The Weight of Ordinary Days

The Residue of Transcendence

Chekhov’s most famous statement about religion is also one of his most theologically revealing: “I lost my faith long ago and when I look at a believer I feel strange and somehow afraid.” He abandoned the faith of his upbringing early and maintained his atheism consistently. And yet his fiction keeps producing moments that his atheism cannot explain — moments of beauty, of longing, of something that breaks through the ordinary surface of his characters’ lives and cannot be contained within a secular framework.

The story “The Student” is the most concentrated instance of this. A seminary student, cold and discouraged on Good Friday, tells an old widow the story of Peter’s denial of Christ. The widow weeps. The student suddenly perceives that the past is not past — that the pain of that night in the courtyard is continuous with the pain of this widow on this night, and that this continuity means something about the nature of truth and the structure of time.

What The Bishop Reveals

“The Bishop” is Chekhov’s most explicitly religious story and one of the most moving things he ever wrote. Bishop Pyotr, dying of typhoid during Holy Week, experiences a series of visions and memories that carry him backward through his life toward his childhood and his mother. The story ends with his death, described with a tenderness that Chekhov’s atheism should not have been able to produce.

What the story reveals is the persistence of the religious imagination in a writer who had intellectually abandoned religion. The liturgy, the music, the light of the Easter candles — these do something to Chekhov’s prose that his secular convictions cannot prevent.

The Seed of the Woman

Genesis 3:15 describes a conflict whose resolution involves the restoration of what the Fall has broken. Chekhov’s fiction documents the breaking with extraordinary precision and keeps gesturing, involuntarily, toward the restoration. His characters long for something they cannot name and cannot find in the world as it is.

In “Three Sisters,” the sisters long for Moscow. In “The Cherry Orchard,” the family longs for the estate they are losing. These longings are inadequate objects for the desire they express — Moscow cannot satisfy what the sisters need, the cherry orchard cannot sustain what the family has invested in it. The longing is real; the objects are insufficient. This is Augustine’s diagnosis of the fallen heart, rendered in secular terms by a writer who had no Augustine to read it through.

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