著者

川島 静

出版者

天理大学地域文化研究センター

雑誌

アゴラ : 天理大学地域文化研究センター紀要 (ISSN:13489631)

巻号頁・発行日

no.8, pp.75-86, 2011

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Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) wrote many works in which female protagonists play an important role. Although never fully sympathetic to the contemporary feminist movement, he was highly critical of gender bias and biological determinist theories and denounced the inequality of education as a source of negative gender discrimination. As Barbara Heldt (1987) and Carolina De Maegd-Soёp (1987) point out, the variety of female characters in his works is unique in the history of Russian literature. Chekhov, who began his career in the early 1880s as a comic short story writer for humor magazines and then for popular newspapers, progressed at the end of the 1890s to write for more intellectual, general magazines such as The Northern Herald and The Russian Thought. In this period, he wrote several stories dealing with the theme of the women's participation in the public sphere. Beginning in the 1860s, because of industrial development and increased freedom of speech in late Imperial Russia, a type of civic public sphere developed as a space of critical discussion, which Jürgen Habermas (1961) defined as the foundation of democratic society. While Habermas sees the exclusion of women from public discourse as a crucial element of the western civic public sphere, the beginnings of the Russian public sphere were characterized by the active participation of intellectual women, encouraged by the relatively higher quality of women's education in Russia at that time. In his novellas "Three years" (1895) and "My Life" (1896), Chekhov described women who try to commit themselves to the public discourse regarding cultural and social issues. Their commitments are not seen entirely negatively, but these women are represented as unnatural and superficial, which may correspond to the expectations of the contemporary (male) readers. Chekhov continued the same theme in "The House with a Mezzanine: An Artist's Story" (1896), but from a different perspective. This story highlights sisters Lida and Zhenya (Missius), who provide a striking contrast: while the protagonist, a cynical landscape painter, allegedly modeled after the author's friend Isaak Levitan (1860–1900), falls in love with the latter, a gentle girl with childlike manners, he discusses public matters with the zemstvo (local self-government) activist Lida. This comparison may allude to the biblical story of the sisters Martha and Mary, a favorite theme of contemporary Russian paintings. Lida is described as a rather intolerant and humorless person who dominates her mother and sister with a pseudo-patriarchal attitude. However, her devotion to social work and education in the zemstvo is reminiscent of Chekhov himself, who as a physician engaged in medical services to peasants in the zemstvo. Lida's character must have evoked strong sympathy among readers at a time when the "Small Deeds" movement, led by Iakov Abramov (1858–1906), acquired popularity after populist activities had been suppressed by the government. With the dichotomized representation of two sisters, Chekhov expressed the dilemma between the ideal of womanly love and intimacy in the private sphere and the argument for women's empowerment.