I am just settling back in after walking the Camino de Santiago with my family. A new reading will be published next week. In the meatime, please enjoy a gem from the archives. Anton Chekhov’s “The Kiss” remains my favorite reading to date.
If you missed these stories the first time around, now is a great time to listen or explore the archives on your own (searchable by date recorded, by author, and by theme).
The writer Anton Chekhov was also the doctor Anton Chekhov. Between these two worlds, he supported his extended family with the practice of medicine and supported his artistic passions with the pen, declaring, “Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress.”
Anyone can guess which one he found more alluring.
In his short story “The Kiss,” Chekhov aligns our attention with a rather lonely, insecure Russian officer named Ryabovitch. In today’s parlance, you could say the poor guy suffers from “low T.” Through an unorthodox chance encounter, Ryabovitch’s sleeping imagination is sparked, igniting a dormant verve. He suddenly discovers a confidence, albeit fleeting, that he may not, after all, be left out of a normal sort of life. This awakening of the spirit is reflected in a number of small details—the trilling of a nightingale, the tingling sensation, almost of peppermint, on the cheek, the sense of time folding in on itself. That is the very allure of Chekhov’s style…the creative moment emerges from the mundane.
The playwright and critic Maurice Valency remarked of Chekhov, “His great talent lay in his sensitive depiction of life around him, the physical and psychic landscape in which he lived.” While Valency made this remark after, rather derogatorily, declaring Chekhov to have no philosophical point of view, the description is apt. (Although it must be said that Valency himself was known best for his stage adaptations of the work of others…how’s that for a point of view?)
Chekhov certainly had an angle. Once one reads but a handful of his short stories, it becomes abundantly clear that he was burdened with realism and buoyed by romanticism. Indeed, in reaction to seeing his plays continually brought to life as tragedies, he protested with his philosophical prod towards optimism:
“All I wanted was to say honestly to people: ‘Have a look at yourselves and see how bad and dreary your lives are!’ The important thing is that people should realize that, for when they do, they will most certainly create another and better life for themselves.”
I think you’ll agree that “The Kiss” delivers exactly that…a beckoning towards a better life, a more enduring happiness.
Please enjoy…
Headline Image: Blue Landscape by Marc Chagall, 1949
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit classicsreadaloud.substack.com
