On Chekhov: The Russian Master

On 'The Russian Master'

By the end of Chekhov’s “The Russian Master”, Nikitin is disgusted, essentially, by the same people, situations and things that he found desirable, touching, endearing and amusing—beautiful, even—at the start of the story. His only constant dislike is for the ‘pet’ animals at the Shelestov family estate. One can only wonder whether his disdain for these creatures doesn’t stem from their inferior ability to dissemble, delude and pretend.

The banality Nikitin claims to deplore to the point of escape was present from the start. The first indications we have of his beloved Masha, the youngest Shelestov daughter, are of a petty, controlling, demanding and jealous young woman entirely fulfilled and consumed within the repetitive routines and most basic patterns of a privileged but simple, mundane provincial domestic life.

Nikitin truly believes himself to be in love Masha; though this is entirely possible and initially simple enough to imagine, Chekhov embroiders this romantic idea with an abundance of contradictions that are anything but innocent.

Out riding on a lovely summer afternoon, Masha’s first comment to her husband to be (he alone, it seems, does not guess the certainty of his future status) is a command about how to control his horse and advice not to take its demeanor seriously—that the beast is only ‘pretending’. Masha is as simple and uncomplicated as the other household pets. Though she and Nikitin appear on the surface to be polar opposites, they share a common strategy toward life of ignoring unwelcome evidence.

No amount of information informs Nikitin’s ideas of world or self; “...anything that happened to clash with his own convictions he found naïve and touching.” Both Masha’s father and Nikitin’s friend Ippolit warn him about the seriousness and changes that marriage entails; he hears the words, but not what they mean.

Nikitin thinks that he lives by the laws of logic and boasts that he is the creator of his own happiness and, therefore, its rightful possessor. The minute that reality and the limitations of shared life impinge on his fantasies of freedom and potent creation, he nosedives into an about face and becomes the absolute victim of the dreadfulness around him. He imagines himself to be consumed with a burning desire to become a factory worker and “to exhaust himself with work, to suffer.” Nikitin believes that a laborer treasures every kopek he earns simply because he is a worker, not because he is able, independent of social status, to appreciate his circumstance.

As for work, he has still been unable or unwilling to find the energy, effort or direction even to read Lessing, so how could he actually enter into labor when he can barely get up off the sofa? Nikitin also does not consider that he need not go looking for the suffering he desires; he has it already. He longs for ‘something’ to overpower him, make him oblivious of his own existence, indifferent to his personal happiness with all its limitations, and yet he reserves the right to select this power, thus sentencing himself in his own pettiness.

Chekhov creates and examines with clinical clarity; he seems often to be weighing how different people are from objects, to what extent they are active or passive within the drama of life and free of the overwhelming realities of mere chemical processes, chance and the Siren call of illusion. Were Nikitin merely a self-deluding fortune hunter, our interest would wane, but he is not. Rather than viewing him as a scheming materialist, one can also see him through the lens of science: osmosis.

The poverty, struggle and isolation of Nikitin’s early life are like a dry sponge immersed in the vital waters of the Shelestov family life. From a scientific standpoint, no matter what he were to tell himself were his reasons or how much he might prefer one liquid to another, he cannot stop the process of absorption that will continue until the sponge is entirely saturated. Then it may loathe its soggy state and entertain fantasies about being dry again, as Nikitin ultimately imagines his final salvation in a trip to Moscow, alone, to visit the poor old rooms he inhabited when he was a struggling student.

By the story’s end it is perfectly clear that we can have no idea of what, exactly, Nikitin is ‘master’. He is self-deluding, though not entirely in the dark. He can make effort until he cannot; he can see this, but not that; in short, he is human and subject to the paradox of a nature that is generous and destructive, entirely indifferent and absolutely selective. Chekhov would endorse work. That may be all one can attempt; certainly there will be scant results without it, but no certainties either because of it.