“KILLING REALISM”: INSIGHT AND MEANING IN ANTON CHEKHOV Andrey Shcherbenok, University of Sheffield (UK) Chekhov takes his implied reader outside classi- cal realism—not into the world of some other lit- erary movement [...] but rather, in a sense, simply nowhere. (Markovich 112) In a 1900 letter to Chekhov, Maksim Gorky formulated the relationship be- tween Chekhov and the tradition of literary realism in this provocative manner: Do you know what you are doing? You are killing realism, You will soon have killed it off com- pletely, and it will stay that way for some time to come. This form has outlived its time, and that’s a fact! No one can go further along this path than you have done, no one can write as sim- ply about such simple things as you can [...]. Anyway, you are knocking realism on the head, I am extremely glad about this. We've had enough of it anyway! To hell with it! (Gorky 53) Gorky’s aphorism, inspired by Chekhov’s short story “Lady with a Lap Dog” [1899], implies that Chekhov is killing realism by perfecting it and thereby exhausting any possibility of literature’s further development in the direction of an ever more accurate representation of reality. Gorky is not alone: at least since Stanislavsky, most attempts to situate Chekhov’s “new forms of writing” (Leo Tolstoy, Russkie vedomosti, No. 192 (4 July 1904), qtd. in Akhmetshin 556) in Russian literary history have focused on the prox- imity between Chekhov’s works and “life as it is.”! The notion of this prox- imity is for the most part sustained by the analysis of the specificity of Chekhov’s poetics in relation to nineteenth-century Russian literature. In Chekhov scholarship, Boris Eikhenbaum’s view that Chekhov shattered the structural foundation of the Russian classics by removing “the differences and contradictions [...] with which Russian literature had struggled so agoniz- ingly and so fruitlessly in the search for a renewal of life” (Eikhenbaum 24) I would like to thank Adam Siegel (UC-Davis) for his generous help in copyediting this article. 1. This proximity effectively became a signature characteristic of the writer’s short stories and, especially, his plays. To quote a recent example, Michael Finke observes that Chekhov's po- tics called for departures from theatrical conventions the result of which was that “for the first time, actors behaved and spoke as though unaware of the gazes directed at them from beyond the footlights” (Finke 9). In a self-conscious celebration of this understanding of Chekhov, Luis Malle’s film Vanya on 42nd Street seamlessly merges the everyday conversations in the theater with the rehearsal of the Chekhov's play, making the transition from life to play imperceptible. SEEJ, Vol. 54, No. 2 (2010): p. 297-p. 316 297298 Slavic and East European Journal was developed into a conception of eventless plots, open endings, absent hi- erarchies, and random details. Rejecting the hackneyed literary conventions pertaining at all these levels, Chekhov, for scholars such as Aleksandr Chu- dakov, demonstrates “the new vision of the world—the contingent one” (Chudakov 1983, 175) and creates a fictional universe that “attempts to merge with the outside world, to look like its part” (Chudakov 1986, 48). It is important to note that Gorky’s formulation of Chekhov’s innovative- ness and its subsequent elaborations does not imply Chekhov's transcendence of the nineteenth-century realist tradition, situating Chekhov on the realist side of the borderline between Realism and Modernism. In this reading, Chekhov destroys nineteenth-century literary conventions without replacing them with any alternative, such as Symbolist metaphysics. This unique posi- tioning explains the fact that Chekhov historically appeared as a supreme Re- alist not only to those who perceived the old conventions as artificial and un- realistic but also to aesthetic conservatives who rejected Modernist innovations. As a realist who is “killing realism,” Chekhov manages to simul- taneously fit what Roman Jakobson defines as two mutually exclusive con- ceptions of realism—“the tendency to deform given artistic norms conceived as an approximation of reality” and “the conservative tendency to remain within the limits of a given artistic tradition, conceived as faithfulness to re- ality” (Jakobson 41). In this article, I will not question the accuracy of numerous studies that demonstrate how Chekhov subverts and challenges nineteenth-century liter- ary models, even though some of these studies tend to ascribe too much sta- bility to such pre-Chekhovian literary models for the sake of contrast. How- ever, I will take issue with what I believe to be an all-too-easy transition from the formal specificity of Chekhov’s texts, such as their lack of narrative clo- sure, to the claim that Chekhov’s universe merges with the extratextual world. In general, I will argue that in order to make this transition, a particular the- ory of the relationship between text and reality is required, and it is precisely such a theory (or, rather, theories) that Chekhovian texts throw into question. It may be argued that the problem of Chekhov's “faithfulness to reality,” which was at the center of, for example, Soviet literary criticism, is largely ir- relevant to contemporary writings on Chekhov, which rarely raise the question of Chekhov's realism explicitly? The irrelevance of this problem, however, is doubtful, because the epistemological problems of cultural, religious, literary, and linguistic models that govern human cognition and behavior—the prob- lems quite central to current scholarship on Chekhov—necessarily involve the 2. Chekhovian studies are be no means special in this respect, although the appearance of such studies as Peter Brooks's Realist Vision, which, in terms of the theoretical substantiation of the problem of realism and representation, vacillates between familiar themes of detailed de- scriptions and revaluation of ordinary experiences, provides evidence that this scholarly tradi- tion is far from being extinct.“Killing Realism’: Insight and Meaning in Anton Chekhov 299 question of Chekhov’s text’s relationship with extratextual reality. It has long become a commonplace to observe that Chekhov’s characters perceive the world, themselves, and each other inaccurately; however, where does the stan- dard of accuracy come from? To argue that a given Chekhovian character fails to achieve a genuine liberation one has to have a precise enough notion of what true freedom might be; to argue, as has long been a staple of Chekhov studies, that his characters fail to gain a true and timely insight into the state of the world in general and their individual predicament in particular requires an elaborate vision of life as it really is, so as to measure the character’s delusion against it, Sometimes the standard of accuracy is explicated—for example, Andrey Stepanov in his Problems of Communication in Chekhov systemati- cally analyzes the communication failures that plague Chekhov’s characters, using as a yardstick Jakobson’s model of the (successful) communication act; more often, however, the standard is left implicit and unexamined. In any case, for these standards to be relevant, Chekhov’s texts should somehow overcome the epistemological blindness that defines their characters and convey a more accurate vision of the world. In other words, any claim that Chekhov portrays the lamentable deficiency of his characters’ perception of the world makes the notion of Chekhov’s realism indispensable. Thus, not only the accounts of Chekhov’s place in the history of Russian lit- erature but also the analyses of Chekhov’s cultural critique depend on the no- tion of Chekhov as a writer whose texts have a superior grasp of the real world. The conception of Chekhov’s realism that dates back to Gorky is, therefore, often implied even by those studies that never use the word realism as such. In this article I will argue, however, that this notion of Chekhov’s realism does not do justice to Chekhoy’s textuality and causes scholars to systematically under- estimate the radical nature of Chekhov’s works. I will attempt to show that Chekhov is “killing realism” in a way quite different from the one suggested by Gorky’s passage. I will do this through a close reading of two of Chekhov's texts: although this inevitably limits the scope of my study, any cursory naviga- tion of multiple works is likely to reproduce the established interpretative mod- els without getting at what I believe is the core of the Chekhovian problematic. I will start with Chekhov’s well-known and much analyzed short story “The Student” [1894]. The plot of the story is simple. Ivan Velikopolsky, a student at a theological seminary, is returning home from hunting on Good Friday evening. He is overwhelmed with gloomy reflections on the perennial misery of life, which has not improved in a thousand years, Ivan comes across his acquaintances—two widows, mother and daughter, named Vasilisa and Lukeria—to whom he tells the biblical story of St. Peter’s denial. Both women have a strong emotional reaction to the story. Ivan leaves them and continues his trip, again musing upon the nature of history. His ideas, how- ever, have changed radically: he now thinks that the “truth and beauty that300 Slavic and East European Journal had guided human life there in the garden and in the high priest’s palace con- tinued without a break till the present day and, apparently, were always the most important element in man’s life and in earthly life in general.” In con- trast with the beginning of the story, life now seems to Ivan “enchanting, miraculous, and imbued with lofty meaning” (Chekhov 8: 309). Before offering my own reading of the story, I will try, however sketchily, to delineate the space of its existent interpretations. This delineation is, I think, the most effective way to get to the story’s critical thrust, because Chekhov’s elusive text quite consciously works to call forth and subvert a number of antithetical readings. Chekhov called “The Student” his favorite short story and cited it to defend himself against the accusation of pessimism (Chekhov 8: 506-7). The pre- vailing interpretation takes this as evidence that “The Student” is optimistic and concludes, as does Leonid Tsilevich, that the story expresses “the opti- mistic conviction of the triumph of truth and beauty” in the world (Tsilevich 78). While not all scholars go as far as Tsilevich, many tend to support the view that the hero’s regained “faith in the essential truth and beauty of human life” coincides with the authorial perspective.* Within the framework of this interpretation, Ivan’s “thrillingly joyous insight into the essence of the world” is compared to the synthesizing visions of such Tolstoy characters as Andrey Bolkonsky and Pierre Bezukhov (Khalizev 47-48) and even the metaphysi- cal revelation experienced by Dante’s traveler after his descent into the In- ferno (Jackson 127; Finke 161). The problem with this interpretation is that the narrative agency in “The Student” is so fluid that it is difficult to separate the voice of the authorial nar- rator from that of a hero.> Their identification requires an interpretative move which is hardly supported by Chekhov’s text. On the contrary, the distance between the implied author and the reader is underscored by the comment about the hero’s age that immediately precedes Ivan’s apprehension of the meaningfulness of life at the end of the story: the sensation of youth, health, strength—he was only 22 years old—and the inexpressibly sweet expectation of happiness were taking possession of him little by little, and life seemed to him enchanting, miraculous, and imbued with lofty meaning. (309) 3. Here and below English translations of Chekhov quotes are mine. 4, See, for example, Robert L. Jackson’s interpretation (Jackson 127). Unlike most inter- preters who dismiss Ivan’s initial gloomy vision as a sheer error, Jackson’s argument is more nuanced, as he considers it a necessary step in the dialectical movement towards the affirmation of life. Nevertheless, this affirmation, for Jackson, is authorial: “The passage from forest to ‘mount, from momentary despair through communion with the widow and her daughter to a mo- ‘ment of spiritual transfiguration, defines the journey of both student and story” (Jackson 128). 5. Thus, Cathy Popkin questions the critics’ hasty belief that Ivan’s “words of faith were an expression of Chekhov's own feelings” and wonders if his surge of faith may be “simply a tran- sitory result of his youthful impetuosity” (Popkin 1993, 33).“Killing Realism”: Insight and Meaning in Anton Chekhov 301 The resistance of Chekhov’s text to the prevailing interpretation gives rise to the opposite interpretation as offered by Wolf Schmid, who entitles his analysis “The False Insight of Ivan Velikopolsky.” Unlike most scholars, Schmid resolutely refuses to identify Ivan’s point of view with that of the au- thor. Instead, he argues that the message of “The Student” is the condemna- tion of Ivan, who, “unlike St. Peter and Vasilisa, is not a repentant betrayer but a happy one” (Schmid 293). Schmid’s claim is based on the argument that the student misinterprets the relationship between the widows and St. Peter. The widows, as Schmid convincingly shows, react emotionally to the story of St. Peter’s betrayal because Vasilisa probably also betrayed her daughter by marrying her to an abusive husband. Yet, according to Schmid, Ivan remains too abstract in his grandiose reasoning, missing the “concrete living reality” of the two widows (Schmid 291). Ivan’s professional penchant for scholastic thought leads him to the following erroneous conclusion: “The past,” thought he, “is linked to the present by an unbroken chain of happenings, each flow- ing from the other. And it seemed to him that he just saw both ends of this chain, he touched one of them and the other quivered.” (Chekhov 8: 309) According to Schmid, the reaction of the women “demonstrated not the causal contiguity, the connection of the early cause and the later effect” but instead “the equivalence, similarity of betrayals, the repetition that justifies the pessimistic image of the circle rather than the optimistic image of the chain” (Schmid 291). I will address the image of the chain in more detail below; for now it should be sufficient to indicate that the link between two historical happenings suggested by the metaphor does not necessarily imply optimistic historical teleology. Yet, interpreting the student’s rather vague feelings as unabashed progressivism allows Schmid to finally discredit the hero, who disregards human suffering and “indulges in the ineffably sweet expectation of happiness” (Schmid 292). Despite their opposition to each other, the two antithetic interpretations of “The Student” share one central element: both of them regard Ivan’s insight as the central event of the story. For Schmid, the insight which must take place fails to materialize, but this does not alter the overall structure of Chekhov’s story; Schmid inverts the prevailing interpretation and gives the opposite answers to the traditional questions but he does not alter the ques- tions themselves. Even though according to Schmid life and history in the story are shown as meaningless repetition and Ivan is portrayed as a deluded egocentric, Schmid still believes, following the majority of readers, that Chekhov in “The Student” asks the question whether or not life has meaning and answers this question in a resolute manner. That this question itself should be considered meaningful is not doubted by Schmid—Ivan, in his in- terpretation, could very well answer it correctly, but failed due to his self-302 Slavic and East European Journal centered blindness. In other words, Schmid takes for granted the possibility of insight into the meaning of life; for him, the grasping of truth about life is quite possible and this truth is, in fact, conveyed to us by Chekhov’s story, even though the protagonist misses it. Recognizing the difficulty of determining the epistemological status of Ivan Velikopolsky’s insight, some scholars argue that its verity is irrelevant to the overall meaning of the story, which is located on a level that may be called musical.’ Thus, for Mikhail Girshman the last passage of “The Student” ex- presses the authorial truth because the very language of the passage is char- acterized by increased sonorous and rhythmic harmony. While on the level of the plot there is repetition, and Ivan’s insight may very well be a mere tem- porary change of his mood, on the authorial level the illusiveness of the in- sight is overcome. The rhythmic organization becomes an expression of “life’s inherent undercurrent” and the concluding idea becomes larger than the hero who expresses it (Girshman 368). Paul de Man observes that the conversion of sound and meaning can be un- derstood either aesthetically or rhetorically. Aesthetic understanding presup- poses the Cratylian conception of the sign, according to which the phenome- nal aspect of language (sound) stands in a natural relation to the order of meaning. Rhetorical understanding, on the contrary, maintains that the con- version of sound and meaning is “a mere effect which language can perfectly well achieve, but which bears no substantial relationship, by analogy or by ontologically grounded imitation, to anything beyond that particular effect” (De Man 10). In these terms, the “musical” interpretation of “The Student” is aesthetic, since it presupposes the immediate connection between the harmo- nious acoustic form (the signifier) and its signified: the final paragraph ex- presses the authorial truth simply because it sounds beautiful. To what extent, however, is aesthetic interpretation applicable to Chekhov's story? Does Chekhov’s text tell us anything about the relationship between sonorous beauty and truth? I believe it does, for the last passage of the story asserts precisely the onto- logical unity of truth and beauty that has always been “the most important el- ement in man’s life and in earthly life in general” (Chekhov 8: 309)—in other words, it articulates the very foundation of the aesthetic interpretation. “Mu- sical” interpretation, therefore, gets caught in a circular reasoning: in order 6. It may be argued that Schmid’s interpretation is conditioned by his structuralist methodol- ogy, which, as Jacques Derrida has shown, inherits—contrary to Saussure’s conception of lan- ‘guage as a system of differences—a metaphysical understanding of the signified as “a meaning thinkable in principle within the full presence of an intuitive consciousness” (Derrida 1976, 73). See also Derrida’s “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (Derrida 1978). The dominant interpretation of “The Student” often openly partakes of metaphysics thus, Tsilevich relies on Hegel in his theory of the meaning of a literary text. 7. This interpretive tradition dates back to Peter Bitsilli’s Chekhov's Art: A Stylistic Analysis (1942).“Killing Realism”: Insight and Meaning in Anton Chekhov 303 for the aesthetic argument to hold, one first has to agree with its conclusion Such is the effect of Chekhov’s ironic gesture: by metonymically superimpos- ing the statement of the ontological unity of truth and beauty with the beauti- ful sonorous form of this statement, the text demonstrates the conventionality of their unity, its dependence on the arbitrary rhetorical effect of discursive conflation. Chekhov’s authorial truth cannot be grasped through the analysis of rhythm and sound because Chekhov's text deconstructs the metaphysical foundation of the Cratylian aesthetic—the supposedly natural bond of the sig- nifier and the signified. So, Chekhov’s text does not allow us to decide whether or not Ivan’s in- sight about the meaning of history is true in the authorial perspective; neither does it allow us to take a shortcut to the authorial conception of this meaning that would render the status of Ivan’s insight irrelevant. Apparently, if we read “The Student” attentively enough, we are obliged to end in suspense and con- clude that Chekhov leaves the question of the meaningfulness of history unanswered. Can it be, however, that we ask Chekhov’s text the wrong ques- tion? Of course, the meaning of history and life is the primary subject of Ivan’s reflections, and the story actually ends with the word “meaning” [smysl] called into question by Chekhov’s favorite phrase “it seemed” [kaza- os"]; however, the fact that reading Chekhov’s story as an investigation into the meaning of life inevitably ends in interpretative deadlock suggests that the story might rather be an epistemological inquiry into the ways in which the concept of meaning is applied to history and “human life in general” by both Ivan Velikopolsky and the readers. The notion of meaning in “The Student” is inseparable from the actual means by which people believe they grasp it—it is inextricably linked with the event of insight, of which the critical discussion of the story bears witness. ‘What is usually neglected, however, is that the notion of insight itself is sys- tematically articulated in the text in the story of St. Peter’s denial. In full ac- cord with the tangible etymology of the word in both Russian and English (in- sight, pro-zrenie), this story abounds with verbs of vision: Peter sees Jesus being buffeted, a woman Jooks at Peter and recognizes him, workmen ook at Peter suspiciously and sternly. Then, Peter recognizes the truth of Jesus’ prophecy: ‘And after that the cock crowed straightway, and Peter, looking at Jesus from afar, remembered the words which he had said to him at supper. He remembered, he came to himself, went out of the courtyard and wept bitterly-bitterly. (308) There are three constitutive clements in Peter’s archetypal insight: it is trig- gered by inarticulate sound, Peter grasps the truth when looking at Jesus, and his insight is manifested by tears. All three elements are strikingly non-ver- bal: Peter’s “awakening” is not mediated by language, it is, literally, an “in- sight,” “pro-zrenie.”304 Slavic and East European Journal When Ivan retells the biblical story, the two widows experience emotional shock, apparently connected with some recognition. Like Peter’s, Vasilisa’s recognition is manifested by tears (“Still smiling, Vasilisa suddenly sobbed and tears, large and profuse, flowed down her cheeks”), but it is triggered by Ivan’s articulate narrative quite unlike a cock’s crow. We know that Vasilisa was at the reading of the Twelve Gospels in church the day before and heard the story of Peter’s denial there; however, she is impressed by Ivan’s rendi- tion of it rather than the canonical version. What is the difference between these two texts? Ivan significantly modifies the Gospel account—he shifts the focus from Jesus to Peter, complicates the narrative structure by introducing different points of view (Peter’s and his own), and ornaments his narration with rhetor- ical figures, such as the folkloristic doubling of epithets. In short, Ivan de- stroys the canonical immediacy of the sacred text, mediating it, first of all, by his own subjectivity —Ivan clearly identifies with Peter. The fact that Vasilisa wept after Ivan’s narrative apparently demonstrates an important change: in the past of the Gospel, insight is, in line with its etymology, immediate; in the narrative present, Vasilisa’s insight is the product of a rhetorically organized and subjectively mediated narrative. However, this change, which could po- tentially invalidate Ivan’s initial view of history as lacking any development, is not systematic enough: Ivan, although he rhetorizes the Bible, comes to his new understanding of the connection between past and present when looking at the widow’s fire and the crimson sunset. Moreover, Chekhov’s story as a whole starts at twilight and unfolds in near darkness, dispelled by a solitary fire, much like the story of Peter’s denial—the likeness that stresses the sim- ilar importance of vision rather than the contrast between ancient visuality and contemporary verbality. Chekhov’s text, therefore, destabilizes the opposition of the visual (imme- diate) and the linguistic (mediated) that underlies the notion of insight as the immediate grasping of meaning. The same destabilization occurs in relation to other—related—binaries that sustain the semiotics of the archetypal Gospel story. In this story, the inarticulate cock’s crow that triggers Peter’s in- sight is contrasted with the verbal conversations in which Peter betrays Jesus; Peter’s tears are an unequivocal sign of his insight juxtaposed to his lack of emotional reaction at Christ’s beating; the fire designates the space of mun- dane human interaction juxtaposed to the space where Jesus is being beaten and questioned. All these elements find their equivalents in Chekhov's story, but their significance becomes problematic. For example, the biblical cock’s crow corresponds with some creature “droning piteously as if blowing into an empty bottle” (306) in the beginning of “The Student,” but this sound remains “empty,” it does not give rise to any revelation. Tears serve as the sign of in- sight in Vasilisa, but not in Lukeria, who nevertheless looks like a person“Killing Realism”: Insight and Meaning in Anton Chekhov 305 “holding back a terrible pain” (308); in this situation Ivan’s lack of tears be- comes ambiguous and cannot be unequivocally regarded as a sign of a false insight. The biblical fire parallels the widows’ fire and Ivan explicitly com- pares his warming himself next to it to that of Peter; however, unlike Peter, Ivan comes to his new understanding of the meaning of life after he has al- ready left the fire and is looking at it from a distance when—in yet another difference from the Bible—people around it can be seen no more. Thus, whereas Ivan in his retelling of the Gospel story merely adjusts it to fit his particular perspective, Chekhov’s text as a whole undermines the system of the story’s structural binaries and transforms it into what may be called a set of différances: a fluid system where each signifying element, rather than oc- cupying a fixed place in the signifying grid, emerges as a displacement of its fixed biblical prototype. Savely Senderovich observes apropos of the Chekhovian appropriation of the genre of Christmas story that Chekhov uses the canonical genre neither as template nor object of parody but instead sees it as a problem: what can a Christmas story mean if it is set in Russia and involves these particular cir- cumstances? (Senderovich 43). Ina similar manner, one can say that Chekhov sees the biblical concept of insight as a problem and asks what it may mean in his time. One way to describe the transformation that the religious canon undergoes in Chekhov’s texts is offered by Julie de Sherbinin, who observes that Chekhov's characters “construct meaning through their language and from their surroundings” and argues that “in a (post)modern spirit of semi- otics, Chekhov shows how the boundaries of meaning expand as individuals budge ‘unequivocal’ texts in directions that suit personal exigency or tend to psychological needs” (De Sherbinin 4, 3). However, while the conditions of the production of meaning are, indeed, paramount for Chekhoy, I believe that he goes further than suggested by de Sherbinin’s structuralist argument.* In “The Student” Chekhov not only enacts Ivan’s appropriation and trans- formation of the religious discourse but also demonstrates the internal limita- tions of such an appropriation. Ivan’s personal exigencies, such as his feelings of cold and hunger in the beginning of the story, influence both his reading of the story of Peter’s denial and his gloomy vision of the repetitiveness of his- tory; Ivan’s eventual change of worldview is also coordinated with his hav- ing warmed himself by the fire and reveling in the success of his preaching. Nevertheless, as is indicated in the passage already cited above, Ivan’s ulti- 8. It should be noted that de Sherbinin’s actual analyses of the vicissitudes of the Marian paradigm in Chekhov often go beyond her own initial claims and end in impasses that demon- strate the failure of Chekhov’s characters to provide a coherent individual “reading” of reli- gious symbols. De Sherbinin’s analyses often effect dissemination rather than polysemy, but, in my opinion, she does not draw sufficient theoretical conclusions from her own fascinating interpretations.306 Slavic and East European Journal mate insight into the connection between the past and the present, expressed in the metaphor of the chain, cannot be reduced to a mere epiphenomenon of his psychosomatics: “The past,” thought he, “is linked to the present by an unbroken chain of happenings, each fol- lowing from the other.” And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of this chain: he touched one and the other quivered. (309) In interpreting this passage as a metaphor for historical progress scholars fail to notice that “the chain of happenings” changes its meaning from the first sentence to the second, In the first sentence, the chain, indeed, functions as a metaphor for the mediated cause-effect relation between events, the relation that supports an idea of a linear historical development; however, in the sec- ond sentence the literal meaning of the metaphor is actualized—a figural chain of causality becomes a literal chain allowing for immediate physical contact. Like the story in general, the metaphor of the chain, too, oscillates between the immediate and the mediated, and it is precisely this ambiguity that makes it the focal point of the story. By making the passage whose ambivalent meaning clearly exceeds the scope of Ivan’s intentionality mark his transition from pessimism to opti- mism, Chekhov’s text questions the notion of subjectivity as controlling the field of signification. Ivan’s striking passivity at the end of the story, when the joyful feelings and expectations are “taking possession” of him, underscores the fact that his stream of thought has an independent internal dynamic. If, while telling the story of Peter’s denial, Ivan controls his discourse and adapts the story’s meaning to his personal needs, in his subsequent meditation he is increasingly led by the logic of language. Thus, having destabilized the bib- lical semiotics of insight, Chekhov refuses to replace the divine with the human in a gesture of humanistic secularization, which would have extolled an autonomous subject discovering his own truth in an act of individual cog- nition of the world. In “The Student,” insight is an effect of language rather than the product of divine intervention or an epiphenomenon of subjective ex- igency: it is neither theological nor psychological but rhetorical. We can now return to the question of the meaning of life and history in “The Student.” The very question of whether life is indeed full of “lofty meaning” or is, on the contrary, a meaningless repetition presupp the pos- sibility of insight transcending language with its uncontrollable play of signi- fiers. This possibility is required even for the interpretation that leaves the question of meaning hanging—to claim that Chekhov’s story ends in unde- cidability is still to uphold the opposition of optimism and pessimism, which depends on the metaphysical concept of meaning as directly accessible to in- tuitive consciousness in the act of insight. “The Student,” however, demon- strates the dependency of insight on arbitrary rhetorical structures at the level of signifier and thereby resists the various interpretations that attempt to for-“Killing Realism”: Insight and Meaning in Anton Chekhov 307 mulate a “Chekhovian” conception of life and history, be it optimistic, pes- simistic or relativistic. This resistance does not mean that Chekhov creates a text that is impossible to interpret—on the contrary, a rhetorically aware read- ing of the story is quite conclusive and does not lead to interpretative dead- locks. Chekhov deconstructs literature’s aspiration to grasp the meaning of the “real world” not by creating a meaningless text but by systematically sub- verting the metaphysical foundations that would allow bridging the gap be- tween text and extratextual reality. This is why in “The Student” we do not have an epistemological crisis sim- ilar to that in Sakhalin Island [1895] as analyzed by Cathy Popkin. Sakhalin, in Popkin’s account, is a “proto-deconstructive, post-structuralist space in which distinctions fail and oppositions collapse” (Popkin 1992, 42). Accord- ing to Popkin, Chekhov’s unconventional travelogue/ ethnographic study is an uncontrollable self-contradictory text that thwarts any attempt to make sense of either itself or its object. “The Student,” on the contrary, is a concise, perfectly arranged story that involves no mimetic contradictions. The concep- tual critique it offers is, however, much more radical: if Sakhalin Island en- acts a failure to provide a meaningful account of an island at the margin of the world and therefore can be read as an allegory of the world’s meaning- lessness, “The Student” deconstructs the concept of meaning itself. In “The Student” Chekhov does not assert the meaningfulness of the world over its meaninglessness or vice versa, nor does he pose the dilemma and leave it un- resolved. Instead, Chekhov deconstructs the very opposition between the two polarities by calling into question the possibility of a meaning that could tran- scend the de-essentialized system of textual differences. At the same time, Chekhov’s critique of the metaphysics of meaning is lim- ited in “The Student” in at least two ways. First, Chekhov’s text does not question the metaphysics of the biblical subtext: the story of Peter’s denial is used as a springboard to launch the process of deconstructing the concept of insight, but this deconstruction does not affect the Gospel itself. Second, the student’s experience of revelation, for all its unsustainability, figures as a nec- essary illusion: Ivan seems bound to conceive of the world as either desper- ately meaningless or hopefully meaningful, for such is the unavoidable effect of the rhetoric of insight in which he partakes. However, Chekhov addresses both the metaphysics of the biblical past and the indispensability of transcen- dental error for human psychology in his penultimate short story, written eight years after “The Student.” “The Bishop” [1902] has numerous parallels with “The Student.” Ivan Ve- likopolsky is a student at a theological seminary; Peter, the protagonist of “The Bishop,” graduated from and taught in one. Both come from a similarly low social stratum: Ivan is the son of a sexton, Peter is the son of a deacon. Good Friday, when the action of “The Student” takes place, is also the last308 Slavic and East European Journal day of Peter’s life. The reading of the Twelve Gospels, so prominent in “The Student,” is the last service held by Peter. Finally, the name of the Bishop is also the name of the apostle with whom Ivan Velikopolsky identifies. “The Bishop” can, therefore, be considered a conscious development of “The Stu- dent.” As I will seek to demonstrate, Chekhov in this story not only returns to some of the themes of “The Student” but further advances his deconstructive critique of the metaphysics of meaning. The plot of “The Bishop” is rather straightforward: the main hero is taken ill with typhoid fever; his attitude to his own life and the world gets progres- sively more negative as his physical condition deteriorates and he finds it more and more difficult to carry out the duties of his office. He feels alienated from other people, including his mother, who cannot relate to him without servility. Finally, he dies, but before his death he has a vision of himself as a simple man walking freely and joyously through the field. Like “The Student,” “The Bishop” is usually interpreted as a story of a trans- formational insight, this time experienced by the hero at his deathbed.? How- ever, while the Bishop’s deathbed vision has a good deal of similarity with an insight of the Tolstoyan kind, in the context of the story it acquires a quite dif- ferent significance. The discursive movement of “The Bishop” reiterates and multiplies that of “The Student”: the story is told as a sequence of the hero’s oscillations between opposite states of mind, and Peter’s dying vision, a final element in this sequence, cannot be understood in isolation from its entirety. This oscillation, along with the main motives of the story, is set in the very beginning. In the church service that opens the story Peter unexpectedly sees his mother and experiences an emotional unity with the crowd, which he, due to his weariness, had barely distinguished before. The subsequent description of Peter’s nocturnal journey home is marked by a universal harmony that cor- responds to the synthesis of the religious ritual and personal memories, the synthesis that first emerges in the church and is reiterated in the subsequent scene of Peter’s prayer at home: “[T]he prayers were mingled with memories, which blazed up like flames, ever more radiantly, and his prayers did not stop him thinking about his mother” (Chekhov 10: 188). Although the actual content of Peter’s childhood memories is not particu- larly idyllic, his childhood constitutes Peter’s personal utopia, characterized by the total immediacy of perception, naive faith, and the absence of alien- ation; the description of childhood itself strives to render the child’s experi- ence of immediacy by making audible the voice of the characters: “He [the 9. The bishop has been said to have been “simply walking toward God” (Zaitsev 229), to have acquired at last his real name and freedom (Kataev 264), to have realized what was wrong in his life (Nilsson 72), to have experienced the “reconciliation with the missing link in his life” and to have arrived symbolically home, an arrival “followed by still another journey—the jour- ney into an unknown but hopeful future” (Kirjanov 59). Even in more skeptical interpretations such as those by Popkin (2007) and de Sherbinin, perceptive as they are of Chekhov’s irony, the model of transformational insight persists.“Killing Realism”: Insight and Meaning in Anton Chekhov 309 teacher] had a shaggy black dog, which he called thus: Syntaxis” (189).!° In the present, however, Peter’s momentary rapport with his mother proves a fata morgana and her embarrassment over her son’s high rank increasingly ir- ritates him. The next day Peter returns again to his past, but his memories no longer totally absorb him, but are disturbed by the empty, repetitive conver- sation in the next room, so that “his entire previous life vanished into some distant mist, as if it had all been a dream” (193). At this point in the story, the link between the Bishop’s alienated present life and his idealized past can no longer be sustained by an appeal to their common element—Peter’s mother. However, the link is sustained by Peter’s religious service: in church, it is not communication with God in the here and now but rather remembering that gives Peter happiness: [Hearing about the bridegroom who cometh at midnight and the mansion richly adomed, the bishop felt neither repentance nor grief but spiritual calm and serenity as his thoughts fioated back to the distant past, to his childhood and youth when that same bridegroom and mansion had also been hymned; and now this past seemed vivid, wonderful, joyfal, as it had never really been, probably. (195) The last phrase makes explicit the motif of idealization involved in the work of memory. Not only Peter’s childhood but any reality is the subject of this mechanism: Peter’s life today can also be idealized in the future: “In the next world, in the life to come, we shall perhaps recall the distant past and our present life with just such a feeling. Who knows!” (195). The narrative attri- bution of these words is uncertain, split between the protagonist and the nar- rator, as is often the case with philosophical meditations in Chekhov’s late stories, which emphasizes the universality of their message. Unlike “The Student,” which did not address the specific mechanisms con- necting Ivan Velikopolsky’s subjectivity with the metaphysics of meaning that he espouses, “The Bishop” articulates a precise structure of idealization that regulates Peter’s existential thinking. According to this structure, the ideal, characterized by a delight in an existence full of meaning and lack of alienation, belongs to the past and can only be accessed through memory, which is triggered and supported by an element that this past shares with the present. Here lies the dynamic of Chekhov’s narrative: in the course of the story, as Peter’s illness increasingly actualizes his discord with the present, this element becomes less material and less personal. In this process Peter’s mother is replaced by church ritual as sustaining the connection with the past. The next stage comes when the bishop finds himself unable to perform his service because of his illness: at this point he suddenly feels “an urge—an ab- 10. The very construction of Chekhov's phrase—he refused to put quotation marks around Syntaxis as his editor suggested —is designed to make the teacher's voice present. Compare “a shaggy black dog, which he called thus: Syntaxis” with a normative “a shaggy black dog, which he called ‘Syntaxis””310 Slavic and East European Journal solute craving—to go abroad. [...] If only there was one single person that he could talk to, open his heart to!” (199). The conflation of living abroad with the need to open his heart is paradox- ical—the defining characteristic of Peter’s living abroad was loneliness and homesickness. If life there now becomes so desirable, it is because such a life would allow him to experience alienation as a purely spatial and therefore tra- versable distance. The past is now idealized not as the immediate presence of childhood but as the point in time when the illusion of the possibility of such presence was still possible. The bishop, who no longer has the strength to hold a church service, is longing for a time and place when the service was not necessary, when it was sufficient to hear a beggar-woman singing by the window to trigger the memory of the idealized world. In the next passage the bishop says that he wishes he “could be a village priest, deacon... or a simple monk” (199). This nostalgia for simplicity, much celebrated by those scholars who read Chekhov’s story through the Tolstoyan binary of real man vs. artificial social status, is, however, analogous to the nos- talgia for nostalgia in the previous passage: it is a dream whose meaning is in- separable from its fundamental unfeasibility. Peter associates the role of a sim- ple monk with the blissful happiness of a child’s innocent faith, when he was following a miracle-working icon: being a simple monk or a naive child is tempting precisely because it seems to allow one to remain inside the mean- ing-generating tradition without coming too close to its displaced foundation. There is little doubt, however, that just as going abroad would not have given the bishop a chance to open his heart, becoming a simple monk would not have made his life “vivid, wonderful, joyful, as it had never really been” (195).!" To say that “The Bishop” has an elaborate religious subtext would be an understatement: the whole story is saturated with descriptions of liturgies, churches, and monasteries. There are numerous parallels between Peter and Christ: the story is set in Holy Week, Peter dies on Good Friday, his mother’s name is Mary, the composition of his death scene resembles a pieta, etc. —al- though the meaning of these subtexts for the story of Peter are by no means unequivocal, as is the case with the biblical subtext of “The Student.” What distinguishes “The Bishop” from “The Student,” however, is that the interac- tion between the story and the religious tradition here goes both ways: not only are biblical models appropriated and transformed in the story, but II. Chekhov's text has an ironic parallel to Peter’s dream of simplicity: Father Sisoy, an un- pleasant and stupid monk, naive in his faith, having no strong ties to anything, and spending his, life walking from one monastery to another. 12. De Sherbinin has every reason to argue, apropos of Mary, that “the proximity of a char- acter to a Marian reference never sanctions a direct association, but rather a break with the stereotypical religious equation. By liberating this imagery from its conventional hooks, Chekhov creates room to explore psychological responses to the paradigm itself, or how the re- ceived cultural construct is ‘used’ in life” (De Sherbinin 43).“Killing Realism”: Insight and Meaning in Anton Chekhov 3 Chekhov’s text itself casts a shadow on the religious tradition. Religious tra- dition in “The Bishop” is predicated on the work of remembering; it is repre- sented as a sequence of church services that bring their participants back to the sacred time of Holy Week, so Chekhov’s model of idealization, which is shown to be an epiphenomenon of temporality and memory, cannot but call into question the inaugural emanation of meaning in the biblical time as well. This emanation could be just another idealization, either emerging ex post facto, as in the case of Peter’s childhood, or containing yet another reference, invisible from the present, as in the case of a foreign country which Peter longs for on the last day of his life. Before Peter dies, the distance separating the mother and the son—the par- adigmatic alienating distance in the story—appears to be eliminated. Lying on his deathbed, the bishop feels “thinner and feebler, more insignificant than everyone else” —a feeling that coincides exactly with his mother’s, who also “felt for some reason that he was thinner and feebler, more insignificant than everyone else,” “forgot that he was a bishop” and “kissed him like a child, very close and dear” (200). The disappearance of this social distance corre- lates with the conflation of the past and the present: for the first time in the story Peter feels happiness in the here and now, unmediated by idealizing memory—the image of Peter walking joyously and freely through the sunlit field resembles the vivid images of his childhood. However, the central role of time in the text should make one attentive to a fundamental discrepancy between the mother’s and Peter’s perceptions. The verbatim repetition of Peter’s and his mother’s spatial perception of the hero sets off a temporal con- trast: while Peter for his mother has once again become a sick child, he con- ceives of himself as having abandoned the earthly present: “it seemed to him that [...] everything that had ever happened had escaped him to some infi- nitely remote place and would not return, would not continue” (200). It is the global, unbridgeable gap between the present moment and his past life that gives rise to Peter’s feeling of happiness. Despite outward similarity, the hero’s self-consciousness here is opposite to the immediate presence as- sociated with childhood —it is based not on total immersion in the present but on the complete escape from temporality. The systematic depletion of the present here reaches its logical conclusion. The last vision of the bishop, the pure utopia of the presence of meaning, is only possible because all links to the actual present have been cut off. But the bishop was past speech, he did not understand anything, and it appeared to him that he ‘was an ordinary simple man walking quickly, cheerfully through a field, thumping his walking- stick, and above him was a broad, sun-drenched sky, and he was free like a bird, he could go where he liked! (200) The bishop’s death demonstrates not the epiphany of truth, however be- lated, but rather the universality of the mechanism of the production of mean-312 Slavic and East European Journal ing established in the course of the story. Much like Ivan Velikopolsky’s final joy, Peter’s rapture is linked with an ecstatic utopian vision. The important difference is, of course, that Ivan’s joy is conditioned by his conceptual grasp of the meaning of life and history, while Peter, who has been on a quest for the experience of immediate presence of meaning, attains it when he stops un- derstanding anything. Nevertheless, both protagonists are, in the last analysis, deluded: Peter’s rapture is, of course, quite real, as real as Ivan’s joy, but the epiphany of the immediate meaningfulness of life is as illusory as Ivan’s dis- covery of the positive laws of history. ‘The description of the Easter celebration that follows Peter’s death, in which “it was all great fun, everything was all right, exactly as it had been last year and as it would be, in all probability, in the future” (201) confirms the in- consequentiality of Peter’s vision. As before, the church tradition is upheld by the repetitive invocation of the supposed original epiphany of meaning—the resurrection of Christ—which cannot possibly be experienced in the present. Such tradition is, apparently, everlasting. However, the ending of the story undermines this certainty as well. The continuation of the religious tradition as it is represented in “The Bishop” is predicated on the stability of the semiotic operation whereby the presence is endowed with meaning through a belief in the emanation of meaning in the past. The story’s finale, however, questions the stability of this mechanism. In an iterative manner that is quite Proustian, the text says that the bishop’s mother, when she would go outside to fetch her cow, would tell other women about her deceased son, a bishop, and would speak “diffidently, afraid of being disbelieved.” The next sentence, a separate paragraph consist ing of the cautious yet determinate “Nor did everyone believe her, actually” (201), denies the absolute necessity of belief.! The possibility of disbeliev- ing the past event opens up the potential end of tradition based on retrospec- tion. If the story of Peter’s illness and death demonstrates that, rather than being an ontological essence, meaning is generated by an infinite chain of flashbacks and references, the story’s ending completes the deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence by questioning the necessity of this meaning- generating mechanism itself. Thus, unlike “The Student,” “The Bishop” not only deconstructs the reli- gious foundation of the metaphysics of meaning but also questions the neces- sity of metaphysical imagination. By rhetorically disentangling the memory- belief dyad, Chekhov calls into question the indispensable nature of the phenomenology of consciousness as the phenomenology of idealizing mem- ory. Concentrating on the subjectivity of a clergyman rather than the rhetoric of original and derivative religious texts, “The Bishop” completes the decon- structive strategy of “The Student.” 13. Itis interesting that Chekhov's first draft of the story contained a brief outline of the plot and the last two paragraphs almost in their final form (Chekhov 10: 425).“Killing Realism”: Insight and Meaning in Anton Chekhov 313 In “The Student” and “The Bishop” Chekhov undermines one of the basic tenets of Russian nineteenth-century literature—the concept and psychology of insight as the way to access the fundamental meaning of human life and history. Chekhov does not question the veracity of a particular protagonist’s insight, as has often been claimed in relation to many of his stories and plays; instead, he deconstructs the metaphysical notion of meaning as such, which renders the question of the insight’s veracity nonsensical. Chekhov’s is not a world where the epiphany of meaning fails to occur due to people’s shortcom- ings; rather, his is a world where meaning is systematically shown to be gov- ered by metaphoric and metonymic substitutions, deferrals, projections, and disseminations. Chekhovian protagonists do not have a way to transcend this system and get access to the world “as it really is,” and neither do Chekhov- ian narrators; Chekhov's complicated narrative structure, in which the voice of the narrator is usually interwoven with that of a character, extends the scope of his epistemological critique to include not only the protagonist but also the narrator and the implied author. In Chekhov’s universe the absence of direct authorial discourse is indispensible: Chekhov’s deconstruction can only work through erroneous speech and the thoughts of others. Despite the absence of a privileged authoritative voice, Chekhov's position stands opposite relativism or polyphony in the Bakhtinian sense: rather than asserting the existence of multiple individual truths, Chekhov deconstructs all of them (including that of his own narrator). The epistemological basis of Chekhov’s critique of human errors is not a superior metaphysical insight into the essence of things (which would include, as an extreme case, an equally metaphysical insight into the plurality of truths) but rather a sustained decon- structive stance: Chekhov’s characters may believe that they know the truth, as does Ivan Velikopolsky, or that they experience its epiphany, as does the bishop, or they may come to realize, as in “The Duel” [1891], that “nobody knows the real truth” and yet hope that it will be found in the future. How- ever, Chekhov’s fundamental problem is not access to “the real truth” but the viability of the very notion of access in a situation when meaning is nothing but a product of rhetoric. Taking into consideration the radicalism of Chekhov’s critique of the meta- physics of meaning universalizes Chekhov’s message: although “The Student” and “The Bishop” are quite culturally specific, they cannot be conceived of as texts exposing the peculiarities of Russian Orthodox religious culture or late nineteenth-century Russian society from the vantage point of an agnostic, an enlightened European, a medical doctor, a social democrat, etc. The structure of these texts excludes the possibility of any such vantage point that would be free from the rhetorical complications experienced by Chekhov’s protagonists: Chekhov’s texts demonstrate the limitations and snares of culture and Jan- guage from within. This is what gives Chekhov’s works their continuous ap- peal: these texts engage us not because we want to either confirm our own314 Slavic and East European Journal epistemological superiority over Ivan or Peter or, on the contrary, embrace their insights, but rather because we sense that the mechanisms of the produc- tion of meaning that Chekhov places under scrutiny in these short stories have their analogues in other cultures, including our own. This is why, despite the widespread consensus that I outlined in the begin- ning of this article, Chekhov’s deconstruction of nineteenth-century literary conventions and his critique of dysfunctional cultural models do not make his texts more realistic in the sense of getting closer to “life as it is.” The concept of literary realism as approximating “real life” depends on the metaphysical notion of meaning as a transcendental signified that can potentially be disen- tangled from textual rhetoric and made accessible to intuitive consciousness, be it that of a character or of an author. It is precisely this notion of meaning that is the central object of Chekhov’s sustained deconstructive critique. Chekhov’s deconstruction of the model of insight as a way to grasp textually unmediated meaning effectively severs the bond between the textual signifier and the extratextual signified. Despite what Gorky believed, Chekhov is not killing realism by destroying the artificial conventions that separated litera- ture from reality; he is killing realism because he deconstructs the mecha- nisms that allowed realist literature to claim access to the extratextual world in the first place. Chekhov, of course, never formulates this program as a theoretical claim. His deconstructive critique of realist metaphysics is only possible as an in- sider’s work that strives to demonstrate the limitations of a given literary system rather than as an attempt to surpass it in favor of a seemingly truer system, which would have relegated him to a Modernist camp with its own pervasive metaphysics. To use a familiar binary from The Seagull [1895], Chekhov the author can be situated in the imaginary no-man’s land between the realist Trigorin and the modernist Treplev, but his literary technique is clearly closer to Trigorin’s.! Chekhov’s rejection of Modernist literary tech- nique is more than just a matter of formal preference, it is necessitated by his deconstructive strategy. This is why, although we have to reject Gorky’s view of how Chekhov kills realism, his positioning of Chekhov on the Real- ist side of the borderline between Realism and Modernism is, I believe, quite accurate, 14, The often quoted example of this similarity is Trigorin’s description of the neck of a bro- ken bottle glittering in the moonlight. In fact, Chekhov's use of “random” detail is another very interesting aspect of his deconstructive strategy. Chekhovian detail is not completely arbitrary, as Flaubert’s “futile” details that, according to Roland Barthes, fall outside both the logic of ‘meaning and the canons of ekphrasis and therefore become the signifiers of the concept of “re~ ality” as such (Barthes 144-46). Nor, however, does Chekhovian detail quite fit deeper struc- tures of signification, such as mythological subtexts, for these subtexts themselves lose their sta- ble meaning in Chekhov's text. Chekhovian detail’s ambiguous status as neither a part of a signifying system nor a fall-out to be quickly re-appropriated by Barthesian semiotics works to problematize the whole structuralist theory of signification.“Killing Realism”: Insight and Meaning in Anton Chekhov 315 REFERENCES Akhmetshin, Ruslan B. “Sovremenniki o smerti A.P. Chekhova (Pis’ma, dnevniki, pressa).” CheKhoviana. Iz veka XX v XXI: itogi i ozhidaniia. Moskva: Nauka, 2007. 51-76. Barthes, Roland. The Rustle of Language. New York: Hill and Wang, 1986. Bitsilli, Peter. Chekhov's Art. A Stylistic Analysis. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1983. Brooks, Peter. Realist Vision. New Haven, CT/London: Yale UP, 2005. Chekhov, A. P. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v tridtsati tomakh. Moskva: Nauka, 1974-1983, Chudakov, A. P. 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