Reduced to Alibis?

At ten o’clock on a dark September evening six-year-old Andrey, the only son of Dr. Kirilov, a Zemstvo physician, died from diphtheria. The doctor’s wife had just thrown herself upon her knees at the bedside of her dead child, and was giving way to the first ecstasy of despair, when the hall-doorbell rang loudly.

The death of a child is one of the most difficult and traumatic events a husband and wife can experience. Coping and getting on with life after the loss of a child seems almost impossible. The death of a spouse is also tragic.

Anton Chekhov, in his short story Enemies, brings together both tragedies and their effects on the two main characters.

The epigraph is the opening to the story. Husband and wife are devasted by the loss of their only son. Reeling from the loss of his son, Dr. Kirilov can barely function:

 . . . in this moment he had no intentions, no wishes, thought of nothing; and probably had even forgotten that in the anteroom a stranger was waiting. The twilight and silence of the hall apparently intensified his stupor. Walking from the hall into his study, he raised his right leg high, and sought with his hands the doorpost. All his figure showed a strange uncertainty, as if he were in another’s house, or for the first time in life were intoxicated, and were surrendering himself questioningly to the new sensation.

The narrator describes the deathplace:

In the bedroom reigned the silence of the grave. All, to the smallest trifle, spoke eloquently of a struggle just lived through, of exhaustion, and of final rest. A candle standing on the stool among phials, boxes, and jars, and a large lamp upon the dressing-table lighted the room. On the bed beside the window lay a boy with open eyes and an expression of surprise upon his face. He did not move, but his eyes, it seemed, every second grew darker and darker, and vanished into his skull.

But in the anteroom a stranger was waiting. Dr. Kirilov’s deathplace is soon invaded by another’s cry for help.

Can one’s all-consuming grief cross over into emotional conflict and animus? Can the egoism of the unhappy shut down dialog and be the alibi for the poison of resentment? The story ends with another loss, another tragedy.

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Before reading further, please take a few minutes to read the short story. As you do, see how Chekhov mirrors inner turmoil with nature, as at the beginning (above) and at the end:

It was dark, much darker than it had been an hour before. The red half-moon had sunk behind the hill and the clouds that had been guarding it lay in dark patches near the stars.

What draws me to the writers of Russian realism (Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Solzhenitsyn, Chekhov) is how they reveal human nature in everyday situations and under the relentless oppression of totalitarian regimes. You can hear a thousand sermons about human nature in theologically abstract terms but in a story like “Enemies,” the characters are straightforward you-and-me.

Chekhov, a doctor, had many opportunities to observe human nature. His description of the effects of a tragic loss is true to life. (I experienced the death of a step-son – his car crashed. That was 25 years ago. And though life goes on, his deathplace remains in my heart.)

Chekhov’s description of using one’s suffering, unhappiness, and perceived victimhood as an alibi for treating others unjustly as justice is also accurate.

Once Abogin, the one who was knocking on Dr. Krilov’s door At ten o’clock on a dark September evening, finds out the trick played on him by his wife, he tells Dr. Krililov, who was rushed to Abogin’s house to revive his wife. Reeling in his emotions from his own loss, Abogin, tells the doctor that he is “deeply unhappy” about the loss of his wife.

The miserable Dr. Krilov cannot relate at all to Abogin’s unhappiness.

While Abogin spoke, the insulted doctor changed. The indifference and surprise on his face gave way little by little to an expression of bitter offence, indignation, and wrath. His features became sharper, harder, and more disagreeable.

Dr. Krilov, in the midst of his own grief, feels insulted and extremely put out by the well-to-do Abogin. “Be so good as to tell me … where is the patient?”

Soon after, Dr. Krilov says Am I a lackey who will bear insults without retaliation?

The narrator:

The two men stood face to face, and in their anger flung insults at one another. It is certain that never in their lives had they uttered so many unjust, inhuman, and ridiculous words. In each was fully expressed the egoism of the unfortunate. And men who are unfortunate, egoistical, angry, unjust, and heartless are even less than stupid men capable of understanding one another. For misfortune does not unite, but severs; and those who should be bound by community of sorrow are much more unjust and heartless than the happy and contented.

A tragedy of poisonous resentment plays out one night between the two men, each with a tragedy of their own.

Egotism that says “Your loss and your grief are nothing compared to mine. I’m the victim here” can lead to resentment, revenge, misplaced anger, exclusion and not embrace.

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Professor Gary Saul Morson cites Chekhov’s Enemies story in Wonder Confront Certainty, Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter. (See my previous post for information regarding Morson and his book.) He does so in Chapter 8 of Part Three Who is not to Blame? The Search for an Alibi, in the subsection titled The Consolation of Suffering.

Morson writes[i] “The Russian experience demonstrates the danger of ideologically based alibis.”

“The appeal of moral dualism represents a still greater danger for those who class themselves as belonging to the good group of oppressed people endowed with the right to attack their oppressors. Victim psychology, indeed, constitutes another of the great themes of Russian literature.”

The moral dualism he refers to is that which divides the world into two groups: the good belong to one group and evil in another. This, he says, “absolves people of individual responsibility. It also offers the heady feeling of moral superiority.”

Morson again: “Here then is another reason Dostoevsky, and Dostoevsky alone, foresaw in detail what we have come to call totalitarianism. He detected in intelligentsia ideology a systemization of victimhood psychology which licenses unlimited harm and provides a preface alibi for those who inflict it.”

While “lying on rotting straw in prison,” Solzhenitsyn “realized the moral truth that precludes spurious alibis: “Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good from evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart – and through all human hearts.”

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Can our suffering, real or imagined, turn into hostility and then murder? Can a devastating loss and the ensuing grief make us both egotistical and cruel, incapable of understanding another’s suffering? Can legitimate suffering lead to crossing the line of good and evil in the human heart?

Jesus: “You’re familiar with the command to the ancients, ‘Do not murder.’ I’m telling you that anyone who is so much as angry with a brother or sister is guilty of murder. Carelessly call a brother ‘idiot!’ and you just might find yourself hauled into court. Thoughtlessly yell ‘stupid!’ at a sister and you are on the brink of hellfire. The simple moral fact is that words kill. –Mt. 5:21-22

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[i] Morson, G. S. (2023). Wonder confronts certainty. In Harvard University Press eBooks. https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674293434, pp 275-278