The Grasshopper by Anton Chekhov

Jack Coulehan — Sun, 11 May 2025 14:40:22 +0000

In this story, Dr. Dymov is an earnest and rather boring young physician, who is preoccupied with his patients and his research. Olga, his wife, craves the excitement and gaiety of the artistic life. She discovers a new lease on romance with Ryabovsky, a colorful landscape artist, who takes her on a Volga River cruise. As they spoon under the stars, Olga and her lover make light of her bumptious stay-at-home husband. After she returns from the cruise, Dymov forgives her infidelity, but in Olga’s mind, his forgiveness proves to be another strike against the poor slob, since she can’t stand his complaisant devotion. She runs back to Ryabovsky for a while, until he makes it clear that he is no longer interested in her.

Then one day Dymov develops diphtheria, evidently contracted by “sucking up mucus through a pipette from a boy with diphtheria. And what for? It was stupid… just from folly.” Dymov soon becomes seriously ill and then dies. Suddenly, Olga is overcome with guilt and grief. Too late, Olga realizes that her husband was a hero.

Chekhov based this story on the real-life love affair between his good friends Isaak Levitan, a well-known (and married) artist, and Lika Mizinova, a young unmarried teacher, who had for many years been infatuated with Chekhov while he toyed with her affection. In this interpretation, Chekhov bases the character of Dymov largely on himself, portrayed as a dedicated and disciplined worker who has no time to spare for frivolous romance. However, in reality, Chekhov had playful relationships with many women, but eschewed commitment until late in life.

Another way of looking at the story is the dramatic tension between practicality (science, public health, and social consciousness), as exemplified by Dymov; and emotion (art, adventure, romance), as exemplified by Ryabovsky. Olga at first chooses the latter, but Dymov’s death turns the tables. After he becomes a martyr to science, she suddenly finds him more interesting and mourns her loss. Was his death the result of a foolish mistake? Did her infidelity play a role, perhaps by distracting him while he was aspirating the pus? Or might Dymov have deliberately performed the foolish procedure, realizing that the infection would cause his death?

The Wife & Other Stories. The Tales of Chekhov. Volume 5, New York, The Ecco Press, 1985.
Translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett.
Shelby Foote (Ed.) Chekhov’s Later Short Stories. 1888-1903, New York, The Modern Library, 1999.
Translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett.

A previous version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database (Litmed).

Reviews of Chekhov’s Stories

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

Howard Trachtman — Fri, 06 Dec 2024 00:14:40 +0000

Can a book be out of sync with the large themes that it grapples with? I could not escape this thought as I read Martyr!, an enthralling novel that tackles the question of what it means to live a life infused with meaning. It recounts the story of Cyrus Shams, who has grown up in Indiana after his single-parent father emigrated from Iran to America. His mother was killed when her airplane was shot out of the sky by a sea-to-air missile fired from the USS Vincennes, a real life historical event that occurred in July 1988. His grief-stricken father is employed in a factory farm in Fort Wayne killing chickens each day on a massive, industrial scale and appears to be biding his time on Earth until Cyrus leaves home and becomes independent.

Cyrus aspires to be a poet but is drowning in self-pity and drug use. He wants more than anything to achieve renown and martyrdom and to die after having made a lasting mark in the world. Interwoven with these tragic human circumstances are antic elements that collide with this depressing narrative. The novel opens abruptly with a humorous but disconcerting encounter between Cyrus, who is working as a surrogate patient in an introduction to medicine class, and a student, who is clearly in the early stages of her education. Cyrus is having a bad day and cynically takes on the role of the difficult patient, nearly driving the student to tears. There is a zany episode when Cyrus and a friend take on a home maintenance and wood chopping job for a man who lives alone and who monitors their work wearing only his underwear.

Dream sequences in which Cyrus receives guidance from figures ranging from Kareem Abdul Jabbar to a thinly disguised, now President Trump materialize without warning. An uncle, his mother’s older brother, passes through the story several times appearing as a figure draped in a black hooded cape and riding on horseback across the blood-drenched Iran-Iraq war battlefields. His mission is to reassure the dying soldiers that they will ascend to paradise. Yet, despite these disparate elements, the book has a powerful coherence and momentum. One of the most striking features of the book is its extraordinarily imaginative similes– “he was skinny in a scrawny way, not like a runner but like a mathematician who forgets to eat,” “the middle school teacher… offered him a racial slur, like a juicy orange they might peel together and share.” These phrases demand that you slow down the pace of your reading and take note of the author’s creativity.

Engagement with language and its communicative limitations emerges as a key theme of Martyr!. Cyrus comments frequently on the arbitrariness of language and the terrifying consequences that can arise from the words we use. Akbar embeds this idea in his writing by implying that plain words alone are inadequate to capture the essence of things, and the only reliable way to convey meaning to readers is by creating vivid and arresting comparisons. The plot of the book takes off when Cyrus is encouraged by a friend to go to the Brooklyn Museum and visit a featured exhibit, DEATH-SPEAK. It consists of an artist who is dying of cancer sitting on a chair and talking with the visitors about death during the final weeks of her life. An unanticipated bond is quickly established between the artist named Orkideh and Cyrus. He feels compelled to return and speak with her over the next four days. Their conversation is genuine and moving. There is more to the artist and her art than meets Cyrus’ eye, and those unexpected twists drive the story to its blazing finish.

What is one to make of this wholly original and emotionally charged novel? I will restrict myself to three thoughts that have had staying power after finishing the book a month ago. First, as mentioned above, Martyr! raises provocative questions about the limitations of language and our ability to communicate with one another. Cyrus (and Akbar) questions the capacity of words alone to express meaning, as if each of us has our own private language. If we can firmly ground our language with references to concrete, real life experiences, which is precisely what Akbar does with the beautiful and jarring similes that are interwoven into the entire book, then we may be able to convey meaning. That Akbar can introduce such a recondite idea, a variant of playing language games, into a best-selling novel is a feat worth noting.

Second, there is a yearning to be healed that drives Cyrus’ quest. Martyrdom is the outer expression, but it is a quest for meaning that is the true driving force that motivates Cyrus to take healthy action in the novel. He attends a group therapy program and has a tough-minded supervisor to help him detox from his drug use. Ultimately, it is the new awareness that Cyrus gains about his parents that enables him to achieve psychological equanimity and peace of mind.

Finally, what is the martyrdom that Cyrus longs for? He is not looking to wrap himself with explosives, kill the infidels, and gain entry to paradise. One could say that what he so desperately wants is lasting fame and renown for an act or artistic creation that will be seen as unique and cherished, that will survive after him, and that will keep his name eternally alive. The Book of Martyrs, a fictional collection of poems written by Cyrus that are interspersed in the text, could conceivably represent this hoped-for act of martyrdom. However, the ending of the novel suggests that Akbar may have a less explosive and more intimate notion of what martyrdom means. The knowledge that Cyrus gains over the course of the novel and his interactions with Orkideh spur him to finally achieve the martyrdom he seeks. His ultimate fate on the final page is actually a bit murky. But the vision that one is left with is that Cyrus has indeed achieved a life of meaning because it is a life of meaningful interpersonal connections.

Martyr!
Kaveh Akbar
Alfred A. Knopf, 2024, pp 332
Web image by Levi Meir Clancy

Martyrdom – medhum.org

The Grasshopper by Anton Chekhov

Reviews of Chekhov’s Stories

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar