This story feels like it owes a lot to Poe. I imagine Chekhov must have been familiar with Poe, no?
But maybe not. There’s not a lot of discussion about writers and writing in Chekhov’s letters, and no mention of Poe. The few writers who do come up are mainly the Russians. It’s possible that old Anton didn’t really read that much literature–he was an enthusiastic reader in his gymnasium in Taganrog, where he was involved with theater and student publications, but as a young man in medical college he seemed to jump into writing mainly as a way of making money, following the lead of his older brother. And when he wasn’t writing, he was in school, or working as a doctor, and if he wasn’t doing that, he was energetically chasing women or, almost as enthusiastically, trying to catch fish. And there was also the matter of the theater: He spent a lot of time writing plays and (so it would seem from many of his stories) detesting the need to hang around with actors.
Reading really didn’t seem to play a huge role in his life.
Even late in life, secure in his success, he didn’t show a lot of interest in other writers – just vague comments like, “I haven’t seen Ibsen’s new play but I’d like to.” Tolstoy comes up regularly, but mainly as a personage: He was old and in ill health by then, and Chekhov occasionally expressed worries about the master’s declining condition.
It’s possible that, rather than Poe, Chekhov took his inspiration from some of the ghost-y stories from 19th Century Russian literature. Pushkin, Lermontov and Gogol all wrote at least one or two spooky tales. And it seems likely that the popular magazines that Chekhov was writing for in the early 1880s would have been happy to publish ghost stories and horror and the like.
Still, I can’t shake the feeling that there’s something very Poe-like about the opening of “The Trousseau.” It begins with a long description of a house–a rundown, overgrown building that is in town and yet weirdly remote and lonely. “Nothing ever drives down that street, and very few persons are ever seen walking through it.” The shutters of the house are always closed, because the occupants don’t care for sunlight. Likewise the windows are closed, because they dislike fresh air.
House of Usher, anyone? Here’s Poe: “With the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit.”
Whatever its source of inspiration, “The Trousseau” is a psychological horror story about a mother and daughter living essentially alone in a dilapidated cottage engulfed by an overgrown garden – a fairy tale dwelling imbued with mystery and dread. The two women occupy themselves with the apparently Sisyphean task of sewing the daughter’s trousseau, preparing a treasure that will never be needed.
If it sounds a little bit campy, well, it is, but spooky stories often can’t avoid that. Overall, it’s an affecting portrait of a weird, reclusive family: the deluded mother waiting patiently for a young man to come courting her daughter; the daughter herself, a fluttering, shy creature half-convinced that her mother’s expectation of a marriage proposal will somehow materialize despite their isolation; and a spectral uncle lurking in the shadows, unable to make a career for himself in either the military or the clergy.
The only thing that really holds this story down is a vaguely unsteady narrative point of view. The first two paragraphs paint a picture of the family home as an eerie, deserted hovel, one step short of a mausoleum. But then the third paragraph begins this way: “The little house stands in an earthly paradise…” Where was Anton’s editor when he needed him??? (This is something that happens surprisingly often in Chekhov’s work – he needed someone to clean up the occasional spilled verbiage, or mop up a trickle of meaningless detail that has spilled from the main story. I don’t think he ever got much editing help.)
In the end, the story works. It’s not just an entertainment but a serious portrait of a doomed family.
READ THIS? READ THAT!
Chekhov didn’t go in for ghost stories, much. He did write one long one, “The Black Monk,” about a specter haunting an overworked professor. It was one of his more ambitious early works, and it even was used as the title story in the first collection of Chekhov to be published in English. (Interest in the story is a little perplexing to me; I certainly wouldn’t count it as one of his stronger works.)
Generally, though, if Chekhov included a ghost or a spirit in a story, it was for a laugh. “Nerves” is a tale of a man so frightened by what he has experienced during a seance that he must curl up and sleep on the floor of a servant’s room.
A Chekhov Circus 