Prelude
In December 1899 Anton Chekhov finished a story entitled “The Lady with the Little Dog” (also known in some translations into English as “The Lady with the Dog.”) The story is a story in the Chekhovian sense: there is not a clear path from one point to another, rather there are musings, lulls, side steps, but also sharp, unavoidable feelings. Gurov, the protagonist, meets a woman under not especially propitious circumstances. They have something like a dalliance. She departs, he returns to his life in Moscow but cannot forget her. He pursues her, finds her and discovers she has not forgotten him. On the contrary, she loves him and he discovers that he loves her. Thereafter, they have to meet clandestinely. They chafe at the time they must spend apart (each is married) and the furtiveness their love entails but don’t know what to do. I quote the ending sentences of the story in the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation:
“….How could they free themselves from these unbearable bonds?
‘How? How?’ he asked, clutching his head. ‘How?’
And it seemed that, just a little more—and the solution would be found, and then a new, beautiful life would begin; and it was clear to both of them that end was still far, far off, and that the most complicated and difficult part was just beginning.”
In the story there is no history. There are generals and ladies theaters and clubs. There are official capacities, although the story’s heroine does not know exactly in what official capacity her husband works. The two lovers exist in time and space but there is a bubble around them, the imperturbable sense that nothing will impinge on their desires and regrets. They are free to play in the fields of their wills. They are free to define themselves through their feelings. However much society rules them in their designated roles, they are still unto themselves.
Very soon history would intrude on this bubble. The word Soviet would make itself known and the freedom that the lovers indulge would be denounced as “petty bourgeois” and numerous other epithets. “A new, beautiful life” was going to be created in steel and blood and denunciation and ideology. What was seething underneath the surface was about to appear. The twentieth century was about to occur.
I picture Chekhov’s lovers a few decades later as emigres or simply as corpses, part of the rubbish thrown out by the Revolution. The humanity that Chekhov embodied and put on display in story after story, that regard for the integrity of a life, not what a life should be but what a life was, particularly the unhappy parts, was about to meet its unhappy fate. The twentieth century with its ideologies and technologies was going to put unhappiness out of business. Excitements of all sorts—revolutions and machines and entertainments—would banish unhappiness. There would not be time to be unhappy. Or there would be no reason to be unhappy in a perfected society. Or there would be so many wonderful distractions and material conveniences that unhappiness would not have a place anymore. The attachment to the vagaries of sensibility and the random motions of love would be unnecessary or, at most, merely tolerated by the busyness of nation-states, scientific enterprises, and corporations. Chekhov’s lovers would be out-of-date, so much sensitive dust.
December 1899—did Chekhov feel an untimely chill at the century’s end? He knew history was real but he could not have known how real. We read the story and we revel in the deliberations, equivocations, and avowals of the man and woman. They are encumbered by their marriages and society’s many spoken and unspoken rules, but they are not believers in anything larger than their own fragile fates. Modern times, twentieth-century times, offered larger matters. The date of the story seems very long ago.
"..so many wonderful distractions and material conveniences that unhappiness would not have a place anymore..." This seems the saddest line in this essay to me. Perhaps because just the opposite has happened... the technology, the newest toy or phone or convenience foisted on us every month or so...meanwhile our children feel alone, we feel alone, no matter how "connected" they tell us we are.... (they being corporate America)
Confounding anyone would think unhappiness could be banished “by the busyness of nation-states, scientific enterprises, and corporations.” And yet, here we are - busy, nationalistic, corporate-centric and unhappy.
Thanks, Baron, for connecting the dots.