A house with an attic by Anton Chekhov...

"A house with an attic" by Anton Chekhov: a commentary for educators

Budimir Rogovoy, Ph. D.

The story of classic Russian writer Anton Chekhov “A House with Attic” was published in 1896, twenty years before the communist revolution in Russia.
Its scene is in the country estates of landlords, who are not alredy masters of their peasants but still have spacious houses and other property. Its action takes place in the period when a major part of the Russian  intelligentsia was fascinated with the idea of of "small deeds", which as they hoped would eventually lead to more social progress and justice. 
Its plot is simple and apparently also "small"
An artist, who relates the story, becomes acquainted with two sisters Zhenya (nicknamed "Missus") and Lida.
Lida an older sister, is busy with medical services to peasants, teaching their children, and other help to them. Missus, a younger one, reads much but generally lives in idleness as well as the artist except however his engaging in painting.
Missus and the artist fall in love with each other. Lida interferes and sends Missus away. Missus obeys docilely and goes from the scene.
A very uneventful love story: the only one embrace, which simultaneously is the beginning and the end of love.
The story finishes with the words of the artist addressed mentally to Missus: "Where are you?" No answer is expected.
A modern Russian critic once said that readers of Chekhov inevitably project the depicted conflicts and problems to their life. It follows that educators reading Chekhov would think over how to project to the matters of education.
We hope that our commentary to the story could make this projection easier.
Let us analyze psychologically the main personages of Chekhov's story.
First abut Missus., who is a 17-or 18-years old girl.
She is cheerily interested in all, even minor, events of life feeling their beauty and sense. Her contacts with people are lively and spontaneous. She adores her mother and is deeply devoted to her sister.
Missus loves art and admires the artworks of the artist.
She reads much, has awakening spiritual interests and looks at the artist as a man who can introduce her into the spheres of the Eternal and Beautiful.
No wonder that Missus easily falls in love the famous artist.
No wonder also that " all Russia fell in love poetically" with this personage. (These words were written by a contemporary of Chekhov).
But at the same time how many insufficiencies Missus has!
A general impression of the weakness of Missus is expressed by the story-teller in many details:
she is afraid of mere bagatelles, abashed by trifles and so on. What is worse, she thoughtlessly obeys all the commands of her sister. And these commands are unhappily directed not to her correct education and psychic growth but only to the suppression of her natural thinking and curiosity. Lida prevents Missus to listen to her serious ideological dispute with the artist.
 The final result we already know.  Her first love is interrupted by Lida who sends her sister away.
   A psychotherapeutic or, better to say, an orthopsychological diagnosis is clear in this case. Missus is not yet a fully grown-up person psychically, with habits of independent thinking and responsible activity. The lonely sojourn in a village, the wrong attitudes of her sister, who, as it is shown in the story, is her only real educator, and in fact a bad one, have made her psychic child prolong too much.
But Missus is quite capable of psychic growth. When she first becomes aware of the conflict between the artist and her sister she only can say, with tears in her eyes: "I do not really understand it". But in some time, in her second talk with the artist on this theme she already says: "I believe you are right", and adds some arguments.
We do not know a further fate of Missus (Chekhov like stories with uncertain ends) but given favorable circumstances her case could be a good opportunity for education.
And now let us turn to Lida.
All that has been told by us above on her shows Lida to be rather a negative personality creting unnecessary conflicts and hindrances to other people.
But what a strange negative personage she is!
When one reads the story, one should not forget that this troublesome Lida is engaged, and in fact very actively, with the matters which Chekhov himself was engaged in for all his life. Lida treats peasants medically, she teaches their children and helps them in every way. But Chekhov did the same: he regularly treated peasants (he was a doctor by education), he built a school for peasants in Melikhovo, and also made an incredibly big number of socially useful things (even a simple enumeration of them would take pages).
Lida, who could have been his colleague in real life, is depicted so unfriendly by Chekhov in the story!
The artist explains his dissatisfaction with Lida in the following words:
"She did not like me because I was a landscape painter and did not depict the needs of the people and because I, as it seemed to her, was indifferent to what she believed so strongly".
“Do you recognize the eternal dogmatist?"- wrote a critic in the post-Stalinist time referring to this citation and clearly having in mind communist dogmatists always ready to oppress those who disagreed with them.
The psychological  kernel of this oppression was shown by Chehov in the image of Lida. Possibly  Chekhov had a foreboding of some future evils which could grow from this kernel, which foreboding remained unattended.
At the times of Chekhov nobody could explain the psychic causes if Lida's dogmatism, her wrong commanding of and generally her poor contacts with people (she had no sexual relations, no friends and was in fact psychically far even from her mother and sister).
At our times some explanation seems to be possible.
Lida's social engagements, self-initiated, difficult and demanding a strife with the enemies of her affairs were connected with much left-hemispheric (LH) brain activities and the suppression of the activities of the right hemisphere (RH). Moreover, these engagements were connected with the passage from the principle of pleasure to the principle of reality (the Freudian terms).
Neither the physiological and psychological knowledge of the dichotomy of the brain hemispheres nor the knowledge of the dichotomy of the principles of pleasure and reality were available to Chekhov and his contemporary readers.
Even now this knowledge is incomplete, while the Freudian theories put, as we believe it, too much emphasis on the superiority of the principle of reality over the principle of pleasure. Nevertheless even with this incomplete knowledge we can say rather definitely that Lida suffered the results of an excessive transfer from the RH to the LH- regulation and from the principle of pleasure to the principle of reality.
It follows that some regression to the earlier stages of development would be desirable for her. In other words, it would be very good for her to learn a little from her sister, who had not left entirely the stage of development with more RH-regulation and a bigger part of the principle of pleasure.
Certainly such recommendation are more easily made than followed but we have at least here some directing lines which could be practically used.
More intricate and difficult to analyze seems to be the case of the artist.
The story is related by the artist, and Chekhov lets him express his own profound thoughts and attitudes.

Sharp criticism of the contemporary man and society combined with the deep understanding of their potentials and ideals-who else of the personages of the story could have spoken about these matters so sincerely and eloquently!
And even the doubts of the artist in the perspectives of the social progress seem to be full of importance for modern readers facing the threats of terrorism and the imminent worldwide ecological crisis.
"We are high beings, and if only we could really become conscious of all the force of human genius and could live only for the higher aims, we would become like gods at last",- say the artist.
But he adds also:
"It will never be so, the humanity will degenerate and genius will leave no trace"
These pessimistic conclusions of the artist are used by him to make excuses for his idleness and the unjust criticism of Lida's activity: Lida brings much benefit to people in relatively minir matters, the artist says much about great aims but remains passive.
"I don't want to work and I won't work any more... Nothing is needed, damn the Earth,"- exclaims he.
One can clearly see in these words not only some foresight of the future (which foresight, in our opinion, remains doubtful) but also an expression of his indifference and egoism.
The egoism of the artist is shown by Chekhov in a number of big and small details of his thinking and behavior, which we shall not enumerate here.
But this is a rather strange, " suffering egoism", egoism not reaching its aims, egoism with passivity. The artist is a split and ambivalent personality.
Such a combination of great intellectual and artistic abilities, with their  apparent nearness to the features and intentions of the author himself, on the hand, and the quite unattractive other personal features, on the other hand, seems rather mysterious and has thrown the critics into confusion. The character of the artist has been unriddled up to now.
   We propose a fresh hypothesis to this effect.
We believe that the artist suffers from the lack of what Chekhov in another masterpiece artwork "A Boring Story" called, rather vaguely, a "general idea" or "a god of a living person". The word "god" was written by Chekhov with a small letter, probably in order to avoid a collision with the notion of God, having a capital letter, in the traditional religion.
Nikolai Stepanovich, the hero of "A Boring Story", says about a "god of living person":  "When one has nothing higher and stronger than all the external influences, then really it would be sufficient to catch a grave cold in order to lose balance and begin to see an owl in each bird and hear dog's barks in each sound".
  If our diagnosis of the lack of a "god of a living person" or "general idea" be correct, what could be done to help it?
Being no philosopher Chekhov has not left us any sufficiently clear statements to this effect. The problem, and this is a really very important problem, needs more investigations.
Pending these investigations the rich experiences of the traditional religious teachings and, recently, the religious psychotherapy, with God in a capital letter, may be effectively used. There is one more intriguing course to follow.
The Russian symbolist writer of the 20-th century Andrew Bely wrote in a paper on Chekhov: “Each moment of life taken by itself becomes, when one is plunging into it, a door to Eternity.” In the light of this remark, one could re-read, for example, the first two pages of the story “A House with an Attic” and see how, with a “choice in randomness” (an oxymoron wording used by the modern judge of Chekhov A. Chudakov), Chekhov creates impressions which seem to bring forward not only pleasures of beauty but also values and pointing to the sense of the world and life.
Some intellectual working out of these and similar  impressions in the spirit of what Chekhov calld a "general idea" could probably become a good antidote against pessimism and egoism.
It is also necessary to take into account the so called "equalizing" proclaimed and creatively realized by Chekhov in his artworks. As early as in 1902 a critic wrote: "That love which is manifested by Chekhov to any, even the minutest, existences resembles the Sun, which "does good equally to a cedar and to a blade of grass', and this not a shortcoming but his greatest merit”.
It would be also the merit of competent educators, and the aesthetic and ethical qualities of Chekhov's artworks could render much help to it.
16.12.2004г.