So I just wanted to let you know that what you're listening here today is
a rebroadcast of a previously posted
episode of the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast.
No new episode today, but enjoy this rebroadcast
because listening to a rebroadcast of the Leadership
Lessons from the Great Books podcast is still better
than reading and trying to understand yet another business
book. Hello, my name is Jesan
Sorrells and this is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast,
episode number 88
with our very short story today. A very brief
character study of peasants and their lives,
both on the Russian steppes and in Russian
cities, is an examination of the reality
of their lives, juxtaposed against the Christian
cultural narrative, particularly the Russian Orthodox Christian
cultural narrative of Christmas, a story
written by the Russian playwright and short story writer
who trained and practiced medicine among the very peasants
about whom he wrote so brilliantly. We are going to be
covering today Anton Chekhov's very short story
At Christmas Time. Leaders
have a vision of the future at the end of the year,
rather than continuing to flagellate in navel gazing
abstraction about sins and
transgressions.
Vasilisa had not seen her for years. Her daughter Yefimaya.
And gone after her wedding to Petersburg, had sent them two letters, and since then
seemed to vanish out of their lives. There had been no sight or nor
sound of her, and whether the old woman were milking her cow at dawn, or
heating her stove, or dozing at night, she was always thinking of one and the
same thing. What was happening to Yefimaya, whether she were
alive out yonder? She ought to have sent a letter, but the
old father could not write, and there was no one to
write. But now Christmas had come and
Vasilissa could not bear it any longer, and went to the tavern to
Yegor, the brother of the innkeeper's wife, who had sat in the tavern doing
nothing ever since he came back from the army. People said that he could write
letters very well if he were properly paid. Vasilissa
talked to the cook at the tavern, then to the mistress of the house, then
to Yegor himself. They agreed upon 15
kopecks, and now it happened on the second day of
the holidays in the tavern kitchen. Yegor was sitting at the table, holding a pen
in his hand. Vasilissa was standing before him,
pondering with an expression of anxiety and woe on her face.
Piotr, her husband, a very thin old man with a brownish bald
patch, had come with her. He stood looking straight before him like a blind man.
On the stove a piece of pork was being braised in a saucepan. It was
spurting and hissing, and it seemed to be actually saying.
It was stifling. What am I to write?
Yegor asked again. What? Asked Vasilissa, looking at him
angrily and suspiciously. Don't worry me. You are not writing for nothing. No fear,
you'll be paid for it. Come, write. To our dear son in
law, Andre Harasinevich, and to our beloved, only
beloved daughter, Yefimaya Petrovna, with our love we send
a low bow and our parental blessing abiding forever
written fire away. And we wish them a happy
Christmas. We are alive and well. And I wish you the same, please the Lord,
the Heavenly King. Vasilissa pondered and exchanged
glances with the old man. And I wish you the same, please
the Lord, heavenly King, she repeated, beginning to cry.
She could say nothing more. And yet before, when she lay awake thinking at night,
it had seemed to her that she could not get all she had to say
into a dozen letters. Since the time when her daughter had gone away with her
husband, much water had flowed into the sea. The old people had lived feeling
bereaved and sighed heavily at night as though they had buried their daughter.
And how many events had occurred in the village since then, how many marriages and
deaths, how long the winters had been, how long the nights?
It's hot, said Jaegor, unbuttoning his waistcoat. It must be
70 degrees. What more? He asked.
The old people were silent.
So our book here, our short story, very short story, it's
only like five pages that we're going to be covering here at the
end of our Christmas season
of shows. Or maybe not the end. It's the beginning actually, of the
Christmas season of shows, because on this podcast we're having come up
next, the Christmas Carol, we're going to be covering that
rebroadcast from last year and we'll have a couple of Christmas
messages in our shorts episodes, as well as
a reading on Christmas Day from the Book of Luke,
which I think is very important for reminding us all what
the actual reason for the season is.
And it ain't Santa anyhow,
when we read At Christmas Time by Anton Chekhov. And by the way,
we covered Anton Chekhov and we covered three of his
short stories in episode number 14 in
season one, published back on April
13, 2022, so you can go back and listen to that.
And we talked a lot in that episode about the
nature of Chekhov's writing and the nature of how
Chekhov fits as a writer into the
pantheon of Russian authors, including Dostoevsky,
Leo Tolstoy and others. Anton Chekov,
as was mentioned in that episode, and I mentioned it briefly here in the opener,
wrote about the people that he actually helped. He was a medical
doctor, and he spent a lot of time outside
of the major city centers in Russia. And just
like in any other country, there are things that are happening in the country
and there are things that are happening in the cities. And
in Russia, particularly during the time of serfdom,
the illiterate peasant was an individual that Chekhov would
have often run across.
We take for granted that people will be literate in our society
and culture. We take for granted that people will be able to read. Now, there
is illiteracy even in our own culture.
And of course, more troubling for us is a lack of comprehension,
a lack of understanding of what you're reading. Yeah, you can read the
words on the page, but you don't actually know what they mean.
That's far more of a problem in the year of our Lord
2023 than the actual act of, or the actual
fact of illiteracy, which was a huge problem in Russia
because serfs and peasants alike, and many
peasants who were maybe a little bit above
serfs, could not read well. And
what that meant was that communication.
And meaning and existence were all floated together.
Right. So if you couldn't communicate with an individual, a person
dropped off the face of the planet. As the
mother Vasilisa points out in that clip there,
the mother, she had no concept that her daughter was
still alive. Communication or even
a lack of communication was seen
as a way of maintaining a lifeline. And when that communication was
cut off, as we will see later on in the story, when that communication
was interrupted, existence itself
ended. Now, there's another piece to pick up
here in this first part of At Christmas Time
that I think is hugely important, particularly for our end of
the year considerations with us, you know, reading
this story at Christmas time during the Christmas holiday season.
The patriarch of this story. And this is another
sort of juxtaposition that Chekhov played
with. The patriarch in this situation
initially seems to be the husband, and the husband
is blind. The husband can't
see, and the matriarch is illiterate.
There's a comment here or commentary here that's being
made about the nature of reality
and how illiteracy and blindness meet
at the end of the year to write
a letter that will hopefully bring
reconciliation.
Back to the book, back to At Christmas Time
by Anton Chekhov. So we're going to move ahead in the story a little bit,
go to our next page and read a
couple of pieces here.
Here it is, written down to the old woman taking the letter out of her
pocket. We got it from Yefimaya. Goodness knows when. Maybe
they are no longer in this world.
Jaegor thought a little and began writing rapidly. At the present time,
he wrote, since your destiny, through your own doing, allotted you to the military career,
we counsel you to look to the code of disciplinary offenses and fundamental laws of
the War Office, and you will see in that law the civilization of the officials
of the War Office. He wrote and kept reading aloud what was
written, while Vasilisa considered what she ought to write.
How great had been their want the year before, how their corn had not lasted
even till Christmas, how they had to sell their cow.
She ought to ask for money, ought to write that the old father was often
ailing and would soon no doubt give up his soul to God.
But how to express this in words? What must be said first and
what afterwards? Take note, Jaegor went on
writing in volume five of the army regulations. Soldier is a common noun and a
proper one. A soldier of the first rank is called a general, and of the
last a private. The old man stirred his lips and
said softly, it would be all right to have a look at the grandchildren.
What grandchildren? Asked the old woman, and she looked
angrily at him. Perhaps there are none. Well, but perhaps there
are. Who knows? And thereby you can judge. Jaeger
hurried on. What is the enemy without and what is the enemy within? The foremost
of our enemy with our of our enemies within is Bacchus. The
pen squeaked, executing upon the paper flourishes
like fish hooks. Jaegor hastened and read over every line. Several
times he sat on his stool, sprawling his broad feet under the table,
well fed, bursting with health, with a coarse animal face and a
red bull neck. He was vulgarity itself,
coarse, conceited, invincible, proud of having been born and bred in a
pothouse. And Vasilisa quite understood the vulgarity, but could not express
it in words, and could only look angrily and suspiciously
at Jaeger. Her head was beginning to ache and her thoughts
were in confusion from the sound of his voice and his unintelligible words, from the
heat and the stuffiness. And she said nothing and thought nothing, but simply waited for
him to finish scribbling. But the old man looked with full
confidence. He believed in his old woman who brought him there and in
Yegor. And when he had mentioned the hydropathic establishment, it
could be seen that he believed in the establishment and the healing efficacy
of water. Having finished the letter,
Jaeger got up and read the whole of it through from the beginning. The old
man did not understand, but he nodded his head trustfully. That's all
right. It is smooth, he said. God give you health. That's all right.
They laid on the table three five kopeck pieces and went out of the
tavern. The old man looked immovably straight before him, as though
he were blind and perfect trustfulness was written on his
face. But as Vassila came out of the
tavern, she waved angrily at the dog and said angrily,
ugh, the plague.
Sam.
So you've got three male characters
in At Christmas Time by Anton Chekhov,
and they all represent three different faces of
the patriarchy, right? And
so we're going to explore. I'm going to talk a little bit about all
three of those faces here. So
we've got Jaeger, right,
who writes a letter that is supposed to
be. Well, it's supposed to be dictating a letter, supposed to be
writing down what other people are saying, and yet
goes off script, right? And he goes off script when
he finds out that Andre, who is the old
couple's, in essence, son-in-law, works at a
hydropathic establishment in Petersburg
and left the army as a. Or left the
service, sorry, as a soldier. Once Jaeger connects on
to that, then he sort of writes his own letter to
Andrew. Now he's a tyrannical male because he's
vulgar, right? Even in Anton Chekhov's description of him, he points
to his vulgarity. He points to his
lack of leadership. His lack of social.
Savoir faire, right? His. His ways. He puts his feet
up and the way he handles himself. But he is the one, of course, who
can only write.
In a town full of illiterates, the vulgar man is king.
Then you've got Andre, who we'll meet later on in a little bit
here. And I'm not going to talk too much about him yet. I'm going to
kind of let him unfold in part two of the story. And of course you
have the blind father who we just talked about, and
that's three different conceptions here where
these patriarchs, these men in a highly patriarchal
society have power, and yet they behave in
manners that are not honoring of that power. And
via doing that or the ways in which they do that
impacts and it controls and it creates
fear. And suspicion and anger
and pride and ignorance in others.
This is a theme that weaves through most of
Anton Chekhov's writing. Most of Anton Chekhov's
short stories follow this sort of path.
When he writes about. Well, when he writes about male
peasants, when he writes about individuals who are not kings
of the country, they're not czars, they don't rule
their own country, but they do rule with a
blind, iron fist, their own households. And of course, that
blindness leads them to be tyrannical, and of course that tyranny
leads to rebellion. And then of course, the rebellion
leads to a tightening of the fist, and so on and so
on and so on. And we in the west, particularly us in
America, who come from a little bit of a different understanding of
how patriarchal power should be meted out and how leadership should be meted
out, usually fail to understand how strong men work in
Russia. But when you read Chekhov's writing and when you read
about how the peasants and the serfs, the history of.
The history of male and female relationships as
navigated through short stories and novels, and as
demonstrated through short stories and novels, when you read about all that,
you begin to get an inkling of an understanding of exactly
the tragic nature of this cycle. And you see some of this
in At Christmas Time. The old woman
has agency, but her agency is incredibly
limited. And it's limited by the blind and
tyrannical patriarchs that are all around.
Back to the book, back to At Christmas Time
by Anton Chekhov. So we're going to. We're going to pick up
with part two a little bit here. We're going to
read just a couple of paragraphs from, from part two, just to
kind of get the flavor. And then we're going to turn the corner and start
to close here. By the way, one of the points I
want to make about Andre, the, the. The
brother. I'm sorry, the brother. The son in law
of, Of Fecila. And,
and. And the blind. The blind father there,
Piotr. So Andre
worked at what was called a hydropathic establishment. And
I had to look this up because I really didn't know anything about this. This
is kind of interesting. Apparently there was an
idea in, in Russia in the late
19th century that water could be a
curative or had curative impact, had curative
effect on a human being, on an individual,
on disease. Right. And on
the. The aspects of disease that were deleterious to a
human being. Well, that,
that led to the creation of hydropathic
establishments. Right. And this is Critically important as a tip,
because. Or not as a tip, but as an indication of sort of where
we're going with this. And by the way, in Christian religion,
water is considered to be
purifying, right? But it is also seen
as a tool or as a symbol of
uniting and unifying. You know,
baptism is hugely important from the time of John the Baptist, baptizing
Jesus in order to begin his public ministry.
And baptism, particularly in Protestantism, but even more
so in Orthodox, Catholic, Christian
rites and sects, baptism is hugely important for
sealing a person, sealing a soul, and
in confirming as an outward sign to the community.
This is how it's taken in Protestant religions, as an outward sign to the
community of sacred salvation, right of Jesus's inner work.
And the baptism is an external. An external
demonstration of that internal work. And so water,
water as a cure for what physically ails, but water also is a
cure for what spiritually ails, is one of the themes here that
Chekhov is trying to get to in At Christmas Time.
Okay, back to the book, back to At Christmas
Time and pick up with part two here. Dr. Bo
Mazelweiser's hydropathic establishment worked on
New Year's Day exactly as on ordinary days. The only difference was that the
porter Andre has Ranovich had on a uniform with new
braiding, his boots had an extra polish, and he greeted every visitor with a Happy
New Year to you. It was the morning Andre
Hasranovich was standing at the door, reading the newspaper. Just at 10 o' clock
there arrived a general, one of the habitual visitors, and directly
after him the postman Andrei Haresinovich helped the general
off of his greatcoat and said, a happy New Year to you, your excellency.
Thank you, my good fellow, the same to you. And at the top of the
stairs, the general asked, nodding towards the door. He asked the same question every day
and always forgot the answer. And what is there in that room?
The massage room, your excellency. When the general's steps had
died away, Andrei Hrasevich looked at the post that had come and found
one addressed to himself. He tore it open, read
several lines. Then, looking at the newspaper, he walked without
haste to his own room, which was downstairs, close
by. At the end of the passage, his wife Yefimya was
sitting on the bed, feeding her baby. Another child, the eldest, was standing
by, laying its curly head on her knee. A third was asleep
on the bed. And, and the communication choke point there is Andre. Remember what I
said about there being tyrannical patriarchs, right? Well, this is a very specific form of
tyranny on Andre's part. It is not the tyranny. And you'll see this later on
one of the other shoe drops here in the moment. But it's not a tyranny
of neglect from a material level. Right? He's got a job, he's working in a
hydropathic establishment. The general comes in, he's working on New Year's Day, which by the
way, in Russian Orthodox Christianity, Christmas comes not on December 25th, Christmas comes on January.
I believe it's January 6th, it's January 6th or January 12th, I believe it's January
6th.
So the old woman got her Hus, got her daughter
married to a man who
totally and completely ignored her
three children in a nursery.
And, and the communication
choke point there is Andre.
Remember what I said about there being tyrannical
patriarchs, Right? Well, this is a very specific form of tyranny on
Andre's part. It is not the tyranny. And you'll see this later
on one of the other shoe drops here in the moment.
But it's not a tyranny of neglect from a
material level. Right? He's got a job, he's working in a
hydropathic establishment. The general comes in, he's working on New Year's Day,
which by the way, in, in Russian
Orthodox Christianity, Christmas comes not on
December 25th, Christmas comes on January. I believe it's
January 6th, it's January 6th or January 12th, I believe it's January 6th.
And so in Orthodox Christianity,
just as in traditional Catholicism, going all
the way back to, oh gosh, I mean, I
mean, Christmas didn't really start being celebrated until after
Constantine in the year. Oh gosh, in the year like
360, 380 something AD
and then it started slowly ramping up, but really didn't kick off
into what we know as modern Christmas until
the latter part of the.
17Th and, and the latter part of the 17th and the
early part of the. The 18th century. And then with the
rise of industrialism and consumer culture, all of which trans. Charles Dickens
bemoaned, by the way. You'll hear that in the Christmas Carol.
You know, then we get into a more modern conception of what
Christmas is and Christmas celebrations and things like Santa and the
tree and all of that came, came way late. But
traditional Christendom, traditional
Orthodox understanding of Christmas, a traditional Orthodox
understanding Christmas puts Christmas after the New Year,
which is interesting for us because, you know, we put Thanksgiving and then
Christmas, then the New Year, in that order. And of course, in
Orthodox Christianity and in many other parts of the world,
you know, the last Thursday in November means nothing. What means a lot
is New Year's Day. And what means a lot is
of course, Christmas Day.
Now, where that falls and why that falls after New Year's is
interesting background information. But what's more interesting on the, when you think about Tom
is he is merely doing his work as he's
supposed to be doing it. He's checking all the boxes.
Many leaders, by the way, do this. And I know this is a leadership podcast
and we are focused on literature here at the end of the year.
But the leadership aspects of this are very important. So as a leader,
if you're just focused on checking the boxes and you're not nourishing the emotional
or psychological life of your followers, you're
probably just barely feeding them. And you
probably have a poverty of imagination now on the
part of the daughter.
The daughter got a husband, right? And the old woman got her daughter
married off. But they both didn't get a reprieve from
tyranny.
Jaegor got his literacy, we talked about that in the
military. And Andre got his hydropathic career
after leaving the army. But they both. Neither of them
got a reprieve from tyranny either. The
tyrannical nature of rulership, the
tyrannical nature of the peasant reality is something that needs to be
reconciled. It's something that needs to be solved, and it's something that needs to
be examined. And Chekhov's critique
of Orthodox Christian society, fundamentally because
he came from a medical background, because he was writing
in the mid to latter part of the
19th century in a Russia that was transitioning
into something else, transitioning into a new thing
in the maelstrom of European understanding
in a post Napoleon world.
Well, Chekhov's critique of Orthodox Christian society
fundamentally is nihilistic in its examination in this
story. But. But
unlike Friedrich Nietzsche, Chekhov holds
on to the slim hope that Jesus
might still have a place in the season.
Back to the story. We're gonna wrap up here. Back to
At Christmas Time by Anton Chekhov. We're going to turn the corner
here and wrap up. Andre just gave
her the letter. As she was sitting.
Yehamaya, as she was sitting on the bed.
He could hear Yefimaya with a shaking voice, reading the first lines.
She read them and could read no more. These lines were enough for
her. She burst into tears and hugging her eldest child, kissing
him, she began saying, and it was hard to say whether she was
laughing or crying. It's from Granny, from
grandfather, she said, from the country. The heavenly mother. Saints and
martyrs. The snow lies heaped up under the roofs now. The trees are as white
as white. The boys slide in on little sledges. And dear old bald
grandfather is on the stove. And there is a little yellow dog. My own darlings.
Andrei Rasinovich, hearing this, recalled that his
wife had on three or four occasions given him letters and asked
him to send them to the country. But some important business had always
prevented him. He had not sent them, and the
letters somehow got lost. And little
hares run about in the fields. Yefimaya went on chanting, kissing her boy and
shedding tears. Grandfather is kind and gentle. Granny is good too. Kind
hearted. They are warm hearted in the country, they are God fearing. And there is
a little church in the village. The peasants sing in the choir. Queen of Heaven,
Holy Mother and Defender, take us away from here. Andre
Harosanovich returned to his room to smoke a little, till there
was another ring at the door and Yefimaya ceased speaking, subsided and
wiped her eyes, though her lips were still quivering.
She was very much frightened of him. Oh, how frightened of him. She
trembled and was reduced to terror by the sound of his steps, by the look
in his eyes, and dared not utter a word in his presence.
Andrei Harasanovich lighted a cigarette,
but at that very moment there was a ring from upstairs. He put
out his cigarette and, assuming a very grave face, hastened to his front
door. The general was coming downstairs, fresh and
rosy from his bath. And what is there in that
room? He asked, pointing to a door. Andrey
Harasenovich put his hands down swiftly to the seams of his trousers and
pronounced loudly, char Kadouche. Your
Excellency.
Gotta admit, when I got to the end of that, I had no, no idea
what charcoal douche meant, so I had to go look that up.
So the last lines of At Christmas Time by Anton
Chekov. Really
are focused around and really are.
Sort of indicative of the. And, and,
and, and, and, and, and hearkening back to
this idea of hydro pathy,
right, this idea of a water cure.
Shark o douche. And I have a link to the
definition of what it is when in inside
of Anton Chekhov's short story At Christmas Time
basically is. It's a, it's a, it's a
French. It'S a
French term, right, that
it was a type of high-pressure shower that was
invented by a French neurologist named Jean Martin
Charcot. And it was initially used as a medical device.
It was called a Charcot shower. And it was,
it was, it was, it was used
in spas in the late 19th and in the early 20th
century in order to.
Have order to create a massage, you know, over the patient's body.
And it was so powerful with,
and was operated at such a high pressure that it almost, it could
sometimes cause hematoma on the patient or in the individual
who was doing that and who was using it. So high-pressure
on a shower head, you know, coming out of that. And so basically
what, you know, Andre is saying
at the end of this story is that,
you know. You know, the,
the thing that's behind the door is a restorative bath, right?
But it could also indicate, and there's many different ideas of this
floating around on the Internet. I'm not the first person to say this, but
it could also indicate that Chekhov is looking for that
hope, right? That hope of healing and restoration between
the daughter and the parents, between
what is in the country and what is in the city,
between the sophisticated folks that are now
living in St. Petersburg and the hillbilly hicks
that are out on the steps in
Russia.
When we think about this short story at Christmas time,
and when we think about the restoration
of relationship, leaders engage in healing and
restorative work. Leaders avoid tyranny. And
of course they need to be literate to write and see and comprehend.
But even more so than this, at the end of this
year, at the end of any year, we
would encourage you to think about
what is the cost of introspection? What is the cost
of looking backward? Who are you bringing forward
in order to restore them and restore relationship,
in order to engage in acts of reconciliation?
Forgiveness is not necessarily for the person who has
done you wrong as a leader, or has done your team wrong, or has
done your organization wrong. Forgiveness is
really for you. It's so that you could be restored.
Look, the. The daughter, right?
When she gets the letter, what is one of the first things that
she does? Well, the first thing that she
does is that she starts crying.
Tears. Hydro
pathi charcadouche.
The healing water of baptism, restoration
at the beginning of a new year, and all before Orthodox
Christmas. Chekhov didn't write this story by
accident, and he didn't write it in a vacuum.
As leaders, at the end of this year, think about restoration,
think about reconciliation, and work very hard
to open up those lines of communication so that
existence can be reconfirmed
between you and the people that you love.
And, well. That'S it for
me.
Sam.
Foreign.
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