Of all the misconceptions of Chekhov that I had before wading into his complete stories, what I hadn’t understood about him was his penchant for cruelty. The man was an ice cold assassin.
Chekhov portrays hopelessness, selfishness, meanness, suffering, vanity, embarrassment, and many other painful human characteristics in an utterly clear-eyed way–so much so that when I came to the later volumes and saw titles like “Boys” or “Sorrow,” I dreaded reading them, worried that they would be cold recitations of horrible suffering.
“Talent” is a brief portrait of selfishness and delusion.
A lazy artist boards at a poor widow’s country home; he seduces the widow’s daughter, who wants nothing more than to escape to the city with him. But he’s an artist only insomuch as he talks about painting and imagines being well-known. He and his friends fall about drunkenly and the widow’s naive daughter waits hopefully for deliverance, which will never come.
Toward the end of the story, Chekhov stops for a moment to deliver a lecture to us about what it takes to make it as an artist: As the lazy young man and his lazy friend argue over this and that, the narrator swoops in to belabor the obvious point that these two hounds will never amount to anything as artists. “It never occurred to either of them that time was passing, that every day life was nearing its close, that they had lived at other people’s expense a great deal and nothing yet was accomplished…”
This was written in 1886, a point at which Chekhov had been writing feverishly for five years, publishing well more than a hundred stories in just a few years time, while also attending medical school and supporting his parents and other family members. So I guess he can be forgiven for the sermon. But it’s a little self-righteous, and holds the story back from the highest levels.
READ THIS? READ THAT!
If you happen to be reading Constance Garnett’s translation (and arrangement) of Chekhov, the best story to read after “Talent,” which appears in Volume One, is the very next story in that collection, “An Artist’s Story.” They are so well-matched, it makes you wish Garnett had more frequently paired stories like this. But her translations of Chekhov came out over a period of some 20 years, so it’s not surprising that the arrangement of the titles within the volumes could seem a bit random.
A Chekhov Circus 