The conference theme, Чеховская карта мира, immediately brought to my mind Chekhov's voyage to Sakhalin; it also caused me think about the motif of getting lost in Chekhov: literally, as in «По делам службы,» or metaphorically, as in «Скучная история» and others. In treating the Sakhalin trip, I will pay very little scholarly attention to Chekhov himself, but it does turn out that the motif of losing one's way is not at all irrelevant.
This essay discusses the influence of Chekhov, and in particular his voyage to Sakhalin and the resulting book, on two American authors who achieved some prominence in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s: James McConkey and (the much more famous) Robert Coles. Both profess to have been profoundly influenced by Chekhov, and in particular, by Chekhov's voyage to Sakhalin and the book, Остров Сахалин.
James McConkey is a Professor Emeritus of English literature at Cornell University who published literary criticism, fiction, and what we now call creative non-fiction, in such prominent venues as New Yorker, Atlantic, and the Hudson Review. Now in his mid-nineties — though still publishing — he has been widely recognized as a master essayist and has received the National Endowment of Arts essay award and the American Academy and
Institute of Arts and Letters award in literature1. As a teacher of creative writing at Cornell he mentored such illustrious students as Thomas Pynchon; and he inherited the European Novel course at Cornell directly from Vladimir Nabokov. He has often acknowledged Chekhov's considerable influence, as in the essay «On Being Human» (American Scholar, Winter 2003), and in 1977—78 he organized a Chekhov festival at Cornell in which a number of prominent authors did the same; he subsequently published a volume of essays based on the presentations in that festival, Chekhov and Our Age: Responses to Chekhov by American Writers and Scholars, which included contributions from such stellar figures as: Walker Percy, Harold Brodkey, Eudora Welty, Denise Levertov, John Cheever, and Simon Karlinsky. McConkey wrote in his introduction, «Touch a fiction writer or a poet, I have come to think, and you are likely to touch a Chekhovian»2. He speaks of Chekhov as «a superb writer» who «makes me want to construct fictions of my own»3. Now, just what a «Chekhovian» might be remains quite ambiguous; for McConkey, however, it appears to be Chekhov the person that matters most, or as he puts it in one place, «the voice underlying Chekhov's creative work that is responsible for the «spirit» to be found everywhere in it»4. Thus, in McConkey's article in the 2004 Chekhov symposium volume, Chekhov the Immigrant, he writes: «I don't think [Chekhov's] been an influence on the style or subject of my writing; rather, he appeals to, and supports, something deep within my psyche»5. Indeed, it seems to be less as a writer than as a perspective on the human condition and moral actor that Chekhov appeals to McConkey, and in that regard, it makes sense that Chekhov's writings related to the Sakhalin journey are key to McConkey. In fact, his introduction to his edited volume ends with an interpretation of Chekhov's motivations for the journey, as though that were key to knowing Chekhov, the most important thing about him6.
McConkey published two other books very tightly connected with Chekhov's person, his travels, and his study of Sakhalin: the first, Journey to Sakhalin (1971), is a novel set during the student revolts on college campuses in the U.S. of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The second, To a Distant Island (1984), is an interpretive and semi-fictionalized retelling of Chekhov's journey to Sakhalin, interspersed with reflections on McConkey's own journey through life.
Robert Coles is a retired Harvard University Professor of Medicine who trained as a psychiatrist and, later, a psychoanalyst. He studied with Erik Erikson and wrote path-breaking biographies of Erikson and also Anna Freud in a wide-ranging career as a public intellectual who identified, studied, and wrote about pressing social issues in the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s, beginning with his study of the emotional pressures children of color were experiencing at the height of the civil rights era. Coles won a Pulitzer Prize for the series of books he wrote in expanding this topic to other communities, «Children of Crisis». He later received one of the first MacArthur Foundation «Genius» grants (1981), as well as the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1998) and the National Humanities Medal (2001). Coles was a public intellectual of the first rank in the United States, appearing on the cover of Time magazine, and ranging widely in his studies and his writings — from the U.S. to apartheid South Africa and Northern Ireland of the «troubles». And he did not scorn popular culture: among his several biographies is one of Bruce Springsteen, in whom he became interested after one of his sons took him to a concert.
As a doctor and a writer — a doctor-writer, with the word «doctor» heavily emphasized — Chekhov was an extremely important model for Coles, one he was led to, as he tells the story, by three powerful influences: the poet and short story writer, Dr. William Carlos Williams; a dying young schoolteacher whom he treated as a third-year medical student interning in a New York hospital; and a sage tutor at Columbia University's School of Medicine, a Dr. Yale Kneeland7. Coles came to teach a good deal of Chekhov as a professor in the medical humanities program at Harvard, and in various essays speaks of a number of Chekhov's works; but Chekhov's journey to Sakhalin clearly stood out for him as a kind of map to an active, socially engaged, moral selfhood.
I will say a few more words about each of these authors in turn.
McConkey
When I first read McConkey's novel Journey to Sakhalin, having been hooked by its Chekhov-related title, I was baffled: what connection was he drawing between his tale of a reflective, fumbling Dean of Students, George Chambers, who is attempting to defuse violent and racially tinged revolt on the Cornell-modeled campus of his fictional world, and Chekhov's 1890 feat or the resulting book, Ostrov Sakhalin? Why this title for a novel with only one brief, very circumscribed, overt reference to Chekhov? Sakhalin as such never appears directly in the novel. About midway through it, the hero has been offered a promotion from Dean of Students to Vice President of the University; he is talking this over with his wife (an artist) at night, in bed. His wife mocks his institutional ambitions, and declares that she does not want to find herself in an academic novel by C.P. Snow, that is, as a character in a small but politicized world of well-spoken trivialities8. It just so happens that Chambers is reading a volume of Chekhov's letters at the time — apparently with biographical annotations — and the critique of Chambers's further absorption into campus politics, and the correlative artistic depiction of «people simply in their political and social contexts» for which Snow stands, find resonance with Chekhov's «decision to make that wild trip across Siberia» and his earlier famous letter to Pleshcheev about his «holy of holies»9.
Indeed, if Chekhov's voyage to Sakhalin is in some obscure sense a model for this novel, then C.P. Snow's academic novels are alluded to as an anti-model: in Journey to Sakhalin, college students are walking around with loaded guns and the dean/vicepresident will be shot and killed at the end; headlines drawn from 1968 newspapers line the bottom margin of the entire novel, like a horizontal scroll: they tell of events pertaining to the Vietnam War, Prague spring, riots in American cities, Black Panthers, John Birch Society and the KKK, SDS, nuclear arms and space races, and so on. The fictional world of this campus novel never loses sight of the bigger, extremely dangerous, eventful «real» world, and the decisions to be made and acts taken by individuals in the novel's college town reflect this bigger world.
Chekhov's mysterious decision to travel to Sakhalin becomes emblematic of doing something very personal — something undertaken for one's own soul — that is nevertheless also a significant social act. In traveling to Sakhalin, Chekhov extracts his self from the social and the rigid ideological positions that have encased it, while also assuming a heavy burden for social problems, becoming, we might say, something of a martyr for them. Thus McConkey reads Chekhov's journey to Sakhalin as deriving from two contradictory impulses: on the one hand, to take responsibility for what his society had done, destroying lives — it's the fault of all of us, not just prison administrators, he cites from Chekhov's letter to Suvorin of 9 March 1890 on why Sakhalin deserves attention; on the other hand, Chekhov heads East «simply out of the desire to escape that society, to be as free as he could be»10. This desire for «freedom» derives from Chekhov's statement about his «holy of holies» in the October 1888 letter to Pleshcheev. McConkey sees such a desire as tending, in the extreme, to «willful self-annihilation:» «...now as always man was caught between the conflicting demands of personal freedom and societal pressures and that the conflict was not so much mutually destructive as salutary, a necessary tension to prevent a willful self-annihilation (which the pursuit of personal freedom eventually amounted to) or the construction of the perfectly efficient beehive society (in which the honeycomb counted, but not its swarming inhabitants as individual creatures). Seemingly preposterous and absurd because of the contradictory impulses he read into it, Chekhov's Sakhalin expedition was for Chambers actually a perfect analogy of those tensions within which human meaning had at least once been found...»11. In his fictionalized retelling of Chekhov's journey, McConkey is very taken by Chekhov's swimming from the steamer in the Indian Ocean while sailing home; that «flouting of death,» to him, is Chekhov pursuing «personal freedom» almost to «willful self-annihilation»12.
The novel ends with the character's college-aged daughter on a «find oneself» trip to Italy, as yet unaware of the tragedy that has struck her family — her father has been shot while attempting to mediate in a violent situation on campus. She is on Sicily, which, in the overarching logic of the novel becomes an analogue of Sakhalin: Chekhov's voyage is an underlying model for both her journey and her father's martyrdom. The last line of the novel is, «But looking at her smiling face as she dreamed, you could believe she was capable of meeting whatever was to come»13. The inner contradiction that McConkey saw as motivating the compromise formation of Chekhov's voyage to Sakhalin results in a kind of splitting in this novel: the university vice president is martyred for the larger cause; his daughter breaks free of the social, is alone, abroad, and ready to recast her selfhood, a process that begins with deciding to buy a stylish pair of shoes. (Though the freedom is mitigated: she's still writing home.)
In To a Distant Island, also, Italy becomes an odd double of Sakhalin. McConkey claims to have discovered Chekhov's letters, and through them the Sakhalin episode, while on a sabbatical stint in Firenze, where he was recuperating from «exhaustion» and depression after a tumultuous year of racial violence on the Cornell campus. McConkey clearly identified with what he understood of Chekhov's emotional state in 1889, when plans for the journey took shape. McConkey calls To a Distant Island, «a combination of biography, autobiography, fiction, and commentary on Chekhov's ... stories, letters, and fact-filled book about Sakhalin»14. It is perhaps because Chekhov scholarship tends to maintain an aura of mystery the question of why Chekhov undertook the Sakhalin project — and no biographer of Chekhov could approach fully explaining Chekhov's self and psyche, of course — that McConkey felt a book retelling the story (from materials available in translation) was warranted. But it was also the case that the story he put together about Chekhov resonated deeply with McConkey's own situation and emotional state; thus autobiographical reflection comprises a significant portion of the fictionalized biography.
For McConkey, Chekhov's trip is about giving life meaning in the face of death. «I am taking a trip to have a goal in my life, it's as simple as that», he has Chekhov tell Olga Kundasova («the astronomer») while they are sharing a cabin on a steamer during the part of the journey on which she accompanied him15. Later, in an analytical section, McConkey speaks of the episode when Chekhov was nearly killed in a collision with a mail cart speeding in the opposite direction: «As an example of randomness in life, it was nothing he could have willed. And yet it or some other rehearsal of his death was, I think, an unconscious part of his purpose in undertaking his expedition...»16. As rehearsal, this «death» was symbolic and regenerative, and it only put one toe into that annihilation of the self associated with «absolute freedom»: rather than non-being, he sheds the skin of fame and social place: «his recovery required anonymity, a continued separation from his own past and his social identity»17. In McConkey's telling, the journey to Sakhalin was in a central sense about getting lost: a deliberate loss of the self, a way to a new self, but a way entailing all manner of risks.
Indeed, the Sakhalin voyage was fraught with danger, and Dr. Chekhov knew well that his would be a life cut short by tuberculosis in any case. In this regard it is revealing that McConkey's retelling of Chekhov's voyage ends not in the multiyear effort to put it all together in the unique and consequential volume, Ostrov Sakhalin — that is not part of the story — but rather with the ending of the story «Gusev». It is death that underwrites the work's meaning. The last pages of McConkey's fictionalized account are a direct citation of the last section of the Yarmolinsky translation of the story. Chekhov's biography becomes absorbed into Gusev's; and so too does McConkey's. That is why it is not preposterous for him to say that he has written this book as a way of understanding the ending of «Gusev», as he does in his preface18. (He had already ended his 1968 memoir Crossroads with a discussion of that story as well, and most recently, the final volume in his series of memoirs, Complete Court of Memory [2014], describes the burial of his wife with details reminiscent of «Gusev» as well: she is wrapped in a shroud, shaped as a carrot, and lies on a board19.)
McConkey is prone to speak of «my Chekhov»; what matters to him is what Chekhov means to him, and there is no pretension toward objective, scholarly analysis, though he delights to learn new facts or scholarly treatments that resonate with his own subjective and intuitive approach. McConkey is not in any sense like Chekhov: the literary form toward which he gravitated over the course of his career, very autobiographical and with philosophical meditation, could not be more alien to Chekhov's poetics.
Perhaps the most interesting and revealing moment in McConkey's Journey to Sakhalin was one of the most clearly fictionalizing: Olga Kundasova shows up on the steamer aboard which Chekhov departs from family and friends at Yaroslavl. She is soaking wet and chilled: Chekhov takes her to his stateroom and has her disrobe entirely; as she stands naked and he dries her hair with a towel, the two have a philosophical discussion. At a certain point he declares: «Why Olga, how beautiful you are!»20 McConkey knows the letter in which Chekhov declared Kundasova too unattractive to marry — he alludes to it earlier in the book. But here he makes Chekhov kinder, more generous and loving than the textual record suggests; he makes Chekhov in the image of his own best self. In Crossroads, too, he says: «Whatever flaws I find in Chekhov I blame on his translators»21. These are moments when you can see Chekhov playing the role of what Freud called the «ego-ideal» for this American writer. And if his Chekhov is not our Chekhov, his readings of Chekhov's stories — in particular, his discussion of «Gusev» — is extremely penetrating nonetheless, and there is much to admire in the way that the figure of Chekhov facilitates McConkey's own fine, wonderful writing.
Coles
Dr. Robert Coles is the better known of these two writers. Here is a figure who chased at least two hares, Chekhov style, all his life, but had a success in combining his various careers that Chekhov could only have envied. Unlike Chekhov, whose cautious inquiries into the possibility of submitting his Sakhalin book as a dissertation in medicine were haughtily dismissed, Coles received an appointment to Harvard medical school after writing his own analogue of Chekhov's Sakhalin book. Fie became one of the founders of the field of medical humanities in the United States, and he actually had the kind of career that Chekhov was dreaming of when he thought he might have a position as a professor of internal medicine at Moscow University.
As an undergraduate student of English, Coles came to know the famous author and physician William Carlos Williams, about whom he had written a term paper; when Coles was inspired by Williams to pursue medical training — he wanted to become a doctor-writer, like Williams — he was exhorted by Williams to read Chekhov. This led to a lifelong engagement with Chekhov, whom Coles featured heavily in the courses in medical humanities that he taught at Harvard beginning in the mid 1970s22, and about whom he often spoke and wrote.
I interviewed Coles in connection with a 2004 Chekhov centennial conference I co-organized with Julie de Sherbinin of Colby College23, and during that interview learned how central the image of Chekhov was to Coles's personal and professional identity. Chekhov's journey to Sakhalin, in particular, clearly provided Coles with a model for how he, as a physician and author, might lead an engaged life. As with McConkey, Chekhov represents a selfhood to which Coles clearly aspires, his best self or ego-ideal. At one point he lists Chekhov as a type, the other examples of which are the Catholic mission worker Dorothy Day and Jesus Christ. «This is Chekhov pursuing medicine in an Isaiah-Jeremiah-Jesus fashion, where being with the poor will heal us and give us ourselves»24. And whenever he discusses Chekhov's work, and particularly the voyage to Sakhalin, it is in connection with himself: in my interview of Coles, each time he answered a question about Chekhov, he proceeded to talk about himself. Very much as is the case with McConkey, however, this ego-centric approach can nonetheless reveal much in regard to Chekhov. For example, when Coles speaks of Chekhov's motivation for the Sakhalin project — very insightfully, from my point of view — he proceeds to recount how he left Harvard and Cambridge, MA, to go to work on poor Indian reservations in New Mexico25.
For Coles, as for McConkey, the self-sacrificing journey is also an attempt to lose the self in a bid for a new, meaningful way of being. The extreme of this idea is of course death: and at times one almost feels that Coles tried to take, through his identification with Chekhov, what he did not have directly himself, but which he knew well as a sensitive, observant physician, and which he saw driving Chekhov and certain other authors, and doctor authors: what he called «the fire of youthful dying»26. the consciousness of the shortness of life that drives one to do more and better. Chekhov's tuberculosis is somewhat romanticized when Coles states, «And I hope that those of us who are critics and scholars, in coming to Chekhov, feel the fire and the breath — yes, the feverish, tuberculous breath — of this extraordinary life, which lives on through his words»27. But the disease is equally deromanticized when Coles rejects psychobiographical speculation on Chekhov's denial of his illness:28 «[Y]ou know when you have tuberculosis. You cough up blood. You feel chest pain. [...] This is a tangible, physical, concrete, palpable phenomenon of the body that Chekhov knew; he knew it as a physician, and he also knew it because at that time tuberculosis was a major prevalent illness. Of course he knew it. He knew that he was dying, he knew he was dying as a human being knows...»29.
The preceding statement takes Coles, characteristically, to recollection of cases where patients knew better than their doctor — Coles — that they were dying, and where the patients had something to teach a young doctor. Here he calls for «a little humility,» especially among doctors and other professionals whose «smugness and arrogance» he finds persistently skewered in Chekhov30; perhaps «Aniuta» is the best example of this, in his view, and he mentions the story often. Chekhov's «doctor-stories» become tools for critical self-reflection for physicians and physicians in training. They attack the hubris, the ego-inflation that can be fed by the detached professional gaze. If Coles's discussions of Chekhov always have a way of coming back to the person of Dr. Robert Coles, it is not because he is solipsistic or narcissistic, but because his narratives offer a demonstration of how to take the lessons he finds in Chekhov and apply them to one's self.
Coles dreamed of visiting Sakhalin — the Sakhalin he knew from Sakhalin Island, of course, not the Sakhalin of oilrigs. He spoke briefly of undertaking that voyage with one of his sons, a photographer, and wondered if I might join them; but that was not to be. In the end, the map Chekhov left for these writers and thinkers was not a cartographic guide to Chekhov's places, that can still be visited as we are doing these days, but of a path to very individual, distinct, and moral selfhoods31.
Literature
Coles, Robert. The Call of Stories. Teaching and the Moral Imagination. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1989.
1. «A Conversation with Dr. Robert Coles: Anton Chekhov and William Carlos Williams». Interview with Michael Finke. In Michael C. Finke and Julie de Sherbinin, eds. Chekhov the Immigrant: Translating a Cultural Icon. Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2007. P. 271—84.
2. «The Wry Dr. Chekhov». In his Times of Surrender: Selected Essays by Robert Coles. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1988. P. 49—56. Finke, Michael C. and Julie de Sherbinin, eds. Chekhov the Immigrant: Translating a Cultural Icon. Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2007. McConkey, James. Crossroads. In his Court of Memory. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1983. 1—184.
3. «A Faded Portrait». In his The Telescope in the Parlor: Essays on Life and Literature. Philadelphia, PA: Paul Dry Books, 2004. P. 82—90.
4. A Journey to Sakhalin. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1971.
5. To a Distant Island. Philadelphia, PA: Paul Dry Books, 1984; rept. 2000. reMcConkey, James, ed. Chekhov and Our Age: Responses to Chekhov by American Writers and Scholars. Ithaca, NY: Center for International Studies, 1984.
Примечания
1. http://www.cornell.edu/video/reading-by-james-mcconkey
2. McConkey, ed., Chekhov and Our Age, p. 2.
3. Ibid., p. 1.
4. James McConkey, «A Faded Portrait», 82—83.
5. Finke and de Sherbinin, eds., Chekhov the Immigrant, p. 166.
6. McConkey, ed., Chekhov and Our Age, pp. 8—9.
7. Recollections of William Carlos Williams pop up frequently in the writings of Coles, but for a focused treatment of the Chekhov connection, see Robert Coles, «A Conversation with Dr. Robert Coles» (interview with Michael Finke); on Dr. Kneeland and the young leukemia patient, see Robert Coles, «The Wry Dr. Chekhov».
8. McConkey, A Journey to Sakhalin, p. 103.
9. Ibid., pp. 104—5.
10. Ibid., pp. 106.
11. Ibid., pp. 107.
12. McConkey, To a Distant Island, 188.
13. McConkey, A Journey to Sakhalin, p. 248.
14. McConkey, To a Distant Island, xvii.
15. Ibid., 60.
16. Ibid., 87.
17. Ibid., 108.
18. McConkey, To a Distant Island, xvii-xviii.
19. Discussed in http://www.cornell.edu/video/reading-by-james-mcconkey
20. McConkey, To a Distant Island, 59.
21. McConkey, Crossroads, 172.
22. See Coles, «Interlude: Bringing Poems to Medical School Teaching,» in his The Call of Stories, 92—101.
23. Coles, «A Conversation with Dr. Robert Coles». The interview, which is transcribed in Chekhov the Immigrant, is also available as a video on a dvd that accompanies the published volume.
24. Ibid., 279.
25. Ibid., 274—75.
26. Ibid., 273.
27. Ibid., 282.
28. As I have tried to do, for instance in «Heal Thyself, Hide Thyself: Why Did Dr. Chekhov Ignore His ТВ?», in Finke and de Sherbinin, Chekhov the Immigrant, 285—97.
29. Coles, «A Conversation with Dr. Robert Coles», 277—8.
30. Coles, «A Conversation with Dr. Robert Coles», 278—80.
31. On this point see Coles, «On Moral Conduct,» which is the last chapter of his The Call of Stories (pp. 192—205).
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