3 - Enacting the present: Chekhov, art and the everyday

Summary

The world's unity is a moment in its concrete uniqueness.

(Mikhail Bakhtin)

This chapter will treat Zinaida Gippius's critique of Chekhov as a productive misreading. While recognizing the fertility of her distinction between byt and zhizn′, I hope to show that, rather than leading to an exitless endpoint, Chekhov's immersion in byt marks the first moment in a journey towards a new, dynamic version of zhizn′. I do so by reexamining the symbiosis binding Chekhov's everyday to the forces of anti-narrative brought to light in the introduction in the context of the analysis in chapters 1 and 2.

Chekhov's anti-narrative strategies are part of the broader resistance to aesthetics in which Russian culture habitually engages. There is no writer who better epitomizes Russia's perennial doubts about the value of art. It is no coincidence that the Sakhalin Project – a monumental exercise in sociological documentation – was undertaken when Chekhov was at his artistic peak, as if to appease a conscience still troubled by uncertainties as to whether literary talent, too, can serve a moral purpose. Accordingly, Chekhov's own art is littered with images of the aesthetic linking the category to inhuman objectification, and pure mauvaise foi. In the early story, “The Privy Councillor” (“Tainyi sovetnik”), a. high-ranking official's visit to his relations turns out, to their dismay, to have been motivated by condescending illusions about the “simple beauty” of country life: “ ‘Upon my soul, how charming!,’ he said, scrutinizing us as though we were clay figures. ‘This is really life. This is what reality has to be like.’ ”