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The Blue Hour in Anton Chekhov

(Picture: nrkbeta)

(19.6.2023) The Russian writer Anton Chekhov is a surprise bag. I do not claim to know him entirely, and at the end of the 1990s I was under the impression that he was more or less a patron saint of Generation X sensibilities and self-pity. Now that I have reread Chekhov (and read many texts for the very first time) my view of Chekhov has changed. He is a surprise bag, a wonderfully alert spirit, who, in almost every text, does or tries to do something new. In his story called The House with the Mezzanine for example, he is not a patron saint of Generation X sensibilities: he has a sort of Generation-X-landscape-painter-slacker crash with a merciless female activist, who manages, in the end, to sabotage the love affair of the painter with the activist’s younger sister. This story Generation X should have read. But this is not about (dumb) generational thinking here anyway, it is about the history of the blue hour, and Chekhov is also a wonder bag as to the ways he has twilight appear and disappear in his art. And we will look into three examples here, and we will highlight three examples here (above on the left an illustration to The House with the Mezzanine).

1) Dazed and Confused

In our discussion of Gesänge der Frühe, a piano cycle Robert Schumann composed in 1853, we had seen that music can be an expression of intimate sentiments while awaiting dawn. And in his 1904 play The Cherry Orchard writer Anton Chekhov takes over.
The first act of that play shows two figures awaiting a whole group of people to return home. It is 2 o’clock in the morning and a candle gets unlit, since it is already getting light outside. Two figures are awaiting others to come home, but one might also say that two voices speak, with the atmosphere still being rather intimate, introspective, but there is already a dialogue at play.
And then, step by step, a whole group of people breakes into this rather intimate atmosphere, chatting, talking nonsense, with some of the members of that group reacting sensitive to all that nonsense, all that nonsense being talked. And it is the niece, reminding her dear uncle, who, in the early hours of morning will come up with a plan about how to rescue the cherry orchard, reminding her uncle, from time to time, that he is talking way too much. The whole group of people that, in the early hours of morning, is gathering, seems confused and dazed. Torn between travelling and being at home, torn between the past and the future, torn between memories of the past, some sweet, some rather bitter, and some devastating, and future plans, the whole act is a concerto of chaotic voices, of chaotic talking, with some people asking for coffee, and others wanting to go to bed. The group has completely lost orientation in time, which might be a natural thing after coming home from a long journey. But here things have to be done, or the cherry orchard will be history. And, as it turns out at the end of the summer (it is still May in the first act), it will be history.

Is there also intimacy, as in the piano cycle by Schumann? Yes, but it is rather implied (or being referred to), and what we get to read as readers (or to see and to hear as viewers) of that play is extroversion. We do not know exactly the inner state of mind of people, while, in music, we are, in some sense, walked through inner states of mind per se (with polyphony, perhaps, alluding or referring to a more collective way of thinking and feeling within one person’s mind). Schumann shows a variety of moods, diversity, and thus is foreshadowing plurality: the chaotic collective awaiting of dawn, or hoping for salvation, which is staged in Chekhov’s play.

2) The Blue Hour Aboard a Ship

A bull’s eye, a scuttle, appears in Anton Chekhov’s short story Gusev, which is set aboard of a ship. And also the vision of a bull’s head without eyes appears in that story. It is a story about dying, but also about life and about the cycle of nature.
It is easy to imagine this short story turned into a short play, or into a radio drama, since it is basically the voices of several people talking that we are hearing, voices speaking of hopes and memories, but also of ethics, of moral. But Gusev is also a short story by Chekhov that has intense images, a story in which Chekhov is working with intense visual images: there is the ending of the story, with a marvellous sunset, set in contrast to the cruel nature at play below sea level; there is the short visit on deck, there are sightings of other boats, but basically it is story set inside a ship, a steamer, which is returning from the Far East to Russia. The views are partly exotic, but there is also darkness inside the steamer, it is the darkness of the ship’s lazaret, with people being sick, with people dying, and then there is the bull’s eye. And it is turning blue outside, which is the first visual impression after darkness, with darkness fading. There is the blue hour. And this is Chekhov’s sense of detail, of details which often have to do with light: a spiderweb’s reflecting of sunlight, with the colors of the spectrum appearing; or the reflection of a fragment of glass near the basin of a mill. It is visual Chekhov here, as well as Chekhov the listener, since he is digesting here things seen, things heard, when returning himself from a journey to the Far East, to Sakhalin, via Ceylon, to Russia. And it is Chekhov, musing on people dying, on people’s lives, and on people’s lives being reflected in what they say, while awaiting to return home. Or to die. Aboard of a ship. Inside the ship, inside a lazaret, with a bull’s eye. It ia about last impressions here. But also about first impressions, since the bull’s eye appears early in the frame of that story. It is a morning to come, for sick people. Another morning.

(Picture: Alexander Mogilevsky)

(Picture: DS)

3) Thinking Twilight and Night as a Writer

Anton Chekhov is very reflected as a writer, in that he very deliberately places his stories in various settings of light (see for example his story Grief). His story Happiness is, on some level, anticipating plays by Samuel Beckett. Again a setting that, very easily, could be turned into a play. Very reduced personal, two shepherds, one old, one young, an official, resting with the two shepherds for a while, a horse, a dog. And the fantasies of people as to the treasures that might be dug somewhere.
Happiness can actually be read as an allegory of night, inspiring, due to real things becoming unreal (like dreams), and dreams having a reality (like real things). But what about twilight, what about dusk and dawn here?
Dusk and dawn, here, are the portals, that the protagonists use to pass. From the world of labour, their daily work as shepherds, to the mental state (of night), that allows them to unleash their imagination. The young shepherd shows as the (more) reflected one, and it is the portal of dawn that, again, seems to trigger the passing from a state of free imagination as to how life might be, but actually rather as to sceneries of treasure hunt, towards the world of daily labour. And perhaps it is the mental state of treasure hunt that actually is sought after, rather than the treasure itself. Which would mean: to have something, a something that keeps one going. In life. Even if daily life, the world of labour, has taken over again. So Happiness is not only an allegory of night; it is an allegory of life, and the cycle of day and night, with its various phases inspiring and triggering various inner movements, sometimes unbound, and sometimes restricted, given that things, at day light, are real again, have turned to be real again. And do so with every new day still to come.

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