Antithesis is not a stylistic device but an organising principle in the classic short story. And so it is not surprising to find it at all levels of the text, where it creates microstructures and establishes secondary oppositions
19 Kojima, p. 296 (p. 205).
20 Ibid, pp. 302-03 (p. 211). Critics frequently insist on the presence of contrasts in the short story, but never, to my knowledge, see it as a profound part of the structure. In addition to the work of Tieck, the contemporary writer Ōe Kenzaburō argues that the density of writing found in good short stories is the result of tension. However, to his mind, this tension might be found not in the text, but within the author. He gives as examples the writers of Meiji and himself. He cites the tension between his persona as a naïve young man of provincial Shikoku and his reality as the celebrated darling of Tōkyō’s literary elite. As for the Meiji writers, they were torn between western and Japanese culture, and this provided the basic oxymoronic tension in most of their short stories — Mori Ōgai’s Maihime (The Dancing Girl) or Fushinchū (Under Construction), for example. One should remark that this does not allow for Ōgai’s Sanshō Dayū (Sanshō the Steward), or Kōda Rōhan’s Gojū no tō (The Pagoda) — yet these texts are nevertheless organised by a very strong oxymoronic tension. Ōe goes on to criticise the younger generation, who refuse to subject themselves to this kind of tension and adapt completely to the American subculture: which is why, according to Ōe, there are no great short stories being written today. Ōe Kenzaburō, “Sakka no soba kara”, Bungakkai, 41-49 (September 1987), 180-83.
36 The Classic Short Story
that contribute to the coherence and stability of the text as a whole. Anton Chekhov’s Volodya Bol’shoi i Volodya Malen’kii (Big Volodya and Little Volodya) provides a good example of what I call “secondary tensions”.21 A young woman, Sophia, has just married a colonel much older than herself (Big Volodya) because the man she loves (Little Volodya) does not return her affections. The essential antithetic tension in this story is the clash between Sophia’s demonstrative gaiety at the beginning (her “discovery” that she really loves her husband and her happiness in being married) and her despair at the end, when her life seems completely ruined. This is a common theme for Chekhov: the impossibility of leading a pure and joyous life.
Along with this basic tension, a series of others are established: the most important is the opposition between Sophia’s exaggerated expressions of deep feelings and the void into which they fall; her husband attaches absolutely no importance to her desire for spiritual purification. She then turns to Little Volodya, who becomes her lover immediately after her marriage, and asks him for guidance — just one word that will help her find a way out of the dreary misery of her life. All he does is to repeat like a refrain, throughout the text, the onomatopoeic “tararaboumbia”.22 Similarly it is enough for Chekhov to compare the relationship that binds the two Volodyas with that which bound the great poets Gavrila Derzhavin and Alexander Pushkin in order to illuminate the antinomy between the two
worlds in which these relationships exist.23
Finally, in keeping with these three oppositions, another contrast plays an important role in our perception of the principal theme: the opposition between Sophia’s life of pleasure, and that of her friend Olga, who has just entered a convent as a novice. The contrivance here is obvious: bringing an adulteress and a nun together creates a strong oxymoronic tension, and allows Chekhov to treat the theme very economically. At the end of the story, Sophia visits Olga in the convent almost every day, and her complaints to
21 Anton Chekhov, Late-Blooming Flowers and Other Stories, trans. by I. C. Chertok and Jean Gardner (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), pp. 127-46 (hereafter Chertok). The Russian text of this story can be found in Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, 30 vols (Moscow: Nauka, 1974-1983), VIII, pp. 214-25 (hereafter Nauka).
22 The beginning of a burlesque song of the time.
23 “[Big Volodya] extolled [Little Volodya], blessing his future just as Derzhavin did for Pushkin”. Chertok, pp. 130-31 (Nauka, p. 216). This line comes immediately after a remark that Little Volodya has always had women in his student room. The very lively tradition of the heroic-comic in the preceding century in Russia made readers even more aware of this genre of proceedings: Russian readers are trained by this tradition to detect irony.
2. Antithetic Structure 37 her pious friend about her all too worldly sufferings totally discredit her character. The global tension gives the story structure while the secondary tensions energise the details: by contrasting Sophia’s life with that of Olga’s, Chekhov intensifies its emptiness. The recurring use of contrast creates the concrete impression of an abyss, a dead-end situation. Not only does Chekhov show a world closed in on itself, dreary and desperate, but, by presenting its absolute contrast, he “locks in” this world, while making it immediately tangible to the reader.24
Vladimir Kataev has shown that the matrix of all Chekhov’s work is a series of short stories from his youth that he calls “the short stories of discovery”.25 In these stories, the hero receives at full force the shock of an apparently ordinary event that transforms his entire concept of the world.
An evening spent with friends in a street of brothels, an insult inflicted by some merchants on a student whom they paid to play the piano at their wedding, a tooth extraction;26 these are the “trifling occurrences”, but for the hero they provide the occasion for reshaping his whole frame of thought, which he had thought to be stable and definitive.27 In a great many of these stories, the basic antithesis is emphasised by the contrast of two expressions: kazalos’/okazalos’ (“it seemed that/it appeared clearly that”).
Chekhov always constructs a diptych. He develops first the character’s false concept of the world (kazalos’), before showing how he becomes aware of its artifice. Only then will he develop the new order of the world as the hero now conceives it (okazalos’): confused, complex and in conflict. The oxymoronic tension is thus established and proclaimed, because Chekhov is well aware of the formidable efficacy it gives to his denunciation. We shall see that Chekhov is one of the very few authors of the period who did
24 Goethe’s Novelle is profoundly structured by the antithesis “strength/gentleness”, summarised in the final image: “If it is at all possible to think that, on the features of such a fierce creature, the forest king, the despot of the animal realm, an expression of friendliness, of grateful satisfaction, could be discerned, then here it was so”. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Great Writings of Goethe, ed. by S. Spender, trans. by Christopher Middleton (New York: New American Library, 1958), p. 260. As is often the case, we have here an entire series of secondary tensions: for example, between the princess’s vow, out of curiosity, to see the animals on her return, and her anguish at the encounter.
25 V. B. Kataev, Proza Chekhova: problemy interpretatsii (Moscow: Izd-vo Moskovskogo universiteta, 1979). For a partial translation see Vladimir Kataev, If Only We Could Know:
An Interpretation of Chekhov, trans. by Harvey Pitcher (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002), pp.
11-19.
26 In Pripadok/The Crisis (Nauka, VII, pp. 199-221); Taper/The Pianist (Nauka, IV, pp. 204-08);
and Znakomyi muzhchina/An Aquaintance of Hers (Nauka, V, pp. 116-19).
27 Kataev (2002), p. 12.
38 The Classic Short Story
write stories free from oxymoronic tension, but these texts only constitute a handful.28 Although he is rightly celebrated for the nuances in his plays, when turning to the short story, Chekhov — like Henry James — uses the capacity of the form to the full. He builds oxymoronic tensions out of paroxystic characters, because this is a particularly efficient way to build a story and to create emotion.