle astuteness of a kind grandfather, toward his secret slaughterhouse.’ [272] ‘[H]e loved her with more anguish than any other, because he was certain he would be dead by the time she finished secondary school.’ [274] The use of language is critical here. Notice the words ‘perversion’, ‘cultivated’, ‘slaughterhouse’ and ‘school’. At no point is Garcia Marquez approving of such behaviour and at no point is he valorising or glamorising this relationship as an erotic or romantic affair. He has expended a great deal of effort in the previous chapters to characterise Florentino Ariza as a predator. The girl’s name, America, and her youth reminds me of the relationship depicted by Vladimir Nabokov in Lolita [1955] and it is instructive to look at some of the critical commentary related to that earlier novel as well as at the critical defence of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover [1928] and James Joyce’s Ulysses [1922]. After they make love he plaits her hair and ties the laces on her school shoes. He is with her on a Pentecost Sunday when he hears the bells ringing at four o’clock in the afternoon to announce to the world the death of Dr Juvenal Urbino.
A great deal of the character development in chapter five is devoted to Florentino Ariza. For the first time and quite unexpectedly Garcia Marquez addresses his obvious peculiarity. At the same time he strives to undercut the oddity: ‘It was fortunate that after so much governmental instability because of so many superimposed civil wars, academic standards were less selective than they had been, and there was a jumble of backgrounds and social positions in the public schools.’ [260] In other words, his status as mixed-race illegitimate child does not hamper his progress through school. In this postcolonial backwater, ‘the sons of the great ruined families dressed like old-fashioned princes, and some very poor boys went barefoot. Among so many oddities originating in so many places, Florentino Ariza was certainly among the oddest, but not to the point of attracting undue attention.’ [260] After years of employment he is eventually appointed by Uncle Leo XII as the sole heir of the R.C.C. However, even this achievement is framed within the overall obsession that dominates his life. ‘[H]e had scaled the heights only because of his fierce determination to be alive and in good health at the moment he would fulfil his destiny in the shadow of Fermina Daza.’ [268-269] Garcia Marquez’s characterisation of Florentino Ariza in this chapter focuses on obsession, nostalgia and aging.
‘[H]e experienced the cruelty of time not so much in his own flesh as in the imperceptible changes he discerned in Fermina Daza each time he saw her.’ [228] After an episode in an inn where he is able to observe her for the length of an entire meal reflected in a mirror it takes him almost a year to convince the patron to sell him the mirror. Whenever he sees Fermina Daza ‘she was almost always on her husband’s arm, the two of them in perfect harmony, moving through their own space with the astonishing fluidity of Siamese cats’ [228-229] When she ignores him in public he greets her rebuttal ‘with his infinite capacity for illusion,’ wondering ‘ if such pitiless indifference might not be a subterfuge for hiding the torments of love.’ [230] He spends ‘almost a year of vigilance’ stalking her outside her second marital residence. [231] In response to ‘the disappearance of Fermina Daza’ he waits ‘Sunday after Sunday on the terrace of the Parish Café, watching the people coming out of all three Masses.’ [233] ‘[H]e was so determined to find out the unequivocal facts regarding Fermina Daza’s health that he returned to the Parish Café to learn them from her father, just at the time of the historic tournament in which Jeremiah de Saint-Amour alone confronted forty-two opponents.’ [234] By this time Lorenzo Daza is dead. The novel, though is clearly following its cyclical trajectory of time as this is the first we have heard of Jeremiah de Saint-Amour since chapter one. Florentino Ariza first becomes aware of Fermins Daza’s return during a screening of the 1914 Italian silent film Cabiria at which he overhears her complaining, “My God, this is longer than sorrow.” [255] What an appropriate epigram this would make for Florentino Ariza’s life-long obsession with her. What he sees of her though is ‘another person’ suffering the irrevocable evidence of ‘the faltering steps of age.’ [256] At the very end of the chapter he receives a letter from Fermina Daza and he is convinced that ‘it was the letter he had been waiting for, without a moment’s respite, for over half a century.’ [278]
Garcia Marquez’s dissertation on love reaches some of its most disturbing aspects in chapter five. We learn, for example, that the only man Leona Cassiana wants to give herself to is a stranger who raped her: “If you ever hear of a big, strong fellow who raped a poor black girl from the street on Drowned Men’s Jetty, one October fifteenth at about half-past eleven at night, tell him where he can find me.” [258] Florentino Ariza sexually exploits the Sunday girls on the office furniture in exactly the same way that his father did with his mother. “I’ll be damned!” said his uncle, without the least sign of shock. “You screw just like your dad!” [265] The undisclosed narrator reflects on Dr Juvenal Urbino’s frenzied lovemaking with Miss Barbara Lynch that ‘he had accomplished no more than the physical act that is only part of the feat of love.’ [246] Finally and most disturbingly we have the sexual relationship between the elderly Florentino Ariza and the fourteen year old America Vicuna.
Chapter Five Tasks
1. ‘Lolita is characterised by irony and sarcasm. It is not an erotic novel.’ [Samuel Schuman, 1979] To what extent could you make the same claim about Love in the Time of Cholera?
2. Why is Garcia Marquez determined in every chapter to make references to the colonial past and the postcolonial present?
3. What do you think of Garcia Marquez’s handling of his female characters?
1. ‘Lolita is characterised by irony and sarcasm. It is not an erotic novel.’ [Samuel Schuman, 1979] To what extent could you make the same claim about Love in the Time of Cholera?
2. Why is Garcia Marquez determined in every chapter to make references to the colonial past and the postcolonial present?
3. What do you think of Garcia Marquez’s handling of his female characters?
1. ‘Lolita is characterised by irony and sarcasm. It is not an erotic novel.’ [Samuel Schuman, 1979] To what extent could you make the same claim about Love in the Time of Cholera?
2. Why is Garcia Marquez determined in every chapter to make references to the colonial past and the postcolonial present?
3. What do you think of Garcia Marquez’s handling of his female characters?
1. ‘Lolita is characterised by irony and sarcasm. It is not an erotic novel.’ [Samuel Schuman, 1979] To what extent could you make the same claim about Love in the Time of Cholera?
2. Why is Garcia Marquez determined in every chapter to make references to the colonial past and the postcolonial present?
3. What do you think of Garcia Marquez’s handling of his female characters?
1. ‘Lolita is characterised by irony and sarcasm. It is not an erotic novel.’ [Samuel Schuman, 1979] To what extent could you make the same claim about Love in the Time of Cholera?
2. Why is Garcia Marquez determined in every chapter to make references to the colonial past and the postcolonial present?
3. What do you think of Garcia Marquez’s handling of his female characters?
Chapter Six
For me as a reader chapter six consists of the most sustained, eloquent and coherent writing of the entire novel as the relationship between the elderly lovers, Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza, is developed during their initial correspondence and eventual riverboat voyage inland on the Magdalena River [which originates in the Andes and drains into the Caribbean at Barranquilla]. However, we must be more vigilant than ever, watching nout for the deliberate traps that Garcia Marquez is setting for his reader; it is too easy to be seduced by chapter 6 into reading the novel as an affirmation of romantic love. Notice, for example, how the reunion of the two elderly lovers is overlaid by the incestuous and exploitative relationship between Florentino Ariza and America Vicuna. A great deal of the strength of chapter six derives from its characterisation of Fermina Daza. Immediately rebutting Florentino Ariza’s indefatigable optimism we learn that Fermina Daza’s first letter to him is ‘inspired by rage… a bitter exorcism’ intended to wound its recipient. [279] We return momentarily to the critique of marriage first initiated in chapter four as Fermina Daza contemplates her ‘half a century of servitude that… did not leave her even the vestiges of her identity. She was a ghost in a strange house… which of them was deader: the man who had died or the woman left behind.’ [279] As a form of exorcism Fermina Daza casts many of the artefacts of their marriage into a bonfire, ‘the symbolic cremation of her husband’ [284] Despite being overcome by the ‘bitter gusts from the mothballs’ and ‘[d]eath’s passage through the house’, Fermna Daza is also in the process of being liberated by widowhood from the bondage of her marriage. [301] Whereas she once compensated for her unhappiness and incarceration by becoming a voracious collector, hoarder and re-arranger of things, now she is free to dispose of them as she wishes and of herself as she wishes. This will be particularly evident in the way she packs so lightly and practically for her voyage on the New Fidelity. Remembering how she once confronted her husband with the fact of her unhappiness, she recalls his response: “Always remember that the most important thing in a good marriage is not happiness, but stability.” [300] Mourning for her dead husband, the widow Fermina Daza – ‘she became known as the Widow Urbino’ [302] – remembers his assurance ‘that amputees suffer pains, cramps, itches, in the leg that is no longer there.’ [280] Her solitude and loss finds her ‘talking to the serving women, who were the only ones with whom she felt comfortable’. [280] ‘[T]he things she had bought on her honeymoon were now relics for antiquarians.’ [280] Navigating and gradually emerging from ‘the mangrove swamps of grief’ she begins to remember Florentino Ariza as an ‘evil’ and ‘pitiable phantom’, a ‘taciturn boy’ who has become a ‘moth-eaten old wreck’ haunting her life and for whom she feels hatred and rage until she is again ‘overcome by nostalgia’ for ‘the illusory days of that unreal love.’ [281, 282] Dr Juvenal Urbino is given ‘the largest and most sumptuous funeral procession’ [286] following which Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza both succumb to ‘the sleeplessness of old age.’ [287]
Following Dr Juvenal Urbino’s death, Fermina and her cousin Hildebranda are reunited after many years. Note how their names are given informally as forenames only, implying the loss of a woman’s identity and status through the loss of her husband. [283] They share ‘nostalgia… the burden of old age… the mists of disenchantment’. [283] In a complete reversal of the bird imagery of the novel Hildebranda sees Florentino Ariza as ‘the memory of the sad little bird condemned to oblivion’ and ‘a shadow that had been obliterated.’ [283] Alternatively, a close friend of Fermina Daza sees him as “a wandering succubus” with a reputation for pursuing boys on the docks. [303]
In response to Florentino Ariza’s initial letters, ‘the more she thought about him the angrier she became, and the angrier she became the more she thought about him’ [284] This crisis in their relationship is accompanied by violent rain and flood. When he is troubled by solitude Florentino Ariza sleeps in his mother’s bed from which he can see the mirror from Don Sancho’s Inn. [288] His desire for reunion with Fermina Daza leads to his need to extricate himself from the incestuous and exploitative relationship with the schoolgirl America Vicuna ‘so that she could become accustomed to the idea that he was her guardian and no longer her lover.’ [289] This extrication proves very difficult; ‘it was a brutal change for her’ [295]
As with earlier details about his aging, some of the novel’s best humour is at the expense of Florentino Ariza. Reading Fermina Daza’s letters in the evening, he puts on his chamois moustache cover and removes his false teeth. [291] The theme of aging is pursued throughout the chapter and is commented on with considerable cruelty by Fermina Daza’s daughter Ofelia: “Love is ridiculous at our age… but at theirs it is revolting.” [323] As their correspondence increases Florentino Ariza begins to use a typewriter: ‘It seemed more like bold modernity’ [292] His letters become ‘an extensive meditation on life based on his ideas about, and experiences of, relations between men and women… he disguised it in the patriarchal style of an old man’s memories… it was really a document of love.’ [293] His letters begin to take on the form of a serialised novel. [294] Fermina Daza receives them as wise, noble and calm, ‘a meditation on life, love, old age, death: ideas that had often fluttered around her head like nocturnal birds but dissolved into a trickle of feathers when she tried to catch hold of them.’ [299] ‘[T]hey were not letters in the strict sense of the word, but pages from a book that he would like to write.’ [308]
When Florentino Ariza tries again to visit Fermina Daza he remembers ‘the bird droppings on his first love letter’ and the ‘magic words for hitting a bird with a stone’ once taught to him by another boy. [304] Florentino Ariza is barely able to control his bowels and when he is safely in his car he loses them completely. ‘It was like being born’ but he is also told that it looks like cholera. After two months of reunion Florentino Ariza is condemned to two months of convalescence after twisting his ankle. He is cared for by Leona Cassiani and America Vicuna. Meanwhile, under the name of Justice a new tabloid newspaper attempts to sensationalise any stories it can about the behaviour of the aristocracy, defaming Dr Juvenal Urbino and publishing the sordid history of Fermina Daza’s father Lorenzo Daza, thus filling in the details – including an arms deal double cross involving the future novelist Joseph Conrad – that were left out in chapter four. The two old friends continue to meet as ‘two old people, ambushed by death, who had nothing in common except the memory of an ephemeral past’ ‘they could not understand what they were doing so far from their youth on a terrace with checkerboard tiles in a house that belonged to no one and that as still redolent of cemetery flowers.’ [305] Eventually, Fermina Daza is prompted to the defence of the man who has waited for her all their lives: “A century ago life screwed that poor man and me because we were too young, and now they want to do the same thing because we are too old.” [323]
As we have already seen the bird imagery is used to great effect in chapter six. The first two attempts of Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza to make love on the New Fidelity are failures. Florentino Ariza is unable to do so the first time and the second time is ‘hurried and sad’. [340] Their physical love regenerates after their visit to the marketplace of La Dorada where ‘the dock appeared to be carpeted with cheeping chicks’. [342] Embarking from this point the decision is made to fly the yellow cholera flag ‘waving jubilantly from the mainmast.’ [343] Their emotional and physical love is reborn as befits the capacity of their aged bodies to express it, ‘beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of disillusion: beyond love.’ [345] Refused permission to dock and disembark because of the cholera flag, the New Fidelity floats in the marshes of the Magdalena delta where, ‘all the birds of the earth and the water circled above them with metallic cries… and Fermina Daza felt in her blood the wild beating of her free will.’ [347] Sharing the wisdom of the occasional omniscient narrative voice the Captain looks at the two lovers and is ‘overwhelmed by the belated suspicion that it is life, more than death, that has no limits.’ [348]
Concerning Garcia Marquez’s depiction of the Caribbean postcolonial setting, there are a number of references to material and technological progress in chapter six. Florentino Ariza is impressed by ‘the progress made in the mail service since his days as a standard-bearer’. [293] His riverboat company is threatened by ‘the rapid progress of aviation’ but it is also the means by which he will eventually be able to be reunited with Fermina Daza and become her lover. [307] The most critical postcolonial commentary, though, is represented by the environmental devastation visited upon the Magdalena River by the riverboat companies: ‘the Magdalena, father of waters one of the great rivers of the world, was only an illusion of memory.’ [331] The decline of the river’s flora and fauna in the half century since Florentino Ariza’s first voyage is described in elaborate and deeply moving detail on pages 331-337. Whilst the ship on which the lovers sail, the New Fidelity is a proud reminder of the first boat to sail the river and is indeed the first boat built in the local shipyards, the river it navigates has been reduced to a wasteland of deforestation and poverty. Upriver, there are always corpses floating down to the sea, the victims of the latest military atrocities against striking plantation workers or of the latest chapter in the civil war or of the most recent outbreak of cholera. At the end of their journey the city they return to, their home, the city of the Viceroys, continues to float on ‘the pestilential stink of its glories’. [346] During Fermina Daza’s reunion with cousin Hildebranda an allusion is made to ‘the massacre of the banana workers of San Juan de la Cienaga.’ [282] A distant relative was involved in the massacre which Fermina Daza became an unwitting witness of during the hot air balloon trip with her husband in chapter five. Garcia Marquez is referring to an actual historical event, the 1928 massacre by the military of banana plantation workers who were striking against the exploitative conditions of their employment at the hands of the American multinational United Fruit Company. Not only is Garcia Marquez’s political sympathy clear, he is again reminding us of the violent transition experienced by colonised peoples in the postcolonial era.
Chapter Six Tasks
1. Comment on Garcia Marquez’s use of America Vicuna in the final chapter; why does her memory and death hover over the narrative?
2. Florentino Ariza’s mature love letters to Fermina Daza ‘can be thought of as constituting the novel itself in different form…’ – Kathleen McNerney. Discuss
3. ‘The same civilisation that idealises lovers produces a global wasteland, and the private fantasies of romance are rafts on a sea of public devastation.’ – Jean Franco. Discuss.
1. Comment on Garcia Marquez’s use of America Vicuna in the final chapter; why does her memory and death hover over the narrative?
2. Florentino Ariza’s mature love letters to Fermina Daza ‘can be thought of as constituting the novel itself in different form…’ – Kathleen McNerney. Discuss
3. ‘The same civilisation that idealises lovers produces a global wasteland, and the private fantasies of romance are rafts on a sea of public devastation.’ – Jean Franco. Discuss.
1. Comment on Garcia Marquez’s use of America Vicuna in the final chapter; why does her memory and death hover over the narrative?
2. Florentino Ariza’s mature love letters to Fermina Daza ‘can be thought of as constituting the novel itself in different form…’ – Kathleen McNerney. Discuss
3. ‘The same civilisation that idealises lovers produces a global wasteland, and the private fantasies of romance are rafts on a sea of public devastation.’ – Jean Franco. Discuss.
1. Comment on Garcia Marquez’s use of America Vicuna in the final chapter; why does her memory and death hover over the narrative?
2. Florentino Ariza’s mature love letters to Fermina Daza ‘can be thought of as constituting the novel itself in different form…’ – Kathleen McNerney. Discuss
3. ‘The same civilisation that idealises lovers produces a global wasteland, and the private fantasies of romance are rafts on a sea of public devastation.’ – Jean Franco. Discuss.
1. Comment on Garcia Marquez’s use of America Vicuna in the final chapter; why does her memory and death hover over the narrative?
2. Florentino Ariza’s mature love letters to Fermina Daza ‘can be thought of as constituting the novel itself in different form…’ – Kathleen McNerney. Discuss
3. ‘The same civilisation that idealises lovers produces a global wasteland, and the private fantasies of romance are rafts on a sea of public devastation.’ – Jean Franco. Discuss.
Here is the blurb from the jacket of the Knopf hardcover edition:
‘It was inevitable . . .’ So begins this story set in a country on the Caribbean coast of South America – a story that ranges from the late nineteenth century to the early decades of our own, tracing the lives of three people and their entwined fates. And yet, at first nothing seems inevitable, for this is a tale of unrequited love. Fifty years, nine months, and four days’ worth, to be exact. For that is how long Florentino Ariza has waited to declare, once again, his undying love to Fermina Daza, whom he courted and almost won so many years before. He has the bad grace, however, to make his declaration at the funeral of her husband, one of the most illustrious men of his time, a patron of the arts, distinguished professor of medicine, and leader in the fight against the cholera epidemics that once ravaged the country. Shaken by Florentino’s bold speech, Fermina banishes him from her house. But that is only the beginning. With the craft, humor, and accumulated wisdom of a master of fiction, García Márquez transports them [and the reader] back to those early days when they first met, courted, and were forced apart. He shows them going their very different ways – Florentino with his poetry, his rise to prominence in business, and [his devotion to Fermina Daza notwithstanding] his constant pursuit of women. And we see Fermina as she is wooed by the most sought-after bachelor of their time, Doctor Juvenal Urbino de la Calle; as they wed; as they experience all the events and emotions – honeymoon, passion, children, small betrayals, separations, dependencies, and adventures – that constitute a long, sturdy marriage. And then, at what might seem the end of their lives, Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza are brought together once more, in a meeting whose outcome is as fateful, as suspenseful, as any in literature.
On November 12, 1928, a massive strike broke out in the banana zone of Cienaga and Santa Marta [Magdalena].
More than 25,000 banana plantation workers refused to cut the bananas grown for the American multinational company “United Fruit Company” and for national producers under contract to that company. Despite that pressure, the United Fruit Company and the workers did not reach a collective agreement.
The strike ended in a bloodbath: on the night of December 5, 1928, soldiers from the National Army shot upon a peaceful assembly of thousands of strikers, killing more than a thousand of them.
[2] According to poetryinternational.org, ‘The poetry of Alvaro Miranda is imbued with profound reflections on Caribbean society and the creative process. He reconstructs Caribbean history from a genuine post-modern perspective that has its origins in a deep observation of its realities. He is concerned with the meaning of the Caribbean and its European heritage for Colombians, and in this inquiry he displays a multidimensional focus. Miranda’s poetry is therefore polyphonic and open to dialogue. His poetry contains echoes of the different voices that make up the colorful mixture of cultures in the Caribbean.’ Following are a few lines from his early work:
A stream of messianic stars announced the coming of the plague. Not the perfume of the pineapple Nor the aroma of mint Or the essence of medlar
Be very careful in your usage of this term. Garcia Marquez is the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude [1967], one of the most celebrated and important magical realist novels. As a consequence it has become a habit of laziness to label all of his novels as magical realist. However, there are actually very few examples of the magical or supernatural in Love in the Time of Cholera:
The whistling scrotal hernias [Chapter Three]
The black doll episode [Chapter Three]
Fermina Daza’s lifelong memory of a muleback journey which her father made five years before she was born [Chapter Five]
Florentino Ariza’s memory of the ‘magic words for hitting a bird with a stone’ [Chapter Six]
Indeed, there has also been a considerable degree of popular critical laziness around how exactly to describe Love in the Time of Cholera. It has often been acclaimed as a love story despite the fact that there seems to be a great deal about the novel that challenges romantic expectations. Back to magical realism. The fact that even the few magical events listed above take place within the narrative of the novel, the fact that they are not presented in any degree as somehow exceptional but are intended to be read as an equally natural aspect of the narrative indicates that we do need to understand what magical realism is. The first thing to notice is that the term consists of two words. ‘Magical’ refers to events within the narrative that are part of the diegetic world of the novel but which cannot happen in the everyday actual world we occupy; a world governed by the laws of reason and scientific actuality. ‘Realism’ refers to the movement in nineteenth century European literature to use the writing of novels as a means of representing life and reality. Personally, I find the term ‘postcolonial’ to be a far more useful term to describe Love in the Time of Cholera. However, understanding the characteristics of magical realism and identifying them if or where they are present in Love in the Time of Cholera will be very useful. For this we are indebted to:
Ordinary Enchantments, Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative, Wendy B Faris, Vanderbilt University Press, Nashville, 2004
***
On Orientalism, Culture and Imperialism
In Culture and Imperialism [1993] Edward Said’s analysis of Mansfield Park, a novel published by Jane Austen in 1814, focuses attention on the way in which the central family maintains its standard of living in England. They possess a sugar plantation in Antigua, a Caribbean island in the West Indies. ‘The Bertrams,’ asserts Said, ‘could not have been possible without the slave trade, sugar, and the colonial planter class . . .’ That there is a relationship between these two parts of the world – Europe and the Caribbean – is acknowledged in the novel but the nature and meaning of that relationship is not explored. Its existence is simply assumed, accepted, normalised.
Jane Eyre, a novel published by Charlotte Bronte in 1847, in part tells the story of Jane’s coming to emotional and sexual maturity through her relationship with Mr. Rochester of Thornfield Hall. The fact that Rochester is already married is revealed to Jane on what was to have been their wedding day. Rochester’s mentally insane first wife is locked away in a secluded area of his mansion. He was tricked by her family into marrying Bertha Mason when he was living in the West Indies. What were he and the other members of the English mercantile class doing there? Again, assumptions are made about the necessity or actuality of the relationship between the imperial power and the colonized place but those assumptions remain unexposed and unexplored.
Concerning Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a novella written between 1898 and 1899 and revolving around the European exploitation of the ivory trade in Africa, Edward Said comments in Culture and Imperialism: ‘This narrative in turn is connected directly with [. . . ] the waste and horror, of Europe’s mission in the dark world.’
In the introduction to his groundbreaking work of cultural and literary theory, Orientalism [1978], Edward Said wrote the following as an explanation of his subject matter:
‘Taking the late eighteenth century as a very roughly defined starting point Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient – dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.’
On Postcolonialism
from the introduction to Postcolonialism A Very Short Introduction by Robert J. C. Young, Oxford University Press [2003]:
‘Since the early 1980s, postcolonialism has developed a body of writing that attempts to shift the dominant ways in which the relations between western and non-western people and their worlds are viewed. What does that mean? It means turning the world upside down. It means looking from the other side of the photograph, experiencing how differently things look when you live in Baghdad or Benin rather than Berlin or Boston, and understanding why. It means realizing that when western people look at the non-western world what they see is often more a mirror image of themselves and their own assumptions than the reality of what is really there . . .
‘Postcolonial cultural analysis has been concerned with the elaboration of theoretical structures that contest the previous dominant western ways of seeing things . . .
‘For now, what is important is that postcolonialism involves first of all the argument that the nations of the three non-western continents (Africa, Asia, Latin America) are largely in a situation of subordination to Europe and North America, and in a position of economic inequality. Post-colonialism names a politics and philosophy of activism that contests that disparity, and so continues in a new way the anti-colonial struggles of the past. It asserts not just the right of African, Asian, and Latin American peoples to access resources and material well-being, but also the dynamic power of their cultures, cultures that are now intervening in and transforming the societies of the west . . .’
Thinking about the above readings and about Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Love in the Time of Cholera [1985], what might a postcolonial novel look like?
The Stories of Eva Luna by Isabel Allende; VIEWS AND VALUES TOPICS by Adrian D’Ambra
1] The art and nature of storytelling
In A Thousand and One Tales of the Arabian Nights Scheherazade must tell stories to preserve her life. Allende’s Stories of Eva Luna suggest to us that storytelling is an essential element of life and that words, names, gestures and stories are incredibly powerful objects.
2] Sex, gender and love
Eva Luna’s stories present us with many varied representations of men and women as husbands, wives and lovers. Romantic and sexual love and sexual identity are clearly important forces in Allende’s fiction. What does she seem to be telling us about these forces?
3] Power, authority, justice, injustice and poverty
Eva Luna’s stories move between characters of absolute power and absolute poverty. Power is examined in political, social, racial and sexual relationships. Clearly, these abuses of power are abhorrent to Allende.
4] ‘…the monumental pandemonium of progress’ [44]
Much of Eva Luna’s storytelling seems to rely on a kind of timelessness and universality. The country and the capital, for example, are never named, as if they could be anywhere at any time. Characters, peoples and villagers live in a world that apparently doesn’t change. In these stories and lives progress intrudes as an invasive and destructive force.
5] Death and fate
The Schoolteacher’s Guest revolves around two murders, the first arbitrary and senseless, the second fated and deliberately calculated as justice for the former. Death and destiny are powerful forces in The Stories of Eva Luna.
The Stories of Eva Luna by Isabel Allende; VIEWS AND VALUES TOPICS – teaching notes
1] The art and nature of storytelling.
In A Thousand and One Tales of the Arabian Nights Scheherazade must tell stories to preserve her life. Allende’s Stories of Eva Luna suggest to us that storytelling is an essential element of life and that words, names, gestures and stories are incredibly powerful objects.
Look at the opening sentence of The Schoolteacher’s Guest and the way that stories are told within stories; ‘the two had known each other so long…’ [144]
‘to speak is also to be’, Walimai, [86]
the unspoken recognitions and stories of Our Secret
the power of Bela Crepusculario’s words and stories in Two Words
2] Sex, gender and love.
Eva Luna’s stories present us with many varied representations of men and women as husbands, wives and lovers. Romantic and sexual love and sexual identity are clearly important forces in Allende’s fiction. What does she seem to be telling us about these forces?
Ines’ son was ‘born of a fleeting love affair’ [144]
Ines’ declaration of love to Riad [150]
The Ila woman and the Indian love story in Walimai
The representations of Tomas Vargas, ‘the most macho macho in the region’ [44], his wife Antonio Sierra, ‘an old woman by the time she was forty’ [45] and the ‘secret compassion’ that develops between her and Vargas’ mistress Concha Diaz
Concha’s pregnancy
Clavele’s origins and her pregnancy and the life and death of her grandmother Ampero Medina in The Road North
The lovers in Our Secret; ‘…fear is stronger than desire, than love’ [115]
3] Power, authority, justice, injustice and poverty.
Eva Luna’s stories move between characters of absolute power and absolute poverty. Power is examined in political, social, racial and sexual relationships. Clearly, these abuses of power are abhorrent to Allende.
The tyranny of el Benefactor
The victims of torture in Our Secret
The Indians and Europeans in Walimai
The poverty of Jesus Dionisio Picero and Clavele’s $250 in The Road North. The North/South divide between the United States and Latin America
Tomas Vargas’ greed and his power over his women and his family and the powr of the police lieutenant in the same story
The positive authority and respect enjoyed by Riad Halabi and Ines in Agua Santa
4] ‘…the monumental pandemonium of progress’ [44]
Much of Eva Luna’s storytelling seems to rely on a kind of timelessness and universality. The country and the capital, for example, are never named, as if they could be anywhere at any time. Characters, peoples and villagers live in a world that apparently doesn’t change. In these stories and lives progress intrudes as an invasive and destructive force.
The National Petroleum trucks
European progress destroying Indian society in Walimai; the loggers, miners, soldiers and the destruction of the rainforest
Progress ‘down the road to prosperity’ [54] for Antonia Sierra and Concha Diaz in Tomas Vargas
Belisa Crepusculario’s survival of ‘… hunger and the exhaustion of centuries’ Two Words [6]
5] Death and fate
The Schoolteacher’s Guest revolves around two murders, the first arbitrary and senseless, the second fated and deliberately calculated as justice for the former. Death and destiny are powerful forces in The Stories of Eva Luna.
Ines’ son [145], her murder of her son’s murderer [147]
Tomas Vargas
Ampero Medina in The Road North
The deaths of the abducted children in the same story
‘I had learned that sometimes death is more powerful than love.’ The gift of death in Walimai.
english literature teacher 