Definitions: Essays in Contemporary Criticism | Page 9

fiction so clearly as a comparison, for better and for worse,
with the Russian short story. I have in mind the works of Anton
Tchekoff, whose short stories have now been translated into excellent
English. Fresh from a reading of these books, one feels, it is true, quite
as inclined to criticize as to praise. Why are the characters therein
depicted so persistently disagreeable, even in the lighter stories? Why
are the women always freckled, the men predominantly red and watery
in the eye? Why is the country so flat, so foggy, so desolate; and why
are the peasants so lumpish and miserable? Russia before the
Revolution could not have been so dreary as this; the prevailing
grimness must be due to some mental obfuscation of her writers. I do
not refer to the gloomy, powerful realism of the stories of hopeless
misery. There, if one criticizes, it must be only the advisability of the
choice of such subjects. One does not doubt the truth of the picture. I
mean the needless dinginess of much of Russian fiction, and of many
of these powerful short stories.
Nevertheless, when one has said his worst, and particularly when he
has eliminated the dingier stories of the collection, he returns with an
admiration, almost passionate, to the truth, the variety, above all to the
freedom of these stories. I do not know Russia or the Russians, and yet
I am as sure of the absolute truth of that unfortunate doctor in "La
Cigale," who builds up his heroic life of self-sacrifice while his wife
seeks selfishly elsewhere for a hero, as I am convinced of the essential
unreality, except in dialect and manners, of the detectives, the
"dope-fiends," the hard business men, the heroic boys and lovely girls
that people most American short stories. As for variety,-- the Russian
does not handle numerous themes. He is obsessed with the dreariness
of life, and his obsession is only occasionally lifted; he has no room to
wander widely through human nature. And yet his work gives an
impression of variety that the American magazine never attains. He is
free to be various. When the mood of gloom is off him, he experiments
at will, and often with consummate success. He seems to be sublimely
unconscious that readers are supposed to like only a few kinds of
stories; and as unaware of the taboo upon religious or reflective
narrative as of the prohibition upon the ugly in fiction. As life in any

manifestation becomes interesting in his eyes, his pen moves freely.
And so he makes life interesting in many varieties, even when his
Russian prepossessions lead him far away from our Western moods.
Freedom. That is the word here, and also in his method of telling these
stories. No one seems to have said to Tchekoff, "Your stories must
move, move, move." Sometimes, indeed, he pauses outright, as life
pauses; sometimes he seems to turn aside, as life turns aside before its
progress is resumed. No one has ever made clear to him that every
word from the first of the story must point unerringly toward the
solution and the effect of the plot. His paragraphs spring from the
characters and the situation. They are led on to the climax by the story
itself. They do not drag the panting reader down a rapid action, to fling
him breathless upon the "I told you so" of a conclusion prepared in
advance.
I have in mind especially a story of Tchekoff's called "The Night
Before Easter." It is a very interesting story; it is a very admirable story,
conveying in a few pages much of Russian spirituality and more of
universal human nature; but I believe that all, or nearly all, of our
American magazines would refuse it; not because it lacks
picturesqueness, or narrative suspense, or vivid characterization--all of
these it has in large measure. They would reject it because it does not
seem to move rapidly, or because it lacks a vigorous climax. The
Goltva swollen in flood lies under the Easter stars. As the monk Jerome
ferries the traveler over to where fire and cannon-shot and rocket
announce the rising of Christ to the riotous monastery, he asks, "Can
you tell me, kind master, why it is that even in the presence of great
happiness a man cannot forget his grief?" Deacon Nicholas is dead,
who alone in the monastery could write prayers that touched the heart.
And of them all, only Jerome read his "akaphists." "He used to open the
door of his cell and make me sit by him, and we used to read....His face
was compassionate and tender--" In the monastery the countryside is
crowding to hear the Easter service. The choir sings "Lift up thine eyes,
O Zion, and behold."