Activity on this blog tends to surge when I'm on leave (a relatively rare occurrence), and yes, this year I do have a sabbatical. My research topics are related to health and Chekhov, which is part of why Yuri Corrigan's little book, Chekhov's Antidotes: Prescriptions for an Age of Unrest really hit home.
Also, the book is brilliant. In thoughtful, perfectly paced prose Corrigan takes us through four ideas he synthesized from across Chekhov's career. And though he never says LOOK HERE, FRIENDS AND COMRADES! THIS IS ABOUT OUR SOCIETY! that is kind of what he means.
Let me give you the subtitles to each of four chapters: "On responding to the pain of others"; "on healing and resisting culture war"; "on mitigating modern loneliness"; "on discerning the meanings of life." Each of these topics feels phenomenally current.
The argument--laid out with the elegant reasoning of a philosopher who wants to speak to a broad audience--unfolds across just 130 pages. Corrigan identifies what he calls "Chekhov's reparative mediations"--and isn't that what we need? a mediator who can repair the fabric of the world in which we live?
The things we tend to repeat about Chekhov apply here: yes, he built his early stories, written for newspapers to make some cash and support his family, as anecdotes, as little narratives with sometimes easy punchlines. Yes, his education as a physician continually affected his career as a writer. And yes, he really did write the following:
"Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress. When I get fed up with one, I spend the night with the other. Though it is irregular, it is less boring this way, and besides, neither of them loses anything through my infidelity."
Indeed, both gained. Here we see Chekhov joking, and not joking, making fun of himself while also speaking truth. These are among his modes, though they are not the only ones. He was lyrical and meditative. But he was also dead serious.
Infected with tuberculosis in his twenties, Chekhov himself was a ticking time bomb. We all have death as our endpoint, but for most of us it seems far away. For Chekhov, it was right there. He felt an urgency from which we might also benefit.
In addition, Chekhov worked in an era when medical practice had significantly fewer options than it does today. Corrigan argues that for the period "physicians' work was not so much to heal as to preside over suffering," to "be next to pain." Skilled and knowledgeable but in some ways helpless--the physician, the financial analyst, the teacher, the politician sit by and the symptoms worsen, the pain increases. Frustrations we feel today--with tools like the ballot box, education, civic opportunities, and a pervasive sense that positive results are not forthcoming--would be familiar to Chekhov.
Instead of leaning into empathy, Chekhov's contemporaries (and, one might agree, today's everyman) aimed to anesthetize, to "medicate the empathic imagination" in Corrigan's words--through vodka, and nowadays, if you read the news, cocaine, fentanyl, ketamine, etc. (Isn't that what the Cornell incident is really about? lack of empathy for a fellow human being, Jane Doe in particular, that led to atrocious and unforgivable behaviors?)
Chekhov and his readers then and now look for antidotes, for a way to counteract the symptoms of the age. To pursue a meaningful life, though, we have to be willing to embrace ethical burdens. We have to seek the purpose that is around us. Instead we laugh off woes that afflict the less fortunate, and we fill our homes with unneeded commodities, pad our retirement accounts, and dull our humanity.
A key takeaway from Corrigan's book is how easily people are afflicted by what he calls "modern sloth." Again, not pointing directly to the 21st century, he diagnoses our illness. As Corrigan defines it, modern sloth is "our unreceptivity to the omnipresence of the work that needs doing." The work is there. Our society--and not just American society, not just Russian or Israeli or French society--is ailing. We are "on the verge."
Reading Chekhov, and listening to / attending to the symptoms of illness around us, may be our only hope.
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