The Lady With the Little Dog and Other Stories, 1896-1904 by Anton Chekhov
With its large cast of characters paralleling and contrasting one another, ‘In the Ravine’ resembles a condensed novel. Grigory Tsybukin and his daughter-in-law Aksinya have greed and shrewdness in common; what differentiates them is that Aksinya lacks family feeling, which makes her unmerciful and invulnerable, while Grigory loves at least his elder son, Anisim, whose downfall leads to his own disintegration. A combination of cleverness and ruthlessness allows Aksinya to triumph even in downright crime, while Anisim, who is just as greedy and ruthless, is caught by the law because he is less clever. All three women in the household are beautiful and come from humble backgrounds – the Tsybukins can afford to marry whom they want – but they could not be more different. Aksinya immediately learns the practices of dishonest trading, outdoing her father-in-law. Barbara, with her gentleness and piety, relieves to some extent the oppressive gloom of pervasive immorality, but with her almsgiving she willy-nilly becomes the family’s publicity agent, polishing its image in the eyes of the villagers. Lipa – resembling Misail of ‘My Life’ – simply cannot grasp the concept that you can live at the expense of other people’s work, and she remains a manual labourer, scrubbing the floors and sleeping in the barn. A character parallel to her is the carpenter Yelizarov, who argues that a man earning his living by his manual skill is more respectable than a wealthy merchant.
By the end of the story we realize that the whole complicated matrix of analogies and contrasts – there are more than I have mentioned – is employed to illuminate the central heroine, Lipa, and the central event, the murder of her baby. When Anisim first comes to meet his prospective bride, her mother, Praskovya, is so numb with fright that she hides in the kitchen and takes no part in deciding her child’s fate. This anticipates Lipa’s inability to defend her baby. Prior to drawing up the deed to transfer Butyokhino to little Nikifor, Grigory tells Lipa to ‘look after’ his grandchild, and after the murder he reproaches her, ‘you didn’t look after my grandson’. Barbara, too, mutters, laying the dead baby out, ‘Her one and only child and still she couldn’t look after it, the stupid girl!’ Is this a just reproach? In order to answer the question we need to take a close look at the scene of the murder.
Lipa is in the kitchen doing the laundry when Aksinya rushes in after the family row over Butyokhino. There is no one else there except for Nikifor, placed on a bench next to a pile of unwashed clothes so as not to hurt himself in case he should fall. At the moment Aksinya appears Lipa has just ‘reached out for the large ladle of boiling water’ standing on the table. Aksinya yells at Lipa that she, a convict’s wife, has no business touching her, Aksinya’s, blouse. ‘Lipa was stunned, looked at her and did not seem to understand. But when she suddenly saw how Aksinya was looking at her and the baby, she did understand and she went numb all over.’ Aksinya grabs the ladle, pours the water on the child, after which: ‘A scream rang out, the like of which had never been heard in Ukleyevo and it was hard to believe it came from such a frail little creature as Lipa.’
Several details are worth noting here. One is that Lipa’s hand was just reaching for the ladle when Aksinya came in: consequently, she could have seized it before her adversary, and given her ‘large arms, just like a man’s’, resembling ‘two huge crab’s claws’, which have been emphasized before, she could at least have put up a fight, weak as she otherwise was. Another important detail is that having understood the meaning of the look Aksinya turned on the child, Lipa grows numb all over with fright, not even thinking that she might resist the aggressor. One is reminded, once more, of Praskovya sitting in the kitchen, numb with shyness, while her child’s fate was being decided. Finally, it is essential to note that not only has Lipa failed to defend her child, but she does not even try to take him to the hospital or summon any other kind of help for him; she just remains in the kitchen until the cook comes back. If this is a didactic tale, it amounts to a satire on the Tolstoyan dictum ‘Resist not evil by force.’ If you do not resist evil, it simply triumphs.
The narrator of ‘In the Ravine’ seems to be so outraged by the murder and by Lipa’s passivity that he cannot go into any further details. The chapter following the scene of murder opens with a matter-of-fact statement about Nikifor’s death; then the narrator launches into a long lyrical description of Lipa’s journey home, with the dead baby in her arms. We are impatient to come to some understanding of Lipa’s extraordinary behaviour during the murder and we are thirsting for news about Aksinya’s arrest and trial, but we are treated instead to the sounds of the cry of a bittern, of the croaking of frogs, and of Nature’s voice saying, ‘We only live once.’ It seems as though slices of life were given as they came to hand. We are reminded of the narrator’s refusal to foreground the essential in ‘The House with the Mezzanine’, but here the inappropriately placed lyricism is more jarring than any previous passage in Chekhov.
It is hard to imagine that the emotional pitch of the story could be raised even higher after the murder scene, but Chekhov succeeds in doing so when Lipa finally arrives home. Her in-laws’ reproach, that she ‘didn’t look after’ her child, is justified in the sense that she had indeed failed to defend Nikifor from the murderer, but it also makes us realize that she did not tell anybody about the murder. Grigory and Barbara, having no idea of what actually happened, are reproaching her for what they think was an accident. Aksinya has not been accused and will not be accused. This implicates not only the meek Lipa, but also Yelizarov, the only person close enough to her to get the true circumstances of the child’s murder out of her, if only he had paid attention to the matter. Aksinya soon orders Lipa from the house, calling her a ‘convict’s bird’. If we as readers and participants felt like throwing ourselves between the baby and the ladle in the murder scene, now we want to shout at Aksinya that she should be driven out and sent to prison. The reason why Chekhov can involve us in the situation so powerfully is that his narrator refrains from comment. If he explained that Lipa was too downtrodden a creature to dare raise an accusing finger, or that she didn’t think the corrupt police would arrest the influential Aksinya (which would probably not be the case even if the police were willing to shut their eyes to some of her lesser crimes), then, maybe, we would come to at least a partial understanding and reconciliation, but his silence farouche produces a most powerful shock.
The Chekhovian techniques I have mentioned, without attempting an exhaustive list, show a writer who has clearly moved beyond nineteenth-century realism. It is not an exaggeration to claim that he is among the most influential initiators of the modern short story, not only in Russia but far beyond its borders. Critical works have demonstrated his influence on various authors in the Bloomsbury group, on Hemingway and Faulkner, on the existentialists, and more recently on practitioners of minimalist prose. But his impact on individual writers, important as it may be, is not as significant as the ubiquitous presence of his literary devices, so pervasive that they seem ingrained in the modern short story.
FURTHER READING
Gordon McVay (tr.), Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters (London: Folio Society, 1994), the best selection and translation of letters.
Brian Reeves (tr.), The Island of Sakhalin (Cambridge: Ian Faulkner, 1993).
Bowdlerized sections of letters restored in Donald Rayfield, ‘Sanitising the Classics’, in Comparative Criticism, 16, Cambridge (1994), pp. 19–32.
SECONDARY LITERATURE: GENERAL BOOKS
Cynthia Carlile, Sharon McKee and Andrei Turkov, Anton Chekhov and His Times (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1995).
Toby W. Clyman, A Chekhov Companion (Westport/London: Greenwood Press, 1985), a very valuable if expensive collection of essays, with extensive bibliography.
P. Debreczeny and T. Eekman (eds), Chekhov’s Art of Writing: A Collection of Critical Essays (Columbus: Slavica, 1977) – among many fine contributions a notable essay is T. Winner’s ‘Syncretism in Chekhov’s Art: A Study of Polystructured Texts’, pp. 153–66.
Thomas Eekman (e
W. Gerhardie, Anton Chekhov: A Critical Study (London: MacDonald, 1974), ‘Bloomsbury’ Chekhov, but well informed.
Michael Henry Heim and Simon Karlinsky (trs. and eds.), Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1973).
Ronald Hingley, A New Life of Anton Chekhov (London: Oxford University Press, 1976).
R. L. Jackson, Chekhov: A Collection of Essays: 20th-Century Views (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1967).
R. L. Jackson (ed.), Reading Chekhov’s Text (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993).
S. Koteliansky (tr., ed.), Anton Chekhov: Literary and Theatrical Reminiscences (New York: Blom, 1968).
Virginia Llewellyn-Smith, Chekhov and the Lady with the Little Dog (London: Oxford University Press, 1973).
Carolina de Maegd-Soëp, Chekhov and Women (Columbus: Slavica, 1987).
Charles Meister, Chekhov Criticism 1880 Through 1986 (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 1988).
V. S. Pritchett, Chekhov: A Spirit Set Free (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1988).
Donald Rayfield, Anton Chekhov: A Life (London: HarperCollins, 1997).
Savely Senderovich and Munir Sendich (eds), Anton Chekhov Rediscovered: A Collection of New Studies with a Comprehensive Bibliography (East Lansing, Mich.: Russian Language Journal, 1987).
L. Shestov, Anton Chekhov and Other Essays (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966).
E. J. Simmons, Chekhov: A Biography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1966, and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).
C. J. G. Turner, Time and Temporal Structure in Chekhov (Department of Russian Language and Literature, University of Birmingham, 1994).
R. and N. Wellek (eds), Chekhov: New Perspectives (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1984), anthology of essays with useful bibliography.
T. Winner, Chekhov and his Prose (New York: Holt, 1966).
Nick Worrall, File on Chekhov (London: Methuen, 1986).
ARTICLES
Petr Bitsilli, ‘From Chekhonte to Chekhov’ in V. Erlich (ed.), Twentieth-Century Russian Literary Criticism (London: Yale University Press, 1975), 317 pp.
Thomas Eekman, ‘The Narrator and the Hero in Chekhov’s Prose’ in California Slavic Studies, 8, Berkeley, California (1975), pp. 93–129.
M. Fink, ‘The Hero’s Descent to the Underworld in Chekhov’ in The Russian Review, 53:1, Columbus, Ohio (January 1994), pp. 67–80.
WORKS ON INDIVIDUAL STORIES IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER
‘The Bishop’
N. A. Nilsson Studies in Chekhov’s Narrative Technique: ‘The Steppe’ and ‘The Bishop’ (Stockholm: Alquist & Wiksell, 1968).
Peter Stowell, ‘Chekhov’s “The Bishop”: The Annihilation of Faith and Identity through Time’, Studies in Short Fiction, 12 (1975), pp. 117–22.
‘The Bride’
Robert L. Jackson, ‘“The Betrothed”: Chekhov’s Last Testament’ in Savely Senderovich and Munir Sendich (eds.), Anton Chekhov Rediscovered: A Collection of New Studies with a Comprehensive Bibliography (East Lansing, Mich.: Russian Language Journal, 1987), pp. 51–62.
Gordon McVay, ‘Chekhov’s Last Two Stories: Dreaming of Happiness’ in Nicholas Luker (ed.), The Short Story in Russia, 1900–1917 (Nottingham: Astra Press, 1991), pp. 1–22.
‘The House with the Mezzanine’
Paul Debreczeny, ‘Chekhov’s Use of Impressionism in “The House with the Mansard”’ in Russian Narrative and Visual Art: Varieties of Seeing, ed. Roger Anderson and Paul Debreczeny (Gainesville, Fla.: University Press of Florida, 1994), pp. 101–23.
‘In the Ravine’
Paul Debreczeny, ‘The Device of Conspicuous Silence in Tolstoj, Cexov, and Faulkner’ in V. Terras (ed.), American Contributions to the Eighth International Congress of Slavists, Vol. 2: Literature (Columbus, Ohio: Slavica, 1978), pp. 125–45.
Hugh McLean, ‘Chekhov’s “In the Ravine”: Six Antipodes’ in W. E. Harkins (ed.), American Contributions to the Sixth International Congress of Slavists, Vol. 2: Literary Contributions (The Hague: Mouton, 1968), pp. 285–305.
‘Ionych’
Alexandar Mihailovic, ‘Eschatology and Entombment in “Ionych”’ in R. L. Jackson (ed.), Reading Chekhov’s Text (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993), pp. 103–14.
‘The Lady with the Little Dog’
C. R. S. Cockrell, ‘The Lady with the Dog’ in C. R. S. Cockrell et al. (eds.), The Voice of a Giant: Essays on Seven Russian Prose Classics (University of Exeter, 1985), pp. 81–92.
Yael Greenberg, ‘The Presentation of the Unconscious in Chekhov’s “Lady with Lapdog”’, Modern Language Review, 86:1 (1991), pp. 126–30.
‘Man in a Case’, ‘Gooseberries’ and ‘About Love’
John Freedman, ‘Narrative Technique and the Art of Story-Telling in Anton Chekhov’s “Little Trilogy”’ in Thomas Eekman (ed.), Critical Essays on Anton Chekhov (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989), pp. 103–11.
David E. Maxwell, ‘The Unity of Chekhov’s “Little Trilogy”’ in Paul Debreczeny and Thomas Eekman (eds.), Chekhov’s Art of Writing (Columbus: Slavica, 1977), pp. 35–53.
‘Peasants’
John Wm. Harrison, ‘Symbolic Action in Chekhov’s “Peasants” and “In the Ravine”’, Modern Fiction Studies, 7:4 (Winter 1961), pp. 369–72.
L. M. O’Toole, ‘Chekhov: The Peasants’ in Structure, Style and Interpretation in the Russian Short Story (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 203–20.
CHRONOLOGY
1836 Gogol’s The Government Inspector
1852 Turgenev’s Sketches from a Hunter’s Album
1860 Dostoyevsky’s Notes From the House of the Dead (1860–61)
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov born on 17 January at Taganrog, a port on the Sea of Azov, the third son of Pavel Yegorovich Chekhov, a grocer, and Yevgeniya Yakovlevna, née Morozova
1861 Emancipation of the serfs by Alexander II. Formation of revolutionary Land and Liberty Movement
1862 Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons
1863–4 Polish revolt. Commencement of intensive industrialization; spread of the railways; banks established; factories built.
Elective District Councils (zemstvos) set up; judicial reform Tolstoy’s The Cossacks (1863)
1865 Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1864) by Leskov, a writer much admired by Chekhov
1866 Attempted assassination of Alexander II by Karakozov
Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment
1867 Emile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin
1868 Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot
1868 Chekhov begins to attend Taganrog Gymnasium after wasted year at a Greek school
1869 Tolstoy’s War and Peace
1870 Municipal government reform
1870–71 Franco-Prussian War
1873 Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1873–7)
Chekhov sees local productions of Hamlet and Gogol’s The Government Inspector
1875 Chekhov writes and produces humorous magazine for his brothers in Moscow, The Stammerer, containing sketches of life in Taganrog
1876 Chekhov’s father declared bankrupt and flees to Moscow, followed by family except Chekhov, who is left in Taganrog to complete schooling. Reads Buckle, Hugo and Schopenhauer
1877–8 War with Turkey
1877 Chekhov’s first visit to Moscow; his family living in great hardship
1878 Chekhov writes dramatic juvenilia: full-length drama Father-lessness (MS destroyed), comedy Diamond Cut Diamond and vaudeville Why Hens Cluck (none published)
1879 Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1879–80)
Tolstoy’s Confession (1879–82)
Chekhov matriculates from Gymnasium with good grades.
Wins scholarship to Moscow University to study medicine
Makes regular contributions to humorous magazine Alarm Clock
1880 G
Guy de Maupassant’s Boule de Suif Chekhov introduced by artist brother Nikolay to landscape painter Levitan with whom has lifelong friendship
First short story, ‘A Letter from the Don Landowner Vladimirovich N to His Learned Neighbour’, published in humorous magazine Dragonfly. More stories published in Dragonfly under pseudonyms, chiefly Antosha Chekhonte.
1881 Assassination of Alexander II; reactionary, stifling regime of Alexander III begins
Sarah Bernhardt visits Moscow (Chekhov calls her acting ‘superficial’)
Chekhov continues to write very large numbers of humorous sketches for weekly magazines (until 1883). Becomes regular contributor to Nikolay Leykin’s Fragments, a St Petersburg weekly humorous magazine. Writes (1881–2) play now usually known as Platonov (discovered 1923), rejected by Maly Theatre; tries to destroy manuscript
1882 Student riots at St Petersburg and Kazan universities. More discrimination against Jews
Chekhov is able to support the family with scholarship money and earnings from contributions to humorous weeklies
1883 Tolstoy’s What I Believe
Chekhov gains practical experience at Chikino Rural Hospital
1884 Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck. J.-K. Huysmans’ À Rebours Chekhov graduates and becomes practising physician at Chikino. First signs of his tuberculosis in December
Six stories about the theatre published as Fairy-Tales of Melpomene. His crime novel, The Shooting Party, serialized in Daily News
1885–6 Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886)
On first visit to St Petersburg, Chekhov begins friendship with very influential Aleksey Suvorin (1834–1912), editor of the highly regarded daily newspaper New Times. Chekhov has love affairs with Dunya Efros and Natalya Golden (later his sister-in-law). His TB is now unmistakable