Thoughts on Anton Chekhov
Chekhov titled one of his short stories, “A trifle from life”. It well could be the title of all of his short stories. It could be surprising, when social media brims with its appreciation for Kafka, that I had to drop reading Kafka before I picked up this collection of stories by Chekhov because I discovered I didn’t like reading absurdist writing.
Chekhov stands out, as many have already pointed out, for writing life — the life one might never notice or never consider significant enough to record. He writes that part of our unnoticed, ordinary life. The incidents that Chekhov records would rarely make it to the pages of biographies or autobiographies. They are just trifles from life, boring everyday happenings, devoid of any grand motive but nevertheless cumulatively shape our personalities.
Get Sahithi A’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
When Chekhov writes about a boy who confides his secret in an adult only to see the adult betray him, he captures the moment a child gets a glimpse of adulthood or when the child is deprived of his childhood. The story “Misery” reflects the interplay of poverty, class, and isolation through a man who loses his son but can’t share it with anyone because people refuse to lend an ear.
Many of the wives in his stories are hardly satisfied with their husbands. At first glance, one could wince at their unfaithfulness, but on a deeper note, it’s a commentary on trapped women. He lays open patriarchy’s conspicuous hypocrisy in defining justice in his story, “Peasant wives”. The absurdity of patriarchal morality is apparent when his character falls in love with a married woman but only the married woman is shamed and punished.
From a man who doesn’t have anybody to confide in, a woman who is trapped with her abusive husband, to a 52-year-old unmarried man who strategically proposes marriage to a middle aged earning woman, a few dominant themes run through his stories — dissatisfaction, greed, isolation, poverty, class differences, women trapped by the man’s patriarchy, and of course, the samovar. For those unaware, Samovar is a container used to make tea; there’s not a single story, perhaps, that ends without it.
While his significance lies in catching the mundane, at times one can predict the emotion he intends to portray long before he lays them out in the open, and some stories are just a little too sentimental and a rare few, boring. Also, he kills off his characters at the drop of the hat, leaving the reader puzzled. “The bet” drew me towards Chekhov and I’m leaving with “The peasant wives” and “The misery”. You would appreciate his writing if you like observing people, notice subtleties in human relations and conversations, and are not bothered much by dreary stories and non-positive endings.
