After Death -- "Misery"

One of the things that is hardest to get used to when you lose someone, even temporarily -- whether a child to summer camp, a boyfriend you've broken up with -- or more permanently, a friend or parent who has died, is the hole it leaves in your life.

Suddenly the time you were devoting to feeding the child, calling the parent, taking time with your friend or lover, is available just for you.

In some cases this can be great -- when my children went off on their own this summer, the days became really long. When I go away for work, and I no longer need to do laundry, the dishes, the shopping, I suddenly can read for hours, or go for long walks, or attend the theater every night.

But the important losses -- the loved one, whether to breakup or death -- create a void that looms from morning to night, and sometimes all night long. Time does not open up horizons, but instead can gape in empty and horrifying ways.

Preparing my new courses for the fall, I've had several things in mind. First, my "masterpieces of Russian lit" course often features death (I have written about it here). The main character dies at the end -- via suicide or illness. Or he kills someone, often in the middle of the book, in a duel or even as an experiment. When it comes to the classic themes of Love and Death, death tends to predominate on my syllabus. I'm trying to lighten things up a little this autumn ... but even the fantastic and absurd fiction tends to feature death. When Nabokov is among the most uplifting authors on your syllabus, you know misery is not far behind.

But secondly, because I'm teaching Chekhov, I have been thinking precisely of misery. Or more precisely, of "Misery" -- or "Grief," or "Melancholy," or however you want to translate the Russian toska. 

This and other evocative images available
with a reprint of the Chekhov's "Misery" here

Chekhov's story "Toska," written in 1886, features a man whose son has died. The narrative follows him across a workday, as he fulfills his duties driving a hansom cab. Throughout the day and evening, Iona also seeks human contact over and over, trying to alleviate the pressure of the void in his life. His passengers are not interested, and the only real "contact" he receives is a thump in the neck when they don't think he's driving quickly enough. Even their jeers help him feel less lonely, though, and when they've paid their fare he feels the intensity of being alone again:

Silence once again surrounds him . . . The grief which had gone for a short while comes back again and wrenches at his heart with even greater force. In his agony, Iona's eyes anxiously scan the crowds pouring down both sides of the street: is there not one person out of those thousands who might listen to him? But the crowds throng past, noticing neither him nor his grief . . . His grief is immense and boundless. If you were to open up Iona's chest and pour all the grief out of it, you would probably flood the entire planet, yet it is not visible. It has managed to squeeze into such a minute receptacle that you would not be able to see it in brightest daylight.

Reading about Iona, we become caught up in his grief -- it seems to echo our own feelings, the loss, the void, the lack of understanding in others about what we experience in our own grief. But of course if you read carefully, there are aspects of this story that are utterly exaggerated, not at all realistic descriptions. Iona is a cabby, the evening is dark and snowy -- do we really think there are thousands of people "pouring down both sides of the street"? From here, the hyperbole gets more extreme: his grief could "flood the planet." And yet it is not visible, it is enclosed in a tiny space -- though we don't know what that space is.

"It will soon be a week since his son has died, and he still has not managed to talk to anyone about it properly." "He needs a listener who will sigh, and grieve, and lament ..."

Chekhov's descriptions of these aspects of grief -- its immensity and overpowering nature, its invisibility and the way it makes you invisible --  are what make this story great. His focus on the need to fill the silence, to talk and be understood, to have someone take the mourner's part and grieve along with him -- these are the moments that ring true in this story about the human experience of grief.

It seems that Chekhov has undercut the power of the story with its tearjerking, almost pat ending, when Iona finally realizes that his horse is his best audience. Instead of the sighs and laments of a human being, he settles for the sound of chewing as his horse listens, or seems to, and "breathes on the hands of her master . . . "

But though Chekhov is chronicling the experience of grief, of loss, in the story, he fixes the experience of misery through the story's structure as well. Though the story ends with Iona's communion with the horse, it also ends with an ellipsis: "Iona gets carried away and tells her everything . . . "

That ellipsis signals that the next day, the day that dawns after the story's end, will still be empty, will still feature the void, the absence of the son, the sense that "death knocked on the wrong door." The grief may abate slightly after telling the story -- and we all need to express our grief, tell the story of how the loved one died, how empty it makes us feel -- but the void, and the misery, don't abate so easily.

That ellipsis leads into the emptiness that may never abate.