“An Artist’s Story” feels extremely Russian, one of a long line of stories and novels that feature members of the upper class arguing about what to do about the lower class. You can find this kind of fervent debate in pretty much all the big Russian names of the 19th Century–Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and of course the Chernyshevsky novel “What Is to Be Done.” I’m sure there are many, many other examples.
As in many Chekhov tales, the central character is an artist–an indolent artist–drawn to the languid ease of the local landowners, the Voltchaninovs. The Voltchaninov’s elder daughter, Lida, is a hard-charging woman devoted to improving the lives of the poor through education and other enrichment.
Lida has a younger sister, Genya, a dreamy type not interested in Lida’s do-gooding, and the artist finds himself falling in love with her, to Lida’s dismay. And because Lida is a woman of action, not mere theorizing, she steps in to foil the artist’s courtship of her sister.
The country-house setting, with its terraces and “tennis grounds,” the heated discussions of the privations of Russia’s peasants, and the general heat-haze indolence of the idle Russian rich… like I say, this is a very, very Russian tale, very, very 19th Century rooted in its time. That’s both a positive–the writing is extraordinarily evocative–and a negative–it feels vaguely like we have read this kind of thing before (but maybe not better than this!)
It’s an effective, even affecting, story. Lida’s passionate outrage is absolutely persuasive and familiar even in 21st Century America. And though she may be a type, Lida feels very real, as does the artist himself: supercilious, undisciplined, and, if not actually despicable, at least far from worthy of admiration.
READ THIS? READ THAT!
In Constance Garnett’s arrangement of Chekhov’s stories, there are a few volumes of thematically linked stories, and the rest is basically random. But in this first volume of stories, she preceded “An Artist’s Story” with another tale of an artist in a rural setting, “Talent.” These two tales make the perfect pair for readers.
A Chekhov Circus 