A few days after Russia launched an attack on Ukraine in early 2022, I went to pick up some vodka at the local liquor store. Squatting down to examine the bottles on the bottom shelf, I heard the clerk call out to me, “We don’t stock anything from Russia.” I said I wouldn’t have bought Russian vodka even if they did stock it, and we concluded our transaction with a sense of shared satisfaction at having contributed, in our ultra-infinitesimal way, to the resistance.
For me, as for many people around the world, the Russian invasion of Ukraine caused an instinctive revulsion to anything Russian. Well, almost anything. Just a few weeks before, I had begun a project to read all of Chekhov’s stories, and as I worked my way through the 13 volumes, it did not really occur to me to associate the writer, who after all had died more than 100 years ago, with Putin’s aggressions.
But the war has created a whole generation of Russia-haters. The hatred, especially in Ukraine, now extends to Russian literary figures. In a New Yorker article, Jon Lee Anderson reported on Ukraine’s efforts to “de-Russify” the country, removing memorials to Pushkin and Tolstoy and relabeling streets named after Russian cultural figures, including Chekhov.
The purge is hardly surprising considering the horrors Russia has unleashed on Ukraine and its citizens. And it makes a certain sense that Pushkin and Tolstoy in particular would be targeted: Pushkin because of his poem Poltava, which slanders a revered 18th century Ukrainian leader, and Tolstoy because of his celebration of Russia’s military in “War and Peace.”
The visceral hatred of Russia and all things Russian gave me pause. By reading and writing about Chekhov, was I being tone-deaf? Is reading (and enjoying) Chekhov in an age of Russian atrocities similar to, say, rhapsodizing about “Huckleberry Finn” during the Black Lives Matters protests?
There is not an obvious case against Chekhov. For one thing, he was one-quarter Ukrainian (his maternal grandmother was Ukrainian). According to biographer Donald Rayfield, Chekhov even claimed to have spoken Ukrainian as a very young child.
As for Chekhov’s portrayal of Russia and Ukraine, well, those entities didn’t really come up in his work. He never argued for a grand Russian empire. He didn’t belittle Ukrainians in his writing. There are no dastardly Ukrainian villains lurking anywhere in the 13 volumes of novellas and short stories.
Still, I think it’s fairly clear that Chekhov had at least a somewhat paternalistic attitude about Ukrainians, if only a tad.
To begin with the most obvious thing, he barely ever used the words Ukraine or Ukrainians. That’s because he, like most other Russians of the day, used the terms “Little Russia” and “Little Russians.”
Those terms are considered at least somewhat offensive these days, and it’s certainly possible that Ukrainians disliked them at the time that Chekhov was writing. The etymology dates back to the middle ages, when cartographers referred to “Lesser Russia” and “Greater Russia,” that is, two neighboring areas, one smaller and one larger, in the same way that there are “Lesser Antilles” and “Greater Antilles,” or there are the Balearic Islands of Menorca and Majorca. (The root “Rus” supposedly refers to the boatmen, or rowers, who plied the rivers of Eastern Europe.)
Nevertheless, something about the phrase “Little Russia” is inherently patronizing, even if used (as Chekhov presumably did) without bad intent, and that literal belittling of the land and its people seems to seep, just a bit, into Chekhov’s characterizations of Ukrainians.
It’s worth noting that Chekhov’s hometown, Taganrog, sits not twenty miles from the border of modern Ukraine. Whether or not Chekhov actually spoke any Ukrainian in his infancy, the Ukrainian language was in widespread use in the area around Taganrog during Chekhov’s lifetime. He attended religious festivals in the region that teemed with Ukrainian pilgrims. In his travels across the Steppe and elsewhere, he regularly came across Ukrainian farmers and workers.
As commonplace as interactions with Ukrainians were, and despite the fact of his heritage via his grandmother, Chekhov seemed to perceive Ukrainian culture (and Ukrainians themselves) as “other.” Their dress, their hair styles, their songs and their speech patterns are regularly noted in stories, and generally for no particular reason except to identify the person as Ukrainian. These occasional references are always in passing, referring to nameless characters. As far as I, a non-speaker of Russian and Ukrainian, can tell, there is not a single major character in any of the 200+ Chekhov stories who is explicitly Ukrainian. (The wife in “The Wife” does come from Ukraine, and speaks with a “jerkiness” that reminds the narrator of her native city, Odessa, but this is a passing reference and it is unclear what her ethnicity is.)
Meanwhile, the geographical entity of Ukraine itself is, similarly, minimally visible in the stories. A handful of characters pass through Odessa or Kiev, but these cities play no meaningful narrative role. His novella “The Steppe,” inspired in part by visits to his grandparents, might be said to be set in Ukraine, although it’s more generally about the Steppe itself, which stresses across Ukraine and Russia. I have read that the village of Ukleevo, the town that is the setting of “In the Ravine,” is in Ukraine, but haven’t been able to confirm that.
I suppose one could argue that the very invisibility of Ukraine in Chekhov’s portraits of the land somehow represents an erasure of sorts, but it’s a stretch.
The one exception to this general geographical invisibility is the Crimean Peninsula, that embattled knob of land that was annexed by Russia in 2014. The peninsula, and especially the town of Yalta, was (and is) a resort on the Black Sea, and for Chekhov Yalta represented indolence and decay. The lovers of “The Lady With the Dog” meet and commence an affair in Yalta. In “A Tripping Tongue,” a married woman accidentally tells her husband a bit too much about her girls-only trip to Yalta.
But there is nothing “Ukrainian” that is objectionable about Yalta to Chekhov. No, he just disliked sunny resort areas–the Crimea, the Caucasus, and even his home town of Taganrog. The sun and the heat were dandy for growing vegetables, he thought, but they bred laziness and bad behavior, at least among the Russians visiting there.
Chekhov was a man of his time; he tended to see ethnicity and nationality as indicators of character. His occasional comments about Muslims and especially Jews have not aged well, but Ukrainians simply don’t feature in the stories. There is no chauvinistic assumption of any “Russian-ness” of Ukraine or its people. His use of the outmoded term “Little Russia” may offend some modern readers but Ukrainians appear, in the main, simply as part of the landscape of polyglot 19th century Russia.
When he was still in his 20s and just at the beginning of his twin careers of literature and medicine, Chekhov rented a country house in Sumy, a village in Ukraine, not far from what is now the border with Russia. Among the neighbors was a “passionate Little Russian patriot,” as he described her in a letter. She was, he noted, teaching local children to read Ukrainian, and he mentions her devotion to Taras Shevchenko, a Ukrainian poet who is a foundational figure in Ukrainian literature.
It is noteworthy to see Chekhov write in a matter of fact way about the Ukrainian language, acknowledging it as a distinct tongue, and show an easy familiarity with the leading Ukrainian cultural figure of the day. There is no judgment of the neighbor’s passion or patriotism. Indeed, the most striking thing about her, he wrote, was her hearty laugh, which could “be heard a mile away.”
A Chekhov Circus 