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There should be a name for this moment in a story when, a situation having been established, a new character arrives. We automatically expect that new element to alter or complicate or deepen the situation. A man stands in an elevator, muttering under his breath about how much he hates his job. The door opens, someone gets in. Don’t we automatically understand that this new person has appeared to alter or complicate or deepen the first man’s hatred of his job? (Otherwise, what’s he doing here? Get rid of him and find us someone who will alter, complicate, or deepen things. It’s a story, after all, not a webcam.)
Having understood Marya as “she who is unhappy with the monotony of her life,” we’re already waiting for some altering presence to arrive.
And here comes Hanov.
This is the big event of the page, and notice this: having made Marya on its first page, the story didn’t stay static for long at all. (We didn’t get a second page merely explicating her boredom.) This should tell us something about the pace of a story versus the pace of real life: the story is way faster, compressed, and exaggerated—a place where something new always has to be happening, something relevant to that which has already happened.
So, this is both a realistic description (it’s spring, snow melts, roads get muddy) and a little poem that adjusts our understanding of the story.
Roughly speaking, we understand this description to indicate: “a steadily degrading situation.” The road is “growing worse and worse.” They are driving “into the woods.” There’s “no turning off.” There’s a cost to this trip (those twigs in the face).
This falls on us differently (with more foreboding, say) than a description in which they drove “out of the woods and into the bright sunshine” to find that “the road widened welcomingly” and “low-hanging flowers brushed against her cheeks softly as the cart gently rolled past a joyful peasant wedding.”
A work of art moves us by being honest and that honesty is apparent in its language and its form and in its resistance to concealment.
Marya’s dilemma is still in effect. She’s still lonely and bored. By removing the first-order solution (Hanov), Chekhov has made his story more ambitious. In its early pages it said, “Once there was a lonely person.” It might have gone on to say, “And isn’t it wonderful? That lonely person met another lonely person and now neither is lonely.” By declining to go there, the story now begins asking a more profound question: “What if a lonely person can find no way out of her loneliness?”
This is where, to me, the story starts to feel big. It’s saying: loneliness is real and consequential and there is no easy way out of it for some of us who are in it and sometimes there’s no way out at all.
We care about Marya, we expected Hanov to help her, and suddenly he’s gone.
Now what?
Chekhov is averse to making pure saints or pure sinners. We saw this with Hanov (rich, handsome bumbler and drunk) and we see it now with Marya (struggling noble schoolteacher who has constructed her own cage through joyless complicity in her situation). This complicates things; our first-order inclination to want to understand a character as “good” or “bad” gets challenged. The result is an uptick in our attentiveness; subtly rebuffed by the story, we get, we might say, a new respect for its truthfulness. Here we’d just about settled into a simple view of Marya as a completely innocent, blameless victim of a harsh system. But then the story says, “Well, hold on; isn’t one quality of a harsh system that it deforms the people within it and makes them complicit in their own destruction?” (Which is another way of saying: “Let’s not forget that Marya is a human being, and complicated, and susceptible to error.”)
Hers is still a sad situation, but now we understand that she contributed to it, by not having the wherewithal to rise to the occasion of the work. I revise her slightly in my mind: she’s limited, a bit less capable.
On the other hand, what kind of Russia is this that compels a person to work a job to which she has no calling, and be so reduced by it? To have to collect funds and teach in a drafty room and get no support from the community? How could anyone love that life? (I find myself thinking of Terry Eagleton’s assertion that “capitalism plunders the sensuality of the body.”)
Just imagine the many Maryas who have existed, all over the world, their best selves sacrificed to exigency, whose grace suffered under the pressure of being poorly suited to the toil required of them to make a living. (Maybe, like me, you’ve been one of them yourself.)
The movie producer and all-around mensch Stuart Cornfeld once told me that in a good screenplay, every structural unit needs to do two things: (1) be entertaining in its own right and (2) advance the story in a non-trivial way.
We will henceforth refer to this as “the Cornfeld Principle.”
In a mediocre story, nothing much will happen inside the teahouse. The teahouse is there to allow the writer to supply local color, to tell us what such a place is like. Or something might happen in there, but it won’t mean much. Some plates will fall and get broken, a ray of sunlight will come randomly through the window to no purpose, just because rays of sunlight do that in the real world, a dog will run in and run out, because the writer recently saw a real dog do that in a real teahouse. All of this may be “entertaining in its own right” (lively, funny, described in vivid language, etc.) but is not “advancing the story in a non-trivial way.”
When a story is “advanced in a non-trivial way,” we get the local color and something else. The characters go into the scene in one state and leave in another. The story becomes a more particular version of itself; it refines the question it’s been asking all along.
For example, there’s a sequence in the film Bicycle Thieves that starts about fifty-four minutes in. The events in that sequence are: A father and his son are searching for the father’s stolen bicycle. A lead they’re following slips away, because of a mistake the father makes. When the son asks him about this, the father slaps the son, who starts crying. The father tells the son to wait on a bridge while he goes down to search by the river.
Then the father hears some commotion: a boy is apparently drowning. He thinks, and we think, that it might be the son. But no: the son appears at the top of a long flight of stairs, on the bridge, just where he was told to wait.
Father and son walk along the river. Feeling bad about that slap, the father checks his wallet, then proposes an extravagance: they’ll go for pizza. At the restaurant, they’re seated near a wealthy family. The son curiously observes a rich boy his age. Noting this, the father, moved to honesty, opens up to the boy. (The wound of the slap is healed.)
In class, watching this sequence over and over, we start noticing things we missed the first time through. For example: When the father and the son are walking sadly along the river, the boy walks on one side of a tree, the father on the other. But as they approach the next tree, the boy swerves over, and father and son pass on the same side of it. (We read this as “possible reconciliation pending?”) A truck full of celebrating soccer fans goes past (they, unlike the father and the son, are happy). The father notices his son noticing the young men in the truck and this, we suspect, combined with the shame he feels about that slap, produces the idea of taking the boy to a restaurant. (But first, he checks his wallet.) As this sweet little scene of reconciliation plays out, behind them in the frame is a loving couple, looking out at the river.
It’s a lesser sequence without those trees, that truck full of happy fans, that wallet check, that loving couple.
In the pub, we felt singing as a mode of communication, elevating these rough men. The singing made some of them cry, gave them access to a register of emotion mostly denied them in their everyday lives. But singing, here, at the end of the story, is a way of getting some violence arranged, a form of trickery committed by one brother on another. So the story also becomes about that—about exalted things being brought low. The men were uplifted and fell; the town was once nice and is now a wreck; singing can be a transcendent form of communication or a way of getting someone home to take a beating. Singing (art) is persuasive but what it will be used to persuade us to do is an open question.
Now let’s go on and try to articulate the exact nature of the good feeling we get when we juxtapose “ravine” and “singing contest.”
One thing that comes to mind is the notion of a binary: there are two singers, and the town is cleft in two. This makes me ask, of the story: Any other binaries in there? Actually, the story is full of them: the doleful, sympathy-seeking rooks and crows vs. the relatively content, chirping, energetic sparrows; the town’s former pastoral glory (it had a common, a pond, a mansion) vs. its present state (the common is “scorched” and “dust-laden,” the pond “black and almost incandescent,” the mansion “grown over with nettles”); Yashka vs. the contractor; technique vs. emotion; Boy #1 vs. Boy #2; the opposition of the beautiful artistic moment Yashka produced vs. the ugly town in which he produced it; the comfortable gentleman who is our narrator vs. the lowly rustics he’s dropped in here to observe.
So, yes, I feel that the lines needed to get that ravine into the story were “worth it.” It’s a lesser story without the ravine. The ravine, we might say, “unlocks” all of the binary references that are, we now see, seeded within the story.
What does it mean, that Yashka has won? To answer, we try to distill the essential characteristics of the two performances. Broadly speaking: the contractor was technically wonderful but produced no feeling in his audience except amazement at his proficiency. Yashka, a little wobbly on technique, evoked undeniably deep feelings in his audience and caused a startling, not entirely rational memory to arise in the mind of the narrator. So, we feel the story to be saying something about technical proficiency vs. emotional power, and coming down in favor of the latter. It is saying that the highest aspiration of art is to move the audience and that if the audience is moved, technical deficiencies are immediately forgiven.
And this is where I always fall in love, again, with the story and forgive it all its faults. Here I’ve been resenting Turgenev’s technical bumbling—those piles of noses and brows and hairlines; the stop-and-start action; the digressions inside of digressions—and suddenly I’m moved: by Yashka’s performance, which is beautiful though not particularly technically accomplished, and by Turgenev’s performance, an analogous performance, also beautiful though technically rickety.
I’m moved by this clumsy work of art that seems to want to make the case that art may be clumsy if only it moves us.
“Always be escalating,” then, can be understood as “Be alert, always, to the possibilities you have created for variation.” If an element recurs, the second appearance is an opportunity for variation and, potentially, escalation. Let’s say that, in a film, we show a place setting (plate, spoon, fork, knife), and then the camera tracks across three other, identical place settings. That’s static. But make the right adjustments to each of the four plate/spoon/fork/knife arrangements, show these in sequence, and that more variation-blessed sequence will be felt to have escalation in it and, therefore, meaning. For example: let’s say that, as we track over the plates in sequence, we see: (1) correct/full arrangement (plate/spoon/fork/knife), (2) spoon missing, (3) spoon and fork missing, (4) all the silverware missing (only the plate remains); this will be felt to mean, let’s say, “evacuation” or “diminishment.”
Here, the pattern of variation isn’t too neat or directly metaphorical. (The clothes don’t, for example, go from unfrozen to frozen, as Nikita and Vasili soon will, but are frozen the first time we see them.) We barely notice the variations at speed but, on closer examination, feel them to be perfectly pitched. Rather than neatly spitting out some predetermined, reductive meaning, they produce a feeling of mystery, the metaphorical world lightly infiltrating the physical.