Both Ends of the Chain

In the Wild North, Ivan Shiskin

Around Christmas, I often turn to Chekhov’s stories. His all-penetrating skepticism might seem at odds with the holiday spirit. That’s because it is. As some might feel a need to roast a beast for Christmas dinner, I feel called to roast up a nice juicy pile of sentimentality. It stands in the way of what’s real and worth remembering. And where else could we find a wintery field evoked so sharply than with Chekhov? Here is his description of a spring day turning back into winter:

A woodcock chirred by, and a shot rang our boomingly and merrily in the spring air. But when the forest grew dark, an unwelcome east wind blew up, cold and piercing, and everything fell silent. Needles of ice reached over the puddles, and the forest became inhospitable, forsaken, desolate. It felt like winter.

The setting is not Christmas but Good Friday. It’s the first paragraph of the story “The Student,” about a seminarian on his way home. He feels that the contradiction between the season and the weather is a sign of nature’s indifference for him and his wishes, a favorite theme of Chekhov’s. But against this familiar backdrop, the good doctor does something strange: he questions his own skepticism.

Not much happens in the story. The student, never given a name, comes upon a mother and daughter, both widows, keeping warm by a fire in their garden. He stops to warm himself. The women are poor, like the student’s parents. The daughter, Lukerya, had been “beaten down by her husband.” He feels wretched about the human condition and the ignorant misery of most people. He recalls that the apostle Peter also came to a fire after the Last Supper. “So it was cold then, too,” he reflects to the mother, Vasilisa. “Ah, what a dreadful night that was, granny! An exceedingly long, dreary night!” To a modern reader, the student might seem to have made a brilliant insight already. But as observant Christians at this time, the three of them know the Gospel stories by heart, to the point of banality. This is just small talk about the weather.

But it encourages the student to go on telling the full story of Peter’s denial of Christ—even though they all just heard it earlier that day. He is particularly interested in Peter’s state of mind at that time. “‘He loved Jesus passionately, to distraction, and now from afar he saw how they beat him,’” he says. “‘The Gospel says: ‘And he went out, and wept bitterly.’ I picture it: a very, very silent and dark garden, and, barely heard in the silence, a muffled sobbing.’”

This stirs something in the women.

Still smiling, Vasilisa suddenly choked, and big, abundant tears rolled down her cheeks. … Lukerya gazing fixedly at the student, flushed, and her expression became heavy, strained, as in someone who is trying to suppress intense pain.

The student walks on shortly after. He reflects on the women’s reaction to the story: “If the old woman wept, it was not because he was able to tell it movingly, but because Peter was close to her and she was interested with her whole being in what had happened in Peter’s soul. … The past, he thought, is connected with the present in an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of the other. And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain: he touched one end, and the other moved.”

The student’s story was not just symbols with no substance behind them, but a direct connection to real people and events, a means of reaching back. And Chekhov’s narrator doesn’t shoot this interpretation down. The student rejoices in the sense of connection he discovered in telling the story to the two women, and “life seemed to him delightful, wondrous, and filled with lofty meaning.”

According to translator Richard Pevear, Chekhov felt that his greatest obligation as a writer was to formulate questions correctly. He was not looking for problems to answer, but unanswerable questions that he could phrase with perfect accuracy. With this as his goal, it makes sense that his doubts about meaning would also turn back upon themselves and question the ground from which they came—to question whether a disbelief in the power of familiar stories is itself misguided.

Pevear writes that this story’s ending has “only the slightest shade of irony, just enough to call [the student’s] youthful ‘anticipation of happiness, an unknown, mysterious happiness’ into question without demolishing it.” To me it seems that the irony clings only to the final words, “filled with lofty meaning.” In the student’s puffed-up sentiments, though, it seems implied that there’s a sharper kernel of truth, a “hard, gem-like flame,” that is the source of the short-lived “lofty meaning” and that will not go away, that the student will keep.

Chekhov told the poet Ivan Bunin that “The Student” was his favorite among those he’d written. From the author of “Ward No. 6” and “Rothschild’s Fiddle,” this might seem surprising. But I imagine that there was a strange kind of delight that crept over Chekhov while writing this story. “The Student” is both of a piece with everything else he wrote, but also apparently running backwards from the usual place his stories end. And so it must have felt new, truly original, to write it. He was not a new writer getting carried away with an optimistic plot: he had published many of his best works and had contracted the tuberculosis that would eventually kill him. At that time in his life, to find something that simply felt different from what he had done before must have felt, if not thrilling, then quietly fulfilling, and perhaps for a moment even “delightful, wondrous, and filled with lofty meaning.”