By Stuart Mitchner

I should like to be a free artist and nothing more …. — Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)

Time for a premature New Year’s Eve toast by way of Chekhov’s “Champagne,” a story from the 1880s narrated by a “young, strong, hot-headed, giddy, and foolish” man in charge of a small railway station in the vast desolate remoteness of the steppe. His only diversions are getting wasted on vodka and watching the windows of the passenger trains for a glimpse of a pretty woman, for which he “would stand like a statue without breathing and stare … until the train turned into an almost invisible speck.” He and his wife are getting ready to see in the New Year. The fact that she adores him only magnifies his boredom. He has two bottles of champagne, “the real thing,” Veuve Clicquot, and as the hands of the clock point to five minutes to twelve he begins uncorking a bottle, which slips from his grasp and hits the floor, but he manages to grab it, fills two glasses, and delivers a toast, “May the New Year bring you happiness,” oh-oh, his wife’s upset, a dropped bottle is unlucky, “a bad omen,” she says. “It means some misfortune will happen to us this year.”

(One can’t help thinking of all the millions of metaphorical bottles of champagne hitting the floor in the early morning hours of November 8, but that’s another story.)

“New and Strange”

Something out of the way takes place in “Champagne” immediately before the dropping of the bottle, as the narrator demonstrates how unlikely it is for the “treasure” of Veuve Clicquot to appear in this desolate place: “It sometimes happens during a lesson in mathematics, when the very air is still with boredom, a butterfly flutters into the class-room; the boys toss their heads and begin watching its flight with interest, as though they saw before them not a butterfly but something new and strange; in the same way ordinary champagne, chancing to come into our dreary station, roused us.”

That’s how it is to read Chekhov. Butterflies come fluttering into the story, new and strange ones, just when you least expect them. In “the same way” the unexpected shift to the school room also rouses our awareness of reading the story in the 21st century in the English prose of Chekhov’s translator and faithful ever-admiring helpmate Constance Garnett (1861-1946).

Head Over Heels

Back in the the remote setting of the story proper, things quickly get out of hand. Put off by his wife’s superstitious “nonsense,” the man goes for a walk in “the still, frosty night in all its cold, inhospitable beauty.” Thus we’ve moved from the classroom butterfly to the bad omen of the dropped bottle to a night that is both beautiful and unfriendly, and out of it comes the red light of a train bringing a visitor, the station agent’s wife’s pretty aunt, like the miraculous appearance of one of the women in the windows of passing trains. While the wife is out of the room, the husband and the lively, good-natured, flirtatious aunt polish off the second bottle of champagne between them and everything goes “head over heels to the devil,” a “fearful, frantic whirlwind” that sends him “flying round like a feather,” sweeping “from the face of the earth” his wife, his aunt, and his strength and flinging him finally into some dark nameless city street, where he wonders “what further evil can happen to me?”

Kennan’s Tower

Thoughts of Chekhov have me remembering the lighted tower window at 146 Hodge Road when we lived at 146A as tenants of George Kennan, “arguably the most famous grand strategist of his age,” according to his biographer John Lewis Gaddis. Since I kept late hours in the garage apartment behind the big house, I was well aware of our beloved landlord, the prize-winning historian, diplomat, advocate for peace, and former ambassador to the U.S.S.R. working in his tower late at night, stoking his wood-burning stove as if Princeton were a village in the Caucasus, writing books, articles, op-eds for the Times, brooding over Reagan’s Star Wars Defense against Russia’s Evil Empire (those were the days!) and writing in his diary.

In an entry dated June 1999, a decade after the fall of the Soviet Union from internal forces he himself foresaw in 1946, Kennan, who cherished Chekhov as a second father, “suddenly sheds tears” as he recalls the “haunting story, ‘The Steppe,’ about a boy of nine traveling with a group of peasants across a vast Russian landscape.” The boy misses his mother, “understanding neither where he was going nor why,” trying to grasp the meaning of the stars at night, only to find that they “oppress your spirits with their silence.” Kennan’s memory of the passage departs from the text, which makes no mention of the mother, at least not in the preferred Constance Garnett translation. Born in 1904, the year Chekhov died, Kennan lost his mother when he was ten and may have been reading himself into that epic tale of the Russian road.

So it is with Chekhov — you read yourself into him. He’s there for you, your wise, sad, compassionate companion in the moment, and since he’s been widely read in his homeland regardless of the regime, his countrymen, whatever their politics over the years, have also read themselves into him. Which is one way of explaining George Kennan’s theory that in time, if the U.S. and its allies were patient and firm and watchful enough, the Soviet Union would collapse, compromised from within by its own people, like a multitude of Chekhovian antibodies.

Flight of the Nightbird

I came to “The Steppe” midway through the reading of all 13 Constance Garnett-midwifed volumes of Chekhov’s stories.

I mention it not only because of Kennan’s emotional response but because it was where I felt myself crossing the line between reading and being. In a recent New Yorker piece on Chekhov’s one full-length non-fiction work, about Sakhalin Island (the remote oil-rich Russian territory being pumped by the Exxon-Mobil CEO and presumptive Secretary of State), Akhil Sharma expresses what I’m trying to get at, which is that with Chekhov “You feel like you are reading something that is occurring right now.” In “The Steppe” aided by his bespectacled British “significant other,” he makes everything about the journey, the boy, the landscape, the people, so immediate, so real, so much in the moment, with no sense of effort, or straining for effect, everything simply happening as life happens, and you’re there with George Kennan reading yourself into the same nine-year-old boy.

Think of the generations of Russians, including the soldiers who shared copies of his stories on various fronts, reading passages like the one where “a nightbird floats noiselessly over the earth … and in the blue sky, in the moonlight, in the flight of the nightbird, in everything you see and hear, triumphant beauty, youth, the fullness of power, and the passionate thirst for life begin to be apparent; the soul responds to the call of her lovely austere fatherland and longs to fly over the steppes with the nightbird.”

The Translator’s Heroics

After a year of reading Chekhov, I found Richard Garnett’s biography of his grandmother, Constance Garnett: A Heroic Life (1991), which reinforces the obvious, that she stands alone, a legend among translators. Of her Turgenev, the first of the great Russians she brought to English-speaking readers, Joseph Conrad said “Turgenev is Constance Garnett and Constance Garnett is Turgenev.” Ernest Hemingway makes essentially the same point in A Moveable Feast. For him, the language of War and Peace and the other great Russian novels was the language of an Englishwoman who began to go blind while translating Tolstoy’s epic. D. H. Lawrence recalls seeing her sitting in her garden “turning out reams of her marvelous translations from the Russian. She would finish a page, and throw it off on a pile on the floor without looking up, and start a new page. That pile would be this high — really, almost up to her knees, and all magical.” When Katherine Mansfield finished reading War and Peace, she wrote to Garnett thanking her for “the whole other world that you have revealed to us …. These books have changed our lives, no less. What would it be like to be without them! I am only one voice among so many — I do appreciate the greatness of your task, the marvel of your achievement.” In 1916 David Garnett wrote his mother a fan letter about “the tremendously momentous thing” she was engaged on, and its effect on “the minds of everyone under thirty in England,” and of how her translation of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot “has probably done more to alter the morals of my generation” than the war or anything that happened to them in the war.

Like George Kennan, Constance Garnett felt deeply attached to Chekhov, writing that “the more one knows him, the more one loves him — what a rare combination his brightness and wit and gaiety with such deep goodness and unselfishness … it seems to make all the turmoil and degradation and misery of human life worthwhile — that mankind can produce now and then such a perfect flower.”

Champagne Again

Chekhov’s wife, the actress Olga Knipper, was with him when he died. Champagne had been ordered. “He took a glass,” she writes, “turned his face towards me, smiled his amazing smile and said, ‘It’s a long time since I drank champagne,’ calmly drained his glass, lay down quietly on his left side, and shortly afterward fell silent forever.”

He’s Everywhere

Thanks to the theater, Chekhov will always “be occurring right now.” The lead in the Arts and Leisure section of Sunday’s New York Times is about the Broadway opening of the Sydney Theatre Company production of his first play Platonov starring Cate Blanchett. A long play he wrote and shelved when he was 20 is currently being staged by Michael Frayn in London. A production of The Seagull opened in Istanbul last month. The Cherry Orchard is playing at Boston University while a revival of the same play starring Diane Lane just closed on Broadway after a two month run.

I owe special thanks to the Princeton Public Library for promptly finding me a copy of the Constance Garnett biography through interlibrary loan.