LITERATURE: Chekhov’s Short Stories

One thing I’ve always loved about Chekhov is how he homes in on the simplest aspects of human nature or human interaction and makes it important.

In The Kiss, with an entire army and a military scenario, the focus is upon a man’s loneliness and his dreams of love based on an instant in which a strange woman unknowingly kisses him rather than her lover as expected in a dark room. In Verotchka, we have a studious young man–though at 29 he doesn’t know love. The story opens with him enjoying the recall of good fortune in spending time with a family who has been more than good to him during his stay. As he is leaving, his kind thoughts of his host’s 21 year-old daughter are turned into mass confusion as she professes her love. It is so simple, so intimate, these problems that Chekhov’s writes about and yet they are something that while encompassing the nature of all mankind, need no drama of global war, famine, illness or strife of any kind over that one on one human connection.

One more thing I’ve realized is a tying together of two completely different stories and cast of characters by detail. In Verotchka:

Ivan Alexeievitch Ogneff well recollects an August evening when he opened noisily the hall door and went out on the terrace with a light cloak and a wide-brimmed straw hat–the very hat which now, beside his top-boots lies in the dust underneath his bed.

And from The Match, as the officials break into the bedroom of the suspected murder victim,Marcus Ivanovitch Klausoff:

Beside the bed, the little table, and the single chair, there was no furniture in the room. Looking under the bed, the inspector saw a couple of dozen empty bottles, and old straw hat and a quart of vodka. Under the table lay one top boot, covered with dust.

I, of course, wonder at the meaning of the hat and boots that Chekhov has brought into each story. Is it a detail that just has stuck itself into his mind and comes out in his writing? It would seem that the head to toe coverings might indicate something more metaphorical. Or it could just be where Chekhov normally stored his hat and boots when he slept.

I’ll need to do a bit of research to find out the dates these two stories were first written or published; that may bear some clue as to meaning or it may indicate no intent of any particular meaning at all.

Another thing I note here is that even as Ishiguro’s writing in The Unconsoled is something like Chekhov’s in it’s formality, I find Chekhov’s so much easier to read and find that my interest in the characters is more easily established even as nothing dramatic or fast-paced is happening.