A Review of The Lady with the Little Dog and Other Stories 1896-1904, by Anton Chekhov

I. Most great literature is about specific human beings in specific human environments, and much of their content is about the peculiarities of those humans, the things that they do, their social relations, and how what they do relates to what other people are doing. In other words, they are stitched together from elements cut out of the rich and sophisticated lifeworld of culture, society, morality, and politics and coloured by social emotions like gratitude, resentment, shame, guilt, pride, ambition, greed, envy, fellowship, and love which constitute the everyday character of that world. They are about what we might call human situations. These situations are the typical (but by no means only) subject of great literature.

These situations obviously do not come from nothing; the author must describe them through the act of writing. But nor do these descriptions come from nowhere, for the description itself must come from some or other perspective. For example, a novel may be written from a sort of view from nowhere, from an inhuman, omniscient third person that does not think or feel in the ways we do, but instead merely observes and describes, doing so through bare, indiscriminate statements of fact and reports of things said, in a way that does not privilege the specific perspectives of any specific characters. Or it may be written about from the first person, exclusively from the perspective of just one character. Or it may be somewhere in between these possibilities, where the writing takes the perspective, largely, of one or several characters, but intentionally leaves the perspective of others’ opaque, thereby blending and keeping distinct various perspectives.

Notably, for my purposes here, authors may also embed a perspective within their writing that is neither from the standpoint of a specific, flesh and blood character (or combination of characters) within the story, who has (and would have) specific thoughts, feelings, reactions, and judgments about the human situations taking place, but nor from an inhuman perspective that lacks all human responsiveness and only reports on things “as they are”. The kind of perspective I am envisaging here witnesses the situations as we do, and so reacts, comments upon, and passes judgment on them, without actually being part of them. It thus exists outside of the world described the by text, outside of its particular situations, but is still nonetheless within the text.

What is peculiar about such a perspective is that it stands in the same relation to the situations depicted as us, as the reader. We too witness, react to, and pass judgment on the situations depicted by a work of literature. This being so, we naturally identify with this perspective, take heed of its observations, pronouncements, and judgments, and even imbue it with a sense that it is to provide an authoritative perspective on things. (Indeed, when we disagree with its observations, say, when something comes across as excessively moralistic, the work comes down in our esteem, which only makes sense on the presumption that it purports to be authoritative and that we are treating it as such.) And this being so, such a perspective is often deployed as a way of providing a vantage point from which the reader can not only understand the situation, but also to react and pass judgment on it in the way. Any writing that deploys such a technique embeds in their writing a sort of a human commentary on the situations it is about. But since it stands in the same relationship to the situations as we do to them, it invites our agreement with it.

For example, there is a lot of social scorekeeping tracking the proprieties and improprieties of the main characters in Pride and Prejudice that runs throughout the book. Accompanying the situation it depicts is a framework of interpretation that supports this or that feeling or judgment. But this score is kept neither by the characters nor completely disinterestedly through pure statements of fact. Rather, it is kept by a distinctively human perspective, making distinctively human judgements, and from within the social milieu that the book purports to represent. We are invited by the book to take this view of things ourselves.

While this is all very abstract, such a perspective is commonplace in fiction writing. Authors often want you to feel a certain way about the situations they are depicting, they want you to make, say, specific social, moral, or political judgments about specific characters and events, so it is only natural that they deploy narrative techniques to give you a concrete lens through which the situations can be interpreted from within the work. (Importantly, this does not mean that you can ever identify the author with such a perspective. While there is often a partial coincidence between the perspective of the author and that which is inscribed into their works, when considering those works it is only the latter which is ultimately relevant. Any coincidence with the author is a purely contingent matter.)

There is also something comforting about the presence of this perspective, because you do not really have to do the hard work of deciding whether this or that character is good or bad, to what and extent, and why, and whether this or that action was appropriate or inappropriate and to what extent, and why. Any sufficiently complex and well written fiction that deploys this technique will not, of course, provide merely comforting answers to these questions, as any sufficiently complex and well written novel recognises that true answers to these questions are not always comforting, nor always easy to come by. Nevertheless, there is some comfort in being party to an authoritative interpretation, a voice that adjudicates, at least to some extent, the fraught situations we find in works of literature, even when tentative.

II. What is curious about Chekhov’s short stories, at least those which are collected in The Lady with the Little Dog and Other Stories 1896-1904, is that the sort of perspective I have been talking about is almost entirely lacking from it. Within these stories, I find almost no explicit commentary framing the characters’ thoughts and actions, nor even an implied frame of interpretation that is subtly brought out without explicit commentary.

This is not to say of course that the characters themselves do not offer their perspectives in the stories. They often do so at length, and even with some aggression. Despite this, Chekhov mostly restrains from adjudicating between them, of giving the reader a stable position of judgment from which they can rest (or dispute). This is also not to say that there is equal lack of perspective in all stories and about all aspects of them. The peasants get a consistent treatment that is equal parts scathing (about their conduct) as it is sympathetic (given its source). It is rather that, what we might call the decisive questions of each story, the thoughts, fancies, and actions of the main characters, especially their particular perspective on their own life and immediate environment, go without an attempt at internal resolution by the text.

This lack of a definitive perspective even applies where Chekhov writes from the first-person. Compare, for example, My Life (the longest story in the collection) to Lolita or Pale Fire. In both cases the work is written in the first person – you are only getting one specific character’s perspective, and no definitive external perspective on it. However, in Lolita and Pale Fire, Nabokov masterfully builds into the narration all sorts of ironies, reasons to mistrust it, and winks at the reader. While there is therefore no explicit perspective, there is an implied perspective which, while not definitively ruling on all aspects of each book, nonetheless answers many of the decisive questions raised by and within each work, and this perspective is never really absent from these books.

You know, for example, where Lolita stands on the at once sinister and ridiculous Humbert Humbert, and you are guided by the text to stand in that same position. In the case of Pale Fire, this perspective is wrapped in several ingenious layers of narrative obscurity, hilarity, and insanity, but in some ways, the genius (and the fun) of the book is in unearthing from the text a definitive perspective on the situation (if indeed there is one, and not multiple) that is expressed by the book, however confusingly. No such presence is apparent in My Life, whose matter-of-fact title befits its utter lack of didactic closure. While the narrator has a distinct, idiosyncratic perspective on society and their vision of the good life, we are left by the text to make our own conclusions about the collection of lives shown to us. We are led to observe, but not judge.

Perhaps what most permeates this collection of stories is individuals who feel a profound lack of satisfaction in their present life, as well a yearning to walk away from it, to escape, to seek another life, or, some kind of greater meaning, or purpose. They are stories about the needs we have that are sometimes called “spiritual” or “existential”, our need to know how to live and what is worth living for. I do not know exactly what these terms are supposed to mean in this context (and whether there need be anything extra-psychological about them), but we do indeed have such needs. Throughout the course of the collection, there is no shortage of answers to these questions – in both word and deed – proffered by the characters depicted, but about the felicity of these answers Chekhov never deigns to tell us.

This is clearly intentional, and this omission leaves us (or at least me) in a state of satisfying dissatisfaction with the text. Whatever Chekhov’s intentions were in doing this, and given what I have just said above, I understand the effect to be as follows. Instead of being provided the comfort of a definite interpretation through which to understand the situations depicted (about which we can debate its relative merits), we are instead invited, by the absence of an accompanying frame, to reflect more deeply on to who and what we ought to direct our blame and approbation, and to do so in the absence of a definite starting point. It also makes us confront the possibility, especially if or when we come up short, that there are no simple answers to questions spiritual and existential, and no simple solutions to problems of the same.