In June 1889, Chekhov’s wild and wildly talented older brother, Nikolay, died of tuberculosis. Nikolay, or Kolya, was an artist and a world-class party animal.
In 1886, Chekhov sent Kolya a doozy of a letter, a multipage screamer criticizing his brother for being drunk and vain, and worst of all for squandering his talent.
After enumerating Kolia’s many good qualities (generosity, sincerity, open-heartedness), Chekhov cited Kolia’s greatest strength, his artistic talent: “You have been endowed from on high with that which the bulk of humanity lacks: talent.… Only one person in two million on this earth is an artist… This talent would set you apart even if you were a toad or a tarantula, for everything is forgiven to talent.”
Having expressed this deep admiration, Chekhov then laid into his brother for two long pages, listing his faults (there were eight specific bullet points), finishing it like this: “Come back to us, smash the vodka bottle…”
Three years later, Kolya was dead. Grief-stricken, Chekhov turned the experience of Kolya’s brief, scatter-shot life into “A Dreary Story.” (As per usual with Chekhov, the title is just the worst.)
The story–a novella, actually–is narrated by Nikolai Stepanovitch, a retired professor of medicine. In declining health, Nikolai Stepanovitch lives with his wife and daughter in what seems to be a loveless or at least bitter household. He entertains visitors occasionally, treating them roughly when they offend his pride. His life has been productive, successful, and apparently passionless.
The counterweight to this bland and bitter life is Katya, Nikolai Stepanovitch’s adoptive daughter. It is Katya–not the dying narrator of “A Dreary Story–who represents Chekhov’s late, lamented brother Kolya. Like Kolya, Katya has lived a passionate life. She ran off to become an actress, fell in love, and had a child with her lover out of wedlock. But the theatrical group failed, the relationship soured, and the child died young. Soon enough she is back in her home city, living not half a mile from her adoptive family, although she is estranged from her adoptive mother and sister. Her only relationship with the family is through Nikolai Stepanovitch, whose dry existence seems enlivened by Katya’s adventures, even if these ended badly.
But Nikolai Stepanovitch can’t help but be critical of Katya’s indolent lifestyle (just like Chekhov couldn’t help but lecture his brother!) Katya’s apartment is furnished like a harem, with soft furniture and soft rugs. Katya lies around languidly, doing nothing.
The relationship between Katya and Nikolai Stepanovitch is weirdly sexual. When he urges her to get married, she sneers, saying that she can have as many men as she wants. And at that moment she takes him “into a very snug little room,” which she has set up as a place for him to work. (She believes his home life prevents him from working.) It’s all very odd and sexually charged.
If all of this makes “A Dreary Story” seem like an interesting tale, well, sorry, it’s really not. It’s long and diffuse and, yes, dreary.
It’s probably not fair to use quotes from Chekhov’s letters to criticize his fiction, but here’s what he had to say about “A Dreary Story” in August 1889: “As a result of the heat and my wretched, melancholy mood, the story is turning out rather boring.”
Alas, that is an accurate criticism. It’s too bad. Katya (Kolya) deserves a wilder, freer tale than this.
READ THI? READ THAT!
Lots of women run off to join the theater in Chekhov’s world, and the results are never pretty. In “The Requiem,’ a grieving father asks his priest to pray for his dead daughter’s soul. But even as he grieves and prays for her, he can’t get past his shame and anger that she ran away from home to become an actress. It’s a sad, economical tale, unlike the bulky “A Dreary Story.”
A Chekhov Circus 