Political Tchekhov

For twenty years and more than he has been doing philosophy, not only with philosophers, but also with artists, and again with writers (Balzac, Mallarmé, Flaubert, Brecht, Borges …), Jacques Rancière continues the deployment of his idea of ​​a “ literature policy ». Even more, by the exploration of works of fiction, and of literary modernity, he specified through several recent works this way of approaching literature by believing that it “ makes politics as literature “, That is to say, she intervenes in what Rancière calls the” Share of sensitive Characterizing political activity. In other words, it acts on the “ relationship between practices, forms of visibility and modes of saying that cuts out one or more common worlds ».

Perhaps we would not have expected, on the other hand, to what he devotes his reflections to Tchekhov, whose work written in the midst of ideological struggles and revolutionary torments resists assimilation with any political anchoring whatsoever. In this apparent indifference, however, for the Rancière reader of Tchekhov, and first of all of her news (even if his theater is also convened), a particular way of making something properly political perceptible.

The time of servitude

In the theater or in prose, Tchekhov institutes, and that is perhaps what characterizes him first, a certain relationship to time-that of the story, like that of the life of the characters. This languid time, which refuses to the event, envelops the reader or the spectator, and often worries the directors, is also one of the points of which Jacques Rancière leaves to take an interest in the Russian author. This time which, moreover, as his stories feel, seems to have started well before the start and continue to flow after the end, is according to him that of servitude, and of the order always continued, always reproduced by those who participate and who submit to it.

It is the purring of the fan and the paper skills, in In courtprohibiting the hearing that she takes on another course than that determined in advance. It is the Laptev trader who, in Three yearslives with a woman who married her by reason, and who does not like him. Dreaming of a departure, he does not cross the gate of his court. He “ let time (P. 23). The time of Tchekhov, Tsarist Russia, strangely comfortable and familiar to the modern reader, is thus that of stagnation and servitude.

Tchekhov has always resisted comparisons. Coming after the colossus with two faces of “ Tolstoyevski », There was neither in their shadow nor under their grip. No one never believed that his pieces were comedies, and Stanislavski himself Mutila to make them (according to him). His news is mostly only miniatures, and almost mock their dimensions the epic spirit instilled by so many authors, from Pouchkin, in their literature and their human portraits ; However, they all seem to brush the painting of whole Russia. Besides, the literature was, for this grandson of Serf who became a doctor, a secondary occupation. No doubt, as an author, Tchekhov never really took himself seriously.

This is perhaps why in him first appears to be the impression of a naturalism pushed to the extreme, an objectification of actions and characters, refusing all lesson, all judgment. Chekhov “ does not use spokespersons “, Observe Rancière, he” Build speech devices (P. 33). This does not prevent him from displaying a fairly arrested opinion on the idealistic temptation in literature, against the millennarism of the Tolstoy aristocrat, and also against the What to do ? de Chernychevski, a socialist novel inspiring revolutionaries and Lenin himself (who resumed the title), and that in certain new Chekhov seems to be in derision, as in Ionytch (p. 64) or even, in The story of a strangerthe narrator’s shoulder to disillusioned a machinal “ What to do ? “, After seeing his tirade falling flat on the workers’ condition (p. 45). Against all those, whether Christian or socialist (or both, like Tolstoy), who speak of life as if they never stopped, and the people as if it were eternal, Tchekhov addresses his side “ to those to whom life is only given once “, Who “ live here and now ” And “ could already learn to live better (P. 82).

A revolution of existence

But Jacques Rancière does not stop there. He does not give in, in particular, to the sometimes tenacious image of a conservative chekhov, indifferent to the sufferings of the people – he who, as a doctor, fought against epidemics, funded voluntarily of dispensaries and schools within the framework of his activities in the provincial assembly (ZEMSTVO) (p. 74), and undertook a trip to the Siberian island of Sakhalin, populated by convicts, to examine their sufferings as close as possible.

And the tchekhov stories would be “ revolutionaries », If we do not understand the Revolution first as reversal, as an upheaval of an order, but as a gap» Compared to an existence always ready to please his slavery (P. 40). We can recall that the Revolution has always been, for Rancière, first thought of as an individual, interior emancipation process – as well as asserted, a long time ago, in his writings on the working speech, or in his portrait of Joseph Jacotot. This is again what the characters of Tchekhov illustrate. The episodes that stage them, behind their insignificance or their daily life, thus reveal first the strength of the moment, the interstice by which could be broken down, if not the transformation of the world, at least a “ Revolution of existence (P. 55). She is a young woman who lets herself be seduced one day of country picnic and who embraces her new life at the cost of dishonor (My life)) ; He is an officer taken for another by a woman in the dark, now obsessed with the memory of the unknown (Kiss him)) ; it is the couple of the Little dogtrained against conveniences and wanting to believe that a “ New and beautiful life » ; It is still the memory of the clumsy declaration of a pretender of youth (MADAME X.) and, in the past years, the regret of not having crossed the threshold, the “ feeling of lost life (P. 59) by not being able to interrupt the apparently irrepressible course of time and convenience.

This moment is therefore that of choice which is given, whether we take it or not: the possibility of a break in the monotonous order of passive, servile life. There is what, in a non -exemplary way, could hold at Tchekhov place of morality. By accumulating these hesitant destinies, these clumsy, if not risky decisions, the only thing that he seems to reprove is the reflex that some people have to despair in advance of new life.

The function of literature

So that’s what Tchekhov reveals through literature. Tell and make the servitude feel, the misfortune of servitude, and the possibility of a change, or at least the existence of a threshold towards the possible change. This is also why Tchekhov’s literature is not a literature of revolt, of violent action, on the contrary making people feel concern about the possibility of upheaval, sadness in the face of disorder – as well that of resentments supporting revolt, as that of life that humans live by forgetting that it has only been given to them. There is, no doubt, an explanation of the penchant “ landscaper From Chekhov, if we remember at least with Rancière that the landscape is inspired by the painter, rather than the reverse. The writer assembles the realities of a society as in a soft-bitter melody, a time and, under her, his pain, his resignation, and the possibility of happiness.

By the story always started again from as harmless as possible situations, Tchekhov does not only testify to his time, and arouse in the face of him indignation or disgust. He opens to “ the possibility of another time “(P. 101), that of always distant freedom,” far away ». So it is necessary “ respect the distance that separates us from it and summons us at the same time »(P. 105): suspension of time, story, and of the reader himself at the end of the story, which leaves only one reality-that of the future, and of its promise that it is important to hold.