Natasha's Dance полностью

Chekhov's literary works are filled with religious characters and themes. No other Russian writer, with the possible exception of Les-kov, wrote so often or with so much tender feeling about people worshipping, or about the rituals of the Church. Many of Chekhov's major stories (such as 'The Bishop', 'The Student', 'On the Road' and 'Ward No. 6') are profoundly concerned with the search for faith. Chekhov himself had religious doubts - he once wrote that he would become a monk if the monasteries took people who were not religious and he did not have to pray.¹²⁴ But he clearly sympathized with people who had faith or spiritual ideals. Perhaps Chekhov's view is best expressed by Masha, when she says in Three Sisters, 'It seems to me that a man must have faith, or be seeking it, otherwise his life is empty, quite empty.'¹²⁵ Chekhov was not overly concerned with the abstract question about the existence of a God. As he told Suvorin, a writer should know better than to ask such things.¹²⁶ But he did embrace the concept of religion as a way of life - a basic moral code - which is what it was for him and what he thought it was for the simple Russian

man.¹²⁷

In his early story 'On the Road' (1886) Chekhov discusses this Russian need for faith. The scene is a highway inn where some travellers are sheltering from bad weather. A young noblewoman gets into a conversation with a gentleman called Likharev. She wants to know why famous Russian writers all find faith before they die. 'As I understand it,' replies Likharev, 'faith is a gift of the spirit. It is a talent: you have to be born with it.'

'As far as I can judge, speaking for myself, and from all that I have seen, this talent is present in the Russian people to the highest degree. Russian life represents an endless series of beliefs and enthusiasms, but it has not, if you ask my advice, it has not yet gone anywhere near not believing or rejecting belief. If a Russian person does not believe in God, it means he believes in something else.'¹²⁸

This was close to Chekhov's view - and he himself was very Russian in this sense. Chekhov might have had his own doubts about the existence of a God. But he never once lost sight of the need for Russians to believe. For without faith in a better world to come, life in Chekhov's Russia would be unendurable.

The need to believe was as central to his art as it was to the Russian way of life. Chekhov's plays abound in characters (Dr Astrov in Uncle Vanya, Vershinin in Three Sisters, Trofimov in The Cherry Orchard) who place their faith, as Chekhov himself did, in the ability of work and science to improve life for humanity. They are filled with characters who reconcile themselves to suffer and endure in the Christian hope of a better life to come. As Sonya puts it in those famous (and already cited) closing lines of Uncle Vanya: 'When our time comes we shall die submissively, and over there, in the other world, we shall say that we have suffered, that we've wept, that we've had a bitter life, and God will take pity on us.'¹²⁹ Chekhov saw the artist as a fellow sufferer - as somebody who worked for a spiritual end. In 1902 he wrote to Diaghilev:

Modern culture is but the beginning of a work for a great future, a work which will go on, perhaps, for ten thousand years, in order that mankind may, even in the remote future, come to know the truth of a real God - that is, not by guessing, not by seeking in Dostoevsky, but by perceiving clearly, as one perceives that twice two is four.¹³⁰

Death is felt in all of Chekhov's works, and in many of his later stories the approach of death is the major theme. Chekhov had confronted death throughout his life - first as a doctor and then as a dying man - and perhaps because he was so close to it he wrote about the subject with a fearless honesty. Chekhov understood that people die in a very ordinary way - for the most part they die thinking about life. He saw that death is simply part of the natural process - and when death came to him, he met it with the dignity and courage, and the same love of life, he had always shown. In June 1904 he booked into a hotel at Badenweiler, Germany, with his wife Olga. 'I am going away to die,' Chekhov told a friend on the eve of their departure. 'Everything is finished."¹³¹On the night of 2 July he woke in a fever, called for a

doctor and told him loudly, 'Ich sterbe' ('I am dying'). The doctor tried to calm him and went away. Chekhov ordered a bottle of champagne, drank a glass, lay down on his bed, and passed away.¹³²