The Beauties: Essential Stories by Anton Chekhov
“You have taken lies for truth, and hideousness for beauty.” - Anton Chekhov, ‘The Bet’
Introduction
To understand Anton Chekhov’s place in the Russian literary canon, look first at his predecessors Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, the two most widely read of the great Russian authors in the English-speaking world. Both were progeny of the Russian elite and came from families that owned serfs. Both wrote epic novels populated by gigantic casts of characters with complicated names. Their books advance arguments (both implicitly and through long speeches by their main characters) pertaining to the major ideological debates of the day, the ones that their upper-class peers in the Russian intelligentsia stayed up late discussing in smoke-filled drawing rooms while drinking port and otherwise behaving like nineteenth-century gentlemen. To be clear, Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s books also have compelling plots and dramatic arcs and wonderful use of language. But they are fundamentally political. They are also significantly informed by their authors’ anachronistic approaches to Christian faith.
Anton Chekhov, born in 1860, was the grandson of a serf. His alcoholic father, a grocer, beat him and his siblings, then went bankrupt and fled to Moscow where the family lived in poverty and squalor. Somehow, young Anton became a doctor (which, admittedly, didn’t require quite as long a residency in those days). He took to writing stories and selling them to newspapers as a side hustle to support his family, because back then writing paid better than doctoring.
Chekhov’s stories are not like those of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. He didn’t write sweeping political opuses and he wasn’t religious. Instead of spending his time shouting at his fellow elites in gentlemen’s clubs about why they were wrong about the mystical Russian tradition’s relation to European thought and hatching plans to topple the Tsar, he treated peasants, merchants, and nobles for their various ailments (often for free), carried out an unwieldy number of affairs and romantic liaisons, and watched his beloved brothers descend into alcoholism. He wrote keenly-observed, laser-focused, darkly-humorous vignettes about the everyday struggles of the people around him, trying to elucidate individual souls rather than abstract debates, scrutinizing the banal and commonplace for insight into the human condition.
In the process, he basically invented modern theater by writing plays like The Cherry Orchard and The Seagull (which, for the first time, made an effort to recreate how people actually talk to each other instead of pretending that we all spend our days tossing off Shakespearean soliloquies). Meanwhile, he churned out such an unbelievably, crazily excellent oeuvre of short stories that his groundbreaking plays are seen as minor curiosities in his native Russia, where he is remembered almost exclusively as a short story writer.
Indeed, Chekhov is widely considered by both critics and practitioners of the form to be the greatest short story writer of all time. To pick one example out of the sea of improbably effusive praise that Chekhov’s writing inspires, Raymond Carver, the “great” American short story author of the 20th century (whom many of us were forced to read in High School English) wrote: “It is not only the immense number of stories [Chekhov] wrote—for few, if any, writers have ever done more—it is the awesome frequency with which he produced masterpieces.”
This is a review of 13 of Chekhov’s best pieces, collected in The Beauties: Essential Stories (Pushkin Press). The collection is an excellent place to start for the uninitiated.
A Note from the Author
Before going any further with this review, I’d like to take a moment to acknowledge an important fact: short stories are bad.[1]
At its best, fiction combines engaging storytelling with insight. But given the constraint imposed by their eponymous brevity,short stories generally don’t have enough time to establish a compelling setting, to introduce us to the relevant characters, or to inspire us to care about what happens to them. The only short stories that have anything to offer tend to be those that transcend the limitations of the form through sci-fi ingenuity (like Ted Chiang’s Exhalations) or by hitting us with a crazy twist (like “The Lottery”).
Somehow Chekhov’s short stories succeed without the aid of sci-fi or plot twists. They are sublime. And I want you to know that I believe this to be the case, even though I’m just a regular guy with a deep and healthy dislike for the short story as a literary form.
What are the stories in this collection like?
Chekhov’s stories are impressionistic. They do not follow traditional plot structures. We glimpse an awkward encounter between a hunter and the wife he’s abandoned in ‘The Huntsman’, or an accidental kiss between a shy soldier and some anonymous, desperate lover in a darkened room in ‘The Kiss’. We hear one friend describe to another the pall that a censorious schoolmaster had cast upon his town, and his droll take on the man’s death (“I must confess that burying people like Belikov is a great pleasure”) in ‘The Man in A Box’. We read a first-person recollection of two times that the narrator witnessed true beauty in ‘The Beauties’, the piece that gives this collection its title.
Chekhov is an apolitical, almost anti-political writer. While his more utopian peers like Maxim Gorky were churning out stories lionizing every peasant as a heroic proletarian, Chekhov wrote about real people. Sometimes they do good things and sometimes they do bad things, but they are never caricatures. When considered within the context of the frenzied political discoursing of the day, these stories can seem almost miraculous in their richly-textured, nuanced portrayals of human beings making bad or stupid or selfish choices, and their (the stories’) lack of interest in passing judgment or presenting anything other than a vision of humanity in its messy glory. No ideology, they seem to imply, can save us from ourselves– only basic decency and compassion can do that.
After his publisher chided him for not being opinionated enough in his writing, Chekhov wrote back: “You are right in demanding that an artist should take an intelligent attitude to his work, but you confuse two things: solving a problem and stating a problem correctly. It is only the second that is obligatory for the artist.”
Chekhov’s stories raise important questions–about what it is to be a person, to love, to live well. About beauty, memory, and tradition. They rarely offer answers, easy or otherwise. They force you to think and to feel. Then, they force you to think about what you are feeling (and vice versa).
Reading these stories can feel more like contemplating a masterful painting than watching an episode of TV. In fact, we can partly blame Chekhov for the modern turn away from plot toward a more fluid narrativization of “how things happen in real life,” a turn that has led to a lot of really awful, really boring writing, and maybe ruined the short story forever. But when a genius executes his aesthetic vision so spectacularly well that suddenly everyone wants to copy him, non-geniuses included, can we really hold it against him?
Part of the reason that his impressionistic approach works is that there is nothing out of place. Chekhov is famous for “Chekhov’s Gun,” his notion that a playwright must, “remove everything that has no relevance to the story…If you say in the first act that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third act it absolutely must go off.” This philosophy holds equally for his stories. There is nothing unnecessary here. All is stripped to that which is required to create atmosphere, personality, progression. He is not Hemingway–there’s some detail that you can anchor on–but it’s always carefully calibrated to pose the requisite question. No more.
In fact, his prose is in many ways quite workmanlike. It gets the job done, and rarely aspires to the literary flourishes that, on rare occasions, make a work of fiction transcendentally beautiful and more often make it a little bit cringe. A typical example is from ‘The Man in A Box’:
The schoolteacher stepped out of the barn. He was a man of medium height, plump, completely bald, with a black beard descending almost to his waist. The two dogs came out with him. “What a moon, what a moon!” he said, looking upwards. It was already midnight.
Yet it works. I will leave to others the task of assessing the accuracy of Nicholas Paternak Slater’s translation in this compilation, but there is none of the stiltedness that can sometimes mar a translated work. Chekhov’s writing is simple and direct. Vladimir Nabokov, a wonderful Russian writer himself (who unfortunately, but perhaps fairly, is infamous only for Lolita), noted this tension in one of his lectures as a professor at Cornell. Nabokov decried Chekhov’s “medley of dreadful prosaisms, ready-made epithets, repetitions.” Then he admitted that his volume of Chekhov’s collected works would be the book he would take to another planet if allowed only one.
The days are mostly gray and the prose is spare in Chekhov. But, then, out of nowhere it’s leavened by poetry or some philosophical musing, as when, in ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ Chekhov turns a description of the murmuring ocean in Oreanda into a meditation on mortality.
The leaves on the trees were still, cicadas were chirruping, and the monotonous dull murmur of the sea reaching them from below spoke of repose, of the eternal sleep that awaits us. That same murmur sounded from the sea below before Yalta or Oreanda ever existed; it sounds there now, and will still sound, just as dull and indifferent, when we are no more.
In the context of Chekhov’s minimalist style, the impact of such discursions–perhaps one or two every story–is multiplied, like clear water after a fast.
Why read Chekhov’s stories?
Aside from the great writing and craftsmanship, read Chekhov for the two primary reasons one should read any literature: to cultivate an appreciation for (a) the contingent and (b) the eternal.
By the contingent, I mean all of the things that we take for granted as facts of life but that are actually just a product of our circumstances as overeducated Americans (or wherever you’re from) alive today immersed in the bizarre culture that happens to correspond to our spatio-temporal coordinates within the block universe. There are a boatload of socioculturally-derived a priori assumptions, constraints, norms, and practices that we live in accordance with day in and day out–the “primordial soup” that gives rise to our thoughts and reactions, that shapes what exactly we can think and how exactly we can react. But, it could be otherwise. This is one truth that great literature helps us to recognize.
It’s one reason that I read sci-fi or fantasy novels. When you read a great novel in either genre, the world you are invited into is fully-realized yet alien. There is an iceberg effect to compelling world-building. You are told just enough to intuit that there is a much richer, much more complex culture, society, history underlying and informing the action. One that you know nothing about. And the combined alienness and depth of the culture in the book throws into relief all the arbitrary peccadilloes and assumptions embedded into our own. It defamiliarizes that which we take as given.
This is what it is like to read Chekhov. But instead of getting a glimpse into the feudal system of the Great Houses or the mythic cycles of Middle Earth, you are gaining insight into the culture of Imperial Russia in the late 1800s. This is world-building at its finest, because Chekhov is reporting what is and doing it with an extraordinarily keen eye.
So, you peer into a strange agrarian society with a baroque hierarchy where even the poor and grossly-indebted of the professional class have indentured servants, and an empire of pencil-pushing officials enact “justice” while local aristocrats in large houses invite military officers and privy councilors to balls. Where golden wheat is threshed and black smoke patterns the sky from trains crossing the vast countryside. Where complex, foreign social norms govern every basic social interaction, and where marriage and propriety are everything yet infidelity, domestic violence, and alcoholism are commonplace. Where there is a deep culture of storytelling on cold nights (Chekhov’s stories are occasionally framed within a meta-scene involving friends chatting after dinner), and there is a deeper culture of suppressing one’s emotions until they burst forth, no longer containable.
Read Chekhov to gain a window into another world and, in doing so, gain insight into our own.
Read him, too, for a window into that which is eternal about the human experience. By the eternal, I mean all the wants, feelings, and tensions that we can sometimes fall into the trap of thinking are unique to modernity, unique to our specific culture, or even unique to us individually as the protagonists of our little cranial drama. At the beginning of this review, I referred to Chekhov’s stories as sublime. I mean this in the Burkean sense–they blend light and shadow, provoking disquiet. This disquiet is then, through the strange alchemy of great writing, transmuted into levity, and insight into the human condition.
His “heroes” are weak, and often pathetic. They are led astray by both their limited Reason, and their ill-considered passions. Their lives are full of the banal, and where they are not they are complicated and full of frustration. They take themselves too seriously. Chekhov also takes them seriously. But he does so with a kind of twinkling-eyed goodnaturedness and compassion that turns the tragic into the tragicomic. There are no heroes or villains. Just men, mostly, stumbling their way toward their happiness through vacillating moods and varying fortunes. As we too have stumbled and will stumble again. This is the humor of Chekhov—laughing in self-recognition at another’s self-important foibles. Laughing at our own.
At the beginning of ‘The Beauties’, the narrator recounts a journey he made as a teenager, traveling through the steppe with his grandfather, when they chanced to stop at the home of an Armenian man with a black-haired daughter.
Every time she darted past me in all her beauty, I felt sadder and sadder. I was sorry for myself, and for her, and for the farm hand who followed her with sad eyes every time she ran through the cloud of chaff to the carts. Whether I envied her beauty, or whether I was sorry that this girl was not mine and never would be mine and that I was a stranger to her, or whether I had a vague feeling that her rare beauty was accidental and unnecessary, and like everything on earth, would not last; or whether my sadness was that special feeling aroused when a person contemplates real beauty–God only knows!
This passage is so perfect to me. There is real pathos to it. Yet, at a level beyond that, it’s funny–the grandiosity of this boy’s sadness. Then, at a level beyond that, there’s such a truth to it. Mix it altogether and it sparks a kind of comical melancholy that’s infused with a general tenderness toward you and me and all us sinners who walk the earth alone, together.
There is a convivial spirit to Chekhov’s stories, and they are neither gloomy nor preachy. When he writes in ‘The Bet’, as quoted at the beginning of this review, “You take falsehood for truth and ugliness for beauty” it is from the perspective of a nihilist bemoaning humanity’s vulgarity who, under somewhat blackly humorous circumstances, has committed suicide. Chekhov is not endorsing the view as a courageous and principled recognition of the fundamental depravity of Man and meaninglessness of the universe. Indeed, he’s implicitly challenging it, or at least making it seem a bit pompous and overheated. But he also recognizes that such nihilism has a certain validity. In the ultimate existential judo move, he gives this nihilism some emotional heft—contrary to its tenets, he makes it and its adherent matter.
After describing a long visit from his uncle in ‘The Privy Councillor’, the narrator recalls their parting interaction: “I looked at my uncle’s happy face, and for some reason felt terribly sorry for him. I couldn’t stop myself jumping up into his carriage and tightly hugging this frivolous man, weak as all men are.”
That’s the Chekhovian sublime. Frank insight into our shared human limitations that inspires not ridicule or despair but open-hearted, brotherly warmth and recognition.
The vignettes in this collection, each unique and unrelated, begin to cohere into an epic on par with those of the great Russian novelists. A symphony of frustrations and missteps, of love and pain, of life and life-affirming joy. Of living moments as we experience them.
The End
Chekhov died of tuberculosis at age 44 in a German sanatorium. Bleak, true, in that he died of tuberculosis at age 44. But not overly so. His wife remembered:
Anton took a full glass [of champagne], examined it, smiled at me and said: ‘It's been a long time since I drank champagne.’ He drained it and lay quietly on his left side, and I just had time to run to him and lean across the bed and call to him, but he had stopped breathing and was sleeping peacefully as a child.
“It’s been a long time since I drank champagne,” are, admittedly, awesome last words. However, they are, perhaps, just a bit too perfect. Chekhov wouldn’t have accepted such an end in one of his own stories.
Fortunately, his corpse was then unceremoniously loaded into a refrigerated railway car packed with culinary delicacies for transport back to Russia. And, on the day of his funeral, most of the thousands of Russians who turned out to mourn their great countryman unwittingly fell in behind the funeral procession of a little known general, wailing onward to the wrong gravesite accompanied by the bombastic brass intonings of a military band. The whole enterprise from sanatorium to brass band was by turns tragic, noble, poignant, and absurd. Chekhovian, really.