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Chekhov at the Hotel Desk
It is possible to learn rather a lot about a hotel from the way its clerk receives a guest who has arrived too early. In the best establishments, the clerk is sympathetic without surrendering the room. In the worst, the guest is made to feel that time itself has behaved improperly and ought to apologize at reception.
I suspect Chekhov would have enjoyed the better example, though he might have written the more interesting story about the worse.
He understood that social life is conducted through small arrangements which appear trivial until somebody fails to observe them. In The Lady with the Dog, the affair begins at a resort, among the freedoms and restrictions of people temporarily relieved of their ordinary surroundings. Yalta gives the lovers sufficient distance from home to behave differently, but it cannot guarantee that they will become different people. What begins as an episode develops a claim on the rest of their lives. The convenient categories prove unequal to the inconvenience of feeling.
A place designed for temporary residence is particularly good at revealing such things. One is permitted the comforts of belonging without being required to endure the obligations of staying. The furniture has been chosen by someone else. The breakfast room has rules which, for a few days, provide a substitute for personal history. The management would prefer that nothing irreparable occur before checkout.
Russian writers were rarely so obliging.
In Turgenev I admire the ability to hear the history of a family in a polite disagreement, and in Tolstoy the patience to observe how a room rearranges itself when a person of consequence enters. Dostoevsky is less interested in arranging the room than in discovering what happens when its occupant cannot bear another hour alone with himself. Gogol, who ought to be compulsory reading for anyone entrusted with a stamp or an official seal, would recognize the terror of having submitted a perfectly reasonable request to an office which has no category for it.
These are different pleasures. I do not read Russians for an exhibition of generalized gloom, and I find the familiar jokes about their length rather tiresome. A long novel is not necessarily indulgent because it takes human stupidity seriously. Nor does seriousness forbid comedy. Anyone who has spent time watching adults defend arrangements they know to be absurd will recognize that comedy frequently requires very little exaggeration.
Chekhov is exceptionally economical with judgment. One person is vain, another lonely; both may be perceptive about everything except the sentence they have prepared to excuse themselves. He leaves room for a reader to have an unflattering reaction without being ordered to sustain it. I have always considered that a courteous way to be merciless.
The modern hotel provides a useful equivalent to the drawing room and the resort promenade. People arrive with claims about themselves that the staff are expected to accept provisionally. Names are entered in a register. A guest's luggage may announce a standing that his behaviour fails to support. A regular customer can be known very well in the limited sense that the staff know precisely which facts not to mention.
I am interested in such communities because they exist halfway between intimacy and anonymity. Recognition need not imply knowledge, and the smallest error of address can disclose a long history of careful misunderstanding. One guest is called sir with admiration. Another receives the same title from somebody who has just finished enduring him.
The people in The Country of Strangers move through European places with histories older than their own, and those places cannot be reduced to atmosphere. A hotel, a street or an ordinary act of hospitality creates expectations about who belongs. Sometimes the rules are generous. Sometimes they have been designed to ensure that a newcomer will always be a newcomer. I prefer fiction that allows both possibilities to remain visible.
Chekhov's gift was to make an ordinary encounter continue after the formal occasion had ended. An arrival, an introduction, a glance across a room may look entirely manageable until it is remembered by someone who has no intention of treating it as a passing incident. The clerk returns the passport, the guest takes the key, and the rules of the establishment appear to have been observed. It is only afterward that one discovers what else has been admitted.