MY GRANDFATHER CHEKHOV AND GREAT-GRANDFATHER PUSHKIN

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Newspaper version. Read the full text in the book of essays by Andrey Bitov, Igor Kikh, Alexander Chudakov, Donald Rayfield "Four Times Chekhov". Will be released in Emergency Exit. 0. In the textbook story "Vanka Zhukov", an apprentice boy, complaining about ...

Newspaper version. Read the full text in the book of essays by Andrey Bitov, Igor Kikh, Alexander Chudakov, Donald Rayfield "Four Times Chekhov". Will be released in Emergency Exit.

0.

In the textbook story "Vanka Zhukov", an apprentice boy, complaining about life in such a way that the reader's soul turns over, writes the address on the envelope: "To the village, Grandfather" - and throws the letter into the box.

The author of this story spoke shortly before his death as follows: "They will read me for another five years, and then they will forget." But even Chekhov, with his perspicacity, had no idea what kind of century it would be! 1904 - 2004 ... list the historical events yourself.

Stalin has been gone for more than half a century.

And here we are still reading and staging Chekhov. The whole world! This, it would seem, is only Russian. Nothing but complaining to him: that's what we are! Dear Anton Palych... we are innocent! These are all of them ... We inscribe an envelope, like Aibolit: "To Doctor Chekhov."

On the other hand, only a hundred years have passed ...

1.

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born on January 29, 1860, that is, still in the year of the Goat, and not in the year of the Monkey, although on its very border, that is, in the very Pushkin year, sixty years later, when the eastern year is not completely repeated. only according to the beast, but also according to the elements - the year of the Metal Monkey. Once in 60 years such an attack. Either Pushkin or Chekhov... Besides, he was born on the day of Pushkin's death. Do not consider, without hesitation, is this a sign?

In his poetics, Chekhov seems to be as close as possible to Pushkin. What brings them so close in my mind? So much so that not only before Pushkin and after Chekhov, like the 18th century and the 20th century ... but as if there was nothing between them, neither Tolstoy nor Dostoevsky ...

Namely: suddenly Pushkin and - immediately Chekhov.

By age, Pushkin could have been Chekhov's grandfather, as Chekhov could have been mine.

<…>

3.

Indeed, everything is too recent. Russian literature has gone through its great development, from Pushkin and Gogol to Chekhov and Blok, also in just a hundred years.

The so-called golden age of Russian literature - Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol - is not even discussed, like the wedding night: it was so long ago, so it was obscured by the arrays of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

<...> Then Russian literature continued to exaggerate its role, lost its immunity and caught a cold. A doctor was required.

Chekhov did not exaggerate his role. He knew the diagnosis.

So this is what connects Pushkin and Chekhov with a simple connecting union "and"!

Civilization! Civilized people!

For the rest, Russian literature is brilliantly wild or wildly brilliant. Only Pushkin and Chekhov neatly frame this sumptuous concoction of genres and styles. Neither sermon nor aggression sticks out in either. Both did not confuse the role with the appointment. Knight of honor and knight of shame. Honor and shame are the working tools of the individual. The absence of pathos, pathos, a naked idea - even a thought is hidden in such a clear presentation that it may not seem like a thought until you grow up enough to perceive it.

That is why it is necessary to impatiently proclaim about Pushkin that he is outdated (from Pisarev to Mayakovsky, right up to today's encroachments), and about Chekhov - that he is boring, gray, belittled, etc. (from his contemporaries, through Akhmatova, to Brodsky). The miracle of the phenomenon of the world cultural level in one Russian person (Pushkin) is tantamount to the miracle of the phenomenon of civilization in the Russian intellectual in the first generation (Chekhov).

Nobility and dignity. Honor and shame. In other words, culture.

The typically Russian gulf between artistic culture and civilization was bridged only in these two cultural heroes.

4.

<...> Chekhov did not live to be sixty, but only to 44. As if he did not survive the defeat in the Russo-Japanese War - he did not want either the First World War, or the revolution, or repression, or emigration. I left all this to my (not much younger) colleagues Bunin and Merezhkovsky, Gorky and Kuprin. Went without rehab.

I was always surprised how our regime allowed Russian literature. All dissident texts did not seem to me so destructive for him. The answer turned out to be simpler than I expected: it was easier to teach her to read it incorrectly.

And the Soviet government did not prohibit, but appropriated (like everything else) pre-revolutionary literature: from whom it could - it made revolutionaries, from the rest - victims and exposers of the tsarist regime. Russian literary heroes have become such effigies of people, the shadow of their tortured creators: either wretched, or fallen, or loyal subjects.

The gallery of Chekhov's heroes, played by the Moscow Art Theater, has become completely unsightly and even aged Chekhov. And he became such a “man in a case”, a provincial doctor, that is, he survived the revolution and accepted it. Soviet literary criticism theoretically confused the author and the hero; the Soviet government erected monuments to all the classics, creating in the past such a cast-iron Politburo of Russian literature, an apostolic dozen predecessors: Pushkin - Lermontov - Gogol, Goncharov - Turgenev - Tolstoy, Chekhov - Blok and Gorky as a passing banner. Dostoevsky was once again imprisoned in a fortress (no other than for his recognition in the West).

And Chekhov became like a school portrait, like the author of "Vanka Zhukov" and "Kashtanka": so elderly, positive, not rich ... He looks at us with a kind look from under his pince-nez.

And the fact that he was a handsome young man, a fashionista and a womanizer, a lover of walking (he tied himself to a chair so as not to escape from a hard labor desk), a lover of acquiring real estate (a house in Moscow, an estate in Melikhovo, a villa in Yalta), is no longer was part of the image of a member of the Politburo of Russian literature, and when I (not so long ago) found out that he was also under two meters tall, I experienced a kind of shock. <…>

What struck me more than the West in the West? Chekhov's popularity

There he was more able to read in the sense in which he wrote: why is the cherry orchard cut down? What binds Uncle Vanya's hands? Why doesn't a dead seagull fly?

In the West, this is exactly how they don't understand Russians: why don't they understand themselves?

They think too much of themselves. And in that, and in another sense.

5.

Chekhov is a visionary.

Did Chekhov foresee Soviet power? Hardly. But what the 20th century would be like for Russia - he felt with his skin, like that Japanese fish that predicts earthquakes.

Otherwise, why would he go to Japan by land, knowing his diagnosis (intestinal tuberculosis), cruelly toiling with his stomach, through the whole of Siberia, through the whole of Sakhalin?

To, as he wrote in a letter to someone, "to count the Japanese whores"? ..

He just didn’t have enough strength for Japan. He had to count the exiles.

All his strength was spent on a journey through the future Gulag. He wrote the book "Sakhalin Island", which, except for specialists, no one read, like Pushkin's "History of Pugachev". Pushkin was considered history, and Chekhov was considered geography.

In Russia, these two subjects are inseparable.

One can also see Pushkin's testament in this: Pushkin was going to China with the secret intention of visiting his exiled Decembrist friends in Siberia.

In 2002, I had a chance to repeat the Chekhov route with one fundamental difference: I did not reach Sakhalin, but flew - not a month on the road, but several hours. And I drove Sakhalin towards Chekhov not from north to south, but from south to north, and not on horseback, but on an all-terrain vehicle. There were no roads, just like under Chekhov. There were no horses. I sat in the cab with the driver, I was taken carefully, like an egg, and yet the journey was considered extreme. How, then, to qualify Chekhov's journey?

Feat. Chekhov would never have used such a word about himself.

He greatly appreciated every sober, rational person doing something. In Stalin's time, my idol was the great Russian traveler Przhevalsky, and I was especially pleased to learn that it was Chekhov who wrote his obituary. He knew how much it costs in Russia: how much is not income, but a contribution.

There was nothing in common with either Przhevalsky or Chekhov in my journey, except for the immensity of my native space: it took me a week to drive only one Sakhalin by car. This outlying island is, in itself, the size of a normal country: the interests of the Japanese on this island are easy to understand. It is their exhibits that fill the local museum of local lore, it is there that you can learn something about the indigenous people.

I liked the Nivkhs the most: they were intelligent in a Chekhovian way, these pagans and hunters: they did not want to cheat on themselves, they were dying out and they knew it. Who were they to live among?

When I reached the northern point, the city of Alexandrovsk, where Chekhov began his journey, I finally opened his book on the first page.

This book is amazingly written! The style of the absence of style, which only a stylist of the highest standard is capable of, gives the book great dignity. I looked out the window: a puddle that had not dried since the time of Chekhov separated the hotel and the pub trailer, where the morning man without a hangover entered, and I saw in his features the features of a convict grandfather, with whom Chekhov went ashore: the ruined pier of that time still went into the sea . The fact that this is the same pier will be reported to you as a historical landmark.

Sakhalin keeps a grateful memory of Chekhov: they were visited by a great man! Touching Chekhov's museums have also become museums of the pre-revolutionary Gulag, combining literature with local history. <…>

7.

Chekhov's works are almost devoid of pathos or edification. His sermon is a mystery and is simple: finally be like people! That is, be more decent and honest, drink less and work better, take care of the forest and soil ... The concept of "ecology" did not exist then. Another reason why Chekhov turned out to be so permanently modern is that his consciousness is essentially ecological.

Here he is also Pushkin's successor, for Pushkin is the ecology of Russian speech. <…>

Did Chekhov know that he was dying out like the last Nivkh?

Chekhov's last words turned out to be: "Their shterbe." This greatly excites the idle Russian mind.

Why in German? Sobering up the hypotheses, I argued that because the doctor was a German nearby and he told him his opinion as a doctor to a doctor. Recently I heard that he said in pure Russian: "Oh, bitch!" - meaning either life or his wife.

So what Chekhov thought is unknown. And what he believed. All this is restrained, all this is on a leash of an artistic task. However ... “In our sick time, when laziness, boredom of life and disbelief seized European societies, when dislike for life and fear of death reign in a strange mutual combination, when even the best people sit idly by, justifying their laziness and their depravity by the lack of a specific goal in life, ascetics are needed like the sun, ”we read in the same obituary to Przhevalsky, 1888.