Chekhov's Na Puti: a story within a story

Abstract

Na puti (On the Road) occupies a central place in the chekhovian fiction. An analysis of the text allows us to understand the narrative processes, the relationship with contemporaneity and the writer’s Weltanschauung at the moment when Antosha Chekhonté became Anton Chekhov. Published as a Christmas story on 25 December 1886 in Aleksei Suvorin’s newspaper “Novoe Vremia”, built on the theme of travel and encounter, Na puti turns into a discourse on the intelligentsia. In the vicissitudes of the hero, literary models (Turgenev’s Rudin and Bazarov, Chernishevski’s Rakhmetov) and historical events of the 1860s-1880s are combined. This figure is thus created by the author through hyperbole. Likharev’s “confession” is punctuated with references to the women’s question, to Chernii Peredel, to a “nun-nihilist” (Vera Zasulich), to Ivan Aksakov, to Tolstoism. We also find there the keywords of Chekhov’s ethical code and poetics: truth (pravda), righteousness (spravedlivost’), conscience (sovest’). The narrator portrays the characters in both outward appearance (somatic features, clothes) and “psyche” (through actions), yet leaves an underlying ambivalence in each. Likharev’s surname itself, coined on the adjective likhoi, has a double meaning. The heroine, the barishnia Maria Ilovaiskaia, is an active, efficient landowner, and at the same time a sensitive lady. But sharp features give her face “a biting expression”, she is “slim as a little snake” and in speaking “she moistened her lips with her sharp, little tongue” The author also seems to create this figure in opposition to contemporary real and literary female types (nihilists, kursistki, Turgenev’s heroines). The reader has been able to observe the characters through numerous details, has been able to listen to them, has been drawn into the story by the constant references to contemporaneity: finally, he will be able to formulate his own judgement. The chronotopic dimension, in which the story is set, plays an important function in the text. The hero and heroine meet in a transitory space-time: the traveller’s room (proezzhaiushchaia) of a tavern and Christmas night. In the morning, each resumes his or her own “road” (put’) towards divergent destinations and beyond the threshold, antithetical spaces loom up: the house for Ilovaiskaia, the steppe, the mines for Licharev.