Anton, O Anton

May 6, 2015
Anton, O Anton

Chekhov’s stories work – we see that they are true – because they are like the stories we know and tell; they are not like the stories professional story-tellers tell, not like the stories most professional story-tellers write. They are nowhere so neat. Chekhov’s stories begin somewhere toward the middle and they break off, unfinished, well before the end. As in “A Doctor’s Visit.”

Chekhov's Back

Korolyov, the doctor in the story, is called out one late evening to attend the unhappy daughter of an unhappy factory owner, Madame Lyalikov. In the grand house by the factory, the only person that is happy is the young woman’s governess, who continues to live with the family; Christina Dmitryevna enjoys eating, she eats well – expensively, heartily, even greedily.

          Circumstances compel Korolyov to spend the night, and uncomfortable in his room that smells of fresh paint, he goes for a walk to look around. He knows nothing of factories. He is baffled by them: “Fifteen hundred to two thousand work people are working without rest in unhealthy surroundings, making bad cotton goods, living on the verge of starvation, and only waking from the nightmare at rare intervals in the tavern.” They are overseen by perhaps a hundred more, whose lives are in “imposing fines . . . abuse [and] injustice.” Only the “two or three so-called owners enjoy the profits, though they don’t work at all . . . .” But what are the “profits”? How do they “enjoy” them? Neither Madame Lyalikov nor her poor, ill daughter are at all happy. “The only one who enjoys her life,” Korolyov decides, “is Christina Dmitryevna, a stupid, middle-aged maiden lady in pince-nez. And so it appears that all these five blocks of buildings are at work, and inferior cotton is sold in Eastern markets, simply that Christina Dmitryevna may eat sterlet and drink Madeira.”

          The doctor sums up: “The only person happy here is the governess . . . the factory hands are working for her gratification.” But not entirely, not exactly – there is one more step to take. That the factory hands work for the governess, Korolyov says to himself, is “only apparent: she is only the figurehead. The real person, for whom everything is being done, is the devil.’

          “And he thought about the devil, in whom he did not believe . . . .”

Turn Korolyov’s conclusions on their head, and it is as the Apostle says: If (in his case) Christ has not been raised from the dead as we preach then our preaching is in vain, and your faith is futile. Those that have fallen asleep in Christ aren’t asleep at all, they are dead. If we still hope, then on what grounds? Our hope is pitiable.

          But of course, you know that Christ has been raised; I say so, and what I say is true, whether it is or not.

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More than Paul’s preaching or even the devil’s absence, Chekhov’s stories remind us that – however hard we try, however much we want to, however strong our faith we can – however powerful our microscope we can’t find the beginning and however long our telescope we can’t see to the end. In the meantime, however diligently we apply ourselves, we cannot even get the middle into a decent order. Something will come up, will distract even the most serious focused, even obsessive of us – scientist, theologian, engineer, philosopher – something that doesn’t fit or belong. He will lose track. He’ll forget where he began, certainly with 0, but wasn’t there a reason to skip from there to -7 or +9.3? And just as she decides where she will begin again, something else swims, wavers, shimmers into view, emerges like the Cheshire cat – something she both can and cannot see. So how to count it? Maybe there are things Then, she doesn’t know where she began – was it with 1? Or had she started somewhere before (-7?) or after (+9)? Then, as he decides where she will begin again, something else swims, wavers, shimmers into view, something he both can and can’t see. There are things uncountable. Oh, shit: look over there. There. There! There seems to be no end to them. However many he can put into this box or into however many boxes he can build . . . Shit!

          She may give the shit a name, “inapplicable” or “mystery” or “yet to be explained:’ but she realizes (against every yearning that naming does not get any of it into any of her actual boxes.

         

To love about Chekhov’s stories – if not about either the Apostle’s preaching or the devil’s silence – is this: they help us rest comfortable with dis-order and un-known, and ill-fit, even when we’re not – either comfortable, much less resting at all