ARTicles vol. 1 i.1: When Father Comes Home

Anton Chekhov celebrated a life that would have crushed most others. Even at the height of his literary success he had ample opportunity to witness and experience life’s many unfairnesses. New and old oppressions–a precocious mortality from tuberculosis that presented as hemorrhages at twenty-four and killed him at forty-four, and a partially resolved past–haunted his newly achieved “sense of personal freedom” that, he told a friend in 1889, he had “paid for with his youth.”

In his plays Chekhov illustrated with insight and feeling the constant temptation he suffered to yield to the circumstances over which he triumphed. His characters struggle to avoid the many roads of surrender to a harsh and unfair world. The multiple guises of slavery–resignation, self deception, intoxication, identification with aggressors–continually trip them up and threaten to consume their lives. The population of Uncle Vanya fall away from work and truth, away from responsibility and self knowledge, into drink, denial, and illusion, as the world rots and is consumed around them. The consumption of Chekhov’s lungs is mapped in the impulsive inexorable consumption of the forests; the cattle eat the seedlings as the hawks pursue the chicks, the locals are scratching at the front door, the inhabitants are drunk and infected.

The play describes certain vicissitudes of surrender but never indulges in judgment or despair. Vanya accuses Yelena of sacrificing her youth to her husband the Professor, as Vanya’s sister did before her, but he readily confesses that he is the one who “worshipped” the Professor “like a dog.” Astrov, recognizing the romance, asks Vanya if he is “worried about his little Professor.” Vanya introduces himself in the Professor’s presence as the “relief nurse.” He says he “lived and breathed for him,” that he “squeezed every last drop for him.”

As so often happens in Chekhov, fiction and autobiography tread parallel paths. These last words of Vanya evoke language that Chekhov himself used in 1889 in a famous letter to his mentor, the writer Suvorin. That same year Chekhov had begun work on The Wood Demon, the unfinished, unproduced play that was later transformed into Uncle Vanya. In The Wood Demon, a conservationist battles a father–a blowhard, literary critic–for his daughter’s affections. The girl chooses the conservationist.

Uncle Vanya, the rewrite, is darker. It focuses on the failed attempts of several characters to release themselves from a loved and hated father-figure. In the letter to Suvorin, Chekhov similarly describes his efforts to free himself from the legacy of a harsh childhood at the hands of a tyrannical father:

“Try and write a story about a young man–the son of a serf, a former grocer, choir boy, schoolboy and university student, raised on respect for rank, kissing the priests’ hands, worshipping the ideas of others, and giving thanks for every piece of bread, receiving frequent whippings, making the rounds as a tutor without galoshes, brawling, torturing animals, enjoying dinners at the houses of rich relatives, needlessly hypocritical before God and man merely to acknowledge his own insignificance–write about how this young man squeezes the slave out of himself drop by drop and how, on waking up one fine morning, he finds that the blood coursing through his veins is no longer the blood of a slave, but that of a real human being.” (Karlinsky, 85).

Vanya also wakes to self-recognition, but his discovery is the reverse of that described in Chekhov’s letter. Vanya’s productive years have been wasted in blind devotion to a false god. Unable to face his own participation in his servitude, he can only blame the Professor. His tragicomic revolution readily collapses back into a regressed and timeless world of a boy king holding the fort for an absent father.

Through his literary gifts and his resilient nature, Chekhov freed himself financially, from his family, and emotionally, from a series of mentors and father substitutes. At twenty-six, Chekhov thanked Grigorovich, a famous older writer, for his words of encouragement, but a few years later Chekhov wrote to Suvorin, his new mentor, “I’m glad I didn’t listen to Grigorovich.” Chekhov worshipped Tolstoy for his moral certainty, then began to distance himself, attributing his former attachment to “a sort of hypnosis.” He rejected the later puritanical Tolstoy, with feeling, and complained that he ought to be arrested. “Devil take the philosophy of the great ones of the world!” (Laffitte, 185).

Biographers have speculated that Chekhov’s keen observational skills may have created a distance that limited his capacity for intimacy, just as his empathy may have muted his aggression. Perhaps humor was his most direct outlet for gratification. He discovered the power of theater through humor when, as a teenager, he impersonated a beggar and successfully obtained charity at the home of an uncle. His writing skills flourished in humor through caricature and parody. The mature Chekhov relied on irony and surprise–putting wisdom in the mouths of fools and fits of blind foolishness in his wise men–to create morally ambiguous characters that subvert our expectations. The humorist Chekhov declares his liberation but creates Vanya to express his disavowed passivity. Vanya makes Chekhov’s struggle with passivity overt. He is a punchline. His life is a joke.

By the play’s end, the question becomes less developmental and more existential. Why go on? And how? Astrov and Sonya seek solace in work and the promise of heaven, whereas Chekhov in his letters pledged to abjure his father’s lies and violence. But Chekhov also mocks finality and closure. He identifies himself with the Professor, the buffoon, by promising, “After everything that’s happened, after what I have learned in these last few hours, I could write volumes for posterity about the way we ought to be living our lives.”

Dr. Phillip Freeman is a psychiatrist and a training and supervising psychoanalyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute. He practices in Newton.