Anton Chekhov's Home and a Visit to Friends
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File: Redwood.391.GALLEY(h).doc Created on: 3/22/2010 10:28:00 AM Last Printed: 4/19/2010 2:11:00 PM ANTON CHEKHOV’S HOME AND A VISIT TO FRIENDS: THE DICHOTOMY BETWEEN THE PERSONAL AND THE PROFESSIONAL, OR THE LAWYER SUBJECTIFIED AND OBJECTIFIED James D. Redwood∗ I. INTRODUCTION Like any other great writer, Anton Chekhov dealt with some of the most pressing and poignant themes of human existence from which the lawyer, for all his learning and training, is not immune—love, loss, pain, joy, suffering, victory, sorrow, and death.1 We know that from Chekhov’s humble beginnings on the Sea of Azov,2 this son of a grocer from Taganrog3 went on to be- ∗ © 2009, James D. Redwood. All rights reserved. Professor of Law, Albany Law School. J.D., Loyola Law School, Los Angeles; B.A. Oberlin College. Editor in Chief, Loyola (L.A.) Law Review; Executive Editor, Loyola (L.A.) International and Comparative Law Journal; Staff Attorney with the Division of Enforcement of the Securities and Exchange Commission before joining the Albany Law School in 1989; previously practiced with Pills- bury, Madison & Sutro in San Francisco. The Author would like to thank his colleague, Maria Grahn-Farley, his research assistant, Nate Kupferman, and his legal assistant, Theresa Colbert, for their invaluable help in completing this project. 1. Vladimir Kataev, If Only We Could Know! An Interpretation of Chekhov 162 (Har- vey Pitcher ed. & trans., Ivan R. Dee 2002). 2. D.S. Mirsky, Chekhov, in Anton Chekhov’s Short Stories 291 (Ralph E. Matlaw, ed., W.W. Norton & Co. 1979). Prince Mirsky, who wrote a highly opinionated history of Rus- sian literature in 1926, treated Chekhov none too kindly: But Gorky, Kuprin, and Bunin, to name but the foremost of those who regarded him as their master, can hardly be recognized as his pupils. Certainly no one learned from him the art of constructing his stories. Russian fiction is quite free from any trance [sic] of Chekhov’s influence. In Russia, Chekhov has become a thing of the past—of a past remoter than even Turgenev, not to speak of Gogol or Leskov. Id. at 300–301. Mirsky could not have been more purblind had he tried to be. It is Chekhov who has survived, at least to Western readers, over the likes of Nikolai Leskov or Alexan- der Kuprin. So why Mirsky’s breezy dismissal of Chekhov as a second-rate author? Per- haps the prince was simply exhibiting the prejudices of his aristocratic upbringing, or had he begun to pander to the yen for “socialist realism” which rendered Stalinist fiction so dreadfully orthodox and prosaic in very short order after 1924? At all events, it is clearly Mirsky and not Chekhov who is today in need of exhumation. 3. Robert Payne, The Image of Chekhov xvii (Alfred A. Knopf 1979). File: Redwood.391.GALLEY(h).doc Created on: 3/22/2010 10:28:00 AM Last Printed: 4/19/2010 2:11:00 PM 48 Stetson Law Review [Vol. 39 come a renowned story teller and compassionate medical doctor who died at forty-four and left behind some 240 stories, which he approved for his Collected Works,4 as well as some of the most influential plays ever to hit the world stage.5 More on his extraor- dinarily short but fruitful life later.6 But what precisely does Dr. Chekhov say to the lawyer?7 This Article analyzes two of Chekhov’s stories—one from 1887 and the other from 1898—not from the perspective of the universal themes of human existence, but from the more focused perspective of a dilemma peculiar perhaps to the learned profes- sions8—namely the challenges posed by the need to integrate the 4. This Chekhov-approved edition appeared in ten volumes between 1899 and 1902. Anton Chekhov, The Undiscovered Chekhov: Forty-Three New Stories xvii (Peter Constan- tine trans., Seven Stories Press 1998) [hereinafter Constantine]. The thirteen-volume edition translated by Constance Garnett and first published between 1916 and 1922 re- mains the most compendious collection in English of the stories of Chekhov. This edition was reissued by The Ecco Press beginning in 1984. Anton Chekhov, The Tales of Chekhov: The Darling & Other Stories vol. 1 (Constance Garnett trans., The Ecco Press 1984). Al- though not considered faultless, Garnett’s translations are still the benchmark by which other translations are measured, even those that are considered superior, such as Ronald Hingley’s collection in The Oxford Chekhov, vols. 1–9 (Ronald Hingley trans., Oxford U. Press 1964–1980). See e.g. Simon Karlinsky, Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary ix (Simon Karlinsky ed., Simon Karlinsky & Michael Henry Heim trans., U. Cal. Press 1973) (commenting on Constance Garnett’s talent as a translator in spite of her occasional misreading). A Russian edition of Chekhov’s works published before 1922 contained, in addition to the 240 stories which the author himself approved, 196 other pieces of short fiction. Constance Garnett, Translator’s Note, in Anton Chekhov, The Tales of Chekhov: Love & Other Stories vol. 13 (Constance Garnett trans., The Ecco Press 1987). A systematic Russian edition appeared in 1929, and then an authoritative critical edition was published in Moscow between 1944 and 1951. Id. at 306. By 1886, as Chekhov was turning from comic to serious writing, he had already published “over four hundred short stories and vignettes in popular magazines, as well as two books of stories, with a third in the making.” Constantine, supra n. 4, at ix. 5. Mention The Seagull, Uncle Vania, The Three Sisters, or The Cherry Orchard, and anyone with a pretension to culture would blush to show his or her ignorance. Or at least such would be the assumption of anyone who, like this Author, grew up in the pre-post- literate world. 6. See infra Part II (providing a background and assessment of Chekhov’s life). 7. It is refreshing to point out Chekhov’s remark that “[t]he only difference between doctors and lawyers is that lawyers merely rob you, whereas doctors rob you and kill you, too.” BBC World Service, Learning English—Moving Words, http://www.bbc.co.uk/ worldservice/learningenglish/movingwords/quotefeature/chekhov.shtml (accessed July 11, 2009). Well, perhaps “refreshing” is not the right word, but it is gratifying nonetheless, given the greater esteem in which doctors are usually held compared to lawyers. 8. This is not the time or place to tender a discussion of Chekhov’s view of the rela- tionship between the medical and legal professions. Suffice it to say that the present Arti- cle is part of a larger project on the significance of Chekhov’s stories to the legal profession, and that a later piece of the project may well pick up the theme here dropped somewhat File: Redwood.391.GALLEY(h).doc Created on: 3/22/2010 10:28:00 AM Last Printed: 4/19/2010 2:11:00 PM 2009] Anton Chekhov’s Home and A Visit to Friends 49 personal and the professional aspects of life.9 After all, the lawyer as lawyer is doppelganger to the lawyer as mother, father, sister, brother, son, daughter, friend, or lover. Notwithstanding Rudyard Kipling’s adjuration that “never the twain shall meet,”10 it is per- haps more accurate to say that “never the twain shall part.” The lawyer can no more separate personal considerations from his professional life than can anyone else. Nor, this Article maintains, is it possible for the attorney to divorce her professional concerns from her personal life. In the two stories to be discussed, Home and A Visit to Friends, Chekhov gives us two lawyers who, without being con- sciously aware of it, struggle to accommodate their personal and professional lives, but who do so in intriguingly opposite ways. In Home, the lawyer reconciles his two opposing selves by shifting from the impersonal and the professional to the personal and emotional through a process of “subjectification.” In A Visit to Friends, on the other hand, the attorney harmonizes the two sides of his character by shedding his subjectified younger self and be- coming more detached, objective, and “professional” as he grows older. Chekhov offers up the story of these two attorneys trying to reconcile the two aspects of their lives without choosing between them,11 and he does so in an uncritical12 manner that surely reso- abruptly, namely the connection between doctors and lawyers. 9. A good example of what this Author means by the phrase “the dilemma of the professions,” which Chekhov poses without solving, can be found in James Fenimore Coo- per’s The Pioneers, where Judge Marmaduke Temple must attempt to render justice to the lawbreaker, Natty Bumppo, who has just saved the judge’s daughter’s life. James Feni- more Cooper, The Pioneers 275–286 (Lightyear Press 1984). Judge Temple struggles with indifferent success to set aside his personal feelings while trying Bumppo for shooting a deer out of season, resisting a search warrant, and assaulting an officer of the law. Id. at 275–286. 10. See Rudyard Kipling, The Ballad of East and West, in The Works of Kipling 3 (The Macmillan Co. 1898) (“Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, / Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat; / But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, / When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!”). 11. One of the most modern and lasting traits of Chekhov’s fiction is that the author poses problems without purporting to solve them.