Chekhov and Forms Part 2 (In Exile)

"In Exile" is a nearly plotless story about a young Tatar whose name we are not given. He has been exiled to Siberia for crimes his brothers and uncle committed and has found work during the flood season assisting in old ferryman, Semyon, nicknamed "Preacher." The Tatar misses his wife, his home province of Simbirsk, where "even the stars were quite different, and so was the sky." He is an open-hearted boy, looking for some small comfort, from the fire, from the natural world, perhaps from old Semyon, a veteran of this life. Certainly from the latter he will not find any. Semyon is preacher of a most cynical faith, telling the young Tatar to forget his wife, Simbirsk, anything of his former existence; to abandon any dreams of change or salvation, for even to hope, Semyon says, is "mere foolishness . . . the devil confounding you."

The bulk of the story is taken up with another story, recounted by Semyon. We all recognize the framing device, "a story within a story," and should bear in mind that this formal structure calls to our notice at least two things: that the real story is most likely not in either the frame or the picture but in dialogue between the two and that the nature of the telling itself—the form of the story—will be worth attending.

The inner story is of Vassily Sergeyich, a nobleman exiled to Siberia fifteen years ago, who has refused to give up hope. He first checked the post constantly for money and messages from home. He convinced his wife, young and beautiful, to join him in exile, and, even after she ran off with an official and left him with a child to raise, he persevered, raised a beautiful young woman, doted on her. His credo, which he made the mistake of repeating to Semyon, is "Even in Siberia people can live!" Now his daughter has taken ill with tuberculosis, and Vassily is obsessed, as any father would be, with finding a cure. He travels con­stantly to far-off villages to seek medical assistance, all of which brands him, in Semyon's eyes, a fool, a dreamer, confounded by the devil. She will die in any case, Semyon assures us, and Vassily will hang himself or run off, only to be caught and thrown in prison.

The Tatar breaks into Preacher's narrative here to say "Good! Good!" his broken speech a nearly strangled affirmation of everything moral in the face of Semyon's cold, eloquent cynicism. Semyon asks him what is good, and the Tatar says:

    His wife, his daughter. . . .What of prison and what of sorrow!—any­way, he did see his wife and his daughter. . . .You say, want nothing.

    But "nothing" is bad. His wife lived with him three years—that w a gift from God. "Nothing" is bad, but three years is good.

The Tatar tells Semyon of his wife, her own promise, like Vassily Sergeyich's wife before her, to join him and ease his exile. Semyon, having finished the vodka he was drinking, goes off to sleep, and the Ta thinks of home, wonders how he will care for his wife, should she actually come, and then, in a turn reminiscent of Marya in the previous story, nods off and dreams that this life is just a dream from which h need only rouse himself to be returned to Simbirsk and his old, his true existence.

What rouses him, instead, is shots from the far side of the rive Vassily Sergeyich on yet another journey to find a doctor for his dying daughter. As they ferry Vassily back across, Semyon mocks him. The father gone, the Tatar launches another tirade at old Semyon, saying Vassily "is good, but you are bad. God created man to be alive, and t' have joy and grief and sorrow; but you want nothing so you are no alive, you are stone, clay! . . . God does not love you but he loves the Gentleman!"

Everyone laughs; all but the Tatar head for the hut and sleep. From inside they hear the Tatar crying. Semyon has the last word, saying "he'll soon get used to it," and then they fall asleep, too lazy or cold to rise and close the door.

On first reading, this, too, might seem a straightforward, even simple story, a tale of morality and cleaving to life versus a dark and life-denying cynicism. Certainly the Tatar, open-hearted, emotionally responsive, is more attractive to us than old Semyon, who has remained outside the hut just so he won't be forced to share any of his vodka, who laughs at the devotion of the father to his sick child, who espouses n creed beyond an arrogant and dark fatalism. The Tatar invokes life as it should be, and Semyon, in rejecting this view, seems beyond the scope of what we would call reasonable human behavior.

But if we look a little deeper we see Chekhov countering, having activated, our reasonable, not to say romantic, notions of life. Once the Tatar, near the end of the story, actually begins to think on his wife's arrival in Siberia he himself realizes almost immediately that he would have no way to keep her, that life here, barely enough to sustain him, would be fatal to her. While his plea that even a moment of his wife' company would make all the loneliness after it bearable is, again, sound], human and attractive, we have the living example of Vassily Sergeyich, who amiably rises from the inner story to demonstrate to us, a page later, how wrong the Tatar is: Vassily had his wife three years, his daughter ever since, and has found no such contemplative satisfaction. And last, while Semyon's habit of mocking others' misery is not endearing, one can't, on the face of it, much dispute his claims. Prisoners under the pars, as later under the Soviets, were not sent to Siberia to be rehabilitated in preparation for a return to life but to be eliminated, forgotten, erased. To hold onto beliefs that life will improve, seems, on the evi­dence, to be foolhardy indeed, even mad, and perhaps it is only the devil's prompting that makes men continue.

So who is right? Our moral leanings favor the boy and the long-suffering Vassily, but practical considerations of reality seem to favor Semyon. We want to know. Are the old moralities upheld? Is life, after all, good? Or a cruel, sustained joke? Our (My?) Hollywood-impregnated minds want clear answers, the balm of resolution. Is it to be John Wayne strutting his certainties across a landscape of lesser men and ideals; is it to be Hepburn?—feisty and talented and smart but finally meeting her fate, and salvation and comeuppance, Tracy reining her in as wife nonetheless? Or is the whole old outmoded, complacent system junk, and we thumb it in the eye, simpering along with James Dean, barely able to enunciate our contempt, like Brando? Which side is Chekhov taking?

Neither.

While I think it fair to assume Chekhov would like to side with the Tatar, would like to be writing of a world where the simple, old verities abide, he knows this is not the case. This story, like many from this period in his writing, arises from a year-long trip Chekhov made to the prison island of Sakhalin, where he gathered information about the conditions of the prisoners, their treatment, their medical problems. While we, and even Chekhov, might have earlier felt that nothing could shake our certainties about family, loyalty, faith in God and man, he saw a dif­ferent world in the east. This, from the book he published about his journey, is Chekhov's description of the lashing of a prisoner:

    The torturer stood to one side and struck the victim in such a way that the lash hit the body diagonally. After each five lashes he slowly moved to the other side, allowing the victim a thirty second respite. The victim's hair soon stuck to his forehead. After only five or ten blows his flesh, covered with weals from former beatings, turned crimson and deep blue; his skin peeled with each blow. "Your wor­ship!" we heard through the screams and tears, "your worship! Spare me, your worship." After twenty or thirty blows he started lamenting, as if drunk or delirious, "I'm an unfortunate man, a broken man. . . .Why are they punishing me?" Suddenly his neck unnaturally, and we heard vomiting. . . . He did not say another word, only moaned and wheezed.

The world Chekhov writes about is the world where man's intentions are pitted against his failures, where the will to live is tested by crushing lessons. Semyon, in his vitality, in his finding a path to s manner of living, has, I believe, some of Chekhov's approval. And does the Tatar, with his battered sensitivity, his clinging, along with Vassily, to a life become illusory, a form of imaginative self-torment. I lit Semyon is damned to his darkness, he is Charon ferrying the dead like himself endlessly across the night river, while the Tatar lives: he will be disappointed, his faith is naive, foolish, no doubt evanescent, but ii I worth noting.

The quality I believe Chekhov admires most is striving. Marya and Semyon bear his gentle and sympathetic censure because they ha v heeded life's lessons and turned from it in fear (Marya) or come!' It (Semyon). He may not admire, finally, their choices, but he understand them. The parallel notions of accomplishment and idealism are lit td abstract to Chekhov, who takes man's measure not by what he claims to have done or believed but by the minute-to-minute life he has lived. III his long story "My Life" he puts is this way: "Alas, the thoughts and doings of living creatures are not nearly so significant as their sufferings.”

How does setting play into this reading of "In Exile"?

Let me suggest, again, that Chekhov activates, indeed counts on, eat reading this story as a simple battle between good and evil, assuming most of us will side with the good, the life-affirming. Then he pits these chubby complacencies against quite irrefutable arguments, to show not that these other, darker truths are vindicated but that neither can be, that life is an endless shuttling between the dark and light, the hope filled ail the despairing, and it is the shuttling itself that matters. These characters, then, are stuck, suspended between realities, and the method Chekhov uses to fix them is inversion, a tipping over of our expectations.

Let's begin again with the title. "In Exile" syntactically suggests location, a place to be "in," but contradicts itself, for, while exile has become idiomatic of a place outside, it is actually a nonplace, a constant negation, defined by what it is not. The characters, from the start, then are in a nonplace, are nowhere. Consider our hero, the Tatar, a man with no name, imprisoned for a crime he did not commit, sent to a place' that is a negation of place.

The landscape Chekhov gives us is nearly a negation as well. It is night, and cold. There is a hut on a dark river, a small fire; lights can be seen in the distance. That's all. He brilliantly dramatizes a landscape of near insubstantiality using the dark and the cold, the bumps of the ferry and the murmurings of the river.

The main physical attribute of the story is the river. Rivers, throughout history and literature, evoke a specific imagery. They are borders, crossed to begin or to end journeys. They are demarcations between old lives and new, old lands and new. And here, on the surface, the river seems to be functioning in the same way. Semyon ferries people across, presumably to continue their journeys. But an odd thing happens on this river—no one leaves. The only character to cross the river is Vassily, who is defined by his endless futile crossings and recrossings. Charon and the River Styx seem appropriate analogies: no one crosses this river to leave, they are permanent crossers, there is no world beyond the dim fire and the cold-battered hut. The river does not demarcate a larger world; has become the world.

These inversions set up the inversions that follow in Semyon's logic. To have faith is to listen to the devil. To pray is to blaspheme; to hope to despair. The tag line he applies to Vassily, "one can li-i-ve," in its mockery suggests that life itself is a joke. In this world loyalty, hope, fatherhood, family, are all illusion. The life the Tatar hopes to regain is effaced as if it never had existed, and once the flood season is over he will disappear himself into Siberia, leaving no trace. All that is left is the river: "The dark, cold river . . . floating ten paces away; it grumbled, Flopped against the hollow clay banks and raced on swiftly to the faraway sea" this boy will never reach.

Still, life goes on, in the boy's longings, in Vassily's futile travels, in the motion of the ferry and the river and the seasons' unpausing cycle. Chekhov shows us, through the setting of this piece, that the world will upturn our pieties, our assumptions, our dearest, most closely held beliefs. Neither one creed nor the other prevails here, simply the dialec­tic, the tension between the two. And fittingly we end on a note of Ambiguity, as the door to the hut remains open, physically, allowing in both the cold and the living cries of the boy near the fire, and formally, suggesting there is no certainty, no closure, no end to this story.

In a letter Chekhov wrote, "When I am finished with my characters I like to return them to life," and it is life, not the Good Life or the Bad Life, not the proclamation of a triumphant creed either over or through his characters but the characters themselves, their vital, their "significant," sufferings, that Chekhov shows us in his small, miraculous stories.

There is much more in these stories, much that could be said about char­acterization, dramatic line, point of view, other matters of form. It has been my intention to demonstrate how one formal device—setting can help illuminate part of the subtle, mysterious machinery Chekhov's art. These two stories, leeched of their setting—the cart at flood, the river and ferry—become something else entirely, something perhaps more tenable and unambiguous, solid, moral tales, but become so much less: inert, hortatory, check marks on one or the other side those lists of Virtue and Vice now being compiled and admired, where message is all.

Also see:

• In Exile By Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
• Chekhov and Form Part 1