I recently picked up a copy of Chekhov’s plays while in a local bookstore. It’s a small, handsome, hardback edition from the Modern Library, probably from 1950s or 60s, though there’s no date listed inside. It cost $8.50.
Everyone calls Chekhov just Chekhov. First, because no one knows his first name (turns out its Anton). And second, because it sounds so nice and smart to just say his last name real quick like. “Yeah I read some Chekhov recently.” He’s a master playwright, unconventional, and a pivotal figure of theater who produced his best stuff near the very end of the nineteenth century. He’s one of those mythical Russian figures that everyone wishes they have read more of. He also died young—44—which only adds to the legacy. Chekhov is said to have created a “theatre of mood” rather than of action. Not much “happens” in the drama or on stage, but somehow you glimpse the whole universe by the end of the play.
The experience of reading him was like settling down into a cold leather chair. The chair is cold because no one else has sat in it for a while, but after a bit, the leather heats up to your body temperature, and somehow goes beyond it. The chair acquires an inexplicable warmness greater than you seem to be giving off. I hope that make sense.
Someone named Bob S. wrote his full name in cursive on a blank page of the collection. Additionally, Bob took the liberty of placing a little label on the inside flap of the cover, which has his name and address on it. He must have wanted very much whoever had this book in their hand to know that it was his. Perhaps if he loaned it or lost it out of his briefcase somewhere in town, it could be safely returned. This was a serious matter for Bob—very official, very deliberate—as he had to have printed out these small rectangular tags, peeled them, and placed them one by one. Maybe he did this only for his favorite books.
I think Bob is dead. The reason I think this is because the edition is quite old (and it smells like it). The stamp also feels old-timey, and the typeface—a sort of default, round-edged sans serif—feels like the stuff on instruction manuals and TV programs from the mid-century. The label has faded a bit over time into a subdued yellow.
I lied a little a minute ago. I know for a fact that Bob is dead, because I found his obituary. I am holding a dead man’s book.
Bob sounded like a good man. He was a longtime English and drama teacher, per the online funeral home page. His wife of 60 years survives him, and she probably misses him very much. I wonder if she misses seeing one of his favorite books on the shelf. It makes me sad to think his Chekhov has been sold off in an estate sale, but maybe, more optimistically, Bob’s wife or son or daughter took this book and his other favorites over to the bookstore in a big cardboard box some weeks after his passing, per his wishes. I bet Bob wanted someone else to appreciate the beauty and mystery of Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya. I am grateful it has come to me. I’ll protect it for you, Bob.
But Bob did something a bit surprising. I found a name crossed out, just a page before his own: “Edwards.” The owner before Bob. All I can make out is that single name in swoopy lettering, sitting behind aggressive scratches and scribbles. I know it was Bob who did this because the defacing was done in dark blue ink, the same with which he wrote his signature.
Wait—should I cross out Bob’s name? Is it my turn? Do I peel off his label? I hadn’t even thought of it. I didn’t even dare. But now I’m not so sure. How much of this book is mine, and how much of it still belongs to Bob, to Edwards who came before him? Is it my job to ransack the ledger of history, or preserve what is here, to honor those who have vouchsafed this text for me? Maybe I owe it to Bob to finish Edwards off with a dark black cloud of ink, and then take to expunging Bob himself shortly after. A sort of baptism by destruction. Out with the old and in with the new. Bob might appreciate the symbolism in that, being an English teacher and such.
In Three Sisters (in my opinion the most moving play of the Chekhov collection) a character by the name of Tusenbach is about to take part in a duel. The duel is set to happen off stage, hidden from the view of his new fiancé, Irina. As Tusenbach makes a departing speech, the world and everything in it suddenly becomes clear to him:
What trifles, what little things suddenly à propos of nothing acquire importance in life!…I must be off; it’s time….See, that tree is dead, but it waves in the wind with the others. And so it seems to me that if I die I shall still have part in life, one way or another. Good-bye, my darling.1
This is Chekhov’s brilliance: he hides incandescent lines within dialogue and plots plagued by misery, uncertainty, and death. Lines that make you as a reader pause and recognize that, it is true, I will die one day, but maybe like Tusenbach says, it’s not all for nothing. Perhaps when my body goes, I will leave something else behind, like a hollow, dead tree that remains a part of the forest. It strangely makes one excited about the prospect of becoming that dead tree, waving in the wind with all the others, a part of the beautiful human tapestry.
I don’t think I will end up scratching out Bob’s name after all. I want him to be here with me—a tree still waving in the wind. Gone but nevertheless wonderfully present. I think I’d want the same. My own favorite books living on after me, resting safely on a bookshelf and indelibly marked, if just barely, by my small presence.
Tusenbach dies in the duel.
Came for the Chekhov; got pulled into this thoughtful reflection on ownership and our relationship with books. Love it.
Preserve, yes - and add to, build on.