H. W. Bruford - Chekhov and His Russia

by
H. W. BRUFORD

First published in 1948 by
Routledge

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

Reprinted in 1998, 2002
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Transferred to Digital Printing 2007

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First issued in paperback 2013

1948 W. H. Bruford

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library

Chekhov and His Russia
ISBN 13: 978-0-415-17809-9 (hbk)
ISBN 13: 978-0-415-86872-3 (pbk)

The Sociology of the Soviet Union: 8 Volumes
ISBN 13:978-0-415-17836-5

The International Library of Sociology: 274 Volumes
ISBN 13: 978-0-415-17838-9

Publishers Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent

THE author of this work was one of the many who were irresistibly attracted by Chekhov when Mrs. Garnetts translations began to appear some thirty years ago, but his book would not have been written but for the second world war. While separated from his books and papers during four years of war work he found in a collected edition of Chekhov in Russian so much delight and such a rich source of information about the older Russia, out of which the world power of to-day has grown, that he was tempted to play truant for once from the normal field of his studies, and to attempt to communicate to others some of the pleasure and the illumination which Chekhov had given him.

His aim from the outset was to throw light both on Chekhov and on Russia, by trying to see Russia through Chekhovs eyes and to see Chekhov as the product of a particular age and country. This way of approaching literature, which is of course only one among many, had become habitual with him in German studies, but it soon became clear that although experience gained in the one field might be of value in the other, a thorough study of the Russian background would be a very exacting task. He has done what he could in a limited time and with limited resources, but in the main this book attempts to use Chekhov himself as a source, and to give only so much information from other sources as will serve to furnish a provisional framework of reference and prevent gross misinterpretation.

Even if the author had been as well informed about Russian history as he would wish to be, such an attempt would still be open to criticism on two counts. One of them could hardly be put more forcibly than it was by Prince Mirsky when he wrote: Only persons ignorant alike of the nature of imaginative literature and of that of historical evidence will attempt to use Russian fiction as an historical source, unless its evidence is corroborated by extra-literary sources, in which case it becomes superfluous.1 The last statement, the only one which may be seriously disputed, may be countered by a few words from a British historian equally learned and perhaps wiser, the late Sir John Maynard: Statistics may (and do) lie. They may be (and are) suppressed. But the picture of manners by the hand of a master outlives brass.1 Certainly it has been the universal practice of our historians of Russia to make use of the Russian novelists, and surely quite rightly, just as paintings are used as evidence, in spite of the kind of criticism that is annually made of the Royal Academy by The Tailor and Cutter. These vivid symbols may be misleading, but they are less misleading than what our unaided imagination would construct from blue-books and our personal experience as foreigners, though they must be used of course with critical discretion.

A second type of critic might consider it a kind of sacrilege to use such a fine literary artist as Chekhov as a quarry for historical material, and the criticism would be justified if there were not already in existence a large number of purely literary appreciations of his work to restore the balance. It would be the height of philistinism to think of Chekhov merely as a historical source, but it is not even good literary criticism to write of him with as little regard to his historical setting as is displayed by many of our essayists.

A comparison between Russian and English appreciations of Chekhov shows that the former tend to stress the content of his work, and the latter the form. Russian critics, both during his lifetime and later, have almost always insisted on the truth of his picture of Russia, and represented it as a challenge to action. English critics have frequently overlooked his background of experience, so different from their own, and taken as a verdict on life itself what was written as an indictment of Russian conditions in his own time. A Russian refutes for instance the objections raised by De Vogu and some English critics to the exaggerated gloom of the disconsolate Chekhovs and Gorkis, asserting that Russians find in these artists work a true reflection of the Russian atmosphere. Chekhov, he says, showed up all the horror of Russian actuality, and to a society suffering from blindness of the soul, a society which saw and did not understand, he said with unparalleled force: We cannot go on living like this. Another calls him, in 1904, the most authoritative historian of the last twenty years. If all the other works of our age were to disappear, he says, a sociologist could paint a picture on a broad canvas of the life of the eighties and nineties and its background from his writings alone. 1 Merezhkovsky said exactly the same in his essay Ghekhov and Gorky.

A book of this kind is meant to point beyond itself. Perhaps it may serve as a brief guide to fascinating country, the daily life of that richly endowed but tragically misgoverned older Russia, as it was seen by the gentle, humorous and understanding eyes of a truly humane spirit and a consummate artist, the last of the Russian classics. No one who knows Chekhov can feel that there is any unsurmountable barrier to understanding between his country and our own, however much the outward forms of life may change, because he will be convinced that the Russian is a human being with joys and sorrows like his own, and that in spite of our very different history, there are, or were, astonishing similarities in our moral outlook, due no doubt in the main to our common Christian inheritance.