Chekhov Stories 2

My Life

Portrays how people are not sincere sometimes...and just do things for "kicks". Even if they are momentarily convinced that a certain thing is what they want, they'll soon change their minds. That is because of the way they've been brought up. Like the character Masha, she had had everything from the beginning. Anything she wanted, she instantly got. Chekhov stresses this. So then, she could afford to play with life, be rich, or play the part of the peasant.

"Our meeting, this marriage of ours, was only an episode of which this alive, richly endowed woman would have many in her life. All that was best in the world, as I've already said, was at her disposal and came to her perfectly gratis, and even ideas and fashionable intellectual trends served her her pleasure, diversifying her life, and I was merely a coachman who drove her from one enthusiasm to another. Now she no longer needed me, she would flutter off, and I would be left alone."

And yet, she did this without guilt, fully convinced she had done right, and that that life was what she really wanted. Superficial people. These people take everything lightly, as if life was sort of a game...now peasants, cannot afford to be superficial. Some they may very well be scoundrels, but not insecure people, at the core. Chekhov also emphasized this, that what the peasants most believed in was truth.

"However much the muzhik looks like a clumsy beast as he follows his plow, and however much he befuddles himself with vodka, still, on looking closer, you feel that there is in him something necessary and very important that is lacking, for instance, in Masha and the doctor- namely, he believes that the chief thing on earth is truth, and that his salvation and that of all people lies in truth alone, and therefore he loves justice more than anything else in the world."

It is also beautiful how he sees all this, sees the errors of his wife's judgment, her superficiality, and accepts it. He not only does that, but he still loves her, even though he knows that it doesn't make much of a difference. Truthful people do not think life is a game, but it's about survival. And through survival comes suffering, which is the only way to live life rightly. The only way to know God. For how does one know whether God exists, if they have no need for Him? That man, the main character, was closer to God than Masha, with all her religion...

Ariadne

"Of course, a woman's a woman and a man's a man, but can all that be as simple in our day as it was before the Flood, and can it be that I, a cultivated man endowed with a complex spiritual organisation, ought to explain the intense attraction I feel towards a woman simply by the fact that her bodily function is different from mine? Oh, how awful that would be! I want to believe that in his struggle with nature the genius of man has struggled with physical love too, as with an enemy, and that, if he has not conquered it, he has at least succeeded in tangling it in a net- work of illusions of brotherhood and love; and for me, at any rate, it is no longer a simple instinct of my animal nature as with a dog or a toad, but is real love, and every embrace is spiritualised by a pure impulse of the heart and respect for the woman. In reality, a disgust for the animal instinct has been trained for ages in hundreds of generations; it is inherited by me in my blood and forms part of my nature, and if I poetize love, is not that as natural in our day as my ear's not being able to move and my not being covered in fur? I fancy that's how the majority of civilised people look at it, so that the absence of the moral, poetic element in love is treated in these as a phenomenon, as a sign of atavism; they say it is a symptom of degeneracy, of many forms of insanity. It is true that, in poetizing love, love assumed in those qualities that are lacking in them, and that is a source of continual mistakes and continual miseries for us. But to my thinking it is better, even so; that is, it is better to suffer than to find complacency on the basis of woman being woman and man being man."

Marvelous! Poetical love is necessary, love cannot truly exist without it. It is as if love goes off into the spiritual realms by the help of this "poetizing". As if it develops and transforms into something that is beyond us, beyond our feelings and emotions, and penetrates into our souls.

"The pure, gracious images which my imagination, warmed by love, had cherished for so long, my plans, my hopes, my memories, my ideas of love and of woman- all now were jeering an putting out their tongues at me."

An example of a man's illusion of woman, and how he worshiped the concept of woman. These ideas seem positively absurd in reality. Reality easily proves us disillusioned people wrong. And how hard it is to get to the point of complete disillusionment! How hard our imaginations have to work to lie to our so-rational mind!

It was interesting though, how he was willing to suffer and make mistakes, (which is ultimately what he did) and yet, he couldn't wait to be free of her. Is that perhaps because he didn't lover
anymore?

The Seagull

"One must depict life not as it is, and not as it ought to be, but as we see it in our dreams."
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1. My Life- Pub. Everyman's Library
2. Ariadne- Pub. The Macmillan Co. 1916