UNBEATABLE CHEKHOV

 

 

"Room Number Six"

 

 

Our destiny is not written in the stars as the classics believed. The particular and general designs of humanity keep some books that are more prophetic than those of the VT. In its pages it encourages a divine drive despite not being recorded in the Bible. This is the case of Anton Chekhov. I have reread on a night of fever and flu "Room number six" and finishing its less than one hundred pages at dawn I have turned it on the pillow in the midst of discouragement. I have seen reflected in its 19 chapters the film of my existence: the ardent young man who was going to conquer the world, the writer's apprentice who went to London, Paris, NY, who loved science, art, beauty and humanity that trusted in the redemption of the human being, who lived encased in his ivory tower reading books and more books that he had treasured since his youth and had them cataloged and numbered in the sancta sanctorum of his library. A man up to date and aware of new ideas subscribed to avant-garde magazines who believes in the good faith of his fellow men, but soon realizes that he is a white blackbird, a rare bird, who had passionate and wonderful love affairs but who He ends up marrying a vulgar woman, and lives surrounded by vulgarity, zoology, selfishness, that violence that politics always generated by creeping and deceitful interests. Who can I be Dr. Raguin whose desire to improve the human condition made him misunderstood and in the end he ended up crazy? The Jewish hatter who lost his mind one night when his shop burned down and who is abused by the security guard-janitor-lackey of authority by the brute of Nilkita? Am I the sick Gromov who lives preoccupied with the subject of immortality? Or I am the usurper: the substitute, the climber who takes the place from poor Raguin accusing him of having lost his mind. Chekhov traces in these paintings a sketch of the turn of the century and nineteenth-century Russia, but his diagnosis is valid not only for that country but for men of all times and latitudes. The outstanding protagonist of this little book had a vocation to the priesthood, but by parental mandate he has to embrace a career in medicine. I think it is the most biographical book of the author of the "Cherry Garden". His father, a deacon, was a cantor in a provincial parish and wanted his eldest son to be able to pursue a more lucrative career than the ecclesiastical one in order to contribute to the support of the family, which Antón fulfilled to the point of exhaustion because to pay the expenses of the numerous progeny wrote so much that he died at the age of 44. An article, a story did not pay for the food, but it subsidized the expenses and a play helped to rent the house for a month. In all of Chekhov's prose, however, that majesty, that tempo, surrounded by grandeur and simplicity (ve li ch a n i e) of the Byzantine liturgy endures. It's like something magical. However, in this book he is shown to us as a perfect coroner bisecting the human soul. The distinguished doctor who graduated from the Moscow Medical School ends up as the director of a hospital in a remote corner of deep Russia, more than 200 versts from the nearest railway station, surrounded by petty people "who spent their lives among the cards and small intrigues and gossip, without being interested in anything and dragging a life full of triviality… Not our poor people have bad luck”, exclaims the author, perhaps without being aware that Russia is lucky to have such enormous writers as Chekhov that they can make self-criticism of their country and that life in Tula is very similar to that of Chester, Tucson, Mexico, Rosario or Zamora and what makes the people great and free is this ability to denounce and react. In this way, I believe that Russian literature picks up the baton from Greco-Latin to project universal problems and types. But this booklet personally had its history. A few months ago I gave it to a friend and the other day I found it in Riudavets unbound and gutted but with my name. He came back to me. I must have a substitute copy at home. I will not forget that this text in an edition of Austral that I had acquired at the Casa del Libro in 1964 accompanied me on a sad night in the San Francisco Park in Oviedo. I was getting married to a girl and the poor thing didn't feel like putting up with me - now I understand her perfectly - and she gave up the altar a day before the wedding. Inside the pages I kept an image of the Virgin Iverskaya, the holy matron of Moscow, and a photograph of me as a blond boy with my parents handing over the keys to a house in Segovia accompanied by Colonel Tomé. I lost this photograph, but the image of the Iverskaya was drawn on top of one of the oak trees in the San Francisco park. The Virgin c