Anyone who claims that literature has ever saved their life has to be careful. The escapist door to kitsch is usually dangerously open, while only a tiny, hard-to-recognize gate leads to art. In order to formulate the difference, what is needed is not more the hereafter, but more this world, no more false fantasies of salvation, but at most a “music of mercy” such as Sean O’Casey heard in the works of Anton Chekhov.
Helga Schubert was nine years old when she first encountered this music in Chekhov’s children’s book “Kashtanka”. And she was a young East Berlin student when she decided to send her cheating husband into the desert and raise their three-week-old son alone. In this situation she read “Gram” for the first time, a story by Chekhov, who was only 25 years old, about a St. Petersburg coachman who was repeatedly humiliated by his passengers. The poor guy just lost his son after his wife, but no one wants to hear about his misfortune. In the end, the horse becomes a patient listener of its suffering.
“I read ‘Gram’ over a hundred times,” admits Helga Schubert. “In my 83-year life I have often been in situations that seemed hopeless to me: When I then brought out this story, it helped me not to sink into self-pity and not to become aggressive towards myself. She helped me take that small life-saving step
retreat from the abyss.” But her essay doesn’t stop at sentiment. Paragraph by paragraph and sometimes sentence by sentence, she follows the secret of his storytelling, which is as cool as it is touching.
Aware that she is now almost twice as old as the author, who died in Badenweiler in 1904 at the age of 44, she reviews her life with Chekhov. How she traveled to Moscow in 1976 with a letter from Christa Wolf in her hand, which she was supposed to give to the dissident Lev Kopelev, but only visited the Chekhov places in Moscow, Melikhovo and Yalta five years later, when Kopelev was already in the West could.
It was never her Chekhov, Helga Schubert once complained, “always that of the others. I felt like an intruder in the circle of adults: Thomas Mann, Natalia Ginzburg and also Peter Urban stood around him.” With this deeply personal essay, which at the same time succinctly introduces Chekhov’s world, she now keeps these greats company as equals.
Source: Tagesspiegel
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