Jacques Rancière, in his most recent essay, explores through Anton Chekhov’s fiction the unpredictable yet ever possible and disruptive appearance of freedom in the everyday lives of his characters; in our lives.
We share below an excerpt from Rancière’s essay, preceded by Chekhov’s short story, “The Student”, which serves as its inspiration. Our own inspiration comes, as it so often does, from the excellent work of the Lundi Matin (30/09/2024) collective and the very recent interview that they conducted with Rancière around his essay; an interview that we also share below.
The Student (1894)
Anton Chekhov
At first the weather was fine and still. The thrushes were calling, and in the swamps close by something alive droned pitifully with a sound like blowing into an empty bottle. A snipe flew by, and the shot aimed at it rang out with a gay, resounding note in the spring air. But when it began to get dark in the forest a cold, penetrating wind blew inappropriately from the east, and everything sank into silence. Needles of ice stretched across the pools, and it felt cheerless, remote, and lonely in the forest. There was a whiff of winter.
Ivan Velikopolsky, the son of a sacristan, and a student of the clerical academy, returning home from shooting, walked all the time by the path in the water-side meadow. His fingers were numb and his face was burning with the wind. It seemed to him that the cold that had suddenly come on had destroyed the order and harmony of things, that nature itself felt ill at ease, and that was why the evening darkness was falling more rapidly than usual. All around it was deserted and peculiarly gloomy. The only light was one gleaming in the widows’ gardens near the river; the village, over three miles away, and everything in the distance all round was plunged in the cold evening mist. The student remembered that, as he went out from the house, his mother was sitting barefoot on the floor in the entry, cleaning the samovar, while his father lay on the stove coughing; as it was Good Friday nothing had been cooked, and the student was terribly hungry. And now, shrinking from the cold, he thought that just such a wind had blown in the days of Rurik and in the time of Ivan the Terrible and Peter, and in their time there had been just the same desperate poverty and hunger, the same thatched roofs with holes in them, ignorance, misery, the same desolation around, the same darkness, the same feeling of oppression—all these had existed, did exist, and would exist, and the lapse of a thousand years would make life no better. And he did not want to go home.
The gardens were called the widows’ because they were kept by two widows, mother and daughter. A camp fire was burning brightly with a crackling sound, throwing out light far around on the ploughed earth. The widow Vasilisa, a tall, fat old woman in a man’s coat, was standing by and looking thoughtfully into the fire; her daughter Lukerya, a little pock-marked woman with a stupid-looking face, was sitting on the ground, washing a caldron and spoons. Apparently they had just had supper. There was a sound of men’s voices; it was the labourers watering their horses at the river.
“Here you have winter back again,” said the student, going up to the camp fire. “Good evening.”
Vasilisa started, but at once recognized him and smiled cordially.
“I did not know you; God bless you,” she said.
“You’ll be rich.”
They talked. Vasilisa, a woman of experience, who had been in service with the gentry, first as a wet-nurse, afterwards as a children’s nurse, expressed herself with refinement, and a soft, sedate smile never left her face; her daughter Lukerya, a village peasant woman, who had been beaten by her husband, simply screwed up her eyes at the student and said nothing, and she had a strange expression like that of a deaf mute.
“At just such a fire the Apostle Peter warmed himself,” said the student, stretching out his hands to the fire, “so it must have been cold then, too. Ah, what a terrible night it must have been, granny! An utterly dismal long night!”
He looked round at the darkness, shook his head abruptly and asked:
“No doubt you have been at the reading of the Twelve Gospels?”
“Yes, I have,” answered Vasilisa.
“If you remember at the Last Supper Peter said to Jesus, ‘I am ready to go with Thee into darkness and unto death.’ And our Lord answered him thus: ‘I say unto thee, Peter, before the cock croweth thou wilt have denied Me thrice.’ After the supper Jesus went through the agony of death in the garden and prayed, and poor Peter was weary in spirit and faint, his eyelids were heavy and he could not struggle against sleep. He fell asleep. Then you heard how Judas the same night kissed Jesus and betrayed Him to His tormentors. They took Him bound to the high priest and beat Him, while Peter, exhausted, worn out with misery and alarm, hardly awake, you know, feeling that something awful was just going to happen on earth, followed behind…. He loved Jesus passionately, intensely, and now he saw from far off how He was beaten…”
Lukerya left the spoons and fixed an immovable stare upon the student.
“They came to the high priest’s,” he went on; “they began to question Jesus, and meantime the labourers made a fire in the yard as it was cold, and warmed themselves. Peter, too, stood with them near the fire and warmed himself as I am doing. A woman, seeing him, said: ‘He was with Jesus, too’—that is as much as to say that he, too, should be taken to be questioned. And all the labourers that were standing near the fire must have looked sourly and suspiciously at him, because he was confused and said: ‘I don’t know Him.’ A little while after again someone recognized him as one of Jesus’ disciples and said: ‘Thou, too, art one of them,’ but again he denied it. And for the third time someone turned to him: ‘Why, did I not see thee with Him in the garden to-day?’ For the third time he denied it. And immediately after that time the cock crowed, and Peter, looking from afar off at Jesus, remembered the words He had said to him in the evening…. He remembered, he came to himself, went out of the yard and wept bitterly—bitterly. In the Gospel it is written: ‘He went out and wept bitterly.’ I imagine it: the still, still, dark, dark garden, and in the stillness, faintly audible, smothered sobbing…”
T he student sighed and sank into thought. Still smiling, Vasilisa suddenly gave a gulp, big tears flowed freely down her cheeks, and she screened her face from the fire with her sleeve as though ashamed of her tears, and Lukerya, staring immovably at the student, flushed crimson, and her expression became strained and heavy like that of someone enduring intense pain.
The labourers came back from the river, and one of them riding a horse was quite near, and the light from the fire quivered upon him. The student said good-night to the widows and went on. And again the darkness was about him and his fingers began to be numb. A cruel wind was blowing, winter really had come back and it did not feel as though Easter would be the day after to-morrow.
Now the student was thinking about Vasilisa: since she had shed tears all that had happened to Peter the night before the Crucifixion must have some relation to her….
He looked round. The solitary light was still gleaming in the darkness and no figures could be seen near it now. The student thought again that if Vasilisa had shed tears, and her daughter had been troubled, it was evident that what he had just been telling them about, which had happened nineteen centuries ago, had a relation to the present—to both women, to the desolate village, to himself, to all people. The old woman had wept, not because he could tell the story touchingly, but because Peter was near to her, because her whole being was interested in what was passing in Peter’s soul.
And joy suddenly stirred in his soul, and he even stopped for a minute to take breath. “The past,” he thought, “is linked with the present by an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of another.” And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain; that when he touched one end the other quivered.
When he crossed the river by the ferry boat and afterwards, mounting the hill, looked at his village and towards the west where the cold crimson sunset lay a narrow streak of light, he thought that truth and beauty which had guided human life there in the garden and in the yard of the high priest had continued without interruption to this day, and had evidently always been the chief thing in human life and in all earthly life, indeed; and the feeling of youth, health, vigour—he was only twenty-two—and the inexpressible sweet expectation of happiness, of unknown mysterious happiness, took possession of him little by little, and life seemed to him enchanting, marvellous, and full of lofty meaning.
Translated by Constance Garnett
FromAu loin la liberté (2024)
Jacques Rancière
Transforming misfortune into song and the tears of grief into tears of joy: for many people, this is an unacceptable aestheticisation of misfortune that prevents us from understanding the reasons for it and seeking its remedies. But Chekhov sees things quite differently. The fundamental misfortune is servitude. And there is no reason for servitude other than servitude itself. It constantly reproduces, in the great and the small alike, the manners, affects and thoughts that perpetuate it in turn.
To break the circle, to form men and women capable of transforming the call of new life into reality, we must first change our ways of feeling. It is this revolution in affects that the writer sets out to bring about. To do this, he has to tell the story of misfortune in a different way, blending its accents with those of the distant call. He has to create a melodic sequence that opposes the hum of servitude and penetrates more deeply than it does into the sensitive experience of human beings. It is this battle won that is recounted in another story of night, tears and joy, which is also a story about storytelling: “The Student”. The hero of this very short story, young Ivan, the son of a poor deacon and a student at a religious academy, returns from hunting on the evening of a dark and icy Good Friday. He had the overwhelming feeling that it was the same cold wind that blew in the time of Rurik or Ivan the Terrible and that still blows today on the same misery, the same ignorance and the same pain. (…) However, a chance meeting and a brief evocation will reverse the course of his thoughts. On the way home, he passes by a fire where an old woman and her daughter are standing. Talking to them, he tells the story of another cold night and another fire, the one the apostle Peter was warming himself by in the courtyard where he had denied Jesus three times before bursting into tears at the thought of his betrayal. The widow must have heard this story just the day before, at the ceremony of the Twelve Gospels. And yet she bursts into tears, as if the student’s unpretentious account, taking up the words of the Gospel of Saint Matthew, had spanned the centuries of Russian misery and servitude that weighed on her shoulders to re-establish the older, deeper bond that allows a simple country woman to share the feelings and weeping of an apostle who lived nearly two thousand years before her. This communion of sorrows produces a revolution in the student’s mind that translates into an overflowing joy: he feels that all the events of human history are linked together by the same chain: not the chain of servitude that always reproduces its own necessity, but the chain of a more essential bond of solidarity, of a sensitive cord that allows anyone to vibrate to the sound of sufferings and joys that are not his own. Anyone who touches one end of the cord today hears the resonance of the other, and feels part of a history quite different from that of shared servitude. (…)
If Ivan Bunin is to be believed, this was Chekhov’s favourite short story. Readers may be surprised. The story is minimal (…). And religious symbolism was not Chekhov’s strong point, as the tyranny of a devout father had forever distanced him from Christianity. Yet there is a reason for his predilection for this modest story. To understand it, we need to take a detour to another story about a religious ceremony that echoes it and in which he displayed all his talents as an enchanter, “Easter Eve”. In it, a lay brother who acts as a ferryman across the river exults in recalling the marvellous hymns that a poor deacon from the monastery had written “for his consolation”, using the most tender words and the most evocative metaphors, so that “the smallest line is adorned on all sides, so that there are flowers, lightning, wind, sun and all the objects of the visible world”.
It is not of the mysteries of religion that these Easter nights speak to us, but the power of writing, the power that consoles by allowing tears to be exchanged for other tears, and that turns the modest and often decried act of consolation into the active power of a human tradition capable of overcoming the apathy of lives doomed to servitude.
Jacques Rancière: Reading freedom through Anton Chekhov
Jacques Rancière, in his most recent essay, explores through Anton Chekhov’s fiction the unpredictable yet ever possible and disruptive appearance of freedom in the everyday lives of his characters; in our lives.
We share below an excerpt from Rancière’s essay, preceded by Chekhov’s short story, “The Student”, which serves as its inspiration. Our own inspiration comes, as it so often does, from the excellent work of the Lundi Matin (30/09/2024) collective and the very recent interview that they conducted with Rancière around his essay; an interview that we also share below.
The Student (1894)
Anton Chekhov
At first the weather was fine and still. The thrushes were calling, and in the swamps close by something alive droned pitifully with a sound like blowing into an empty bottle. A snipe flew by, and the shot aimed at it rang out with a gay, resounding note in the spring air. But when it began to get dark in the forest a cold, penetrating wind blew inappropriately from the east, and everything sank into silence. Needles of ice stretched across the pools, and it felt cheerless, remote, and lonely in the forest. There was a whiff of winter.
Ivan Velikopolsky, the son of a sacristan, and a student of the clerical academy, returning home from shooting, walked all the time by the path in the water-side meadow. His fingers were numb and his face was burning with the wind. It seemed to him that the cold that had suddenly come on had destroyed the order and harmony of things, that nature itself felt ill at ease, and that was why the evening darkness was falling more rapidly than usual. All around it was deserted and peculiarly gloomy. The only light was one gleaming in the widows’ gardens near the river; the village, over three miles away, and everything in the distance all round was plunged in the cold evening mist. The student remembered that, as he went out from the house, his mother was sitting barefoot on the floor in the entry, cleaning the samovar, while his father lay on the stove coughing; as it was Good Friday nothing had been cooked, and the student was terribly hungry. And now, shrinking from the cold, he thought that just such a wind had blown in the days of Rurik and in the time of Ivan the Terrible and Peter, and in their time there had been just the same desperate poverty and hunger, the same thatched roofs with holes in them, ignorance, misery, the same desolation around, the same darkness, the same feeling of oppression—all these had existed, did exist, and would exist, and the lapse of a thousand years would make life no better. And he did not want to go home.
The gardens were called the widows’ because they were kept by two widows, mother and daughter. A camp fire was burning brightly with a crackling sound, throwing out light far around on the ploughed earth. The widow Vasilisa, a tall, fat old woman in a man’s coat, was standing by and looking thoughtfully into the fire; her daughter Lukerya, a little pock-marked woman with a stupid-looking face, was sitting on the ground, washing a caldron and spoons. Apparently they had just had supper. There was a sound of men’s voices; it was the labourers watering their horses at the river.
“Here you have winter back again,” said the student, going up to the camp fire. “Good evening.”
Vasilisa started, but at once recognized him and smiled cordially.
“I did not know you; God bless you,” she said.
“You’ll be rich.”
They talked. Vasilisa, a woman of experience, who had been in service with the gentry, first as a wet-nurse, afterwards as a children’s nurse, expressed herself with refinement, and a soft, sedate smile never left her face; her daughter Lukerya, a village peasant woman, who had been beaten by her husband, simply screwed up her eyes at the student and said nothing, and she had a strange expression like that of a deaf mute.
“At just such a fire the Apostle Peter warmed himself,” said the student, stretching out his hands to the fire, “so it must have been cold then, too. Ah, what a terrible night it must have been, granny! An utterly dismal long night!”
He looked round at the darkness, shook his head abruptly and asked:
“No doubt you have been at the reading of the Twelve Gospels?”
“Yes, I have,” answered Vasilisa.
“If you remember at the Last Supper Peter said to Jesus, ‘I am ready to go with Thee into darkness and unto death.’ And our Lord answered him thus: ‘I say unto thee, Peter, before the cock croweth thou wilt have denied Me thrice.’ After the supper Jesus went through the agony of death in the garden and prayed, and poor Peter was weary in spirit and faint, his eyelids were heavy and he could not struggle against sleep. He fell asleep. Then you heard how Judas the same night kissed Jesus and betrayed Him to His tormentors. They took Him bound to the high priest and beat Him, while Peter, exhausted, worn out with misery and alarm, hardly awake, you know, feeling that something awful was just going to happen on earth, followed behind…. He loved Jesus passionately, intensely, and now he saw from far off how He was beaten…”
Lukerya left the spoons and fixed an immovable stare upon the student.
“They came to the high priest’s,” he went on; “they began to question Jesus, and meantime the labourers made a fire in the yard as it was cold, and warmed themselves. Peter, too, stood with them near the fire and warmed himself as I am doing. A woman, seeing him, said: ‘He was with Jesus, too’—that is as much as to say that he, too, should be taken to be questioned. And all the labourers that were standing near the fire must have looked sourly and suspiciously at him, because he was confused and said: ‘I don’t know Him.’ A little while after again someone recognized him as one of Jesus’ disciples and said: ‘Thou, too, art one of them,’ but again he denied it. And for the third time someone turned to him: ‘Why, did I not see thee with Him in the garden to-day?’ For the third time he denied it. And immediately after that time the cock crowed, and Peter, looking from afar off at Jesus, remembered the words He had said to him in the evening…. He remembered, he came to himself, went out of the yard and wept bitterly—bitterly. In the Gospel it is written: ‘He went out and wept bitterly.’ I imagine it: the still, still, dark, dark garden, and in the stillness, faintly audible, smothered sobbing…”
T he student sighed and sank into thought. Still smiling, Vasilisa suddenly gave a gulp, big tears flowed freely down her cheeks, and she screened her face from the fire with her sleeve as though ashamed of her tears, and Lukerya, staring immovably at the student, flushed crimson, and her expression became strained and heavy like that of someone enduring intense pain.
The labourers came back from the river, and one of them riding a horse was quite near, and the light from the fire quivered upon him. The student said good-night to the widows and went on. And again the darkness was about him and his fingers began to be numb. A cruel wind was blowing, winter really had come back and it did not feel as though Easter would be the day after to-morrow.
Now the student was thinking about Vasilisa: since she had shed tears all that had happened to Peter the night before the Crucifixion must have some relation to her….
He looked round. The solitary light was still gleaming in the darkness and no figures could be seen near it now. The student thought again that if Vasilisa had shed tears, and her daughter had been troubled, it was evident that what he had just been telling them about, which had happened nineteen centuries ago, had a relation to the present—to both women, to the desolate village, to himself, to all people. The old woman had wept, not because he could tell the story touchingly, but because Peter was near to her, because her whole being was interested in what was passing in Peter’s soul.
And joy suddenly stirred in his soul, and he even stopped for a minute to take breath. “The past,” he thought, “is linked with the present by an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of another.” And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain; that when he touched one end the other quivered.
When he crossed the river by the ferry boat and afterwards, mounting the hill, looked at his village and towards the west where the cold crimson sunset lay a narrow streak of light, he thought that truth and beauty which had guided human life there in the garden and in the yard of the high priest had continued without interruption to this day, and had evidently always been the chief thing in human life and in all earthly life, indeed; and the feeling of youth, health, vigour—he was only twenty-two—and the inexpressible sweet expectation of happiness, of unknown mysterious happiness, took possession of him little by little, and life seemed to him enchanting, marvellous, and full of lofty meaning.
Translated by Constance Garnett
From Au loin la liberté (2024)
Jacques Rancière
Transforming misfortune into song and the tears of grief into tears of joy: for many people, this is an unacceptable aestheticisation of misfortune that prevents us from understanding the reasons for it and seeking its remedies. But Chekhov sees things quite differently. The fundamental misfortune is servitude. And there is no reason for servitude other than servitude itself. It constantly reproduces, in the great and the small alike, the manners, affects and thoughts that perpetuate it in turn.
To break the circle, to form men and women capable of transforming the call of new life into reality, we must first change our ways of feeling. It is this revolution in affects that the writer sets out to bring about. To do this, he has to tell the story of misfortune in a different way, blending its accents with those of the distant call. He has to create a melodic sequence that opposes the hum of servitude and penetrates more deeply than it does into the sensitive experience of human beings. It is this battle won that is recounted in another story of night, tears and joy, which is also a story about storytelling: “The Student”. The hero of this very short story, young Ivan, the son of a poor deacon and a student at a religious academy, returns from hunting on the evening of a dark and icy Good Friday. He had the overwhelming feeling that it was the same cold wind that blew in the time of Rurik or Ivan the Terrible and that still blows today on the same misery, the same ignorance and the same pain. (…) However, a chance meeting and a brief evocation will reverse the course of his thoughts. On the way home, he passes by a fire where an old woman and her daughter are standing. Talking to them, he tells the story of another cold night and another fire, the one the apostle Peter was warming himself by in the courtyard where he had denied Jesus three times before bursting into tears at the thought of his betrayal. The widow must have heard this story just the day before, at the ceremony of the Twelve Gospels. And yet she bursts into tears, as if the student’s unpretentious account, taking up the words of the Gospel of Saint Matthew, had spanned the centuries of Russian misery and servitude that weighed on her shoulders to re-establish the older, deeper bond that allows a simple country woman to share the feelings and weeping of an apostle who lived nearly two thousand years before her. This communion of sorrows produces a revolution in the student’s mind that translates into an overflowing joy: he feels that all the events of human history are linked together by the same chain: not the chain of servitude that always reproduces its own necessity, but the chain of a more essential bond of solidarity, of a sensitive cord that allows anyone to vibrate to the sound of sufferings and joys that are not his own. Anyone who touches one end of the cord today hears the resonance of the other, and feels part of a history quite different from that of shared servitude. (…)
If Ivan Bunin is to be believed, this was Chekhov’s favourite short story. Readers may be surprised. The story is minimal (…). And religious symbolism was not Chekhov’s strong point, as the tyranny of a devout father had forever distanced him from Christianity. Yet there is a reason for his predilection for this modest story. To understand it, we need to take a detour to another story about a religious ceremony that echoes it and in which he displayed all his talents as an enchanter, “Easter Eve”. In it, a lay brother who acts as a ferryman across the river exults in recalling the marvellous hymns that a poor deacon from the monastery had written “for his consolation”, using the most tender words and the most evocative metaphors, so that “the smallest line is adorned on all sides, so that there are flowers, lightning, wind, sun and all the objects of the visible world”.
It is not of the mysteries of religion that these Easter nights speak to us, but the power of writing, the power that consoles by allowing tears to be exchanged for other tears, and that turns the modest and often decried act of consolation into the active power of a human tradition capable of overcoming the apathy of lives doomed to servitude.