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Chekhov's Fiction and the Ideal of “Objectivity”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
The term “objectivity,” as well as several other words which have been used as its synonyms—“restraint,” “disinterestedness,” “neutrality,” “dispassionateness,” “detachment,” “impersonality,” and “indifference”—has been applied by critics to Chekhov's fiction from his own day to the present, sometimes in disparagement, but usually in praise. In various remarks about his own works or writing in general which he let fall in his correspondence, Chekhov himself used one or another of these critical labels. As early as 10 May 1886, writing to his brother Alexander, he listed “thorough objectivity” (ob”ektyvnost' splošnaja) as one of several conditions of true art. But in spite of the ubiquity of the term in his own vocabulary and that of his interpreters, its value as a critical tool has been practically nullified by the extreme imprecision with which the latter have usually handled it.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1966
References
1 Sobranie Sočinenij, 12 vols. (Moscow, 1954–56), xi, 94 (hereafter abbreviated as SS). For the English translation see The Life and Letters of Anton Tchekhov, trans. and ed. S. S. Koteliansky and Philip Tomlinson (London: Cassell, 1925), p. 78 (hereafter referred to as Koteliansky and Tomlinson—henceforth English translations will be listed, as here, immediately after the citation of the Russian texts).
2 C. Williamson, “The Ethics of Three Russian Novelists,” The International Journal of Ethics, xxxv (April 1925), 234–235.
3 The Modern Short Story, A Critical Survey (London: Nelson, 1941), p. 91.
4 SS, xi, 81–85. The Selected Letters of Anton Chekhov, ed. Lillian Hellman and trans. Sidonie K. Lederer (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1955), pp. 10–15 (hereafter referred to as Hellman and Lederer).
5 SS, xi, 263; Hellman and Lederer, pp. 55–56.
6 SS, xi, 263; Hellman and Lederer, p. 56.
7 Ibid.
8 The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 81.
9 Ivan Bunin, Memories and Portraits, trans. Vera Traill and Robin Chancellor (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1951), p. 36.
10 Œuvres complètes de Gustave Flaubert: correspondance, Nouvelle Edition Augmentée, Troisième Série, 1852–54 (Paris: Conard, 1927), pp. 104–105.
11 The Rhetoric of Fiction, p. 82.
12 SS, xi, 15. Letters on the Short Story, the Drama, and Other Literary Topics, by Anton Chekhov, ed. Louis S. Friedland (New York: Minton, Balch, 1924), p. 69 (hereafter referred to as Friedland).
13 SS, xi, 162: Koteliansky and Tomlinson, p. 93. Cf. letter of 4 February 1888 to I. L. Leont'ev, and letters of 16 September 1891 and 28 February 1895 to E. M. Šavrova: SS, xi, 191–192, 523–525; xii, 73–75: Friedland, pp. 217–218, 77–79, 80–82 (misdated 1893).
14 See my article, “The Tragic Sense in Chekhov's Earliest Stories,” Criticism, vii (Winter 1965), 52–80.
15 SS, xi, 232; Hellman and Lederer, pp. 54–55. Cf. letter of 9 June 1888 to Leont'ev himself: SS, xi, 234–235.
16 SS, xi, 287; Hellman and Lederer, p. 56.
17 SS, xi, 287–288; Hellman and Lederer, p. 57. An extension of this ideal of stating problems correctly and refraining from attempting to solve them is the artist's right frankly to treat certain subjects which, for one reason or another, have come to be regarded as taboo—his right to recognize and represent existing reality faithfully, irrespective of prevailing standards of decorum. Evidence that Chekhov was objective in this way even in his early stories is the trouble he had from time to time with the state censors or his editors, who found tales like “The Willow,” “Sergeant Prišibeev,” and “To Speak or Be Silent” politically objectionable. (See, for example, his letter of April 1883 to Lejkin: SS, xi, 23: Koteliansky and Tomlinson, p. 52.) The classic declaration of this ideal is his letter of 14 January 1887 responding to his friend M. V. Kiseleva's charge that his story “Mire” (1886) was sordid and immoral: “Certainly, to believe that literature bears the responsibility for digging up the ‘pearls’ from the heap of muck would mean rejecting literature itself. Literature is called artistic when it depicts life as it actually is. Its aim is absolute and honest truth. … To chemists there is nothing unclean in this world. A man of letters should be as objective [ob”ektiven] as a chemist; he has to renounce ordinary subjectivity and realize that manure piles play a very respectable role in a landscape and that evil passions are as inherent in life as good ones“ (SS, xi, 113; Hellman and Lederer, pp. 19–20). At first glance, this credo might seem to be contradicted by what Chekhov wrote later in the same year to Lejkin: ”The ugly is not more real than the beautiful. … And, if you please, a decent prostitute will call forth in the reader sympathy and compassion sooner than a vile one“ (letter of 2 September 1887: SS, xi, 150; Friedland, p. 108). This does not mean, however, that writers should not depict the ”vile.“ It means only that their duty is to the facts of experience, whatever they may be, and not to any doctrinaire theories of literary ”realism“ which would equate reality with the sordid exclusively.
18 SS, vi, 324; The Wife and Other Stories, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Macmillan, 1918), p. 215.
19 SS, XI, 484; Hellman and Lederer, p. 133.
20 Cf. letters of 25 November 1892 and 3 December 1892 to Suvorin, in which Chekhov reproaches Russian artists of his own generation for lacking “transcendental aims” (otdalennyx celej): SS, xi, 600–604; Hellman and Lederer, p. 172; Friedland, p. 285.
21 This technique is not to be confused, of course, with that kind of art which is usually called “photographic” or “documentary” realism. The latter, which is based partly on a philosophy of style and technique and partly on a philosophy of subject matter, may be said to specialize in rendering faithfully the outward details of certain social and natural circumstances which are taken to be the determinants of human behavior. This kind of art may employ the kind of objectivity I am here defining, but it is not necessarily coextensive with it because it does not necessarily preclude intrusive authorial commentary (witness Dreiser's novels, for instance), and because the doctrine of objectivity, in turn, has nothing to decide about the writer's choice of subject or his philosophic interpretation of it.
22 SS, xi, 204; Friedland, p. 219.
23 SS, xi, 428–429; Hellman and Lederer, pp. 98–99.
24 SS, xi, 556; Hellman and Lederer, p. 163.
25 SS, xi, 570–571; Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Macmillan, 1920), p. 306.
26 See my article, “The Shooting Party, Čexov's Early Novel: Its Place in His Development,” Slavic and East European Journal, ix (Summer 1965), 123–140.
27 1883: “Joy,” “She Left Him,” “Fat and Thin”; 1884: “The Skit,” “Surgery,” “A Chameleon,” “Where There's a Will, There's a Way,” “The Drama”; 1885: “A Living Calendar,” “In An Hotel,” “The Malefactor,” “Drowning,” “The Village Elder,” “Sergeant Prisibeev.” Two other stories which might be added to this list are “The Ninny” (1883) and “The Dance Pianist” (1885). They are narrated in the first person, but consist mainly of dialogue and monologue, and exclude any reference to the narrator's own thoughts and feelings on all but three or four very trifling occasions.