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A Boring Story: Chekhov and Germany.

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"When someone has been sick for a long time, everybody in his household, deep inside, wishes him to be dead," Anton Chekhov recorded in one of his last notebooks (Polnoe, Sochineniia 17.38). Chekhov's short life span (1860-1904) coincided with what Philippe Aries describes as a transition from one cultural view of death to another. (2) Chekhov died at a time when death was becoming increasingly "medicalized" by being relocated from private homes to hospitals and various hospices, thus being treated as "invisible" and "denied." This concept of death (as something that "turns [one's] stomach [...] like the biological acts of man") has been prevalent ever since the end of the nineteenth century and defines our relationship with death nowadays (Aries 563 and 569). Aries's analysis might throw light on the allegedly ruthless scene from Chekhov's last play, The Cherry Orchard (1903). In this play, the owners hear their beloved orchard being destroyed and are made aware of its end. Why didn't the new owner, Lopakhin, have enough tact to wait until they were all gone? Because being tactful was not an issue: the resolution of the play was not as cruel as many critics seem to imply today. The orchard, like a typical nineteenth-century man, was dying in a familiar setting, surrounded by friends and family. That is also why all attempts to send the old servant Firs to the hospital fail: he is left to die in his masters' house, in full view of the sympathetic theatregoers who have come to know and love him in the course of a three-hour-long performance.

A ceremony reminiscent of final farewells in The Cherry Orchard was organized for Chekhov on January 17, 1904, at the Moscow Art Theatre to celebrate his forty-fourth birthday and, more important, the twenty-fifth anniversary of his writing career. Despite Chekhov's protestations (he repeatedly pointed out that the anniversary of his literary career was not due until March 1905), the organizers of the event dragged him onstage during the intermission between acts 3 and 4 of the very first production of The Cherry Orchard. As much as they wanted to shower Chekhov with love and affection, they were equally worried that he was not going to live another year. The sight of a "hunched, pale and emaciated" writer, who was noticeably having difficulty standing during the long speeches in his honor, made some theatregoers beg him to sit down, for they feared that he was going to collapse onstage before the ceremony was over (Rayfield 587).

Given the effect that these celebrations had on Chekhov and even the impartial onlookers, it is now generally believed that Chekhov chose to spare his siblings and his mother the sight of his passing away when he agreed to be taken abroad to seek the advice of German specialists in June 1904, one month prior to his death. Chekhov was a doctor and his understandable consideration for his relatives fits Aries's theories beautifully. I suggest, however, going one step beyond this satisfying explanation and taking a look at Chekhov's trip to Germany not only in the context of his last months, but in the broader context of his life and literary career. In his semiautobiographi-cal "A Boring Story" ("Skuchnaia istoriia," 1889), Chekhov sends his dying character on a mission to the town of Kharkov. Nikolai Stepanovich has been expecting to die for the last six months and fears that he might die "alone in a strange town [and] on a strange bed" ("A Boring Story" 103). This does not happen, however: after what turns out to be an unexpectedly peaceful night, Nikolai Stepanovich is summoned back to Moscow by the news of his daughter's secret wedding. "Like in life, there is nothing accidental in art," Chekhov advised a budding poet, Boris Sadovskoi, shortly before his departure for Germany (Polnoe, Pis'ma 12.108). But what about death? Is there anything accidental in death? I submit that Chekhov's ultimate trip to Badenweiler was, in fact, not very different from his many other trips under taken in order to change the scenery and to fight mundane boredom to which he was particularly susceptible.

It was in 1890, after his brother's sudden death from tuberculosis, that Chekhov had seriously faced up to his own mortality for the first time and embarked on his longest journey to the island of Sakhalin. In 1904, he went to another extreme, in the opposite direction--first crossing a sizable portion of Russia and then the whole of Germany to reach his final destination--in all senses of the term--Badenweiler, near the Swiss border. Once Chekhov arrived there in the second half of June 1904, the little-known Badenweiler was instantly put on the map of Europe thanks to the journalists who provided regular reports on Chekhov's deteriorating health to their compatriots back home. Consequently, the attention of the Russian intellectuals was divided between Manchuria and the German-Swiss border. While the Russian fleet was fighting the Japanese in the Far East, Chekhov was battling his terminal illness in the Schwarzwald. Both campaigns ended in fiasco.

The centennial of Chekhov's death in 2004 prompted Russian critics to contextualize and conceptualize his death within the already known wider context of Russian history. According to some critics, Chekhov, in a way, willed his own death because he knew that he was not going to survive the major social and cultural upheavals...

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