The Cambridge Introduction to Chekhov by James N. Loehlin

Author:James N. Loehlin
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2010-03-06T16:00:00+00:00

“My Life”

“My Life” was the only other story Chekhov wrote in 1896, and it shares with “The House with the Mezzanine” a concern about how to live, as well as a hero who is a principled dropout. It is one of the longest and most personal of Chekhov’s prose works, revisiting the provincial vulgarity of his upbringing.

Chekhov mixed longer and shorter pieces together throughout his career – his one full-length novel, The Shooting Party, appeared in 1884 – but in general his stories grew fewer and longer. In addition to “The Steppe” and “The Duel” (1888 and 1891), his longest works include three stories from the Melikhovo period: “The Story of an Unknown Man” (completed in 1893), “Three Years” (1895), and “My Life” (1896). The first of these, about a revolutionary working under cover as a servant, has a melodramatic, Dostoevskian feeling; it is the only one of Chekhov’s major works to take place in Dostoevsky’s usual setting of Petersburg. “Three Years” explores the world of Moscow’s merchant classes, drawing on Chekhov’s father’s years working in a warehouse. “My Life” focuses on the dreary provinciality of a southern Russian city very like Chekhov’s hometown of Taganrog. In their different milieux, all three stories ask, but don’t clearly answer, questions about how Russians should live their lives. Interestingly, as Richard Pevear points out, all three stories end with the protagonist looking after a helpless orphaned girl, whose future must be provided for.20 “The Story of an Unknown Man” ends thus: “Sonya was sitting on the table and looking at me attentively, without blinking, as if she knew her fate was being decided.”21 Evidently, in Chekhov’s view, his characters’ failures to find a better way of living do not free them from the obligation to do so.

Like “The House with the Mezzanine,” “My Life” is narrated by its protagonist, a young man of noble birth with the unusual name of Misail (his sister is named Cleopatra). Their father, the local architect, is a petty despot, like Chekhov’s own father and many fathers in his works. In the story’s first episode, he beats Misail with an umbrella after the young man has lost his job for the ninth time. Unwilling to trade on his social position and take the fast track into a bureaucratic sinecure, Misail decides to work as a manual laborer, digging ditches, painting houses, assisting a butcher. Taking a high-minded Tolstoyan attitude, he declares that “Unwealthy and uneducated people earn their crust of bread by physical labor, and I see no reason why I should be an exception.”22 He finds this life honest and satisfying, and it awakens him to the plight of the working classes: in one of the more openly political statements in Chekhov, Misail observes that serfdom may have been abolished, but capitalism is taking its place.

Misail’s status as a laborer creates an acute social embarrassment for his family and the town. Eventually he is summoned by the local governor, whom he visits after a day working in the slaughterhouse, reeking of meat and blood.

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